Among the Mad

STRANGE LAUGHTER (214 pp.)--Pierre Molaine--Roy ($3)

There were four of them in the mental ward. Old Max would imagine that he smelled the scent of pines, and he wouldbe back on Hill 299, fighting the Boche. Coselli listened to the charge of wild horses in his head. Bebert, a veteran of the Spanish civil war, kept hearing the laughter of the dead. The fourth patient, "the Druid," constantly saw beside him him the head of Christ, crowned with thorns and bleeding.

Old Maz broke loose one day. Shouting that he heard "the organs playing in Hell," he began to crush the others in gigantic bear hugs. A little later he blacked Coselli's eye, bit Bebert's thigh, stamped on a watch and swallowed some of the shattered glass. When the guards subdued him he took the calming injections with gloomy dignity.

So begins Strange Laughter, a French novel which devotes itself, with a kind of savage pity, to the mind of the mad. Novelist Molaine (in real life Major Leopold Faure, a professional soldier in the French army) unrolls his story in the disorderly sometimes brilliant voices of the patients themselves.

Bebert, struggling up the road to recovery, falls in love with a nurse named Jany. Old Max sinks deeper into his fantasies. Coselh spends days weeping over the portrait of his son, "little Guy Charles Stephane Coselli''--though he has no son. Coselli does have a wife, however: the nurse Jany, who has come to work in the hospital to be near him. Tangled together in their nightmares and obsessions, Bebert and Coselli make their escape from the hospital, frantically trying to assert themselves as free men.

Toward the end, the violence of language and action becomes somewhat wearisome. But the book is redeemed by Novelist Molaine's deep sense of fraternity with the poor wretches about whom he writes, his admiration for that dim, human feeling which keeps Old Max and Coselli together in a brotherly embrace even as they surrender to their manias, "one barking, the other whinnying, one a dog, the other a horse." And the wild, rhetorical prayer that Bebert casts up in his misery also speaks for Novelist Molaine: "Father here we are in the ooze, inert as fishes spawning. Our souls scent the mud, and our eyes are gradualIy closing to the light from the bank . . . Lighten us and regenerate us in the depths where we lie. Save us from darkness and the plague. Let us be filled with that better life towards which we yearn with palpitating gills . . . And take pity on our small fry. Amen."

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