Books: Unfrail Mother

THE CHEERFUL DAY (242 pp.)— Nan Fairbrother—Knopf ($4.50).

English Author Nan Fairbrother’s books are minor prose poems in praise of practically nothing. Six years ago, in An English Year, she wrote with impressive charm about a stretch of living in the country. In her new book, she is back in the city, and she writes mainly about the business of keeping house in London for a doctor husband and two growing boys. The story runs uncomfortably close to the banalities of the women’s magazines, and could have been a crashing bore. Instead, it is a sometimes placid but always graceful commentary on mothers and kids that few parents will find dull.

Author Fairbrother, like many a modern parent, suffers the nagging guilt that comes from failing to read books on bringing up children. Peter and John, her sons, may never know how lucky they were. For no book on child care spells out the formula for sensible parenthood that their mother contrived through natural kindness and a tough yet loving intelligence. She knows that children have troubles, but she also knows that parents should not pry into them too hard: “Their troubles are secret and not to be exposed to the alien air of adult reason.” But unlike many women, she always stayed tuned to her sons’ wave lengths. John was a happy extravert whose best crack was the observation that “God is a preacher who preaches to himself,” while Peter was a grave student of life who at ten wrote an essay on “Frailty thy name is Woman”: “I do not think that this is true. I do not think that a woman is frail. I think that she should be hard-working in the house while her husband goes and earns the living.”

Hard-working and far from frail, their mother developed some notable pedagogic ideas. “I have always thought the bathroom best for informal entertainment,” she reports, and in the bathroom she and the boys had some of their best talks. In a break with more advanced thought, she declares: “Sex, I think, is not one of the things that parents can help with . . . unless they are invited.” Her way was to acquaint the boys with it through novels, “pictures, plays, poetry, sculpture” because sex will introduce them to the arts, and “so long as they become conscious of the arts it scarcely matters how.” It is alarming to note that Father, busy with his patients, scarcely enters The Cheerful Day. But Mom shines and quietly dominates, a woman of taste and perception, as acute in describing the special character of London as she is in appreciating the pleasures and puzzlements of boyhood.