End of a World

WORLD WITHOUT VISA [499 pp.]--Jean Malaquais, translated by Peter Grant --Doubleday ($3.75).

When France fell to the Nazis, thousands of stateless and homeless Europeans fled to Marseille, there to dream of visas to freedom that most were never to get. In this lecherous and filthy port, where men squirmed on the precipice of hysteria and a knock on the door might be a Vichyite summons to an internment camp, the agony of Europe was, for one delirious historical moment, crammed into a few square miles.

This is the setting that Jean Malaquais has chosen for his huge and exciting novel about "shamed and sunken France." World Without Visa is a novel on the grand scale, packed with enough action to fill a dozen less ambitious books, bursting with dramatic and melodramatic climaxes, written and overwritten from a gnawing sense of social urgency -- a desperate, ear-splitting wail of grief at what human life has become in the 20th Century. Niggling critics will find many faults in it, and the faults are there; but it is nonetheless a book that communicates, as no other has yet -- far better than Arch of Triumph, for example -- the feeling of what it meant to be a European in Hitler's heyday.

World Without Visa , is one of those many-leveled books that sometimes appears to have half a dozen plots, and sometimes none at all. Dozens of sharply drawn characters move through it, their lives intertwined in frantic quests for visas, underground resistance, concentration-camp ordeals, involved political discussions and harried interludes of personal life. With a strong awareness of social gradations, Author Malaquais shows Marseille under the Vichy regime as divided into four groups: the scum, the innocents, the resisters, and the victims.

The Scum. Top specimen of social scum is Adrien de Pontillac, French aristocrat and Vichyite ruler of Marseille. His instincts refined to a delicate dimension of amorality, De Pontillac is one of the lovely brutes who classifies women by zoological categories, and has made indifference to other people into an art of living. When orders come from Vichy to round up all Jews into internment camps, he sets about his task with the precision of an official in an abattoir.

The Resisters. When De Pontillac prepares his bullies to search for "their load of Jewish meat," posters of protest, mute and futile gestures though they are, appear on the city's walls. They are the work of Marc Laverne, leader of an anti-Stalinist leftist group, a man so imbued with revolutionary fatalism that he seems like a disembodied symbol of rebellion. More human than Laverne is Ivan Stepanoff, an Old Bolshevik who has miraculously escaped from Stalin's prisons and who feels himself increasingly a historical anachronism. When Stepanoff is arrested, "his first concrete thought [takes] the form of a triple question . . . Vichy? Gestapo? OGPU? ... He [knows] how to recognize the agents of the OGPU," for he has had enough experience with them. But this time it is the Gestapo, which wishes him to become a Russian Lord Haw-Haw. Stepanoff gathers together the tag-ends of heroism, starves himself and cuts his wrist.

Sometimes World Without Visa trembles on the edge of ten-twent'-thirt' melodrama, sometimes it seems incongruously romantic in its motivations. But all such objections are ultimately swept aside by the power with which Malaquais has raised a verbal monument to the martyrdom of Europe.

The Author. Jean Malaquais is a short, tense French socialist. He is the author of a novel, Men from Nowhere, which won the Renaudot Prize in Paris, and of an account of his experiences in the French army, War Diary, which Andre Gide hailed as "an extraordinary document on the collapse of France."

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