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Munro's maternal grandparents were different-"foreign"-in a way Anglo-Saxons could never be-and they stay shadowy and mysterious in her book: a French grandmother, a Romanian grandfather who was, the reader gradually comes to realize as Munro herself did, Jewish. It is difficult now to believe that this might be the hidden factor in a happy family's disintegration, but the 1940s were a different time, and one must accept Munro's perception that it was not the fact of her mother's being Jewish but the hiding of the fact that was disastrous. There are no ghosts, her father said, no gods, no such thing as loneliness. Man is the measure; reason, humanism, intelligence and common sense are all. But there were ghosts, whose shades drew substance from the concentration camps and the war years of [Eleanor Munro]'s adolescence. "And gradually the diving bell of our household sank into dark waters."
AFTER COLLEGE and a year in Paris, Munro moved to New York and struck up a friendship with Judith Malina and Julian Beck of the Living Theater. When they cast Picasso's play Desire Caught by the Tail, with John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara, Munro played Lean Anguish, a name she thought appropriate to her frame of mind. In the early 1950s Eleanor Munro joined the staff of Art News. As her father had helped Americans to see the Post-Impressionists, so Munro, working with Art News editor Alfred Frankfurter who became her husband, helped a later generation to see what she calls "the last Modernist art movement," Abstract Expressionism.
MEMOIR OF A MODERNIST'S DAUGHTER By Eleanor Munro Viking. 271 pp. $18.95
TO WRITE about oneself honestly is an act of courage, and Eleanor Munro acquits herself honorably. If there remain some corners of her life unexplored and unexplained, it is not because she was afraid to lift the veils.
"There is always a beginning, not known as such at the time but marked off by the imagination from what memory holds in store. So I'll say that, in the beginning, there was sunlight on a meadow." That sunlit Catskill meadow and the dogwood tree beneath which her parents were married is a scene to which Munro circles back again and again "in the years' spin of memory" as she comes to terms with who she was and what she has become. "I had to find a way back, not directly but as a circumnavigator ends up back by having perservered forward."
To most of us, Munro's childhood would seem charmed. Protected daughter of a noted educator, who was himself a prote'ge' of John Dewey and a friend of George Santayana, she grew up in an ordered and sophisticated household. Her father was the director of education at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Primitive sculpture, Tanagra figures, Coptic textiles and Bauhaus candlesticks stood on their crowded bookshelves. Family evenings were spent listening to African tribal ceremonies captured on records by anthropologists, Chinese flute music, Beethoven: "As we would sit in the semi-darkness of a summer or winter evening listening to records, slowly, as if the whole house became a diving bell, we sank together through the surface of things." Eminent figures who lectured at the museum came to dinner: Gertrude Stein, Margaret Mead, Lewis Mumford and the Indian musician Ravi Shankar. What could go wrong in such a family?
What went wrong was what happens when theory is imposed on life. In his books and lectures, Munro's father argued that a work of art is to be understood in terms of line, shape and color. But human beings cannot be reduced to abstractions. Expecting to lead his family by example, Munro's father could not tolerate resistance. Having taught his daughter that anything was possible for her, when she began to explore her possibilities, he saw rebellion and suppressed it. Wanting his children to be independent, he also wanted them obedient.
Eleanor Munro, whose own books have been nonfiction works on art and, most recently, on pilgrimage, is a spellbinding storyteller. The tales she tells are those of her grandparents and parents. In every family, one side dominates. In Munro's, her fathers'. In him Scottish Free Church and New England Christian Science merged and clashed. Shaped by Darwinian hard science filtered to Social Darwinism, offspring of a failed schoolteacher father and a mother who succeeded on the Chautauqua circuit reciting Shakespeare and Whittier and lecturing on thrift and hard work, Tom Munro reflected a Utopian belief in progress and improvement. "My father's problem," writes Munro, "wasn't narrowness but too much height and breadth. He was a behaviorist who wouldn't admit he was himself conditioned."
Munro's maternal grandparents were different-"foreign"-in a way Anglo-Saxons could never be-and they stay shadowy and mysterious in her book: a French grandmother, a Romanian grandfather who was, the reader gradually comes to realize as Munro herself did, Jewish. It is difficult now to believe that this might be the hidden factor in a happy family's disintegration, but the 1940s were a different time, and one must accept Munro's perception that it was not the fact of her mother's being Jewish but the hiding of the fact that was disastrous. There are no ghosts, her father said, no gods, no such thing as loneliness. Man is the measure; reason, humanism, intelligence and common sense are all. But there were ghosts, whose shades drew substance from the concentration camps and the war years of Eleanor's adolescence. "And gradually the diving bell of our household sank into dark waters."
AFTER COLLEGE and a year in Paris, Munro moved to New York and struck up a friendship with Judith Malina and Julian Beck of the Living Theater. When they cast Picasso's play Desire Caught by the Tail, with John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara, Munro played Lean Anguish, a name she thought appropriate to her frame of mind. In the early 1950s Eleanor Munro joined the staff of Art News. As her father had helped Americans to see the Post-Impressionists, so Munro, working with Art News editor Alfred Frankfurter who became her husband, helped a later generation to see what she calls "the last Modernist art movement," Abstract Expressionism.
Again her life, to the outsider, seems charmed. In the four years of her marriage to Frankfurter before he died, there were European trips, lunches at I Tatti and at the Rothchilds', a Kennedy White House dinner in honor of Andre' Malraux.
What makes Eleanor Munro's memoir more than a sequence of vividly described scenes is that she puts her experience to purpose. True daughter of the Enlightenment and of a father who believed that education and understanding could change lives, she generously offers what she has seen and learned. Her intelligence and vulnerability are gifts to the reader.
Margot Backas, who has worked in scholarly and trade publishing, is a Washington writer.
PHOTO,,Jerry Bauer CAPTION:Eleanor Munro
Copyright The Washington Post Company Apr 3, 1988