Crumbs from the Upper Crust
LEKACHMAN, ROBERT
Crumbs From the Upper Crust London Was Yesterday, 1934-1939 By Janet Flanner Viking. 153 pp. $9.95. Reviewed by Robert Lekachman This sumptuously illustrated period piece will appeal, I...
...Much in this volume is fun to read and the pictures evoke sentimental tears for one's lost youth...
...They like horses more than people...
...They work as hard as the horses they admire...
...The longest set piece is a profile of Queen Mary that confirms the world's judgment of English royalty...
...They all have hot tempers they have learned to control-a sacrifice for their country's sake...
...Flanner takes this royal nonsense fairly seriously, admiring Stanley Baldwin's handling of the abdication and judging Edward harshly...
...The chap did, when all is said, let the side down...
...Until 1938, when the shadows of Munich and the premonitions of impending war begin to color her chronicle, she writes of a London whose most visible personages were members of the royal family and their entourage...
...Were the readers of the New Yorker that fixated upon royal crises, the follies of the rich, and the ephemera of the London season...
...Janet Flanner will remind them of the high-grade corn of Edward's farewell speech ("At long last I say a few words of my own,' and all that), placing love above the crown...
...They know they are supposed to sell British merchandise at home and abroad...
...Flanner did journey out of London for events like the Glyndebourne opera festival, but a trip to Glasgow, though much less pleasant, might have produced some insight into the lives of Depression casualties...
...I yield to few in my admiration of them, yet I can't help recalling that during the 1930s Oswald Mosely was stirring up East End anti-Semitic demonstrations, Aneurin Bevan was rising as a radical labor politician, and the electorate were nerving themselves to be sufficiently undeferential to throw the Conservatives out of office in 1945 and install a Labor party pledged to nationalization and redistribution...
...One and all, including the romantic Edward, they are dull as dishwater...
...Were the English really as adorable in their gentle, helpful, loyal, and deferential way as one must gather from London Was Yesterday...
...The pictures are stunning, both of people and places, and especially of theater people...
...what the Queen wears today, hordes of her adoring subjects will purchase tomorrow in the form of Marks and Spencer imitations...
...They possess average intelligence, no sense of humor and phenomenal memories, forgetting neither faces nor statistics...
...What better entertainment could one ask...
...When finally she turns to politics, her assessments of the major performers-Chamberlain, Churchill, Eden, Atlee, and their associates-are enduringly interesting...
...Fortunately, there is more in London Was Yesterday than court society...
...The young Laurence Olivier was either the decade's handsomest man or, if he was not, an equally youthful Anthony Eden deserved the palm...
...I learn more than I really care to about the presentation of debutantes at court, Queen Mary's hats (against which her children reported themselves "powerless"), the length of the trains attached to ceremonial gowns (two and a half yards reduced in the interest of economy from the pre-1914 four and a half yards), and the austerities of an English monarch's daily routine...
...In this collection her vision of England, though generally admiring, suffers from an exceedingly narrow focus...
...Reviewed by Robert Lekachman This sumptuously illustrated period piece will appeal, I suspect, particularly to those middle-aged Anglophiles who suffered through the romance of Edward VIII and twice-divorced Wallis Simpson, forever "Wally" to her devotees...
...But I expected a heartier menu from this writer than this assortment of meringues...
...On the whole, however, this scrapbook left me disappointed...
...Their interest in books, art, music, and architecture is minimal...
...There are priceless photographs of Noel Coward, Gertrude Lawrence, Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne, John Gielgud, and Emlyn Williams...
...Away from her society infatuations, the author exercises a keen critic's judgment of plays, orchestras and art exhibitions...
...Wasn't anyone in New York (or Dubuque) curious about how men and women were making out in London slums, Welsh coal valleys and Midland manufacturing towns...
...Flanner, whose Paris letters are a New Yorker institution, alternated English with French communiques during the years just before World War II...
Vol. 58 • July 1975 • No. 14
