Fox into Lady

SYLVA (256 pp.)--Vercors--Putnam ($4).

Albert Richwick, bachelor and gentleman farmer, was strolling near his garden one day when a pack of hounds chased an exhausted fox into his hedge. Suddenly "there was no fox. But protruding from the hedge, on the ground, a pair of bare legs. They were kicking. The rest of the body, caught in the hedge and slashed by thorns, was trying to push through...It was a woman."

What happens to a fox become woman is the substance of this evocative new book by the French novelist who calls himself Vercors. The author frankly admits his device is a reverse switch on the metamorphosis m David Garnett's Lady Into Fox, one of the most popular English novels of the '20s in which a young husband finds his wife transformed into a small red fox ("He saw at once that his wife was looking at him from the animal's eyes").

Death & Laughter. Vercors' fox-woman, whom her new protector calls Sylva from the Latin word for forest (Garnett's changeling lady was named Silvia), has the pretty figure of a lithe and leggy 18-year-old with brilliant onyx eyes and, of course, red hair, but inside she is all fox. Richwick learns this the hard way. Sylva sleeps under the bed, curled up in a vulpine ball; she refuses to wear a stitch of clothes, and she smells so strong that her room must be cleaned and thoroughly aired each day. She bolts down whole chickens, crunching up bones and all. She barks and bites.

But Richwick--priggish, prudish bachelor that he is--perseveres. He lets it be known that she is the mentally retarded daughter of a sister in Scotland and engages a nurse for her who has specialized in backward children. Richwick, who narrates the story, and Mrs. Burnley, the nanny, settle down to their labor of love: turning a vixen into a girl.

Sylva slowly, painfully struggles away from the animal world. She escapes to the forest, only to discover that it rejects her new body. She escapes again to shack up with a feeble-minded woodcutter and returns to embarrass the prissy Richwick with her uninhibited advances (in a satirical switch, Vercors has Richwick study Freud in order to give Sylva some inhibitions). But the major gap that separates human from animal mentality is man's conscious awareness of his own existence. Eventually, Sylva makes the leap, and from the frightening moment when she discovers herself as an individual entity separate from her environment, Sylva cannot turn back; she is, as it were, hooked by humanity.

Then, when a dog she plays with dies, she discovers death. With the knowledge of death comes laughter. "It is because the human species is the only one which knows that death is our common lot that it is also the only one to know laughter as a saving grace," reflects Narrator Richwick. "During the moment when laughter shakes us, we are immortal."

Sugar-Coated Pill. Vercors counterpoises Sylva's struggle upward with the sordid decline of Richwick's sometime girl friend into a drug-addicted, sexually perverted mindlessness. After a dash of degradation with her in London, Richwick escapes to come back home as a love-smitten Pygmalion to his Galatea--who turns out to be pregnant.

Will he marry her? Is the unborn offspring his? Will it even be human? The answers supply some neat fillips at book's end, but they are only part of the literary sugar-coating on Vercors' pill. For pill it is, Vercors is not so much a novelist as a moralist, and Sylva is not so much a novel as a fable--an edifying tale designed to explore the question that has been bothering 59-year-old Jean Brueller ever since he took the pen name Vercors and wrote the book that made his reputation: The Silence of the Sea.

Aspiring & Striving. "All of us French intellectuals have had to come to terms with the same problem," he told a friend last week in the U.S., where he is currently on a lecture tour. "Camus and Sartre and Malraux saw life the way I did--as meaningless and absurd, with war the most meaningless absurdity of all. And yet, instead of withdrawing and doing our best to avoid suffering, which would be the logical course, we all worked hard and risked our lives in the Resistance. Why? Another way of asking this is: What is man?"

Vercors' writing since the war has probed and worried that question--most notably in the bestselling You Shall Know Them (1953), which, like Sylva, examines man in terms of his relation to animals. The animals in the earlier novel were a species of hominid, subhuman, but capable of breeding with men--which Vercors used, as he uses his fox-lady, to exemplify his belief in the power of the aspiring will to change and transcend the natural, i.e., animal, condition of man.

This evolutionary striving, he feels, is the means and end and sanction of life. In this, he has been strongly influenced by the thought of the late French Jesuit philosopher-anthropologist, Father Teilhard de Chardin (TIME, Feb. 10). "But the striving and aspiring must be social to be fruitful." Vercors insists. "The yogi working by himself for himself is a dead end. In my book, the forms and standards of society are represented by Richwick--that's why he may seem something of a prig. But it is these very forms, personified in Richwick, that give Sylva a direction and pattern for her development. And in dedicating himself to her, he too is elevated at the end."

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