Books: English Spring

INVITATION TO THE WALTZ—Rosamond Lehmann—Holt ($2). U. S. letters in any department are no longer colonial to Britishers, with the possible exceptions of detective stories and letters-to-the-Times. But while a glaring U. S. dawn silhouets many a crude indigenous growth, England’s politely setting sun bathes her literary garden in a relatively classic glow. English readers dislike and distrust such experimenters as James Joyce and David Herbert Lawrence. And many a U. S. reader, Tory if no longer colonial, shares the British dread of untrimmed edges, prefers the clipped formality of more traditional writers. For such tastes Authoresses Rosamond Lehmann, Margaret Kennedy and Victoria Sackville-West (see cols. 2 & 3) offer fine nosegays.

Few writers have been so infallible as Rosamond Lehmann. Dusty Answer(1927) might have been a lucky strike; A Note in Music showed it was not. In Invitation to the Waltz Authoress Lehmann, with sure and delicate touch, tells a tale of vernal English virginity. Olivia and Kate were sisters, both pretty, but different. Kate was neat, chic, determined; Olivia dowdy and diffuse. Both were beside themselves with breathless ambition at the prospect of Lady Spencer’s dance—Olivia’s first. Their hard-put-to-it mother had relaxed so far as to let them invite a young Oxonian to escort them. Reggie turned out to be unattractive, unimpressionable; when he announced that he was planning to take Holy Orders the sisters wrote him off as a loss. Olivia, because she was a wallflower, met many new people but they were all queer or preoccupied, not advantageous. Kate met nobody new but managed so well that super-eligible Tony looked on her with desirous but honorable eyes. Next day the sisters, with a whole dance-full of mutually exclusive experience behind them, knew they would never be really intimate again. And Olivia, though she had failed to get her man, had discovered more possibilities in life.

Authoress Lehmann, wise economist of effects, never gives you too much ofanything, of some of her characters lets you have tantalizing glimpses that arenot half enough. What she lets you see of young brother James, a glowering but attractive rebel, would make any reader call for more. In the silence of his crib James was given to versifying his wrongs. One scorcher:

Too many things have we got to, Too many things have we not to.

The Author. U. S. readers who chuckle and sniffle over her books may be pleased to know that Rosamond Lehmann has U. S. blood, comes from the same family as Playwright Owen Davis. Her father, the late Rudolph Chambers Lehmann, was on Punch’s editorial staff, was better known as one of England’s mightiest oars. Aged 31, Authoress Lehmann is married to Arlist Wogan Phillips, nephew of towering Lord Kylsant who spent the past year in jail for malfeasance in connection with the affairs of the Royal Mail Line (TIME, Aug. 12, 1931 et seq.). Like Infant James she lisped in numbers, still prefers verse to prose but is refreshingly reticent about publishing her verses.