Hatpins & the Femina

To the troubled bubbling of the French literary cauldron, no one supplies more fire, or more newt's eyes, than twelve eccentric old ladies who meet every so often to nibble lunch, bite backs and, once every year, pass out one of France's top literary awards, the Prix Femina. Although the Femina's cash value is only 5,000 francs ($12), the prize has enough prestige to guarantee a 100,000-copy sale to the novelist who lands it. To literary onlookers, the Femina's entertainment value is even greater; although the prize was created (in 1904) to bring literary women closer together, the hatpin-tongued old fates who hand it out feud continually, and in a good season their pother can all but drown out the crash of a falling French Cabinet.

This is a good season, thanks largely to the leader of the "Red" faction of the Femina jury (named for its sanguine literary tastes and bloody infighting), a novelist, playwright and onetime actress known only as Simone (real name: Pauline Benda). "Several years ago," according to an acquaintance, "she stationed her age at a permanent 75." She reads a novel a day, still manages to take a personal interest in handsome young writers. Madame Simone is haughtily and heartily despised by the "Blue" faction (named for the hue of its blood), led by a scientist, mathematician and relative youngster, the Duchesse de la Rochefoucauld, 62. An oldtime suffragette and notorious pincher of sous (says a fellow juror: "She dresses in a splendid mink coat lined with rayon"), the Duchesse blazed in protest when her arch-antagonist grandly announced that she would accept no other Femina choice for 1957 than Le Carre four des Solitudes (The Crossroads of Loneliness), by Christian Megret.

Against Eroticism. To the Blue opposition the Duchesse rallied an impressive phalanx, including the Comtesse de Pange and onetime Actress Judith Cladel, 86. But the Simone forces seemed stronger; among others, the Red leader had lined up antediluvian Prix Fighter Saint-Rene Taillandier, Novelist Jeanne Galzy and Germaine Beaumont, a jury sitter of indeterminate vintage ("Age is fiction"). The week before the balloting, three lined-up Simone voters came down with the grippe. In silence, at the deciding luncheon, the embattled ladies spooned their bombe glacee. When the voting began, the committee was deadlocked, but under pressure from Madame Simone, one Blue member began to abstain. Snarled another Blue: "My poor friend, once again you have understood absolutely nothing!" The third abstention, on the seventh ballot, allowed crafty Parliamentarian Simone to invoke a tie-breaking rule: as acting President, she cast two votes, and Novelist Megret, 53, had his Prix Femina. Cried the done-in Duchesse: "I am proud to have voted against eroticism!"

Toward the Clinch. Actually, the winning book is less an erotic bedtime story than a kind of literary badminton match, in which the reader is the bird; it tells, in alternate chapters, the separate stories of a slum-crawling, dope-pushing American Negro and a broad-beamed Russian lady discus thrower. The Soviet episodes are written in maundering, meandering imitation of what Henry James would have called the "luid-pudding" style of Russian prose. In the American chapters Author Megret tries hard to talk out of the side of his mouth ("Take a look at that guy's eyes: they're like oysters...you never see eyes like that except on a cop"). Though Megret has never been in the U.S.. he refers learnedly to lynchings, George Raft, Wall Street, Quaker Oats and the FBI. From patiently assembled bits of fact and near-fact, Author Megret creates a work of ludicrously flawed vision. At one point, Buddy--who also writes poetry for New Masses--stands in front of Manhattan's Chrysler Building admiring a puddle, when -he is splashed by "a sedan with a chauffeur in white livery, a car for the president of a corporation."

After some 400 pages of this, Buddy and the discus thrower meet in wartime France, clinch briefly (for a few pages the style is French), then are separated.

Whatever the merits of Le Carrefour (some critics praised it lavishly; others yawned: "A dead end": "Does not contain one idea that has not been batted around a hundred times"), the power of the Prix Femina has been proved once again. By last week Megret's jackpot-boiler had sold 111,000 copies, more than his eight previous novels together.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.