Love Among the Ruins

A FAVOURITE OF THE GODS (287 pp.) --Sybille Bedford--Simon & Schuster ($4.50).

It is not true that Freud, Joyce and general confusion in the mind have made it impossible to write novels in the manner of Anthony Trollope. Sybille Bedford does just that. She is not an existentialist desperado; she does not go into psychological swivets; she has no new material for Dr. Kinsey. She just tells a plain tale with an old-fashioned Trollopean sense of the importance of what people wear, the houses they occupy, the jobs and property they get and lose, and the inherent drama of the tables of consanguinity. To this concern she adds a truly female tongue for the arts of conversation and a grasp of the idiom of appearances.

With this admirable equipment and range of interest, Mrs. Bedford wrote The Legacy (TIME, Feb. 11, 1957), a family study of the antediluvian fabric of Catholic European civilization that is regarded by a small but devout body of readers as a minor masterpiece. Now seven years after, she has followed it with A Favourite of the Gods, in which another family of aristocratic Europeans (this time, Italian-English-American rather than German-English) plays the complicated game of living by the exacting rules of class and faith.

No Place like Rome. Anna Rowland, an American heiress who looked like a Botticelli, arrived in Rome trailing clouds of 19th century transcendentalism and money. She quickly became a princess (by marriage) and a Catholic (by conversion). Her New England cash restored the frescoes in the Roman palazzo, and her new

Catholicism reinforced her temperamental prudery. It seemed incredible to her princely in-laws, but she did not know what all Rome knew--that Prince Rico, her husband, had lived throughout their marriage in devoted adultery with a Principessa Giulia Monfalconi. She created a tremendous fuss when she found out, decamped with her daughter Constanza to lead a diminished but still sumptuous life in London, and went into a huff that lasted the rest of her life.

Constanza grows up believing that Papa's unmentionable crime was some dark, monstrous Byronic business. When she finds out that Mama's big Mad Scene had been over nothing more than poor Papa's peccadillo, she is unimpressed--particularly as she is already giving her aristocratic English husband a bad time, not because she won't put up with his love affairs, but because, sophisticated and all that, he just can not put up with hers. So Constanza is left with her daughter Flavia, who at the age of ten shows similar signs of wit and wantonness. It is very Grand Opera indeed, complete with a potty plot, gorgeous scenery, some nice, old-fashioned novelistic business about missing rubies and revoked wills, and mercifully crisp recitative.

"All Wrong, Mr. James!" Sybille Bedford also has some fun with another character, an Anglicized American dilettante called Mr. James, apparently introduced so that the novelist may let us know that the old master Henry did not know all he was supposed to know about American heiresses--or American simplicity muddled by European sophistication. "You are all wrong," Constanza tells Mr. James. "It is the Italians who are simple; they did not have any novelists to tell them what they are like."

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