A Book of Common Prayer

...And in so doing she is carving out a literary corner for traditionally female concerns like motherhood and coping and compliance alongside traditionally male concerns such as war and courage and conquest...

...clear, and some have managed to combine, as Lewis puts it, "both the child and the man, both the savage and the citizen, both the head and the belly...

...20005 D Enclosed is $10 for a year's subscription to the AIM Report...

...the other is detached and objective...

...And Charlotte Bronfd, whose material was the "female obsessional life," was therefore incapable of wryly dismissing it...

...The simplest, and thus most convincing, explanation is this quotation from an unnamed survivor, the epigraph to the honor chapter: "Authorities on the holocaust...

...Hungry...

...It doesn't believe, doesn't understand...

...Historians...

...On occasion this apocalyptic vision is reflected in his journal: "At moments of great melancholy, when I feel the end of Western civilization near, I meditate on destiny and on the lesson that Hector gave us...

...It seems to me that man will succeed--if he wishes-in remaining free and creative, in any circumstance, cosmic or historical...

...house are Romanian artifacts he and his wife Christinel have given us over the years, reminders of a past in a country we have known in the beginning of life, a land of beauty neither can forget...

...She sets out to discover how Charlotte's own make-up and her environment and the things that have happened to her have combined to turn her into what she has become, and although the author acknowledges in the end that her quest has not been entirely successful, still Didion can see in Charlotte proportions which approach the heroic...

...A Book of Common Prayer is narrated by a weary and dying 60-year-old American anthropologist, widow of one of Boca Grande's landed gentry...

...They can write subjectively while disregarding a universal or impersonal judgment upon what they are writing, or they can speak exclusively in an official, detached voice while disregarding any personal divergences from the impersonal...

...Deep down, he knew that Troy was destined to perish...

...The murkiness of the thick voice becomes clarified, the thinness of the clear voice is given depth...

...What actually happened was that millions of people were systematically killed simply because they were Jews...

...And Hemingway feels good when he's fishing...

...He asks "How can one live in history without betraying it, without denying it, and still partake of a transhistorical reality...

...And indeed, from what I had heard of A Book of Common Prayer I was prepared to find fault...

...BOOK REVIEW No Souvenirs, Journal, 1957-1969 Mircea Eliade / Harper & Row / $15.00 Juliana Geran Pilon Known and loved in America for works like Patterns of Comparative Religion, Cosmos and History, The Sacred and the Profane, and many others, Mircea Eliade is famous throughout the world as a historian of religion and philosopher of culture...

...The survivors also have different understandings of the special obligations of survivorhood...

...The agony of such a question has not subsided...

...They did, after living through hell, go out and start over again--proof of a fundamental courage and spiritual strength...

...Now none of this is meant to imply an automatic admiration for writers who combine thickness and clarity...

...The implication of the questions is, clearly, that the Jews somehow provoked, and thus in a sense must have deserved, their vile treatment...

...AIM) was founded to combat inaccuracies and distorted reporting by the major media...

...Still, when the two voices mingle and harmonize, the combination adds texture and richness and it works at the same time to neutralize weaknesses which the exclusive voices can tend to emphasize...

...At a time when modern confusion and disillusion threaten a rerun of prehistory, Eliade's insights into the earliest modes of finding inner harmony, of recapturing creation, of transcending the ephemeral, could serve to reawaken a sense of identity, indeed, a redefinition of beauty...

...why, they are asked, did they allow themselves to be walled in, starved, tortured, killed by the Germans and their accomplices...

...But the underlying motive-common to all--is the duty to maintain some connection with their past...

...Boca Grande is not a land of contrasts...

...I give her a xylophone and a sundress from Madeira, and promise to tell her a funny story...

...Both Fitzgerald and Mailer intermittently combine the voices, Hemingway does so invariably, and many novelists who do not are better than they...

...Eliade has no answer...

...He knows that "the ugliness, the boredom, and the exalting of the insignificant of which the artistic creations of the last twenty years make a display are, with nihilism in philosophy, anarchism in social ethics, and violence in political activity, the expres36 The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1977...

...It does provide, however, a unique atmosphere which compliments and highlights both the characters and their actions...

...I was hesitant as well because of a certain tone in an essay she had written about conceiving this novel...

...Eliade loves dance, he loves wine, he loves to read...

