A Surfeit of Dainties
BOLGER, EUGENIE
A Surfeit of Dainties Three-Cornered Heart By Anne Fremantle Viking. 306 pp. $8.95. Reviewed by Eugenie Bolger Clara Annabel Caroline Grant Duff, called Tiny, was born on December 25, 1870. The...
...Looking back on her past and comparing it with the present, she once remarked, "The people of 90 years ago were, I think, wiser in their dealings with the young than the people of today...
...What an hors d'oeuvre of a friendship ours has been,' " she tells him...
...The daughter of a Liberal Member of Parliament, her first years were spent in a nursery ruled by a self-righteous nurse and a sadistic governess...
...One tale describes how Ramsay MacDonald, an admirer of the then widowed Tiny, invited Anne to the Royal Literary Fund dinner in place of her mother, who was sick with flu...
...When she does place herself center stage, it is often to play the comic...
...This time it was the nursemaid who staved off disaster...
...As she was destined, Tiny married and reared a family of her own...
...Fremantle's own life, it is filled with delight...
...Another guest was Robert Browning...
...Tiny's life was not without its portion of the soft and pleasant, including the close companionship of her father and the acquaintance of the distinguished men who were his friends...
...Halfway through Three-Cornered Heart Mrs...
...When the suicide attempt was reported to Tiny's mother, she ordered the child tied to a table leg every day for a week to discourage future folly...
...She appears to have played the duckling to her mother's swan, and her story wavers beside that of her elegant mother...
...Interestingly, these two women--the one modern, the other Victorian--maintained a close and affectionate relationship over the years...
...Tiny once asked him to explain the meaning of some lines from Pauline, only to have Browning reply he no longer understood them himself...
...Three-Cornered Heart views a changing society from the windows of the best houses...
...The passages describing her three years in India are as exotic as a gilded Eastern miniature...
...To which Lord Russell replies, " 'Yes . . . and now we have got, you might say, into the soup.'" Too many relationships in Three-Cornered Heart seem not to have progressed very far beyond the soup...
...Fremantle to see everything in both an objective and subjective light, to record the most painful memories with a certain affection...
...Fremantle is not writing a definitive literary or social history...
...All went well until after coffee, when, just before the Prime Minister's speech, big Corona y Coronas were handed around...
...One senses some of the strain her mother's political beliefs placed upon the liberal-minded Anne, but it is muted by deference, distance and her mother's death...
...The great adventure of her youth, however, came in 1881, when her father was appointed Governor of Madras...
...It is her next-to-youngest child, Anne, whose story makes up the second portion of Three-Cornered Heart...
...And like Mrs...
...Tiny was autocratic, willful, a confirmed agnostic...
...Anne, who since Papa's death had been quietly smoking in the lavatory the boxes and boxes of Romeo y Julietas he had left, took one and smoked it, very pleased and proud that her ash was longer than that of either of her neighbors...
...Still, the lack of substance and proportion is easily understood, if not quite forgiven...
...Without disturbing the tranquility, even the sweetness, of her memoirs, she reveals the uglier aspects of life in a large Victorian household...
...One frequent visitor was Matthew Arnold, to whom Tiny recited his own poetry while sitting on his knee...
...Fremantle's book...
...They were harder, less tolerant, less sentimental, but they were much more what the Germans call Realmenschen...
...Ramsay, however, was not amused and told Mama he would never escort the child again...
...She suffered such unmerciful bullying at the hands of her older brothers that one day, when one of them had teased her beyond endurance, she lunged at him with a carving knife...
...nostalgia is not disposed of, but rather set aside...
...In her memoirs, which she relates in third person, she is not so much the central figure as the amused observer...
...There is such a thing as a surfeit of dainties, and after a while one longs for more substantial fare...
...Such discursiveness, though charming, has its limitations...
...They brought up their children with a view to a real world with real problems where people constantly had to do things they disliked and where it was not all soft and pleasant...
...Yet her treatment of these events conveys the quality of Mrs...
...A year later, having overheard the servants gossiping about a local suicide, she tried to end her misery by leaping out a window...
...It may be misleading to begin a discussion of Three-Cornered Heart, Anne Fremantle's biography of her mother and herself, with the most nightmarish episodes of her mother's childhood...
...Her return to England left her with a sense of loss from which she never completely recovered...
...This enables Mrs...
...Peeling off the gentle nostalgia that wraps the past, she is nevertheless careful to preserve it...
...If she cannot resist showing us more than we need to see of some things, and less than we wish of others, that does not mean the tour is without value...
...Her forte is a quiet, self-mocking humor...
...Tiny is tougher...
...She relishes light moments, stuffing her pages with diverting anecdotes about everyone she knows, and even some people she does not know...
...Whatever the reason, her story seems pastel and muted, chatty and cheerful, but carefully guarded in relating the private moments...
...Fremantle when she is dealing with her own feelings...
...Perhaps the romance of a bygone age lends grace and style to her mother's story, perhaps English reticence inhibits Mrs...
...Born into a different world, she is the antithesis of her mother...
...Anne is intellectual, scholarly, deeply concerned with questions of faith...
...There was the palace at Guindy with its hundred servants, the stable with its hundred horses, the residence at Ootacamund where one could go hunting jackals in the hills...
...Fremantle recalls a luncheon with Bertrand Russell, an old family friend...
...Only the butler's presence of mind prevented her from inflicting injury...
...It is domestic, witty, eccentric and warm...
...Tiny was among those members of the family who joined him there...
...She is leading us through a crowded attic, unpacking for our benefit boxes of memorabilia and small artifacts that evoke a vanished way of life...
Vol. 54 • March 1971 • No. 5
