Genetics

AN AMERICAN IN PARIS--Janet Planner--Simon & Schuster ($2.50).

At least twice a month for 15 years, Paris letters signed "Genet" have appeared in The New Yorker and have been among the best things in it. In a style so well turned that epigrams seemed pure condescension, Genet has written of everything Parisian from the dernier cri to the derniere crise without slipping from a fashionable tone.

Genet's real name is Janet Planner. She was born in Indianapolis 47 years ago. In her teens Janet tried the University of Chicago; tried by the University, she returned to Indianapolis. From 1915 to 1917 she held a job as cinema critic (she thinks she was the first reporter with that title) on the Indianapolis Star. In 1921 she arrived in Paris, inquisitive, amiable, amused. In 1925 she wrote her first letter for The New Yorker.

It was a well-paid job and one that Janet Planner soon liked so well that she gave up cocktails, developed a working method as scholarly as a Ph.D.'s. Her letters were laid out a week in advance, researched by herself and an informal staff of friends, checked thoroughly, painfully polished in draft after draft. Among her best friends were (and are) Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, publishers of the once-famed Little Review in Greenwich Village. Last Christmas she spent with her mother and her sister, Poet Hildegarde Planner, at Altadena, Calif. Last week she stopped in Manhattan on her way back to Paris.

Her sophistication outwardly evident in a billowing grey mop and man-about-town monocle, Francophile Janet Planner still has a certain girlish naivete. Her friends remember that when Vanity Fair asked her for a series on French murders she objected that Americans wouldn't be interested because French murders were so different from American murders.

Pressed to explain, Janet ran a distraught hand through her hair and recabled: "Well, for example, in France nobody ever kills anyone he doesn't know." An American in Paris is a selection of the best of her New Yorker and Vanity Fair sketches. Each a mosaic of tidbits culled from hundreds of informants, each sleek with refined comedy, these reports and profiles are a valuable dossier on the very highest life of the past 20 years.

Janet Planner believes firmly that the international smart set of those years was "even more important than its members thought, which is saying a great deal." In dealing with the private lives of such public persons as Queen Mary, the late Isadora Duncan, the late Edith Wharton, Gabrielle Chanel, she is superb.

Though their everyday oddities are her dish of tea, the serious talents of such male characters as Picasso and Stravinsky escape imprisonment in Miss Planner's prose. Yet her detailed profile of Adolf Hitler, written in 1935, is extraordinarily prescient (she recalls that at the time her editors doubted he was worth the space). Probably the most cheerfully cold-blooded reporting in the book is in Genet's accounts of several eminent French murder cases. Sample (of a couple of life-insurance murders): "Both mates were tucked into the potter's field where their viscera were soon too general for exhumation. . . ."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.