France's France

ANATOLE FRANCE--Edwin Preston Dargan--Oxford University Press ($5).

When Anatole France (Jacques-Anatole-Franc,ois Thibault) died in 1924, the younger generation of French writers swarmed to the scene with strong antiseptic criticism intended to fumigate the world of his reputation as the equal of Montaigne, Rabelais, Renan, Voltaire. Most contemporary writing about him has reflected this opinion. With the possible exception of Proust the most-written-about French writer of the last century, Anatole France has not yet been the subject of a definitive English biography. Why biographers have been scared away may be surmised by reading Author Dargan's volume, a 729-pager which took ten years to write and covers only 52 of France's 80 years. Author Dargan, Professor of French Literature at the University of Chicago, excuses himself from covering the last 28 years by saying that the facts are too hard to get straight, that France only repeated himself during that period. A painstaking job, Anatole France is a scholarly juggling of biography and criticism aimed at separating the tangle of legends (including many an anecdote told by Anatole France's secretary Jean-Jacques Brousson) and the blind-man-&-the-elephant judgments of fellow-writers. Except to suggest that France lived 28 years too long, Author Dargan believes the younger critics have carried literary hygiene too far.

France's own accounts of his childhood should not be taken too literally, warns Author Dargan. Only child of a famed Paris bookseller who rose from an illiterate peasant, little Anatole arrived at his first opinions by taking the opposite side from his father, one of whose opinions was that his son would never amount to much. His mother, who tucked him into bed until his marriage at 33, was the first woman to spoil him; of the others, he remembered back to the ''fair ladies" who, while he was still in his cradle, aroused his "precocious sensuality" with their tender duckings. At kindergarten age he acquired his "abiding penchant for actresses" when Actress Rachel patted him on the head. In clerical college he smarted, did little studying, because the main honors went automatically to sons of the nobility. Smarting ever after, as an old man he let loose against the college a blast of irony that all but put it out of existence, having first advertised it as the place where he picked up his ideas on "social iniquity and inequality" and his anticlerical bent.

Exempted from active duty in the Franco-Prussian war, 27-year-old Anatole did special patrol in civilian clothes, showed his indifference, during one attack, by sitting atop a hill reading Virgil and making bets on how many shells would fall into the Marne. The bloody Commune which followed "threatened to disturb my serenity," so he fled to the country on a Belgian passport. A mild radical until the Commune (because his father was a Royalist and the revolutionary movement supplied good anecdotes), he thereafter wrote bitterly about everything connected with it. Particularly he was disgruntled at the Commune's having so disrupted the publishing business that he was forced to work on a Dictionary of Cooking. As France's contradictory personal life went, says Author Dargan, so went his views. Married at 33 to the daughter of a well-to-do, scholarly family, "a rare type of blonde, with 'marvelous' hands and feet," France was an easygoing, absentminded, not very ambitious husband.

In the famed salon of Jewish Mme de Caillavet he found the sympathy lacking at home. The hardheaded, chubby, henna-haired Madame set to work making him a Great Man. In the next 20 years, before he tired of her (four years before her death he married her housekeeper), Anatole was changed from a horse-faced "miserable librarian and scholar" into the suave literary lion of Paris, rich from the sale of never-ending editions of his books. Mistress, secretary, adviser, judge, publicity agent, Mme de Caillavet corrected his natural laziness by putting him on a production quota, acquired the knack of ghosting his articles. To importunate publishers she ordered: "Come to me next time. It is I who fulfill his promises." With a like forcefulness she silenced her husband's digs at the Master. With difficulty the Master eluded the watchful eye of Madame to get some much-needed relaxation with actresses and shopgirls.

Having whittled his political opinions to the point needed to enter the needle's eye of the French Academy, France showed a last burst of radical enthusiasm in support of Dreyfus. Thereafter his radicalism was of a free-lance kind which took as its motto that "men in general are worse than they seem to be." In a characteristic burst of gloom, the old voluptuary once confessed to Brousson: "There is not an unhappier creature in the whole universe than I! . . . I have never been happy--not an hour--not a day!"

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