Portrait of a Generation

THE GOLDEN ECHO (272 pp.)--David Garnett--Harcourt, Brace ($4).

Everyone can remember something in his childhood that seems as wacky and improbable as an incident in Alice in Wonderland, but Novelist David Garnett wins hands down with his memories of childhood and youth (the first volume of his autobiography). When he was five, Joseph Conrad took him into the garden and taught him to sail a boat ("the sail was a . . . sheet tied . . . to a clothes prop . . . The green grass heaved in waves . . . our speed was terrific"). Novelist Ford Madox Ford showed him how to "twitch one ear without moving the other"; he went for a drive "accompanied by Henry James riding a bicycle," and a man named Jack Galsworthy, who had bookish aspirations, taught him to keep his head when others all about were losing theirs, by taking charge at the Garnett home when the Garnett puppy was discovered dragging a rotten bullock's head into the living room.

"The literary aspirant did not turn a hair, though the stench would have overpowered most people. He calmly fetched a shovel and a wheelbarrow, conveyed the horrible object to the bottom of the garden, dug a large hole, buried it, and then returned to wash his hands carefully and dust his knees with a handkerchief scented with a few drops of eau de Cologne." The same method may be detected, of course, in The Forsyte Saga.

Advice from George. The Golden Echo is a "picture of a literary generation" as well as a self-portrait. But it is additionally a well-done picture of what it meant to grow up in a world where the ring of the doorbell might announce the arrival of anything from a female Czarist assassin to corpulent Hilaire Belloc. In those days, young Garnett had no intention of surprising the world, as he did in the '30s, with such out-of-the-ordinary novels as Lady into Fox, The Sailor's Return, Pocahontas. He did not even listen when George Bernard Shaw, watching him play in a children's charade, dubbed him a "born actor." Botany was his choice, but it failed to flourish in air that was positively humid with literary precipitations. All that survives today of Botanist Garnett is a pinheaded fungus named Discinella Minutissima Ramsbottom et Garnett.

Few children have had the luck to grow up amid such intellectual variety. Grandfather Richard Garnett actually lived in the British Museum, where he was Keeper of Printed Books. Father Edward, who climbed the museum roof as other boys climb trees, became one of Britain's most influential literary advisers. Mother Constance learned Russian to while away the time, soon became the foremost English translator of Russian literature. Her toughest assignment: War and Peace, from which she emerged half blind.

Reassurance from Maynard. The growing boy never knew what strange world he would be living in next. One day he would find himself "turned loose into . . . the anthropological galleries" of the great museum. Another day, on a trip to Russia, he would be riding a pony furiously over the steppes. It is no wonder that, at the age of 18. he planned (and might as well have pulled off) the rescue from Brixton Prison of his friend Vinayak Savarkar, who today leads India's "extreme religious Nationalists--the Hindu Mahasabha" (Papa Garnett retrieved his son before the scheme could be put into effect).

The "golden echo" that rings throughout his book is of an English era when thoughtful men and women (except for those in Brixton) were so unconstricted and free from world-worry that the occasional explosions of war and revolution fell on their ears like detonations from another planet. So inbred was their sense of imperturbable peace that, when World War I broke out, none suspected that it was sounding the knell of the golden echo. Indeed, Author Garnett; fussing with his fungi, saw no need to join the army. His friend John Maynard Keynes (who grew up to be the great economist) had assured him "that the war could not last much more than a year." Author Garnett closes his book with the dry words: "It was a great relief for us all to have Maynard's assurance on this point."

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