Books: English Summer

A LONG TIME AGO—Margaret Kennedy —Doubleday, Doran ($2).In a day which has not yet decided what shape a novel ought to have or whether it should have a shape at all. it is sometimes a relief to find a novel which not only has form but notably ingenious form. Such is A Long Time Ago, a much better constructed, not to mention better finished book than Authoress Kennedy’s best-selling The Constant Nymph.

The story opens not in medias res but long after everything has happened. Hope Napier, brusquely grown-up Post-War product of what she regards as a typically Victorian family, discovers something that makes her wild with curiosity. In a book of memoirs by notorious Diva Elissa Koebel she reads of a summer idyll on an Irish lake, with her dead father as Elissa’s passionate lover, with no mention whatever of her mother. Hope’s Uncle Kerran, attacked on the subject, tells her what he remembers, shows her some old letters that fill in Elissa’s rhapsodic account.

Ellen Napier, Hope’s mother, was married at the time and about to have still another baby. The whole family—it was Elder Sister Louise’s urgent idea—had for-gathered for the summer in a most uncomfortable ancient keep on a tiny island in the middle of an Irish lake. Ellen had left her husband Dick, a hard-working surgeon, in London. She thought she would like the place better when he arrived. But before he came Elissa showed up, captivated most of the party. By the time Dick came, the atmosphere was stickily platonic, ready to precipitate. Elissa made a dead set for him and. thanks to his nervous state, got him. Ellen’s attitude throughout was so superhuman nobody could understand it, then or later. For her sake everyone pretended nothing had happened; she acted as if nothing had. After reading Elissa’s memoirs and the old letters, and talking to Uncle Kerran, Hope’s brusque verdict was: nothing did. But Uncle Kerran, the reader, and nearly everyone but Ellen knew better.

The Author. A literary infant like Rosamond Lehmann (see col. 1) Margaret Kennedy (Mrs. David Davies) had written five novels and three plays before she went to Oxford’s Somerville College. There she sang in Sir Hugh Allen’s famed Bach Choir. After taking her degree she spent two years writing a modern European history textbook (A Century of Revolution], then turned to novels. Her second (The Constant Nymph, 1924) made her a bestseller. Year later she married young Barrister David Davies, onetime secretary to Lord Asquith, lives with him and her small daughter on London’s only hilltop (Campden Hill Square). Other books: The Ladies of Lyndon, A Long Week-End, Red Sky at Morning, The Fool of the Family.