Concerto

THE FOUNTAIN OVERFLOWS (435 pp.)--Rebecca West--Viking ($5). A few years ago, "watching our marmalade cat drink a saucer of milk," Rebecca West thought how nice it would have been to have had hair the same color. For no particular reason, she went on to think: "I would like to have been a musician." A few seconds later, she had made a resolution. "I am going upstairs to write a short story about a musical family," she told her husband, retired Banker Henry Maxwell Andrews.

The short story grew into a 150,000-word novel which marks Author West's return to full-length fiction after two decades of critical and topical treatises (A Train of Powder, The Meaning of Treason). It is also a return to the world of her childhood, when hansom cabs rolled London's streets, and children, shopping with mothers whose skirts trailed to the cobblestones, stared goggle-eyed at the blazing naphtha flares of the foggy street markets. At the center of this scene stands the marmalade cat--metamorphosed into ruddy-haired Cordelia Aubrey, pathetic child victim of the musical muse.

Tombs of Ogres. Cordelia's mother is a former concert pianist who takes for granted that music is the staff of life. "I wonder what instrument you are going to play?" is the only question she asks of Richard, her infant son. Richard chooses the flute almost before he can walk; his older sisters, Rose and Mary, are already pianists who deem a summer well spent if they have passed it "infatuated with arpeggios." Cordelia, eldest of the four, plumps for the violin, and while her heart is always in the right place, her fiddle bow never is. As for their father, Piers Aubrey, he is a frustrated and debt-ridden minor genius. So, visitors to the Aubrey home usually find Mrs. Aubrey at the door assuring angry tradespeople in her musical voice that her husband is not at home, Mr. Aubrey hiding in his study writing a scathing survey of national economics, and four children filling the air with a piano duet, a flute solo and an excruciating violin.

But The Fountain Overflows is no farcical satire on an eccentric family.* On the contrary, told from the inside through the lips of daughter Rose, it is the story of a family that believes heart and soul in the eccentricity of the rest of the world and the normalcy of itself. Other children have pets, but the Aubreys, who prefer "made-up" animals, go daily to empty stables and feed imaginary horses with nonexistent sugar. Their dingy surroundings in South London never depress them, because they know that the isolation hospital, the workhouse and the sewage farm are really "the tombs of ogres which had been found lying here after a rout of ogre forces in a battle."

Dialogues of Dolls. As spelled out by Rebecca West, the tragedy of genius is that there is no way of judging whether it is real or illusory. When father Aubrey, for instance, takes balloons and other airborne things quite seriously, even his best friends fear that he will go round the bend unless he takes a complete rest. Misguided Cordelia, on the other hand, is believed by her schoolteacher to be an infant prodigy. Obsessed with convictions of her own genius, she fiddles madly before audiences of ardent ignoramuses. When at last a tough old professional assures her that she is no good and never will be, Cordelia runs to her bedroom, clutching a bottle of poison. Downstairs, her father's study stands empty. Frayed to the breaking point by the scorn of common-sensical people, father Aubrey has left his wife and family flat and run away like a hunted animal.

The Fountain's fatal weakness is an unnatural and very unmusical style of dialogue. Modeled on Victorian storybooks for young readers (e.g., "Children, is it not about this time that the lapegeria comes out at Kew?"), it makes all the characters, without exception, sound like awkward, clockwork dolls. Too bad, because Rebecca West's descriptions of period colors, clothes, homes and mealtimes recapture the world of half a century ago as brightly as a painted canvas.

*Author West's own family background shows remarkable similarities: she was, like the narrator of her novel, the third daughter of an ex-concert pianist and an itinerant journalist with a talent for money troubles.

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