Live & Learn Nothing

A DEGREE OF PRUDERY (340 pp.)--Emily Hahn--Doubleday ($3.50).

At first glance there seems to be something badly awry in Emily Hahn's choice of 18th Century Novelist Fanny Burney as the subject for a biography. Miss Burney kept a journal which frequently tells how the turn of the talk had forced her to dart from a room with blushing cheeks. She would have run like a deer from her cigar-smoking biographer, who, in China to Me, documented her position as one of the most uninhibited girls on the China Coast.

Miss Hahn has always written direct, and sometimes excessively frank accounts of the whole substance of her globe-ranging life; Miss Burney produced her first novel while living quietly at home with father. Shy, mousy Fanny was, in fact, the pioneer of the monstrous regiment of sentimental domestic novels written for ladies, by ladies, and about ladies & gentlemen--the sort of novel that melts in the mind the way home-made fudge melts in the mouth.

Grumpy Sam. Why Miss Hahn bothered to go after her becomes clear as she brilliantly follows prim, self-satisfied Authoress Burney through her career. The success of her first tender little bore of a novel, Evelina (1778), lifted her out of the circle around her father, Dr. Burney the music master, and into the center of the group surrounding the formidable Dr. Johnson. Fanny became the confidante of Mrs. Thrale, who was loved by the great man after his grumpy fashion. When Mr. Thrale died and left his wife free to marry, she passed Johnson by and declared she would marry an Italian musician. This started an immense family row in which Miss Hahn discovers Miss Burney acting with deadly efficiency as a troublemaker.

The main characters in the sTory are gargantuan figures: Mr. Thrale, a lecherous, rich brewer, who stubbornly ate himself to death; Mrs. Thrale, a wonderfully vital, earthy character capable of marrying a second time for love after 18 years of marriage in which she had borne twelve children, and the bulky, bearlike Sam Johnson himself.

Weeping King. With Mrs. Thrale married and Dr. Johnson dead, Fanny was at a loss, but in 1786 a place was found for her among Queen Charlotte's ladies in waiting at the court of George III. Her journal gives a picture of the daily life of the sober, dull King and ugly Queen, with their love of housekeeping and bargains. Charlotte rejoiced in a book bought well below cost at a second-hand stall; George loved to beat down the asking price of a load of hay for the royal stables.

At first His Majesty was put down merely as an eccentric. Slowly he drifted over into madness. He met a notoriously ugly woman who hid her face under a wide-brimmed floppy hat, stepped up to her, tipped up the hat brim, stared in for a moment and let it drop, saying, "Good God! Even uglier than the Queen!"

Fanny, like the rest of the court, pretended not to notice his eccentricities until one night at dinner the King attempted to bash out the Prince of Wales's brains. After that, his attendants kept constant watch over his apartment where he sat about weeping, tormented by flashes of the old brilliant shrewdness. Once he heard that Lord North, his luckless Prime Minister at the time of the American Declaration of Independence, had called to inquire after his health. Said the King, reflectively: "He. poor fellow, has lost his sight, and I my mind. Yet we meant well by those Americans. Just to punish them with a few bloody noses, and then make bows for the mutual happiness of the two countries. But want of principle got into the Army, want of energy and skill in the First Lord of the Admiralty, and want of unanimity at home. We lost America. Tell him not to call again; I shall never see him."

Not long after, when Fanny met George in Kew Gardens, she bolted, knowing he was dangerous. He caught up with her, then pathetically explained that he only wanted to talk.

In telling the story, Biographer Hahn rounds out Fanny's famous journal by adding to it the cream of many franker contemporary memoirs and of much modern research. She builds up a skillful portrait of a lady who lived with her back to life and learned nothing from it. of a good reporter who distilled her experiences into a series of saccharine novels, each sillier, more wordy and more sentimental than the last. In the end. Realist Harm's acid portrait of Sentimentalist Burney amounts to a manifesto for her own forthright approach to life and writing.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.