Hard-Luck Tale

SINABADA -- Elinor Mordaunt -- Greystone ($2.75).

Most autobiographies are marked by significant omissions. Elinor Mordaunt's has at least two. The first: that Somerset Maugham once sued her for libel when she tried, in Gin and Bitters, to lay him out as he had tried to lay out Thomas Hardy in Cakes and Ale. The other gap in Author Mordaunt's autobiography is a period of two and a half years when she was married to a Mauritian sugar planter. He was not a good husband. He put her up as a stake in a card game, tried unsuccessfully to give her away to a sea captain. Because of these interesting omissions, what is left in Sinabada is mostly travel-adventure and a long hard-luck story.

An ugly, fuzzy-haired, sour-tempered little tomboy born of English gentry, Author Mordaunt started life trying to keep up with her strapping brothers, one of whom was champion spitter at his school. In spite of her parents' insistence that "no one who is not physically, mentally or morally wanting seems to fancy you," she got herself engaged to a handsome protege of Cecil Rhodes. Soon after his sudden death in Africa, Author Mordaunt married the sugar planter--a mistake born of pity, for which she blames most of the hard luck that dogged her thereafter.

After her getaway from her husband, she went to Australia on a sailing vessel, gave birth to a baby shortly after her arrival. Followed a period of seven and a half years of grinding poverty, with pneumonia and a broken leg thrown in for good measure. Back in London, where a doctor prescribed "love, leisure and a balance at the bank," she wangled a newspaper assignment to go to Jamaica, fell on deck and broke her leg again. Subsequently she had a serious operation, the flu, heart trouble, high blood pressure, another broken leg. But between mishaps she managed somehow to visit Africa and the South Sea Islands, where she won Sunday supplement fame as "Lady King" ("Sin-abada") of 60 cannibal islands. A good mixer with savages, she has been visiting them ever since.

Looking back on her 66-year life, Author Mordaunt does not, despite a stout attempt, make much sense of it. Nor does the reader. Most difficult to make out is the connection between her career and her comforting moral: "Never love, never pity; keep one end in view--your own success, and all will go well with you."

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