CHILDREN, YOU ARE VERY LITTLE by Betsy Drake Grant. 245 pages. Afheneum. $6.95.
Movie stars who write are like statues that bleed—highly suspect. But Betsy Drake, a minor star of the late '40s (Deep Are the Roots) who spent the '50s as Mrs. Gary Grant, has produced in Children, You Are Very Little a first novel with flair and ferocity.
Her subject, an unhappy childhood, is a certified Freudian yawn, but she plays it for funny and painful surprises. More like Little Lulu than Little Nell, her 10-year-old heroine Lucia refuses to let grownups run and ruin her life. When her parents fight, and Lucia is sent to live with a saurian grandmother in Virginia, she battles the old monster to a standstill. "You're a big mean bug," she screams, "and I sink your mean mud head about ten million feet into the ground!" Then with all her force she struggles to reconstitute the family she needs.
Convinced that money is the problem, Lucia hatches a sort of Raffles-in-hair-ribbons plot to rob a jewelry store, fence the proceeds through her favorite newsboy, reunite her parents in New York and live with them ever after. The plot is a hilarious failure, but the robbery makes such a scandal that Grandma sends Lucia back to her mother. Lucia arrives in a glow, triumphant. "Mother, I love you. I'm home." Mother, just out of a mental hospital, begins to laugh hysterically.
In the black literature of childhood, the book will not rank with Christina Stead's horror story of family life, The Man Who Loved Children. Lucia is less a person than an argument. Most adults, the book suggests, are losers, and most children feel the lash of a loser's fury a hundred times a day. To make the point, Author Grant makes Lucia's life a masochistic nightmare in a gallery of Halloween horribles. Her mother is a festering grievance, her father an intellectual wimp, her aunts and uncles high-church lobsters of menacing respectability.
Even in scenes where the author delicately snips the buttons off her characters with scissors of irony, one senses that she would really like to cut a good deal deeper. Why does she restrain herself? She has image, language, an actor's sympathy that lets her inhabit as well as observe characters. If she had fully released her rage, this impish novel could have been a devil of a book.
Author Grant says she began to write when she was eleven and, like her heroine, was living with relatives on a farm in Virginia because her parents had separated. Born to money (her grandfather built the Drake Hotel in Chicago), she grew up in Paris, New York, Chicago, Washington. In her teens she and her mother were broke, but in 1946, after summer stock and a go at modeling, she signed a film contract. She met Cary Grant on a boat coming back from England and, not sorry to escape a career in mediocre movies, married him in 1949. Divorced in the early '60s, she signed on as director of psychodrama therapy at the U.C.L.A. Neuropsychiatric Institute.