Natural Switch

AN ACTOR'S DAUGHTER--Aline Bernstein--Knopf ($2).

Aline Bernstein is a Manhattan theatrical designer, one of the best in the business. She is also an author. Her first book, Three Blue Suits, was short stories. Her second, The Journey Down, was a novel about a middle-life love affair. An Actor's Daughter, her third, is her memoirs from birth to marriage, but it reads like a novel.

She writes of Manhattan theatrical boardinghouse life a generation ago. The characters--Aline, her weak father, her patient mother, her wayward aunt--are engaging not merely as characters, but also as vehicles for an elegant, painter-like style: the morally deaf and helpless Aunt Nana, for instance, is a solid, touching characterization. But far more--as witness her crossing a street--she is a Renoir.

"She gathered the back of the skirts in her right hand, swirling them forward, so the ruffled lining and frilled silk petticoat showed above her ankles and you could see ten inches of her high-heeled buttoned shoes. She held her pocketbook in her left hand but managed to pick up just a pinch of skirt above her knee with the thumb and the forefinger. Holding her skirts that way molded her thighs and showed every beautiful curve of her figure. As she stepped over the curb to the cobblestones, she raised her eyes to the house next door and I could see a slight tremor come over her, in her eyes and ruffles and the feathers in her hat. . . ."

Not many middle-aged women who have spent their lives in one trade can switch to writing as successfully as this. But for Aline Bernstein it was quite natural. Her writing combines a theatre worker's feeling for mannered grace in gesture and interiors with the lithe conversational style of a skilled manual worker, a cultivated peasant. Hers is sentimental writing, but it is good enough to melt in the mouth.

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