DEAR, SLOVENLY MOTHER MOSCOW
THE BEGINNING OF SPRING
By Penelope Fitzgerald.
187 pp. New York: Henry Holt & Company.
What is it that makes a good old-fashioned comedy of manners just about the most satisfying reading there is? For many people - certainly me - a few days spent immersed in a tiny domestic atmosphere, full of characters as ordinary (and as weird) as my own friends, with their schemes, self-delusions and operatic emotions, is the literary equivalent of a whole pint of rum raisin ice cream.
But for all the pleasure it gives, the comedy of manners remains a vastly underrated art form. It is considered a little too shallow, a little too polite to be taken all that seriously. Look at E. M. Forster. His purported masterpiece, ''A Passage to India,'' is thought to be the height of profundity; to me, it's just another long-winded book about a trial. But his first novel, ''Where Angels Fear to Tread'' - now there's a book you can read over and over.
The United States has never been very good at turning out comedies of manners, but the form still flourishes in England, where there is a whole new stream both of heirs and innovators to the tradition. One of the best, only recently familiar to American readers, is Penelope Fitzgerald, who won Britain's Booker Prize in 1979 for ''Offshore.'' Her latest book, ''The Beginning of Spring,'' is a very good comedy of manners. But old-fashioned? Hardly.
It begins with a group of concerns that would tempt the pen of Forster himself. A middle-class British family is domiciled in a most un-British country, in this case, Russia. It is 1913, the tail end of the Edwardian age. The head of the household, Frank Reid, runs a printing business that was established by his father. Frank was born in Russia, unlike his wife, who hails from Norbury, a few miles south of London. Nellie, a difficult, headstrong woman whose favorite expression is ''I'm not going to be got the better of,'' has headed back home to England. Why did she leave? Is she coming back? No one - most of all Frank - seems sure. But one thing is certain. Arrangements must be made about their three young children.
Frank is a decent, honorable man, somewhat of a loner in spite of the masses of humanity who depend on him. Aside from the employees at the printing plant, there is a household that includes ''a general manservant in charge of opening the door, a cook, an assistant to the cook . . . a yardman, and a boy who formerly cleaned the lamps but now that electricity has been installed, cleans the shoes and does odd jobs of various kinds.'' He is a modest and self-effacing hero, and this is definitely his book, but much of the bite and sparkle belong to the secondary characters.
These include Frank's management accountant, Selwyn Crane, who, if he were around today, would be into channeling and health foods. ''Ascetic . . . earnestly questing, not quite sane-looking,'' Selwyn weaves his own sandals. His new volume of poems, ''Birch Tree Thoughts,'' is about to be published, in a somewhat limited edition (75 copies, one of which figures in the plot). Selwyn is an ardent follower of the recently deceased Tolstoy; in fact, he once sang at a concert at the lunatic asylum bordering the Tolstoy estate. The great man attended and was later heard magnanimously to remark, after most of the audience had fallen asleep: ''To be bored is the ordinary sensation of most of us at a concert of this kind. But to these unfortunates it is a luxury to have an ordinary sensation.''
Selwyn may not quite be the do-gooder he seems, but, like all of Frank's friends and neighbors, he enters enthusiastically into the problem of what to do with the children. One possibility is to engage the dowdy but determined Muriel Kinsman, at loose ends in Moscow after being let go from her position as governess to a provincial family following a number of unfortunate incidents, including ''the matter of the valerian drops'' and the mysterious ''matter of the bath house.'' Fortunately, Miss Kinsman is sent back to England, and a beautiful young peasant girl named Lisa Ivanovna gets the job instead.
Another trait Ms. Fitzgerald shares with Forster is the ability to create characters from other cultures that are so deftly drawn they become as believable as her slightly flaky British expatriates. The Russians in ''The Beginning of Spring'' are an exuberant bunch, from the vast and unruly family of the merchant Kuriatin to the student radical Volodya, who sneaks into the Reid Press one night, ostensibly to print a manifesto on ''universal pity.''
But with Forster there was always an unbridgeable gap between the two cultures. When someone tried to cross it, the results were at first comic and then disastrous. This is certainly not the case with Ms. Fitzgerald. Her British and her Russians meet as social and emotional equals; in fact, Frank and his family are so assimilated into their adopted country that their life style (to use a most un-Edwardian word) is almost entirely Russian. And it is this slightly exotic atmosphere - daily life in pre-Revolutionary Moscow, with its housekeeping rituals, the blessing of the office ikon and a visit to the family dacha - that gives ''The Beginning of Spring'' its rhythms and much of its charm. The novel is suffused with the atmosphere of ''dear, slovenly, mother Moscow, bemused with the bells of its four times forty churches, indifferently sheltering factories, whore-houses and golden domes, impeded by Greeks and Persians and bewildered villagers and seminarists straying on to the tramlines, centred on its holy citadel, but reaching outwards with a frowsty leap across the boulevards to the circle of workers' dormitories and railheads, where the monasteries still prayed, and at last to a circle of pig-sties, cabbage-patches, earth roads, earth closets, where Moscow sank back, seemingly with relief, into a village.''
I hope I'm not giving the impression that Ms. Fitzgerald is merely a clever imitator of the masters. She and her characters have their own agenda; its priorities are the timelessness of human nature and the possibility of love. She is that refreshing rarity, a writer who is very modern but not the least bit hip. Ms. Fitzgerald looks into the past, both human and literary, and finds all sorts of things that are surprisingly up to date. Yet as ''The Beginning of Spring'' reaches its triumphant conclusion, you realize that its greatest virtue is perhaps the most old-fashioned of all. It is a lovely novel.
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