Doomed Summer

THE BURNING GLASS by S.N. Behrman. 396 pages. Little, Brown. $6.95.

In this era of shock theater, it is hard to realize that there were mellow days of social comedy, when moral and political dilemmas were discussed in the drawing room with reason and wit. In the '30s, Samuel Nathaniel Behrman was the master of the form (Rain from Heaven, No Time for Comedy). Now 75, he has applied the formula to his first novel, and it is as well-turned and entertaining as his best plays.

This time Behrman's vision of man's folly is acted out against the Nazi takeover of Central Europe, and the cast is varied and larger than could possibly be packed on a stage. The hero Stanley is a young Jewish playwright from Ohio, talented but vain, who is battening on the smash success of his first Broadway comedy. He falls in love with Stephanie von Arnim, a beautiful, aristocratic Austrian actress, and goes to live in her Salzburg castle with the hazy intention of fashioning a comedy for her talents and her accent.

Flight. As Stephanie's guest, Stanley plunges into the brilliant intellectual and social haut monde in Salzburg for the music festival. He is a self-conscious blunderer, but the one thing he understands far better than his indifferent friends is the true nature of Hitler's mania. The Jew and Gentile gathered to hear Toscanini conduct Fidelia cling to the illusion that Austria is protected by some ineluctable immunity. But after watching his barber preen in his new National Socialist uniform, and after seeing the troopers take over the best restaurants, Stanley knows that he must get out. He realizes that the society that obsesses him is committing suicide.

Leave he does, for an assignment in Hollywood, only to find his Salzburg companions arriving daily--adrift, usually broke, looking for movie money. Behrman's glimpse of Hollywood will not trouble the ghosts of novelists Evelyn Waugh and Nathanael West, but he does focus on something these satirists missed. Behrman's Hollywood is like a latter-day Paris or Geneva--an asylum for talented refugees who in fact fled to the area in the late '30s.

Palpable Authenticity. Behrman's ending is an embarrassing cliche, but his mastery of dialogue shines on every page, and the ease with which he routes characters on and off the scene amounts to sleight of hand. But what gives the book its real fascination is its palpable authenticity. Behrman has collected people and experiences like a connoisseur. He has known the rich, the beautiful and the talented, and he appears to have put them into his novel as vividly and intimately as in a diary. Freud, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Arnold Schoenberg and Irving Thalberg make cameo appearances. Franz Werfel, Alma Mahler Werfel, Max Reinhardt, and several society beauties of the '30s are only slightly disguised. The author mocks, but he also burnishes his characters with an elan found all too rarely in current fiction.

Like Stanley Grant, Behrman went to Salzburg in 1937, and the memory of a doom-laden summer started him on the book, the only novel he plans to write, nearly two decades later. "I knew what was coming," he said. "The streets were choked with Mercedes full of Nazis. But all that those dear people talked about was whether Mahler or Bruckner was a better composer--that was the big debate then. To this day I don't understand why they didn't see it and get out; but the sad truth is that no matter what public tragedy is looming, people continue acting out their own private comedies."

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