Stately Tome

EUSTACE AND HILDA (736 pp.)--L. P. Hartley--British Book Centre ($5.95).

Once upon a time, and a very leisurely time it was, a novel resembled a sheaf of obituary notices; it took various characters from the cradle to the grave and firmly left them there. Nowadays, when a novel may resemble anything from an unrhymed poem to an unprintable pamphlet or an analyst's case book, there is something refreshing about this old-style trilogy (its component novels were published in the U.S. more than a decade ago, but this is the first U.S. publication of all three in a package). Most remarkable fact about this work: Novelist L. P.* Hartley manages to sustain interest in several essentially drab, dim characters over 736 closely printed pages.

The drab is a girl named Hilda, and the dim is a boy named Eustace. Their family name is Cherrington, and they start out in a modest, money-haunted, middle-class way during that long Saturday afternoon--the sunlit late-Edwardian, early-Georgian period. Hilda is vibrant and dry-adlike--the sort of girl most men cannot stay away from, but should. Eustace cannot, which is particularly unfortunate since they are brother and sister. So an overstuffed couch of near incest trundles along through two decades. In Novel No. 1, entitled The Shrimp and the Anemone (Eustace, of course, is the poor shrimp and Hilda the voracious anemone), the pair spends a lot of time in the nursery or playing with sand castles on the seashore. But the plump, inadequate little boy and the domineering sister live on to play out their roles in real castles. Eustace is a birthright snob, smart, in his way, and nice to old ladies. One of them is a rich Miss Fothergill who--with solid cash though otherwise in the manner of Dickens' Miss Havisham in Great Expectations [ --becomes little Eustace's patroness.

In Novel No. 2, The Sixth Heaven, Eustace has turned into a pet of the Oxford esthetes. He has still not made it to the Stately Home set, but this social beatification is only a matter of time. Sister Hilda and he are invited to Anchorstone Hall, ancestral padded seat of the Staveleys, a proud family said to have their coat of arms embroidered even on the bath mats. Dashing Dick Staveley, M.P., is the very man who used to knock down Eustace's sand castles. Now he falls in love with Hilda, and takes her up in his private airplane. "The empyrean that had received Hilda had at last received them all ... The absolute sense of spiritual well-being that Eustace had coveted all his life now enveloped him." Unfortunately, Novel No. 3, Eustace and Hilda, does not carry the pair farther into the empyrean but in the opposite direction. Hilda ends up jilted, a psychological wreck with "a slight squint, a drooping eyelid," while Eustace turns into a dead shrimp deprived of the loving tentacles of his anemone.

The book is essentially a brass-rubbing on the tomb of a dead society. In his introduction, Lord David Cecil (The Young Melbourne) talks of a "masterpiece" and describes certain passages as among "the most beautiful in all modern English literature." While the trilogy plainly fails to live up to this exaggerated billing, it remains a well-written, well-crafted work. Another of the Stately Tomes of England has been thrown open to the public.

*Not for Long Playing, as some weary readers may suspect, but for Leslie Poles.

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