The Private Tutor

THE VERDICT

by HILDEGARD KNEF 377 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

$10.

One of the great climaxes in Proust's Remembrance of Things Past occurs when Charles Swann confides to the Due de Guermantes that he is dying. Instead of sympathizing, the Due turns to his wife, who has dressed for a party, and demands that she wear red shoes, not black, to go with her red dress. He tells Swann jovially to calm down; they will be meeting for lunch soon.

That sort of callousness is about what people with cancer can expect, according to Hildegard Knef. She has it and lives Proust's horrid little scene. She is in a consulting room when fear engulfs her. "I'll see you at the gala," the doctor assures her. "I'm afraid you won't," she says. "Now, now, now, fresh air, enjoy life and love" is the advice.

Knef in particular does not need this asinine counsel. As The Verdict and her earlier memoir The Gift Horse show, she has pursued life and love with fierce energy all of her 50 years. She is one of Germany's best-known actresses, a performer in 54 films, including Silk Stockings and Decision Before Dawn in Hollywood.

The Gift Horse (1971) revealed that she could have been a writer as well, perhaps even a novelist. Although that book contains a fine, stringent recollection of Hollywood, it is best about the war. Knef had a wretched time of it, usually hungry and sick, falling in love with Nazis and Jews, shuttling across constantly altering boundaries. The secret of her style then and now lies in its immediacy.

One never feels she is making an effort to remember; the past seems to emerge visually and verbally whole, like unspoken thoughts in the mind.

In The Verdict Knef deals just as effectively with the panic of being sick in a modern hospital. Emerging from anaesthesia, she hears herself being discussed by attendants: "Would you recognize her? I mean, the way you know her from TV?" There is the blinding need for painkillers. "I'm not allowed to give you anything" is the standard reply. "My bed is standing in the middle of the room," writes Knef. "It didn't quite make it to the wall. My room in hell has been lifted out of time, hordes of starving rats are gnawing at my belly."

Not all of The Verdict occurs in Swiss and Austrian hospitals. For one thing, the disease is now under control. Also, the book often dips back into "preverdict" times. There are three long, notable set pieces--a jet-set party in a ski chalet; an account of the boyhood of David Palastanga, Knef's husband, in London's East End; and a chronicle of a nightclub tour a few years ago in which she sang and Palastanga did just about everything else. They are all funny, mercilessly observed scenes, full of irony and incongruity.

When Knef writes about her husband, there is some tenderness as well. A stage director, he also served as his wife's skillful English translator. In most of The Verdict he is a shadowy figure waiting patiently at home in Salzburg with their little daughter Christina. It is a shifting, troubled relationship that bests even Knef's considerable descriptive powers. Most of The Verdict delivers the uncut stuff of emotion. So it is with dismay that one comes, near the end, upon a passage about love that is pure cant. Marriage has its ups and downs, reports Knef, but love has an in tensity that mere friends are incapable of understanding. The passage sounds false, and, unfortunately, it is. Since the book was finished, the Palastangas have separated. Knef has returned to Berlin and has completed another movie. Although in uncertain health, she will come to the U.S. next month to promote her book. She is going on.

The Verdict may not reach the audience that might best appreciate it.

Anyone would hesitate to take it into a hospital. But the story is told with a blank lack of self-pity, and there is some thing inspiring about Knef's appraisal of her fears, resentments and rather gallant hopes. At one point she surveys her body, which has been naked on the screen. The belly is scarred; a breast is gone. However, she looks at herself with a degree of composure. She sees her body "as a stern and sadistic private tutor, but one capable of springing a delightful surprise."

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