If I Were King

THE SHORT REIGN OF PIPPIN IV (188 pp.)--John Steinbeck--Viking ($3).

At long last, France decided that the French Revolution had all been a big mistake (some readers will say "I told you so"). Caught in a parliamentary impasse to end all parliamentary impasses, the National Assembly decided to abolish the republic and restore the monarchy. Hour-ra! Vive le roi!

This is the central situation of John Steinbeck's latest booklet--an underdone novel and overdone gag which is a long, long way from wrathful Okies and Tortilla Flat. After Author Steinbeck and the Assembly make their momentous decision, there are of course almost as many pretenders in France as there ever were premiers, but the royal prize goes to a man who does not seek it--M. Pippin Arnulf Heristal, a distant collateral relation of Charlemagne.*

Before destiny sideswipes him, the lean, fiftyish Pippin is content to live on his unearned income and enjoy a nightly orgy of stargazing from the roof of his Parisian town house. More concierge than wife, Mme. Heristal rations out new telescopes with a parsimonious hand. Daughter Clotilde, 20, is addicted to Hollywood horse operas and has already Saganalyzed her life in a bestseller written at 15, Adieu Ma Vie.

This typical French family is scarcely prepared for the brouhaha and hurluberlu that follow Pippin's elevation to the throne. There is the grand opening of the "Versailles-Hilton" hotel; the Folies-Bergere holds a contest for the official post of "King's Mistress"; and visiting royalty floods the capital ("Ava Gardner and H.S.H. Kelly are in residence"). Two hundred nobles come out of the woodwork and descend on Versailles, all set to eat Pippin out of house and palace. His daughter's American suitor proposes to merchandise the impoverished monarchy ("The Dukedom of Dallas?--why, ten billionaires would be after it"). All goes well as long as Pippin is content to remain wax in the hands of his advisers. Unfortunately, ermine makes the king, and he is soon drawn to exercise his divine rights.

Pippin travels incognito (on a motor scooter) among his subjects and decides that what France most needs is an F.D.R.-style New Deal, a kind of People's Monarchy. To a stunned constitutional convention met to draw up a Code Pippin, he lays down what he wants to be the law. beginning with the maddeningly un-French notion of everyone paying his taxes. Before the reader can say "Ca ira," the mob is in the streets clamoring for the Fifth Republic, and what happens to King Pippin after that is best left for Author Steinbeck to tell.

Though The Short Reign of Pippin IV (a May co-selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club) is a fable that makes no claims for itself beyond the desire to please, its author waters Aesop with Alsop, mixes persiflage with prescriptions for the ills of modern France. The satiric lapses into the pontifical ("The French are a moral people--judged, that is, by American country-club standards"). Pippin makes a charming king-for-a-day, but the joke goes on for so long that those who come to laugh may stay to yawn. Helas, political reality in France is so preposterous that even better satirists than Steinbeck have a hard time topping it.

* Himself a son of Pippin III ("the Short") and grandson of Charles Mattel, bastard son of Pippin II, who in turn was a grandson of Pippin I ("the Old"). The novel's Pippin IV supposedly is descended from either Drogo or Grimoald, who were half brothers (legitimate) of Charles Martel.

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