Three Women
Years of Plenty. By E. do Gramma. (Cape. 10s. 6d.) An Austrian Background. By Nora PurtscherWydenbruck. (Methuen. 7a. 6d.)
THERE are three ways of writing biography. The author can, as it were, separate the grain from the chaff and select for his purpose only important personages. The grain-sifter's method is, at its worst, like that of the society paragraphist : he must interest those who expect to be interested by the doings of the great. Now, there is a quantity of big grain in the Ex- Duchesse de Clermont Tonnere's book, but she has not made the mistake, common to so many chroniclers, of attributing importance to the irrelevant. As the friend of Anatole France, Gourmont, Herres, Pierre Louys, Colette and Proust, and as the frequenter of Paris salons, she had opportunity of mixing with celebrities, but her wit saves her descriptions from any tiresomeness. Her comments on the Duchesse de Rohan are particularly amusing : " Her philanthropy and charity created an eddy that was soon swelled by a surging billow of poets. . . . She wanted everyone who had laid offerings before the Muse to come at least once in their lifetime and recite verses beneath her lambrequin. Hence the batch of famished creatures, who, while declaiming their hexameters, would keep squinting at the buffet."
The whole book is lightened by irony and made gracious by sympathy. The author does not stress the auto of her bio- graphy, but she cannot conceal her zest for life, and nothing but a slight jerkiness of style prevents her book from being a perfect history of Parisian social life.
The author of An Austrian Background has adopted the middle method of biography. Grain and chaff are equally interesting to her. She records life among rich and poor, immaculate and squalid. The book begins with mention of her birth in London, where her father was First Secretary to the Austrian Embassy. After this come descriptions of child- hood, school days and the general slough of hysteria, false idealism and muddled thinking in which the adolescent wallowed. All this is rather over-stressed, for the author, in her determination to be true to herself, apparently forgets that she may be boring to others. The chapters on Italy, on coming-out in Venice, on the outbreak of War and on the discovery of music, literature and art in general make fai better reading than the analysis of youthful thought and the experiments in spiritualism. The author is at her best when describing animals, people, places, and those small adventures of the mind which made even" the inferno of life " ins Bayswater boarding-house tolerable. She has many amusing comments to make on England, where she spent a great part of her married life, and says a great deal that is true about those aspects of poverty that are particularly harmful to women. On the whole An Austrian Background is a wise and amusing book, full of the stuff that life--particularly the life of a woman—is made of;
Miss Leigh does not pay very much attention to sound grain. Most of the people she mentions are queer, tiresome and warped. " I must write," she begins ; " it may be a means of fixing my mind on a logical sequence of ideas. It is ridiculous to allow one's thoughts to run round within a desire like a squirrel in a cage." This may be so, but the activity of the squirrel makes even the reader giddy. The book is full of searchings for sincerity, perplexities and questions such as " Why do people want children ? " There is some championing of the cause of prostitutes and perverts, a great deal of muddled thinking, rather tediously recorded, and a complete absence of any sense of humour. The author is for ever setting herself problems, but makes little attempt to solve any of them, unless, indeed, the book was written for the purpose of leading up to the following statement : " The conquest of fear is a last crusade on which all the remaining forces of a solitary- woman with a love of freedom might well embark."
B. E. Tours.
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