Books: Some Boys Are Happy

THE DAYS WERE Too SHORT (335 pp.) —Marcel Pagnol—Doubleday ($4.50).

One of the more deplorable casualties of current writing is the happy childhood. Still, there must be some adults who were happy kids, and occasionally a writer is bold enough to stand and be counted. English Poet Laurie Lee made no bones about the joy of his poverty-stricken youth in The Edge of Day (TIME, March 28). Now Marcel Pagnol, a French Academician and man of film and theater (Fanny, The Baker’s Wife), writes with uninhibited pleasure of a Provence boyhood. By his account, it was so lacking in bitterness that, to Freudian critics, it will seem downright square.

At 65, Pagnol may seem to suffer a bit from total recall, but the simple charm of his story is ingratiating enough to suspend disbelief. Chiefly, Pagnol recalls his vacations in the Provence countryside with a mother and father who loved him and a brother and sister who seemed never to arouse his resentment or cruelty. Their rundown, rented “villa” stood on a hillside in wild country that was a hunter’s paradise. With his father, who had an antique shotgun, Marcel and a local Huck Finn type bagged enough birds to feed a battalion. They roamed the dramatic forests like the Comanches they pretended to be, and formed one of those enduring boyhood friendships that can later be seen as one of the milestones of a life. Young Marcel repaid his friend for the treasure of country lore by teaching him one of his favorite words, finally showing his deep regard by writing out for him “anticonstitutionellement.”

Gradually, in a rambling way. Pagnol builds up a fine store of memory, characterized by the special blend of feeling —love of life combined with a shrugging irony about its limitations—that marks the best of his films and plays. Some of Author Pagnol’s anecdotes are a little too pat, recalling some of the slapstick in his lighter movies. And at the end, when he looks back on the deaths of some of those he loved, he allows himself a platitude, a kind of sentimental existentialism: “Such is the life of man. A few joys, quickly obliterated by unforgettable sorrows.” But he notes immediately with the kindness that informs his story: “There is no need to tell the children so.”