Books in Brief: Sarah Bernhardt: The Art within the Legend

Sarah Bernhardt: The Art within the Legend, by Gerda Taranow (Princeton, 287 pp., $10). The author pays the “divine Sarah” the compliment of taking her seriously as an actress who studied her craft and approached her parts with technical ability and intelligence. Gerda Taranow’s style is dry. Her book is more interesting for what it quotes than what it says, but as an assemblage of information about Bernhardt it is superlative. There are a number of dusky photos of Sarah in her big roles, including a sequence from the death scene of La Dame aux camélias. Perhaps the main lesson of the book is that the synthesis of the performer’s craft is more important than the analysis of its parts. Bernhardt as a totality emerges more from the biographies by Cornelia Otis Skinner and others than from this assessment of her abilities in voice, pantomime and gesture. The specific analysis almost always undercuts any totality of impact and totality of impact is what the theater is all about. r. crinkley