Nonconformist

SIX PEOPLE AND LOVE (233 pp.)--Stella Zilliacus--John Day ($3.50).

This curious and amusing book is billed as a novel, but might just as accurately be called a memoir, a short-story collection or a religious tract. The 37-year-old author is the daughter of Britain's pinko Pundit Konni Zilliacus, Laborite Member of Parliament. During her untrammeled childhood, when her father was with the League of Nations Secretariat in Geneva, Stella Zilliacus obviously kept her eyes open and the tape recorder of her memory turned on. Real names drop like ripe plums--Nehru, H. G. Wells, Anthony Eden, Bernard Shaw--and the fictional ones seem to be readily guessable. What emerges is a wickedly witty portrait of an atheistic, humanist household headed by a zealot father who devoutly believes that religion is "nothing but a means of maintaining injustice, corruption and poverty," and a euphoric mother who dismisses all that sort of thing as "Bloomsbury talk." But the narrator's main concern is love, and the way in which it has come to six women of her acquaintance. The backgrounds range from bomb-flattened Warsaw to fat and peaceful Stockholm, from English country houses to the ski slopes of Austria's Vorarlberg. The people are nearly as cosmopolitan as Author Zilliacus herself (she has Swedish, Polish, Finnish and American blood), and their luck is uniformly bad. Placid Maria is forced into marriage with a Russian count; lovely Lisa's husband dies in the war; reckless Clarissa gets pregnant by a social inferior; Polish Teresa lets her fiance go rather than subject him to Communism; headstrong Rosemary's lover already has a wife; Pianist Anne-Marie loses her man to the priesthood.

For all of them, Author Zilliacus has an encouraging message: the love that really matters is not that between men and women, but the love of God. A Roman Catholic convert, she also looses repeated salvos against the materialism of her upbringing. In abandoning Marxism, she has unfortunately retained the hectoring manner of Marxist argument: "You're afraid of the fact that pain is an inevitable adjunct of life, for man as he is at the moment. That fear even leads you to deny the very existence of God Himself. Oh, you don't have to explain. I was brought up to that kind of nonsense, and I can repeat all the arguments in my sleep."

All told, the book is the work of a rebel against both the limp cliches of romance and the inverse pieties of atheism.

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