Peacock Path

A LEGACY (311 pp.)--Sybille Bedford--Simon & Schusfer ($3.50).

Julius von Felden stood with sinking heart in Berlin's Reichseisenbahnhofs-vorstandsamt (Station Master's Office). Across from him, icy, stone-faced officials jotted down the long list of damages inticed by his three small charges. Robert, Leon and Tzara. during the train journey from France ("1 Porcelain Washbasin with Lid, property of the Mittel-Europaeische Schlafwagen Gesellschaft. 1 Enamelled Notice-Plate marked VERBOTEN, property of the Preusfische Staats-Eisenbahm," etc.). Julius begged the little monsters: "Now if you will only be good a little longer, you'll be in your own nice beds with a glass of delicious hot milk." And grabbing Robert (who had skipped behind a vacant desk and gone to work with pen and rubber stamp), he rushed the trio off in search of a hotel. But not until day's end did weary Julius find a place that was prepared to admit Robert. Leon and Tzara--and even then, "they were taken up in the service lift." Such is the inhumanity of man to chimpanzees.

Von Felden's pet chimps are among the best of dozens of characters in A Legacy, a first novel that British critics rated as the richest windfall of 1956. Clearly, Author Bedford has written not only a good novel but one that touches her contemporaries in a vital, highly sensitive nerve. That nerve is the anguished one of old Europe. A Legacy describes the Victorian and Edwardian heyday when well-to-do men and women wandered without let or hindrance in a network of social connections that ran from the tip of Scotland to the toe of Italy. They toiled not, neither did they spin (except in diplomatic circles), and Robert, Leon and Tzara struck them as being a lot more human than the middle and lower classes. The broken, frontier-barred Europe of today is the "legacy'' they left behind; their saddened heirs look back upon them not with the anger of indignation but with the hungry envy that an upright sparrow might feel for a bone-lazy peacock.

Across the Pond. The peacock in its prime is shown by Author Bedford with the brilliance of an artist who can paint both a huge panorama and an Audubon closeup. Julius von Felden, feckless son of an ancient baronial house of Baden, has come to Berlin to marry Melanie. daughter of the Jewish House of Merz--a plutocratic, rock-solid family that lives in a welter of steam heat, massive drapes, and meals so continuous and gigantic that every room contains a deftly hidden mousetrap.

Julius' and Melanie's main aim in life is not to get bored to death, so they wander feebly to Spain and France, their pockets full of Merz money, their lives empty of solid interests. When Melanie dies (of tubercular tedium), Julius leaves their daughter to be raised by the kindly Merzes, and marries an Englishwoman who is kind to his pets. The stalemated wanderings begin again: soon the cosmopolitan millpond is covered with the crisscrossing tracks of society's idle, discontented water beetles. The never-changing House of Merz is the center and paymaster, and so long as it stands, all Europe plays upon its bounty, feeding the Merz gold into art. bric-a-brac, gambling debts, mistresses and "culture."

Toward Scandal. As surprising as the book itself is the identity of its author. Sybille Bedford was born in Germany of German-English parents, married and divorced an Englishman, has wandered all over the world as restlessly and aimlessly as her characters, and has blossomed forth in middle age (45) as a first-rate writer. She has pulled off the astonishing feat of writing cosmopolitan history in the high, insular manner pioneered by such stylists as Aldous Huxley. Ronald Firbank, Ivy Compton-Burnett and Evelyn Waugh. All her characters--whether French, German, British; whether Jewish. Catholic, agnostic--pass under the same cool scrutiny. Theology, gastronomy. Prussian militarism, diplomacy, French art, are all interwoven to make the final tapestry: every dropped thread is neatly picked up. A Legacy ends with the symbolic "Felden Scandal," concerning Julius' insane brother, a poor lunatic who had held a captain's commission and had even (by mistake) been decorated by the Kaiser. The howls of rage and the showers of mud that follow this disclosure mark the end of a mighty epoch.

To cram so much into so little space, Author Bedford has used short, carefully chosen dabs of dialogue, which say little but speak volumes. By the end. most readers may be tired by a compression that forces them to guess at the essential meanings. But Legacy lives by its delightfully tart and feline wit, and by its author's remarkable gift for capturing the breath of Europe past on the glass of fiction present.

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