Goya a la Kinsey

THIS Is THE HOUR (516 pp.)--Lion Feuchtwanger--Viking ($3.95).

The best historical novelists have held the past as a mirror to the present. In Lion Feuchtwanger's grand historical novels, Power and Success and the Josephus trilogy, the reflection was broad and occasionally profound. Since writing those books, Feuchtwanger has moved from Europe to Southern California, and his mirror has smogged up. The Book-of-the-Month Club presents his latest as a novel about Goya--and the novel is indeed about Goya, as a stud chart is about a bull. About a bull there may not be much more to-say. But about Don Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, the most penetrating portraitist since Rembrandt, the cool politician, the haggling and ruttish peasant, the subtle courtier, the loving father, the most varied Spaniard of his day, there should be more to say.

Author Feuchtwanger spends most of his time jotting down the statistics of Goya's sex life--especially the part of it he spent with the Duchess of Alba. The Alba affair was a minor episode in Goya's career, but it produced two of his most famous-paintings: La Maja Vestida (The Maja Clothed), a reclining portrait of the

Duchess, and La Maja Desnuda (The Nude Maja), a second portrait in the same attitude.

This Is the Hour is little more than an expanded anecdote of how these paintings came to be done. "His knees shook," it is recorded on page 10, where Goya and the Duchess meet. "Every hair, every pore of her skin, the thick arched eyebrows, the breasts half exposed under the black lace, aroused in him unbounded desire." Soon to his studio "she came, heavily veiled. They did not speak, not even words of greeting ... He snatched her to him, dragged her down upon the bed."

For the rest of the way, Feuchtwanger follows Goya like a patient Kinsey, occasionally dubs in statistics of other kinds, e.g., "The Escorial had 16 patios, 2,673 windows, 1,940 doors, 1,860 apartments, 86 staircases, 89 fountains, 51 bells . . . 204 statues . . . 1,563 paintings ... the complete skeletons of ten saints and martyrs, 144 skulls, 366 arms and legs, 1,427 fingers and toes." The most depressing statistic of all is the number of the final page: 516.

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