Word: grimault
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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BEAU CLOWN, by Berthe Grimault (188 pp.; Rinehart; $3), a crawling compost heap of a novel, accepts as normal and comical the sort of horror about which seamy-side Novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline wrote with fascination. Author Grimault describes a degenerate clan of French peasants and the flotsam that fetches up at their farm-two prostitutes, four U.S. Negro soldiers foraging for sex, and a netful of AWOL lunatics, including a gently demented old clown and a bloody-nailed slug named Chopper (he is obsessed with decapitation). When Chopper is gored by a huge white bull, a litter...
Tiny (4 ft. 8 in.) Author Grimault, herself a French farm girl, groups her rush of words well in short, clear sentences. Despite the repulsive midden from her imagination, there is a kind of dirty-faced innocence about the book, and an undeniable storytelling ability. Half-illiterate when she wrote the novel, Berthe Grimault had help from a village postmaster who barbered the grammar, laundered the sex. Currently, a proper laundering is in process: at the Grove, a British finishing school, the staff is trying to get Berthe to behave as if she were less familiar with country matters...
Well-brought-up Author Gaskell sees her fairyland through a kaleidoscope made of prunes and prisms; she might profit if she could spend a semester as an exchange student in Berthe Grimault's barnyard...
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