Books: All in a Lifetime

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MARION ALIVE-Vicki Baum-Double-day, Doran ($2.75).

One reviewer amused Vicki Baum by suggesting that nobody in one lifetime could do and see all the things Heroine Marion Sommer did & saw. The facts are that even at 586 pages this novel is scarcely half its original length, and that Miss Baum was trying merely to set down the average experience of a European woman of her own generation.

Marion Sommer started life in middle-class Vienna; toured Germany as a violinist until she ruined her wrist in a train wreck; helped get out a Socialist news paper in South Germany until the outbreak of World War I; took lovers, of whom the best one fell in Belgium; befriended a lonely archduchess and nursed and under-ate throughout the war; had two children, one by a man who was not her husband; beheld and took part in the miseries of German post-war democracy; was sent to Soviet Russia as a skillful toymaker and there married a U.S. industrialist; got eyefuls and skinfuls of U.S. boomtime living, Manhattan Prohibition and Naziism; watched one son grow dully dependable and the other flirt with Naziism; and in general covered the uneven 20th-century scene with all the mountain-goat agility and twice the aptitude for human pleasure and pain of Upton Sinclair's Lanny Budd (TIME, Jan. 5).

While France is falling, Marion climbs a difficult Alp (the novel is told in flashbacks from the climb) and falls down a crevasse. At this point the reader feels that it's about time: she has run through most of the personal and historical crises possible in her time, vividly, rather flamboyantly, never mawkishly, and,, all told, she has had. and provided, a very good time indeed.

The Author. This is apparently the case with Miss Baum herself. Only child of Viennese bourgeois, Vicki Baum (real name: Hedwig) started writing when she was 14-surreptitiously, for her father disapproved of authors (he still does). She was also an ace harpist, gave up music when she married Richard Lert, who later conducted the orchestra of the Berlin State Opera Co. During the war she was, like Marion, a nurse; but "we didn't have these uniforms the women are wearing here now; soldiers needed them."

In post-war Berlin she edited a woman's magazine for the Ullstein publishing house, took up writing again in desperation to pay doctor bills for her two sons. From her trunk she dragged a half-made romance about people in a big hotel which, with 40 days' work, became Menschen im Hotel-in English, Grand Hotel, one of the hits of the decade. It brought Vicki Baum to Manhattan and Hollywood, where she "fell in love" with the U.S.

Back in the Germany of 1932 it became clearer every day that she must leave: "the people seemed sad, and gruff. . . ." She saw her two sons drifting towards Naziism, and realized, seismographically rather than rationally, what Europe was in for. "I packed up my children and came." She became a U.S. citizen two years ago.