The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • Page 239

Richard Eder At Peace With War A man more comfortable in uniform than in his own skin SEE NAPLES A Memoir of Love, Peace and War in Italy By Douglas Allanbrook (A Peter Davison Book Houghton Mifflin: 320 pp.) The "Peace and War" in the subtitle of this memoir by a man who fought in Italy during World War ii, and studied music there afterward, is descriptive but with a twist Douglas Allanbrook, a harpsichordist, composer, professor of philosophy and untran-quil spirit, found his only real peace among his fellow soldiers in the 88th Division. The loves and pursuits of peacetime, on the other hand, were a painful warfare which he is still fighting. There are memoirs that reconcile the past, and others that vent old wounds. Allanbrook's is largely of the second kind, not so much out of anger as out of the pain that his pleasures have seemed to inflict on him. Allanbrook's story of two postwar years in Naples, of the musical career he was trying to develop, of a woman who was his lover and Kj I i 1 of another woman 7 At Home in the World A novelist explores the longings for family and freedom SHARDS OF MEMORY By Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (Doubleday: 221 pp.) Reviewed by Judith Freeman What a long and distinguished career Ruth Prawer Jhabvala has had as a writer.

She is both prolific having published 16 books and profound, the winner of the Booker Prize (for her novel "Heat and two Oscars (for "Room With a View" and "Howards and the recipient of a MacArthur grant the so-called "genius" award. She remains a rather mysterious figure, one who rarely gives interviews, does not turn up at awards ceremonies and shuns publicity. One senses an immensely private person who shuttles between the worlds of New York City, London and New Delhi. It's easy to imagine her needing these diverse worlds now, as one who understands that movement itself has become the theme of our age. Mobility, exile and displacement have long been dominant concerns in Jhabvala's fiction; the little dramas of the extended family, and gurus and spiritually starved Westerners have had their place.

As she once stated in a rare interview, "Everyone is so estranged, no one is rooted. That's what I like to write about more than anything else. Everything being so mixed up. Racially mixed up, people moving from place to place, everything shifting." To understand this interest, one has to look back, I think, to Jhabvala's own history. Her German-Jewish family fled Germany in 1939 and took up a life of exile in England; there she met her future husband, the Indian architect and artist Cyrus Jhabvala, with whom she would move to New Delhi.

Jhabvala herself is emblematic of the chaotic events of the 20th Century: In both her life and her fiction she is uniquely placed, a brilliant observer standing at the confluence of the literary and philosophical streams of the East and the West. "Shards of Memory" continues to explore these themes, now familiar to her readers, of exile, longing and family, as well as the quest for spiritual meaning. It is set in New York City, London and India. A multi-generational story, the novel features a cast of Germans, Indians and English the Kopfs, Bilimorias and Howards who have intermarried to create one family. As in a number of her novels, a guru also features prominently in the story, called simply "Master" here, a man of indeterminate nationality and indisputable charisma.

The story itself is rather simple, in the sense that it is driven by the memories of four generations of Bilimo-ria-Kopfs, all of whom have been involved with the Master in one way or another during the course of their lives. At the novel's opening the Master has died, and his papers have been bequeathed to Henry, the youngest of the Kopfs, whose task it is to sort through them. Left badly crippled by a childhood car accident, Henry lives a semi-invalid life in New York City, sharing a large old house with his parents, Renata and Carl, his grandmother Baby and the gentle Kavi, his Indian great-grandfather. At first indifferent to the Please see Page Judith Freeman's latest novel, "A Desert of Pure Feeling," will be published by Pantheon next spring. VI wnom ne married, contains freezing gaps and silences.

By contrast, his account of a grimly fought year and. a half in the Italian campaignthree quarters of the original members of his regiment were killed or woundedis passionate, detailed and oddly joyful. Judging from his writing Allanbrook is not, as the French say, comfortable inside his skin. He was less uncomfortable in a uniform. The army, he 3 5 Douglas Allanbrook, above, as a young staff sergeant in Italy during World War II and, left, the author today.

became a temporary social pariah. He writes beautifullynot enough, perhaps about music; particularly a description of a harpsichord lesson; "A curve, a curve. You must never play in a straight line." It is Landowska we hear in the voice of M. Gerlin, her disciple, who painstakingly enters her fingerings into Allanbrook's scores. They were designed, the author writes, "not so much for facility (although often they did facilitate) as for proper articulation: discourse for the fingers." The two years in Naples were marked by two love affairs: the first with Laura, a fellow student; the second with Candida, the woman he married.

Allanbrook's account has a removed and chilly focus. With Laura, there was much fire, but he writes that it was mostly hers. To paraphrase another French expression: She kissed, he proffered his cheek. "Did I love her?" he asks, after describing her sexual voracity. A bout of lovemaking in the waters off a beach is recalled not for its pleasure but for the sight of a priest watching them through binoculars.

Allanbrook writes of his women as if he too were using binoculars. Laura's passion, "framed in its Neapolitan setting, made me hold her at a certain aesthetic distance." When he drops her and goes off to Positano with Candida, his interest seems mainly aroused by the polymorphic erotic tangle in that Bohemian mini-Capri. Of Candida herself we learn little more than that she has beautiful white skin and a substantial body, earning her the Please see Page 8 remarks at one point, is a place where it is not only possible but necessary to blame all one's miseries on "they." What would be civilian paranoia is a blessed military sanity. If the wartime portion of the memoir is more satisfying, the peacetime part, awkwardly joined, is frequently arresting. This is so despite, and in a way because of, its emotional oddity.

Allanbrook, who had passed briefly through Naples on the way to the Monte Cassino front, arrived there a second time at the start of the 1950s. He had studied music on the G.I. Bill at Harvard where, he tells us, he was one of the two best composers of his generation. He won a scholarship to work with Nadia Boulanger in Paris and then a Fulbright to Italy to study harpsichord with a disciple of Wanda Landowska and to work on an opera. It sounds like a golden start but there was a crack, not entirely explained.

Harvard's Walter Piston had backed him but another Harvard professor let him know that there would be no job for him when he returned His advice was "to live in Europe on a private income" not merely a rebuff to a young man without resources but, seemingly, a mockery. His account of Naples in the early 1950s, still war-battered and desperately poor, has a beginning of affection stiffened by judgment and unease. He is very good on the city's complex social machineries. For example, he gives a shrewd account of the terrible mistake he made when he reported to the police a theft from his lodging. Both the proprietor and the maid had familial networks among the authorities; Allanbrook i i IPS ciFs-rtM BOOK REVIEW SUNDAY, OCTORcR 1.

1S.