Books: Daydream

MEMORY OF LOVE—Bessie Breuer—Simon & Schuster ($2).

Author Breuer compares modern love to a nickel-in-the-slot piano: “Sad and twanging and uneven and the old sacred chords breaking through.” This should be fair warning to readers who like a more classical-romantic tune. Memory of Love is an ambitious attempt to transpose the old sweet song into what traditional troubadours will call a purely imaginary key. Author Breuer is a woman but she writes her story in the masculine first person. Her feminine peers may see in her novel the projection of a feminine daydream : how it would feel to be a lady-killer.

Alec (the “I” of the story) is a rich man’s son, nearing 40 but still with no visible means of support other than periodic parental checks. A member of The Brook, most select of Manhattan clubs (where there are “always amusing fellows . . . ready for anything”), Alec divides his time between his country estate and the pleasures of town. He is married to a beautiful wife, but they are just pals. Alec not only has good looks (he was called “Adonis” at Yale but was somehow popular), but also a fatal charm. He knows a lot about animals, rides like a centaur, drives like a state policeman. He did his bit in the War (“We had slept with our windows open that hard winter and had had only one blanket apiece”). And he is almost as hard a drinker as a Dashiell Hammett hero. It is small wonder that Julie falls in love with him at sight. Conscious of the fact that she is “not a lady,” that she has a far-off husband with whom she does not get along, a precarious job as a style-illustrator, she begins writing him love-letters even before they are introduced. Her resistance to his seduction is merely formal, slightly complicated by the unexplained facts of her married life, the twistiness of her pursued personality.

Their affair reaches a physical climax at times, an emotional climax every day. When Alec shows signs of taking the thing too seriously, and makes a practice of going to bed with a bottle, his father steps in, cuts off his allowance. Faced with a thoroughly frightening economic reality he comes to heel like the well-brought-up son of his mother that he is, drops Julie like an old bone. Author Breuer’s intention was not tendentious, but Memory of Love does better as a tract on snobbery than as a tragedy of souls.