Paris in the Fall

WITCHES' SABBATH by Maurice Sachs. 315 pages. Stein & Day. $7.50.

Maurice Sachs enjoys a curious underground notoriety in the French literary world. Although he died young (at 36, in 1943) and wrote little--a number of moderately successful plays and several volumes of middling poetry--he knew most of the Parisian literary lights of the late '20s and early '30s and became, by his own testimony, "an ear into which they dropped their most private avowals." More important, he recorded some of those avowals in his autobiography, which he called his "moral memo" to the world. Published posthumously in France in 1946 and now translated into English for the first time, Witches' Sabbath is a bizarre compound of self-pity, fantasy and braggadocio, relieved by occasional passages of honest self-appraisal and sound literary sense. It constitutes, as one French literary critic put it, an anecdotal "chronique scandaleuse" of Sachs's own place and time.

Sacred Bodies. Born into a family of wealthy Jewish diamond merchants, Sachs adopted the complete works of the Marquis de Sade as "the bible of my early youth." Armed with that perverse testament, he descended on Paris intent on a literary career. It was a time, Sachs recalls, when young men like himself sat on bar stools at Le Boeuf sur le Toit eying the great--Picasso, Cocteau, Milhaud, Satie, Radiguet--like "some Chinese under the Empire viewing the Emperor's sacred Body." Sachs got to know most of the sacred bodies. Cocteau gave him some secretarial work to do, and he repaid his benefactor by painting him as a kind of cultural public-relations man who took the "rediscovered imagery" of "tough, miserable men" like Apollinaire and Max Jacob and "vulgarized the knowledge of it." Andre Malraux, too, "was something of the charlatan," but Gide was the wholly incorruptible artist, a man with a face that "no fattening passion burdened" and with lips "straight as those of someone who has never lied."

Although Sachs never knew Proust, he knew several of his homosexual servants, including one who ran a house of male prostitution originally financed by the novelist. From the servants' recollections, Sachs draws a picture of "an unknown Marcel Proust of the great, terrible depths," whose sadism led him to butcher shops where he watched calves being slaughtered and who once had a rat brought to him so that he could stab it to death with a hatpin. Proust, says Sachs, was "a kind of monster child, whose mind had all the experiences of a man, and whose soul was ten years old."

Too Much Dung. The description will do for Sachs himself. At one time or another he was a prominent editor, a leading art dealer, a playwright and producer. But he was also consumed with self-loathing--and with sufficient reason ("I always," he writes, "had a little too much dung on my soul"). He drank prodigiously (he could down a full bottle of whisky before breakfast), swindled his friends indiscriminately, and records with obvious relish how he gulled the daughter of a Presbyterian minister into a marriage of convenience only to desert her two months later for a homosexual alliance with a boy he met in California. A collaborator with the Germans after the fall of France, he became a nightclub manager in Hamburg's notorious St. Pauli district and apparently died in Germany after he was arrested for black-marketeering.

Cocteau, shortly after he met Sachs, made what was perhaps the kindest judgment of him. He was, he said, "a deep-sea fish, luminous but blind."

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