Ecstasy Without Agony

PLUCHE, OR THE LOVE OF ART by Jean Dutourd. 278 pages. Doubleday. $5.95.

God has his prophets and saints, and art has its Pluches--aesthetic Jesuits, Leathernecks of creativity, defenders of aristocratic art-soul against bourgeois art-stomach, men of passion and appetite, of sublime ups and leaden downs. Pluche is a talented, unfashionable, moderately successful painter who is down--or, in Jean Dutourd's words, "chained down in hell amid the circle of the frivolous damned, where everything is mere diversion, where one only hears rank stupidities, where one only says stupidities oneself, where one is bored to death without ever dying."

It is not quite as bad as that, except when Pluche, a 45-year-old Parisian bachelor, is in a period of creative sterility. For a man of Gibraltic self-confidence, however, even sterility has its uses. If Pluche must lie fallow for a few weeks, he can at least write a journal about it. Nothing goes to waste: stinginess is not only close to his Gallic heart; it is a law of nature. Besides, writing gives him the chance to expound on his dearest personal fancies:

ON ART AND MONEY: "There can't be any question of despising money. On the contrary, one's painting has to bring it in. But one mustn't paint the kind of pictures that bring it in."

ON TASTE: "Never have people had so much taste as in the past twenty years, and never has the true creative spirit been so impoverished. It is in periods without taste, periods of vigor and simplicity, that art flourishes best."

ON PAINTING IN GENERAL: "Bad painters never achieve a likeness because they reproduce exactly what they have before their eyes. Good painters achieve a likeness because they work like poets and when they contemplate the ocean, begin by seeing horses."

ON ARTISTS AS UBERMENSCHEN: "We artists carry no tragedy within us, even if we are in despair and do away with ourselves . . . our minds stand back to watch us suffering and thereby mitigate the pain as it were, push our troubles into the background, transform them into a spectacle over which we can joke or philosophize."

Descent from Olympus. Pluche does not spout off entirely in a vacuum. Like a god descending from Olympus to reassure himself of his immortality, he ventures from his studio on the Rue Boissonnade to loaf among the plebs until inspiration returns. But no sooner is he in "the circle of the frivolous damned" than the world's petty annoyances close in. Brother Georges, a witless executive living far beyond his means and on the verge of ruin, asks for and gets the balance in Pluche's bank account. Brother-in-Law Mesnard, an immensely successful painter who sold his talent out to fashionable tastes, has taken up with a young bird and threatens the happiness of Pluche's sister Marie.

It is Mesnard's unfaithfulness to his talent that really concerns Pluche. The two have it out in a climactic scene--a Magic Molehill sort of confrontation on the crisis of art in the second half of the 20th century. Mesnard emerges as a Darwinist who excuses his bad, profitable painting as an adaptation to an age in which Art is Dead and the future belongs to electricians. He misses the intellectual upheavals of the 18th century and the naive optimism of the 19th, but one must keep up with the times.

Pluche will not answer such devilish logic. As a 19th century romantic and true believer, he can only counter with faith: "Happiness," he tells the not noticeably unhappy Mesnard, "can never be gained by bowing to circumstances but only by following the dictates of the heart one has, which is difficult to locate and hard to fathom."

In hands less dexterous than those of Jean Dutourd, a skillful French novelist and writer of memoirs (The Taxis of the Marne, The Man of Sensibility), Pluche could easily have turned into a one-dimensional poseur, both dated and familiar. Instead, Pluche and his rhetorical posturing melt smoothly into Dutourd's richly perceived Parisian setting and a fluent, entertaining narrative. Ecstasy without agony was never easier to take.

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