Birth of An Englishman

THE DOOR OF LIFE--Enid Bagnold-- Morrow ($2.50).

In "National Velvet" Enid Bagnold won a big U. S. audience with a slight story about an English girl and a race horse.

In The Door of Life she has taken on a bigger theme, which she describes as "the relationship of a mother and young children and unborn children and just-born children," adding her belief that her novel is "the first attempt to portray the very first moments of this relationship in de-tail." Whether or not it is the first attempt, Enid Bagnold's admirers are likely to hope that it will be her last, since The Door of Life gives such a rosy view of the joys of motherhood, contains so many lush emotional passages and so many unreal philosophical conversations about woman's responsibilities, that it might have been written in an effort to check Britain's declining birth rate. Mother of three sons and a daughter, Enid Bagnold in private life is Lady Roderick Jones, wife of the chairman of Reuters, leading British news agency.

The central character of The Door of Life is a middle-aged woman of the upper middle class, who is referred to throughout as "the squire." This in itself is likely to be a little confusing to U. S. readers, who usually think of English squires as ruddy, irascible old gents, more or less akin to Kentucky Colonels. So when they read about the squire picking up her sewing, putting on her evening dress and performing other distinctly feminine duties, their surprise tends to make them miss the point of Miss Bagnold's story. The squire, it turns out, is so called because in the absence of her husband she runs the household. Waiting for the birth of her fifth child, she watches over her three sons and her gentle, intuitive daughter, takes no nonsense from anybody: "Nonsense and a trouble," she thinks, "but it had to go on. No other way of living if you wanted to walk to your grave cloaked in the English life."

Aside from a few bright glimpses of the children and constant troubles with the help, these reflections make up most of The Door of Life. Although the. squire bears a healthy son without too much trouble, there is such confusion downstairs --the cook leaves because she cannot stand childbirth, another turns out to be immoral, the butler hates women, his substitute is a drunk and a maid is discharged for theft--that readers are likely to forget that Author Bagnold is picturing the fortitude of English mothers, not the corruption of English domestics.

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