Portrait of a Lady

THE LOVED AND ENVIED (288 pp. Enid Bagnold--Doubleday ($3).

Ever since British Novelist Enid Bagnold warmed the hearts of thousands of readers with her smoothly told little story about an English girl who wanted to become a jockey, her admirers have been waiting for another National Velvet. They got their first disappointment in 1938 when Novelist Bagnold published The Door of Life, a sentimental tale of childbirth. They are not likely to be much encouraged by her latest novel, an ambitious but brittle portrait of international nobility as it slowly succumbs to the ravages of death and taxes in postwar France.*

At the center of The Loved and Envied shines Ruby Maclean, a 53-year-old beauty of angelic character, much too good for the decadent and useless idlers who surround her. Sympathetically and quietly, she administers the last rites to a dying generation. One friend, a rich old Italian duke who has made the frightful error of marrying his cook, dies with Lady Maclean bending tenderly over his deathbed. Another, a dried-out, egotistical playwright, gets Ruby to beg his 30-years-estranged wife for a reconciliation. And Good Samaritan Ruby is there with shelter when the withered mistress of a septuagenarian vicomte is left stranded by his death.

Amidst this onrush of decay, Ruby fights heroically to preserve the integrity of her own family. When her Scottish husband Gynt becomes a bird-loving mystic and proposes to search for wisdom in the Far East, Ruby is stricken, but has the courage to let him go. When stolid daughter Miranda, in mute rebellion against her mother's beauty, proposes to marry a mincing dressmaker, Ruby pulls together all her resources and prods Miranda into a decent marriage with a likable young man with the imposing name of James Edouard Goethe de Bas-Pouilly. The implication of the story seems to be that Ruby alone of her indolent set has salvaged something by helping to set her daughter right. But this implication is not likely to strike anyone very forcefully amid the mountains of irrelevant society chatter which Novelist Bagnold has felt obliged to record. The Loved and Envied scatters its effect among too many characters, and despite a glossy prose surface often succumbs to lip-trembling sentimentality. Not all the wealthy, fading beauties in Novelist Bagnold's France are worth one little Velvet Brown.

* A theme closely like one explored six months ago in a slick first novel by Timothy Angus Jones, son of Novelist Bagnold and Sir Roderick Jones.

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