In the 1960's there were certain names that blew across the South, right Alabamians considered Virginia and Clifford Durr traitors, not heroes, they represented to many of us the best of the white South, its native strength: they were sensible, outspoken, committed and only accidentally heroic.
Virginia Durr did not write the autobiography so aptly called ''Outside the Magic Circle.'' She spoke it, over the course of two years, in a series of interviews for such invaluable collections as those of the oral history programs at Columbia University and the University of North Carolina. Well edited by Hollinger F. Barnard, so that it is only occasionally repetitive, the book is, one suspects, far more representative of Mrs. Durr's true voice than a written memoir might have been. It is chatty, informal, rich with the sound of laughter and an outrage that often stops at the brink of awe at some of the goings-on she has witnessed in a changing and yet deeply unchanging South. It is a true nonfiction Bildungsroman - a journey from innocence to experience, to disillusion but never cynicism - and it's superb reading.
The daughter of a minister unchurched for admitting that he did not believe the story of Jonah and the whale (among others), Virginia Foster grew up in Birmingham early in the century. Although she was noisy, obstinate and not sufficiently beautiful to be an outstanding ''belle,'' the child Virginia grew as she was expected to: she tried to please Daddy, who believed in the myths of the South if not of the church; she prayed to be as popular as her sister, who entertained 40 beaus on one good day; she attended Ku Klux Klan parades and loved ''The Birth of a Nation'' because it was ''thrilling and dramatic''; and she went off to Wellesley College (almost as penance for being smarter than she was charming) still believing that kissing might be the way to make babies. ''Nothing was ever discussed; everything was assumed,'' she says of the Civil War, of the conduct of the sexes, of the rich and the poor (who generally reaped what they sowed) and of the races.
At Wellesley the young Virginia found her shell painfully cracking when she was forced to sit at table with a ''Negro girl'' or go home. She married a young lawyer named Clifford Durr and in 1933 they went to Washington, where, step by step, casual meeting by dinner party - Virginia's sister had married Hugo Black, first a United States senator, later a Supreme Court justice, and the Durrs entered a society Virginia would probably never have joined otherwise - we see the young woman begin to listen to her own small dissenting voice on questions of sexual and racial equity. Clifford became a member of the Federal Communications Commission, and while she raised a family and took into her copious household a myriad of others (including, for years, Jessica Mitford and her baby - Miss Mitford has told stories about this time in her books), Virginia got embroiled in the fight to abolish the poll tax so that women (though not blacks) could vote.
But one thing led to another for these courageous people, and eventually, returned to the South against her will in the 50's, the Durrs became, willy-nilly, part of the movement to secure civil rights of every kind for everyone. About differences in strategy she was not interested in cutting distinctions too fine: ''I always felt it was exactly like the distinctions in religions - are you going to get to heaven by dipping or sprinkling or total immersion.'' Clifford, whose sympathies were somewhat more classically constrained than his wife's, claimed not to be interested in the legal and constitutional rights of the blacks he represented, only in those of people ''because I happen to be people myself.''
Their philosophical differences did not impede the Durrs' mutual respect, because the results were the same: the two of them were the locally vilified champions in long battles from the New Deal through the arrival of the Freedom Riders. (In 1954, when Senator James O. Eastland hauled Virginia Durr up before his Internal Security Subcommittee she stood mute and then, using the old stereotype with vengeful wit, proceeded to powder her nose.) ''Outside the Magic Circle'' is crammed with good stories told with gusto. After her father lost his church, young Virginia became one of the genteel poor, whose ancestors owned vast plantations, whose cousins became governors. Thus, having come of good family, she could be ''placed,'' as she puts it again and again, her reliability vouched for wherever there were Alabamians to recognize her name. At these moments, Mrs. Durr's book sounds exactly like Peter Taylor's fiction and her spoken voice takes on a priceless complexity, earnest yet slyly self-aware.
Commenting on the humiliating behavior of Mr. Eastland, she tells a wonderful story of a group of Mississippi women trying to dissociate themselves from the Senator because - from the ''wrong'' part of the state, from new money, in Mrs. Durr's words as ''common as pig tracks'' - he was simply not one of them. That honey phrase recurs frequently. ''I valued the idea of being well-born,'' she says unapologetically, though she understands the limitations of such a vantage point. She understands that dissent is easier for the financially secure and even pities Klansmen for being so emaciated: ''You couldn't help but feel that they had been deprived all their lives.''
We see Mrs. Durr help Rosa Parks get ready - without knowing it - for the moment when she will sit her way into history in the Montgomery bus boycott; we watch her nearly come to blows with Joan Baez across the generations, and hear how she had to ante up 27 cents to cast her first vote in Virginia. Along the way she gives us unselfconscious portraits of two Wallaces, Henry and George, of Representative Vito Marcantonio of New York, of a host of other politicians and socialites and, at a discreet distance, of Hugo Black, to whom her sister, she insists, gave up too much of her independence. T HE sum of her experiences, however personally liberating, leaves Mrs. Durr disillusioned. For all their heroism, she and her husband were reduced to insolvency by political betrayal and the vagaries of civil liberties law, which was never a growth industry in Montgomery. She cannot reconcile herself to the wretched behavior of so many men in the public trust. But finally, less personally and most painfully, she sees how people use the vote she has helped to secure with such difficulty - they have no class canniness, no protective self-interest, or how could they elect demagogues like George Wallace?
And yet she understands. In one extraordinary scene in which she is insulted by this generation's students at Tuskegee Institute, Mrs. Durr begins to grasp that they respect no one of her class or generation - no ''big shot,'' black or white. They want what the white folks have, ideology and morality aside. It reminds her of the time she asked a young black man if he hadn't heard about the struggle for desegregation of the buses. ''Huh, Mrs. Durr, who wants to ride on a bus? I want a car of my own.'' Such a moment is worth a whole book of sociology. The education of a true witness is never finished. 'NO BOMBS FELL ON ALABAMA' When you grew up, didn't you feel safe? I was scared of snakes and runaway horses, but there really was nothing to be scared of in those days that I can remember - except hell. And my mother dispelled hell for me - told me that it didn't exist and it was ridiculous to pay any attention to it. I'm sure there was a great deal of fear in the world, but I wasn't aware of it. In the circumstances that I lived in I certainly wasn't afraid of black people, because they took care of me and nursed me and fed me and were my protectors. In fact, they were the people I depended on to look after me. I was only fourteen or fifteen during the First World War, and it was a long way off. No bombs fell on Alabama or New York. To me that war was a lot of good-looking young men with bars on their shoulders and learning how to dance and knitting sweaters. Maybe we were protected from fear because we didn't have television then. . . . If you didn't read the newspapers for a week, you wouldn't know there'd been an explosion somewhere. - From ''Outside the Magic Circle.''