Puckish Proust

A NUMBER OF PEOPLE, Sir Edward Marsh, Harper ($3.50).

Lady Wenlock was so absent-minded that once when she was hunting a pen, she found herself looking for it under P in the French dictionary. Deaf, too, she carried a silver ear trumpet that looked like an entree dish. When she turned it toward an Italian duke at luncheon, he gallantly filled it with green peas.

Sir Edward ("Eddie") Marsh knows as many such stories as there were incredible characters in preWar, bilingual British society. In A Number of People he strings them along on the bright, thin thread of his own life story with all the wit, charm, and intimate malice of a puckish British Proust. Unlike Proust, Marsh seldom sees through his irascible, Latinizing, fox-hunting dukes and musical, horsey, but absent-minded duchesses, although their snobbishness often makes him wince.

Eddie Marsh worshipped his pious, bookish, tone-deaf mother (she "couldn't tell God Save the Weasel from Pop Goes the Queen"). She weaned Author Marsh on Hamlet's soliloquy, and he started her reading such moderns as Zola. She taught him to sew, too, and later, Sir Warrington Smyth, a schoolfellow, and "a powerful influence for good, fired me to knit mittens. . . ."

At Cambridge, he made friends with future Philosopher Bertrand Russell and future Diplomat Maurice Baring. Cutup Baring sometimes filled Marsh's French pastry with quinine, sometimes wrote such T. S. Eliot poetry as:

Above the towering, tumbled hills Shy grey clouds wander near and far: The impatient ravens bite their bills Awaiting the unpunctual star.

To his friend, Critic Edmund Gosse, Baring sent a telegram: "Maurice Baring passed away peacefully this afternoon." At Gosse's Marsh heard Artist-Writer Max Beerbohm explain the diminutive figures in William Orpen's pictures: because Orpen was so short. "He sits down to paint, and says, 'Now I'll do a tremendously big fellow, I should think about five foot six.' "

In 1905 Marsh became Winston Churchill's secretary at the Colonial Office. For Marsh it was love at first sight which he never got over. Soon Winston had Lion Hunter Marsh lion-hunting in Africa, although he would not trust Marsh with a gun until a wounded rhinoceros charged him (Churchill had shot it while it was sleeping). For days they traveled through the tropical vegetation where Lady Cromer's maid had once asked: "How long, my Lady, must we tarry in this shrubbery?" At Khartoum, Churchill's valet died. Writes Marsh: "I was grateful to him [Churchill] for his confidence in my right feeling when he told me that though it might seem an odd thing to say, he knew I should understand him if he owned that he would have minded less if it had been me."

In Marsh the literary great seem to generate no spark. Strangely flat are his reminiscences of Anatole France, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, George Bernard Shaw, G. K. Chesterton and A. E. Housman to whom Marsh credits this Regents Board bettering of Wordsworth: First Don: 0 cuckoo, shall I call thee bird, Or but a wandering voice?

Second Don: State the alternative preferred, With reasons for your choice.

Marsh felt especially flat in the presence of the unrelated Lawrences, D. H. and T. E., with both of whom he corresponded. His closest literary friendship was with Poet Rupert Brooke, with whom he exchanged many long, often rather silly letters.

The War made Marsh a bitter-ender. With Churchill he went on a heroic reconnaissance of the front where he was "rather surprised at not feeling the least frightened." He talked tanks with experts, swapped barrack-room tales too rancid to print "even in French." With the War over, many of his friends killed, Marsh took to collecting pictures, editing his serial anthology, Georgian Poetry. It sold 73,000 copies. Seven years Marsh spent making the only complete English translation of La Fontaine's Fables.

Like the witty, glittery, fragile society it reports, after 300 pages A Number of People begins to peter out in trivia and spotty reminiscences. When Marsh retired in 1937, George VI made him Sir Edward Marsh. So tickled was the new knight, he forgot to go to his own knighting, had to be phoned for. At a luncheon soon after Lady Leslie asked him what difference he found being a knight made. "I said I hoped it had given me more presence." "More presents?" exclaimed astonished Lady Ribblesdale, "What a very sordid point of view!"

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