The Reticent Autobiographer

TOO STRONG FOR FANTASY by Marcia Davenport. 483 pages. Scribner. $8.95.

What is left out in an autobiography is usually what the reader hoped to find. Novelist Marcia Davenport (The Valley of Decision) gives fair warning that, at 64, she is old-fashioned enough to believe in a "suitable reticence," and strong-minded enough to keep back what she thinks is her business alone. She carries the stance a bit too far. Though she knows that the main attractions of her story are the famous men and women in her life, she tells about them with the righteousness and much of the trivia that precede the chicken a la king at a librarians' luncheon.

Marcia's mother was the fine soprano, Alma Gluck, a Rumanian immigrant who went almost literally overnight from humming in the kitchen to success at the Metropolitan Opera. Marcia's father is swiftly disposed of in the book. Her stepfather, Violinist Efrem Zimbalist, is seen simply as an amiable husband and parent who spent a lot of time on the road. Toscanini, her lifelong friend and hero, comes off somewhat better, but his famous tantrums at rehearsals and his personal crotchets add little to one's appreciation of his genius as a conductor.

Add marriage to onetime FORTUNE Editor Russell Davenport, a staff job on the young and heady New Yorker, a close friendship with Wendell Willkie and a deep and tragic one with Czechoslovakia's Jan Masaryk. Add, for good measure, her editor at Scribner, Maxwell Perkins, and an entire gallery of people who were constantly in the public eye, and it is hard to imagine that she experienced a dull moment. Almost certainly no other American of Jewish descent sat, feet hanging out the window of the Foreign Office building in Berlin, facing Hitler and Hindenburg across the street as the old marshal handed Germany over to his successor. And there cannot be too many people who ever had Toscanini drop in and play passages from Lohengrin on the piano as he sang in his cracked voice.

But not until Mrs. Davenport tells of her relationship to Jan Masaryk does a heart begin to beat in her book. When the Communists took over Czechoslovakia in 1948, she saw both Prague, the city she loved best in the world, and the man who meant the most to her become sacrifices to forces she despised. After World War II, she had taken a flat in Prague where she hoped to live the rest of her life. While he was Foreign Minister, she saw Masaryk almost daily until his death (she is convinced that he was murdered by the Communists). Yet even here the book, as it does throughout, consists of moments walled in by the commonplace. Those who know enough about her time and the people she describes can fill in some details for themselves as they go along. For the others, it is plainly a book that Mrs. Davenport felt she had to write even if she kept the best of it to herself.

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