Nostalgic & Nice

WITH MUCH LOVE (276 pp.) -- Anne Green -- Harper ($3).

Papa was already the father of six, but overjoyed at the news. "Oh, my dear darling wife!" said he, "we haven't had one for ages. I love babies." Mamma, who had to run the household on 250 francs a month, said coldly: "So you're glad for me to bring another poor wretch into the world?" And Papa replied: "Of course I'm glad. It'll be a boy this time, he'll be born in 1900, beginning his life with a world's fair too!"

The "poor wretch" who was born in Paris in 1900 was to become Novelist Julian Green, an expatriate American who has written his moody psychological novels in French. Sister Anne Green, who never married, has also spent her life in France but writes her deft, frothy novels in English. With engaging candor and none of the moodiness of her famed brother, she tells in With Much Love the story of the family's first 21 years in France. Few books of family reminiscences have been written with such obvious joy and communicate so much of it to the reader.

In 1893, after Papa had lost his considerable cotton fortune in Savannah, he took a job as manager of a cotton agency in Le Havre. Mamma did wonders with his small pay and her almost total lack of French. The children born in France had to ask others what Mamma said when she scolded them in English, though both parents tried to "prevent us from becoming expatriate mongrels." As the years passed, easygoing Papa became fairly well off and brought his family to a comfortable home in Paris. But it was Mamma, tiny and handsome, who staved off the early crises and somehow managed to discipline her brood of bilingual barbarians.

But not entirely. In mock despair she frankly told friends that her children were dolts, once complimented Anne with: "That's right, lovey-dove, you seem a shade less stupid than your sisters." Stupid or not, they all wanted to know about Oscar Wilde, who had just completed his prison sentence in England for immorality and could be seen drinking his absinthe at the Cafe de la Paix. Papa advised that they be enlightened in 20 years. Eleanor, the loveliest one, first accepted, then jilted English Novelist Arnold Bennett. Writes Anne: "A chit was throwing over a good heart, a fine brain and an emerald ring, all belonging to a literary gentleman of some prominence, aged thirty-nine."

The parents, though they never returned to the U.S., firmly refused to think of themselves as expatriates. The children, too, still consider themselves Americans. Papa, unable to get bourbon, made his mint juleps with French brandy, sold U.S. cottonseed oil with enthusiasm and regularly leafed through Southern history. As for Mamma, nothing cheered her so much as an American visitor. Writes daughter Anne: "She felt herself to be an island around which surged forty million incurious French. . . . When she spoke of herself as a Southerner, these foreigners understood her to mean South America and that was a bad start, so Mamma never brought the French into her universe and was never part of theirs." When she died in 1914 as the Germans advanced, "she took everything with her: the small safe world built around us by her love. A world where good children flourished and the bad ones escaped righteous retribution."

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