"Opp"

THE POOL OF MEMORY --E. Phillips Oppenhelm--Little, Brown ($3).

E. Phillips Oppenheim, author of 111 of the most popular novels ever written about international intrigue and espionage, got his diplomatic training in the wholesale leather trade. Unless this volume of his reminiscences is hiding state secrets, the nearest he ever came to the world he wrote about was a short stretch of propaganda writing for one of the British special services during World War I. The peculiar Oppenheim blend of dispatch-box atmosphere, femmes fatales, double traitors, and a tight plot totting up to eventual victory for the British Intelligence--most of it came out of Oppenheim's head.

Author Oppenheim was born to write romans d'intrigue, and born at exactly the right time. He wrote for the Europe which was preparing feverishly for World War I. His brand of literary Scotch & soda was as welcome in British clubs as U.S. club cars. "Opp" loved his age and his age loved "Opp." It also paid him well.

On his royalties, Author Oppenheim oscillated between tennis courts, cricket fields and gaming tables, or drifted from Paris hotels to Manhattan hotels, from London to the Isle of Guernsey or the British West Indies, usually fetching up at Monte Carlo or Cannes. There he hobnobbed with other well-heeled amiable drifters such as Edgar Wallace, Somerset Maugham, Sax (Fu Manchu) Rohmer, P. G. Wodehouse, the King & Queen of Siam, the King of Sweden, Lord Rothermere ("although it was before the days of his peerage"), the "inevitable" Berry Wall, Tennis Player Suzanne Lenglen, "whom I boldly declare to have possessed, in her delightfully modeled bathing suit, the most beautiful figure of a woman I have ever seen in my life." This harmless, pointless, rootless existence, stirred from time to time, like seaweed in the tide, by the fluctuations of the franc, took up most of Oppenheim's life and takes up most of his autobiography.

But if Author Oppenheim was born at the right time, he made the same mistake as his age--he did not die at the right time. Shortly before Neville Chamberlain began commuting to Germany, Oppenheim and his wife bought the Domaine of Notre Dame, a small, hill-hugging, seaward-looking piece of Provence which they had long loved and where they expected to end their days. They were growing old. Then something happened which would never happen in a well-contrived Oppenheim novel--the Nazis swarmed into northern France. The refugees swarmed into southern France. It was like a badly directed mob scene from an amateur production of The Last Days of Pompeii.

It was the end of Oppenheim's free life. But it makes a memorable last section to his book. The Oppenheims had a chance to leave France on the overcrowded, death-ridden ship Somerset Maugham described in his Strictly Personal. They left via Spain. The crawling trains were crammed with human misery. Everything whereby Oppenheim had lived --his money, his reputation, his dignity--had lost its value. What happened to the old couple was quite unimportant. Their self-concern in the midst of a collapsing world is grotesque. But this sense of futile nullity in the face of crushing impersonal forces gives to Oppenheim's last pages a peculiar pathos.

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