TOO STRONG FOR FANTASY

I have never deliberately written an autobiographical novel, last ""the necessity is about to win over the reticence,"" and she has set down the people and places and the work that have made up her life. And the music. The daughter of Alma Gluck, determined as a child to be a writer, Marcia Davenport had early entree to the great music world. She writes revealingly, thoughtfully, affectionately about her gallant, gay and divided mother, of Toscanini (""The dearest friend I have ever had""). At twenty-one she was on her own with a baby, abandoned by her young husband. She later married Russell Davenport, a marriage that terminated in 1944. With him and by herself she made her careers as a New Yorker writer under Ross, as critic, biographer (Mozart--her first book)., then novelist under the aegis of Maxwell Perkins (""The one person I could not do without""). Political men Came into her life: professionally--Wilkie, with whom she and Russell campaigned, later, personally the Czech patriot, Jan Masaryk. Marcia Davenport counts her strength in fiction ""an authentic knowledge of certain large elements of life and the world""; in her memoir this quality, substantiated by her feeling for people and place, make an engrossing book.