French Manhattan*

NEW YORK -- Paul Morand -- Holt ($2.50).

"I like New York because it is the biggest city of the world, and because it is inhabited by the strongest race in the world--the only one which has succeeded in organizing itself since the War; the only one which is not living on a past reputation; the only one, along with Italy, which does not demolish, but knows, on the contrary, how to construct." So says M. Morand, who has visited Manhattan four times, once for two months, and has seen enough to write a book about it.

Manhattan, says Morand, is an open book: he who stands still may read. "It takes several months to appreciate the damply diffused grandeur of London; it needs a few weeks to catch the dry charm of Paris; but let yourself be taken to the middle of Brooklyn Bridge at dusk and you will understand New York in 15 seconds."

No reporter need ask M. Morand what he thinks of Manhattan's skyline: it is all down here in ecstatic black & white. Aside from his few omissions, his book would make a fairly good, nearly up-to-the-minute guide from Battery to Bronx. One of the omissions: speakeasies. Natu rally M. Morand is too polite to mention them by name, but he is not too polite to damn them generically. Says he : "I know nothing so depressing. . . . If only one could drink water there!" Of Manhattan's big cinemas, he thinks the Paramount "a blend of St. Peter's at Rome, the Parthenon, and the Valley of the Kings": Roxy's he says "surpasses the impossible."

Morand knows but disagrees with the opinion of many U. S. citizens that Manhattan is untypical of the U. S. Though he waxes elegiac on Manhattan's skyscrapers, he thinks "nobody now lives in New York for pleasure. One stays there just long enough to make one's fortune. Everyone works as hard as possible, for as few years as possible. . . . You live there, you whistle, you answer 'O.K.' to everything, and you only die at the last moment, very quickly. You aren't born there (a pregnant woman is never seen in the streets); and you don't die there either. As soon as anyone has breathed his last, he is immediately driven off very fast in a Packard to the funeral parlor, where he is laid out and painted up. So, if ever you see a very restful, very pink face in New York, it belongs to a corpse."

Morand makes surprisingly few misstatements. Some of them: that one may bathe at Coney Island naked; that champagne averages $40 a bottle; that a balcony seat for a hockey game in Madison Square Garden costs $7.

The Author. Paul Morand, 42, poet, globetrotter, onetime member of the French diplomatic corps, is tall, dark, silent in company, but says he is happy, content, unruffled and undisturbed. Other (translated) books: Green Shoots, The Living Buddha, Open All Night, Closed All Night.

New York is the December choice of the Book League of America.

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