King Charles's Head

MONOGRAM -- G. B. Stern -- Macmillan ($2.50).

Autobiographers who want to tell about themselves, without giving the whole show away, have discovered there is more than one way to kill a cat. Gertrude Stein did it by pretending it was Alice B. Toklas speaking. Norman Douglas did it by thumbing through a lifetime's collection of calling cards, telling what he could remember about each visitor. Last week Gladys Bronwyn Stern beat an even more ingenious path about the bush. Readers learned little from Monogram about the facts of Author Stern's life but heard plenty about her fancies and opinions. For her admirers, the plenty was a surfeit.

Author Stern's autobiographical scheme was also a psychological experiment. She decided to start from a casually selected object, let subconscious association's artful aid carry her whither it would; repeat the process twice, to the point where all three random lines met -- "and see then whether the space they enclose remains a vacuum, or whether anything of interest, any personal King Charles's Head, has got itself involuntarily shut into the triangle."* The scheme has the merit of surprise: no one, not even Author Stern, can tell where she is going to end up. For example, her first meander, starting from a glass dragon on her mantelpiece, peters out with a goldfish in Hollywood that swooned during an earthquake and had to be revived with salt water.

Like most successful writers, Author Stern likes and approves her successful fellows, contemns her somehow threatening colleagues whose brows are higher: "I would give you the Hundred Most Massive Highbrow Living Writers, the kind who creak and heave as they thrust their shoulders at the wheel, like figures in a frieze of Modern Labour, for what Dorothy Parker can do by not quite using half the strength in her little finger." U. S. readers, who have long recognized Author

Stern's freedom from the stuffier forms of British insularity, will applaud her enthusiasm over the Grand Canyon, the Mt. Wilson Observatory, the Marx Brothers. Litterateurs will admire her fondness for Jane Austen, deprecate her passion for the Elsie Dinsmore books. Newsy nosers will note her family were well-to-do London

Tews, her mother a pretty Viennese: that H. G. Wells calls her "Tynx"; that for 38 years she was afraid of oysters; that she was thrice proposed to before she was 20; that she was married 14 years but does not mention her husband's name (Geoffrey Lisle Holdsworth) or anything else about him.

In her search for her King Charles's head. Author Stern shakes several likely candidates out of her grab-bag. One is a childhood desire to be included in the glorious goings-on of a large but mythical family of Rectory Children. One is a sturdy feminine contempt for what she dubs the Peter Pannery of the typical Englishman. And one is the Dreyfus Case, which fascinated her not only because she was a Jew but because she was a young contemporary of its long-drawn-out events. When the three lines of her association-autobiography have crossed, the King Charles's head she finds in the resultant triangle is -- rather to her surprise -- the Dreyfus Case. Unconvinced readers thought it might as well have been the Rectory Children.

* As every Dickensian knows, King Charles's head was the personal obsession that kept cropping up in Mr. Dick's interminable memorial.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.