Rare Mixture

FANNY KEMBLE: A PASSIONATE VICTORIAN -- Margaret Armstrong -- Macmillan ($3).

Though the Victorian era has long been considered smug and lacklustre, readers of Victorian lives may yet decide that Victorianism turned out as many unconventional characters as Prohibition did drinkers.

Latest addition to the growing evidence of bootleg Victorian unconventionally is Margaret Armstrong's story of Fanny Kemble, to whom Novelist Henry James, her close friend, paid this tribute: "She was one of the rarest of women. . . . She reanimated the old drawing-rooms, relighted the old lamps, retuned the old pianos. . . . An extraordinary mixture of incongruous things, of England and France in her blood, of America and England in her relationships, of the footlights and the glaciers in her activities, of conformity and contumacy in her character and tragedy and comedy in her talk."

On no such level of eloquence and penetration as James's monograph, Author Armstrong's biography is nevertheless written with care and understanding. Her subject is a "natural," and, thanks to the fact that she quotes liberally from Fanny Kemble 's own vivid journals, the result ably suggests the reanimating qualities that inspired James's enthusiasm.

Born in 1809, Fanny Kemble was the last of the celebrated, exceedingly proud, theatrical "Kemble dynasty," the most famous of whom was Mrs. Siddons. The proudest, John Philip, whom Byron called "supernatural," sulked in retirement because he was jealous of Mont Blanc. Spoiled by her father, owner of Covent Garden theatre, Fanny was so high-spirited that at her French boarding school the only punishment that could subdue her was seeing a guillotining. Until she was 19 the Kembles had no thought of making an actress of her. Then, as a last resort to save Covent Garden from bankruptcy, her father drafted her to play Juliet. With only three weeks' rehearsal in the part, she became an overnight rage, paid off Covent Garden's -L-11,000 debt in a year. When a cholera plague shortly afterwards put Covent Garden in the red again, Fanny's father took her to the U. S. on tour.

Among her U. S. admirers, the most ardent was a 13-year-old Brooklyn boy named Walt Whitman, who testified that "nothing finer did any stage ever exhibit--and my boyish heart and head felt it in every minute cell." A year later, at the height of her fame, she quit the stage to marry the heir to a large Georgia plantation, handsome, dilettante Pierce Butler (no kin to Supreme Court Justice Pierce Butler). Their marriage started badly, and got worse. When Fanny refused to compromise with social conventions, Pierce agreed with his family, who thought he had married beneath him. When Fanny published her U. S. travel impressions, which made a scandalous success, her in-laws' opinion was echoed even by Poe.

But this book was nothing compared to her Georgia Journal, published in 1863, a brilliant, devastating account of conditions among the 700 slaves on the Butler plantation. By this time Fanny had returned to England and the stage, and her marriage had ended in a divorce case that for acrimony on both sides must have set a record for the time. Margaret Armstrong puts most of the blame on Butler, and much of the evidence appears to support her. But at times, as Fanny's dimly pictured husband goes bankrupt and drinks himself to death, the reader cannot help a fleeting sympathy for a man whose wife must have seemed a far more formidable enemy than all the Yankee armies combined.

The Author comes of a literary and artistic old New York family, descended from Peter Stuyvesant. Her grandfathers were painters; one was a writer, also. Her father, David Maitland Armstrong, was a well-known stained-glass artist, as is her sister, Helen. A brother is Hamilton Fish Armstrong, editor of Foreign Affairs. Miss Armstrong began as a painter, switched to writing when she wrote and illustrated a best-seller on Western wild flowers. Her extensive travels began at two, when her father, consul general at Rome, took her to Italy, where she stampeded a papal procession by charging at the Pope with yells and hand clapping. A detective story addict, Margaret Armstrong is now writing a mystery to her own specifications.

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