Edwardian Laughter

THE LIMIT (256 pp.)--Ada Leverson--Norton ($3).

"The wittiest woman in the world," said Oscar Wilde of Ada Leverson. Others who admired Ada's sparkle were Max Beerbohm, Aubrey Beardsley, Henry James and George Bernard Shaw (whom she succeeded as drama critic of the Saturday Review). Venomous with bores, she flattened them joyfully. When a vacation acquaintance buttonholed her with "I don't know whether you realize it ... but my aunt was a Thunderby," Ada cried, "Oh, how terrible! Oughtn't we to inform the management?" Accused of using peroxide on her hair, she flashed that she "only darkened it a little at the roots."

Ada Leverson died in 1936, deaf, but witty to the last. In addition to her dramatic criticism, she left six novels and at least one unfinished work--to be entitled (she said) The Collected Telegrams of Oscar Wilde. Her third novel, The Limit (1911), now appears in the U.S. for the first time. It is a fine example of the Leverson specialty: Edwardian laughter with an edge to it.

Like most novels of its period, The Limit deals with fashionable ladies & gentlemen--mostly too well off to worry about having nothing to do. Among them: #&182; Miss Luscombe, a woolly-headed, stage-struck creature who nonetheless has an eye for hard cash. "She lives in the clouds, but she insists on their having a silver lining."

#&182; Mrs. Wyburn and Miss Westbury, two elderly pussies whose skill in exchanging tattle and insults is so practiced that it is sometimes hard to know which is speaking. When one has clawed the other a particularly deep swipe, she always follows up with the stinging antiseptic, e.g. "I do assure you, Millie, I never dreamt of hurting your feelings."

#&182; Mynheer von Stoendyck, a Belgian inventor whose perfect command of the English language is simply not credited by his British hostess. She helpfully translates everything that is said to him into broken English.

These characters whirl around the edges of The Limit like the fringe on a parasol. But at the center, holding the story up, stands Romer Wyburn, one of those proverbial Britons who scarcely ever open their mouths. "I thought he was a strong silent man, a man with an orange up his sleeve," complains his flighty wife (whom he adores), "but I've never seen the orange." Romer silently ignores her affair with a playboy until, reaching "the limit," he suddenly fetches out of his sleeve not an orange but a sledge hammer. One blow from Romer and the dancing characters around him disintegrate like glass toys.

Like its characters, The Limit has a wholly unprofessional air. Chapters are skittishly allotted first to one set of people, then to another. The stern "line" and "unity" of a Flaubert (or of a professional instructor in how-to-write-a-novel) is replaced by the skilled amateur's best tool--a skewer of personal touch and bias that holds all the pieces together. To post-Edwardian writers, obsessed by character analysis and an urge to get to the bottom of everything, The Limit should bring two salutary reminders: 1) actions speak louder than words; 2) the agony of creation belongs to the author, not the reader.

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