Shining And Free. By G. B. Stern. 318 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $2.50.
Thousands of Mrs. Stern’s faithful readers will be glad to learn that her new novel, “Shining and Free,” adds a panel to the story of the Rakonitzes and evokes once more that grand old dame, the Matriarch, in all her rambunctiousness, and at the climax of what the family call “one of her bad spells.” The new panel, however, is not equal in size, scope and density to the three preceding ones. It is not, like them, a long, leisurely novel with a wealth of characters and incident. Confining its plot to one day in the Matriarch’s life, the day before her eighty-eighth birthday, it is a brief, wistful after-image of the glory of the Rakonitz noon.
The Matriarch herself and the deft storytelling of her creator have lost none of their appeal, however. Anastasia is now an old and fragile woman, walking with the help of two sticks, living in the house and on the earnings of her grandchildren, and existing upon memories of the past—that golden past when the Rakonitzes were received in the finest salons of Vienna and Paris, before they lost their fortunes in the crash of the Nong-Khan sapphire mine.
She is sublimely oblivious to change, poverty, or the personalities of her grandchildren, whom she regards as foot-soldiers in the family regiment over which she imagines she still presides. She satisfies her imperial impulses by gathering a court about her as she goes. Waitresses, schoolboys, chauffeurs, fortune-tellers, bus-drivers—anyone to hand is swept up in the encompassing folds of her charm and her hospitality. After wandering around Piccadilly all evening, to the consternation of her daughter, Truda, she would, like as not, turn up at the house at two in the morning with a troop of hooligans, wake every one in the family and the servants as well—for had she not promised her guests a dish of Gansereis or a feast of Hungarian gulas?
On the particular evening before her birthday she had been entertaining a crowd of casual strangers at the Universal Café, much to the embarrassment of Maxine, her hard-working granddaughter who had tried to fetch her away at the relatively early hour of midnight. It was two-thirty before the irresponsible old lady returned to the house—and then she came riding home in the side-car of the motorcycle of her waitress’s young man. Truda appeared just in time to prevent Anastasia from giving away the last of the family heirlooms to the waitress. By then it was five o’clock, the morning of the Matriarch’s birthday, and time for Mr. Sumner to come for her to take her to Brighton. In Brighton they were to pick up a fine old commode which Anastasia had given away, and now was left to her by the will of the recipient.
But that commode was the least of the day’s business. On the platform of Victoria Station the Matriarch came across her shell-shocked grand-nephew, Neil Czelovar, who was about to commit suicide.
You can readily imagine the melting of this determination under influence of the overwhelming old lady: several times during that day Neil was forced to laugh at himself for having his personal tragedy converted into a junket to Brighton.
Anastasia had a habit of talking to everyone as if the world were acquainted with the intimate details of family life. In the train she enraptured a whole compartment full of people, and gathered a good half of them to escort her around Brighton. She consulted a fortune-teller, altered the course of several lives, almost bought a hotel (she was forever doing this), and gave a luncheon for nine people in the middle of the boardwalk. She had to pawn a ring her brother Max had given her to finance the party, she failed to marry Neil then and there to a pretty girl they picked up, and she blundered into the disagreeable family affairs of poor Mrs. White—but it all left her undaunted. For a day she basked in the splendor of the old Rakonitz traditions of lordly hospitality.
“Shining and Free” is not at all riotous fantasy. There is an undercurrent of shrewd and bitter analysis that strips away the shabby pretenses of every character who steps into the line of Mrs. Stern’s vision. And there is the pathetic story of Truda’s day at home, Truda, who tried to hold together the last fragments of the family fortunes, who tried to be a mother to Maxine and Iris, her modern daughters, and yet a faithful daughter of the Matriarch. In the course of that slow day spent in solitude, she realized that there were not three generations, but two; only the young and the old, and that already, without having had any life of her own, she was one of the old. And out of this realization arose the admission that perhaps the Matriarch was right; perhaps they should no longer economize, but fling open the doors of the unused salon while fleeting time and still more fleeting money permitted. She waits up to tell this to her mother—but a strangely deflated Matriarch comes home that night, a Matriarch who wished only to sink peacefully and quietly into her bed. I will not reveal what wrought this change; if you wish to spend a pleasant evening with “Shining and Free,” you will be glad to discover it yourself. Though this book is a minor panel, it is not unworthy of the other volumes of the Matriarch trilogy.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
