BOOK REVIEW : ‘They’re All Love Letters’ in This Story of Devotion : THE SEASON, IT WAS WINTER: Scenes From the Life of an American Jew, Vol. 5 <i> by John Sanford</i> ; Black Sparrow Press; $15, paper; $30, cloth; 295 pages

This book, the fifth in her husband’s autobiographical quintet, belongs to Marguerite Roberts Sanford.

Gentle, tender and suffused with admiration for the remarkable woman the author cherished for more than half a century, “The Season, It Was Winter” is a labor of love in the purest but far from the simplest sense. “There was more, though, more than pigmentation, more than fineness of form and feature: She was the repository of winning ways, as if all the graces had devolved on her.”

There are, of course, the characteristic Sanford portraits of the people and events that marked and marred the decade of the 1950s, fiercely scathing excoriations of the era’s villains; passionate commentaries on the climate of betrayal and fear they created.

Reading Sanford’s brief vignette on Roy Cohn’s visit to Israel, one shudders, as if brushed in the dark by the scales of a serpent.

“Still, this pox, this pestilenza, they permitted to land: It was his right. What had he come for? Did he wish to see the Rock of Agony, he who’d caused so much of it, or like finding like, was it the Dung Gate that drew him--or, being in the city of David, did he, God dissuade him! ask for the road to Yad Vashem, there where a flame would burn forever amid the shards of a copper urn?”

A mere handful of such descriptions could flavor a book 10 times as long as this one. Here, as always, these “Color of the Air” segments are inserted to create the atmosphere of the time. Set against these flaming markers, the daily life of John and Maggie Sanford--in Carmel, in Europe and finally in Santa Barbara--seems to take place on another planet, in a private and tranquil counter-world of their own devising.

In time, as friends and colleagues succumbed to the low temptations of the time, that world shrank until it became a universe of two, not to expand again until the summer of 1960. Then, nearly 10 years after the bleak November day when John Sanford removed Maggie Roberts’ nameplate from the office at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where she’d written her most notable films, she was finally allowed to resume the career interrupted when she was declared “an uncooperative witness” and blacklisted by the film industry.

To appreciate this woman “upon whom all the graces had devolved,” you need to see her during that bleak decade.

Slighted by sometime friends, deprived of the work that provided pleasure and satisfaction as well as livelihood, obliged to sell the Encino ranch and her beloved stable of saddle horses, Maggie manages to behave as if these sad alterations were mere temporary aberrations.

Wandering through Europe more as exile than as traveler, she still succeeds in extracting a measure of delight from the experience.

Eventually, when that indomitable spirit flags, her equanimity is restored by analysis, although the buoyant confidence that turned a hardscrabble Nebraska farmer’s daughter into a noted screenwriter never quite returns. Suddenly, John, the cynic, becomes the optimist; the once ebullient Maggie, the skeptic.

At the end of Sanford’s stunning book of American women, “To Feed Their Hopes,” there’s a small personal note:

“You’ve never written me a love letter,” Maggie says, and he replies, “They’re all love letters,” and so they were, but this is Maggie’s own.

Read it, because it seems unlikely that the next 50 years will inspire many such stories or produce another writer of equal distinction to chronicle a half-century of absolute devotion.

Next: Carolyn See reviews “Jewel” by Brett Lott (Pocket Books) .