...Learning from Proust: "The happiness of listening and remembering...

...the determination to remember where they came from and whom they left behind, and the determination not to allow others to forget...

...Those "authorities on the holocaust" are not, however, the only--or even the chief--threat to the truth...

...In fact there is no voodoo in the hills...

...She is an open and trusting child, unprepared for and unaccustomed to the ambushes of family life, and perhaps it is just as well that I can offer her little of that life...

...spiritually speaking, genocide is as much genocide when it allegedly deprives people of rights and "cultural heritage" as when it actually deprives them of life...

...Rabinowitz' survivors are not in any way maimed...

...Only Christianity, says Lewis, demands the combination...

...But Didion refuses to dismiss silly and incompetent women as being merely silly and incompetent...

...The action takes place in Central America, and it has been my experience that when North Americans carry their typewriters South, they rarely get beyond the business of applauding themselves for being there...

...The new women's consciousness tries to insist that beneath the maulings of environment, women, except that they are more highly sexed, are just like men...

...Accuracy In Media, Inc...

...There is a local currency but the American dollar is legal tender...

...The thick religions enjoy orgies and ecstasies and mysteries...

...But the young man who used to read voraciously into the night, who would wonder at the monumental and exciting task of understanding man's need for beauty and holiness, for peace as well as magic, needs no souvenirs: He contains the human heritage like an enchanted receptacle...

...Name Address City State Zip The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1977 35 then suffering a pregnancy which ended in lingering and tragic death...

...Great writers...

...Until A Book of Common Prayer, I had always thought she had done this more successfully in her essays than in her fiction...

...That it is human, not weak, not to want to believe that someone is out to murder you, and that on the way to the slaughterhouse he will also drain you of your possessions, of your strength, the gold from your teeth, and the hair from your head...

...that had they been different, they would not have been savaged so brutally...

...I would like to promise her that she will grow up with a sense of her cousins and of rivers with fried chicken and her hair uncombed, would like to give her home for her birthday, but we live differently now and I can promise her nothing like that...

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...That those who lived through the horror consent to consider such questions seriously--and with patience--testifies to the depth of their commitment to history...

...He sympathizes, at times, with Hirai's approach: "We have no theology...

...The first person here is a character in her own right, but her voice is much like Didion's and therefore lends credibility and dignity to a subject which could otherwise become melodramatic or hysterical...

...Perhaps he is right," says Eliade, not resigned so much as bewildered--the West doesn't seem to know what it stands to lose...

...And I feel the combined use of the thick and the clear voice is especially important if feminine feelings and emotions and experiences are to gain literary stature alongside those of the masculine...

...That liberation consists of an ardent, almost erotic appreciation of the spirit within each of us...

...Listen to Joan Didion in an essay from Slouching Toward Bethlehem: The very setting of the novel put me off...

...For the most part, however, the Jews could not and did not resist...

...And it seems that until now, serious women writers have drifted in the wake of either one or the other of these two archetypal female novelists...

...For there are people out there--those fashionably fightminded people who are, for the time being at least, our moral trend-setters--who deny the most basic truth of the holocaust...

...For me, although perhaps not for other critics, the approach would have destroyed her value...

...AIM) is a non-profit, non-partisan, educational organization Washington, D.C...

...There are no waterfalls of note, no ruins of interest, no chic boutiques...to provide dramatic cultural foil to voodoo in the hills...

...Jane Austen could not, as Joan Didion does, identify with a "female obsessional life," for had she done so, she could not have dealt with it on an exclusively impersonal level...

...Perhaps no answer is possible...

...Of all the good women novelists I have read, Joan Didion alone writes with a sensibility and vision that are both thick and clear, emotional and detached...

...In the evening, after she has gone to sleep, I kneel beside the crib and touch her face, where it is pressed against the slats, with mine...

...If media bias upsets you...

...If Charlotte Bront~ struggled for a larger context within which she could weigh her dreams of mutilation and death, she too covered it 34 The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1977 nicely...

...He tells horror stories from Communist Romania--of priests tortured for reading the Bible, of innocents in prison fed excrement--and is bewildered...

...Thus Eliade's overwhelming optimism: "I have limitless confidence in the creative power of the mind...

...Didion writes with a clear sense of right and wrong, natural and unn a t u r e . She is in no way satisfied with the kind of motiveless action-reaction syndrome which makes so much modern fiction unreadable...

