Books: Love in a Dying World

MAIN LINE (313 pp.)—Livingston Biddle Jr.—Julian Messner ($3).

In its day, the Philadelphia Main Line was perhaps the most splendid suburb since Louis XIV’s real-estate development at Versailles. That day is past. Many of the estates have been broken into petty parcels, many of the great homes torn down or converted into genteel academies. The grandsons of the great generation have not exactly returned to shirtsleeves, but they are catching the 8:24 instead of the 9:35.

Yet the social and moral order of the Main Line lingers, as a good upper will outwear its sole. Many of the old families have bravely kept up the appearance of a world long after its death. They are the members of a social body that proudly awaits its Proust. He may never come, but the Main Line will at least have had its Biddle.

He is Livingston Biddle Jr., 31, of the Main Line’s very own Biddies, a great-great-grandson of Banker Nicholas (“The Old Nick”) Biddle, a cousin of onetime Attorney General Francis Biddle and of Sculptor George Biddle, and the author of Main Line, a new novel that attempts to explain the society which produced him.*

Best Ivy. Like many princelings of the Biddle blood, Livingston grew up on the Main Line (in Bryn Mawr) and was educated among the very best ivy (at Princeton). Then he turned his back on leisure, took a job as copy boy at the Philadelphia Bulletin. After the war, in which he served as an ambulance driver, Livingston wrote a novel and 30 short stories, “threw them all in the Schuylkill River.”† In 1947 he joined Writer Martha Foley’s workshop at Columbia University.

Main Line is his first big postgraduate effort. It is a pretty good one, well organized, carefully if stiffly written, and sincere in tone. It manages with very few means to convey the musty gloom of the old Main Line houses, and to suggest that the gloom may be the emanation of the people in them, that the mustiness may be the reek of decaying personalities.

Best Friend’s Wife. Yet Main Line is far less than an adequate analysis of its subject, and something less than a good novel. For one thing, Novelist Biddle seems too fuzzy-fond of his world to see it clearly. For another, his story is a little too pat to be believable: a scion of one of the first families runs off with his best friend’s wife; their noses are thoroughly rubbed in the mess they have made by both families and by most of their friends; then, gradually, family & friends forgive them.

Novelist Biddle also has small success at creating character. All his young people talk as if they had read a book to learn how. Still, in its seriousness and workmanly care, Main Line is a moderately promising first novel—though it scarcely promises a novelist. By the end of his middling-length book, Author Biddle is so badly out of breath and ideas that it is clear he was meant to go a shorter distance.

* Not the first of his family to try. Back in 1927, Francis Biddle knocked out a novel, The Llanfear Pattern, in which the upper-crust Philadelphia hero tries to be a social rebel, finds it too much for his well-conditioned conventions. † A custom which, if generally followed by Philadelphia writers, may partly account for the notorious taste of Philadelphia’s drinking water.