...Their writing tends to be either thick like the Bront'e~' or clear like Jane Austen's...

...The story she tells is that of Charlotte Douglas, an attractive but unfortunate middle-aged Californian to whom many bad things have happened, among them her 18-year-old daughter's going underground as a criminal revolutionary and It is time for the baby's birthday party: a white cake, strawberry-marshmallow icecream, a bottle of champagne saved from anothe~ party...

...Eliade has difficulty understanding the reason for violence, for man's inhumanity to man...

...His scholarly endeavors are remarkably passionate: "I want to show the cathartic function of a correct understanding of myth...

...We all have the same dreams...

...I f he w i s h e s " - - t h e perpetual, perplexing * * i ~ P . . . . Eliade is, of course, a citizen of the world in the broadest sense, for his contemporaries include Pico della Mirandola no less than Papini, Croce, Balzac, Buddha...

...he is disarmingly gentle...

...Survivors are asked--by people claiming special understanding of human nature or the nature of the world--to explain, please, why they and their dead children acquiesced in the horror perpetrated against them...

...Her psychological dishonesty and her delusions have reached the point of rendering her nearly incapable of functioning, the kind of woman who up to now has been dealt with in literature as funny--a character--or has been written off in exasperation...

...If anything can counter such fancy footwork, it is the calm and straightforward account provided by New Lives of what actually happened in Europe thirty years ago...

...Great thinkers...

...There must, indeed, be cripples among the survivors, but they do not speak for the majority...

...No souvenirs" means that all is gone--only his eyeglasses remain from the country he left forever in 1942, not realizing at the time that he would never return...

...I would like to give her more...

...She and her husband are presently writing a book on energy...

...If Jane Austen dreamed of mutilation or death, she covered it nicely...

...Charlotte has reacted by becoming an aimless drifter...

...How could his journal be called No Souvenirs...

...If the experience had crippled the lucky few who survived, there would, probably--and sadly--be no need for constant vigilance against distortion: The world loves a loser...

...do something about it: Subscribe to The AIM Report t Specialprie o the re~-~ ,:e c~tIel'S 0 T~e ~lltern...

...Q ~ 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 ~176176176176176176176176 BOOK REVIEW A Book of Common Prayer Joan Didion / Simon and Schuster / $8.85 Patricia S. Coyne C.S...

...Even on the most informal occasions, relaxed and sipping his favorite scotch-and-soda, he will ponder upon the meaning of ritual, the need for transcendence as well as conformity among the hippies, or the implications of Kissinger's Spenglerianism...

...It liberates [modern] man from certain inhibitions which made him incapable of loving his own prehistory [and history...

...But until now, women novelists have been notably unsuccessful at managing the combination...

...But as I read the first chapters of A Book of Common Prayer I realized that everything would be all right...

...Though fascinated with symbol, Eliade is very much aware of this world...

...Eliade radiates knowledge...

...For them, it seems, certain facts are too trifling to be worthy of notice...

...Why is freedom so difficult, love so rare...

...It has gained national attention because of its highly professional approach and its fearlessness in tackling such media giants as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CBS, NBC, and ABC...

...While most twentieth-century philosophers of psyche were analyzing the secular musings and aberrations of our cerebral hemispheres, Eliade was perusing prayer...

...Some, he said, a r e " thick" and some are "clear...

...And although the characters in the novel do act and react in ways which reflect the author's imagination--her "obsessional life' ' - - s t i l l , her main concern is not with their acting so much as with an attempt to discern why...

...It takes a convert from central Africa and tells him to obey an enlightened universalist ethic: it takes a twentieth-century academic prig like me and tells me to go fasting to a Mystery, to drink the blood of the Lord...

...One aspect of the danger is dwelt on in the chapter of New laves entitled "Honor...

...But they are, in the end, simply human, and--though Rabinowitz' decision to translate their words into fine and evocative language is something of an interference-their humanness gives the lie to those who see the holocaust as a sort of pyschological laboratory as well as to those who use it as a political symbol...

...I suspected that she was beginning to feel that the stuff of her imagination was worthy, by definition alone, of being recorded as art, rather than as raw material ready to be fit into context...

...But women cry when a dispassionate view would hold that there is nothing sad, and Joan Didion would hold that that is every bit as significant...

...Norman Mailer tests his courage by walking Harlem at night...

...The clear ones are philosophical, ethical, and universalizing...

...and that the survivors cannot permit...

...Great intellectuals...

...And so, rather than giving way to inarticulate rage, they point out that in many cases the Jews did rise up violently --the fact that uprisings only hastened death is significant only to those of us who believe that it is better to be alive than dead, even when death brings honor...

...This passage perhaps defines and identifies the thick, clear voice more than it employs it, but even so it transcends the range of a writer who writes in a single voice...

...But a constant theme running through this novel and through much of Didion's work is that while there is a discernible behavioral norm in the human condition, woman diverge from the norm in ways inherently different from men...

...Lewis' distinction, with a different emphasis, might also be applied to literature, and especially to the novel...

...for the upholders of moral standards, Harlem is as much a ghetto as was Warsaw...

...The books he had shipped were lost...

...Alone among women novelists, Joan Didion seems able to deal with personal and subjective experiences in a universal voice...

...But even as his philosophy inspires those who read him, his personality endears him to those who know him...

...Jews...

...The politics of the country at first appear to offer contrast, involving as they do the "colorful" Latin juxtaposition of guerrilleros and colonels, hut when the tanks are put away and the airport reopens nothing has actually changed in Boca Grande...

...We dance...

...She writes as a woman with uniquely female emotions and reactions, but she manages to retain a vision of the universal human experience against which her own can be viewed...

...He has uncovered the archetypes of sacred consciousness, convinced that the West can learn from ancient mythology: Eliade explores the forms of ritual--that primordial rehearsal of commitment to the Author, the reaffirmation of faith in the basic human scenario...

...Except when they write children's stories, which is another subject, women stitl tend to be either thick like Joyce Carol Oates or clear like Muriel Spark...

...One is emotional, subjective...

...Let them put this in their books: that by the time we walked to the tragedy we were already emaciated and enslaved...

...A man who still consults the poets of his native Romania for inspiration (he would read passionately from Eminescu at literary gatherings in his home), who remembers in intimate detail his land and its music...

...For the hard cold facts of the holocaust are in danger of being forgotten...

...To implicate the victims in their own murder is to minimize the crime against the Jews...

...f OnlY $10 tve ACCURACY IN MEDIA, INC...

...Lewis once compared religions to soup...

...J o a n Didion's subject is the feminine, but unlike other writers who draw from the same material, she neither romanticizes nor patronizes it, nor, as is common today, does she politicize it...

...In her newest novel, for instance, she ends a chapter with a dismissive description of a journal her heroine kept: On those pages she had tried to rid herself of her dreams, and these dreams seemed to deal only with sexual surrender and infant death, commonplaces of the female obsessional life...

...Eliade is not only a man of genius, of dynamic exuberance...

...Yet his roots are very much in this busy, materialist world of ours on the edge of self-destruction...

...Fitzgerald is drawn to expensively turned-out women...

...Starting this fall she will be teaching philosophy at Emory University...

...They have been unwilling or unable to meld the two modes of expression...

...In fact there are no hills, only the flat bush and the lifeless sea...

...There is need for such determination...

...His adolescent novels and short stories are no more...

...Throughout my Juliana Geran Pilon, a personal fn'end of Mircea Eliade, is a native of Romania and has recently received a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Chicago...

...How simple...

...I would want us to fall as Hector did...

...J o a n Didion's imaginary Central American country is neither self-consciously quaint nor indulgently grotesque...

...By studying worship, he unveiled basic patterns of man's attempt to find cosmic meaning...

...Some novels are exclusively thick, some are Patricia S. Coyne is Washington editor of Private Practice...

...Equally fine, it seems to them, is the distinction made by some sticklers for detail between the fate of Europe's Jews and the condition of America's blacks...

...Doing our duty, at peace with our conscience, and, nevertheless, without illusions...

...nor are they remarkably heroic...

...That Jews were confined in the Warsaw ghetto as part of an official policy of extermination, while American blacks are free to move away from Harlem and are not, nor have ever been, threatened with mass extinction --this is considered a fine distinction...

...On the contrary, Boca Grande is relentlessly "the same": the cathedral is not Spanish Colonial but corrugated aluminum...

...And what's more, says Didion, women's divergences are neither more worthy nor less worthy, but instead are equally worthy of literary examination...

...That duty, however, includes a relentless faith in human energy and spirit...