Violet Weingarten

...Or nobody writes well about these women ---except perhaps Violet Weingarten...

...The young "liberal" and "liberated" ~ ~ ~" [ reviewers cut Weingarten to shreds...

...In the midst of an epidemic, diagnosis seldom is possible...

...i They find her protagonists passive and k ~ ,i I masochistic...

...When the Bears arrive without a coach for the All-Sun Belt Championship (or whatever) at the Astrodome in Houston, Devane is given a chance to make it all up to his kid by doing the coaching himself...

...What distinguishes Weingarten from those glossy magazines and the Mirabel Morgans...

...When Jason insists that his affair is not merely an affair, but a "relationship," she declares that their thirty-year marriage was also a relationship...

...Jane never does find out what went wrong...

...In the penultimate chapter of Hal/ a Marriage, Jason has returned, has even stoppfd acting as though he's doing her a favor (most of the time...

...Nor does she find out how to make things right...

...Twenty years younger usually...

...I'm afraid the only alternative Hollywood can offer is, again, an historical one--Treasure Island, or a Chaplin or John Ford film...

...All is the fact that dad, now divorced from morn and living in Houston, hasn't even bothered to see his son in eight years...

...Just as she is aware of the limita, tions of life, Weingarten is aware of the limitations of art: "It's the nature of the form to oversimplify, but life isn't a short story, shaped to be read in a single sitting under a hair dryer...

...While Jason, supposedly at a law seminar, goes to Paris with his petite amie, Jane drives aimlessly around New York and wonders, "What was I going to do with myself anywhere...

...It doesn't have, for instance, Peter Ustinov, Spike Milligan, Roy Kinnear or even Marty Feldman, nor is it at least a reminder, however pale, of a movie better than itself...

...Do you ever think of her?' I ask...

...In a movie that's aimed at children as an audience, no matter how much dirty talk there is in the kids or "bad news" in the world where they live, in the end that world should be capable of decent human relationships and at least some moral order in which a kid can believe...

...we'll call you...

...Martha and Mary . . . the doers and the takers-as-their due, the ones who run to fetch the stool and the few who sit down secure in the knowledge that it will be there behind them (as it is, as it always is...

...Literary, lonely, depressed, "plain Jane" tries to find herself in her own empty bed...

...Dad of course turns out to be the greatest coach that ever knocked the dirt from his cleats...

...Besides, the relationship to an adult, and so to the whole adult world, is the crucial one in any kids' movie just as it is in the real lives of kids...

...Now Hollywood does it the other way aroimd, which is worse...

...Ever...

...The pain, always surfacing, and conscientiously suppressed...

...It is perfectly possible to care about one person, to love him, or her, without it affecting your relationship with someone else...

...Having picked the scab, torn open the wound, she can't bear it, and asks, " ' N o , really,' He gets out of bed...

...In considering how dimcult it i s to write about a husband who leaves a wife, whose wife fears he will leave again, she adds, "They don't make marriage the happy ending any more...

...You could use a slide rule...

...Asking, "How do you get to be a Mary...

...That leaves the Bears themselves, and although a couple of ~hem can act, or at least ham it up engagingly, they don't have enough collective personality to carry the movie...

...Not content simply to grow older, she insists on beginning to grow up...

...No matter how far afield her protagonists go in her four novels, Weingarten returns them to a traditional structured marriage...

...Jealousy, daughter of Mistrust, born Much-Afraid...

...The happy ending---qualified...

...9 . . Is Martha-dom a genetic trait, or is it thrust upon one...

...This is pure Weingarten...

...Pretense is not her m6tier, tempting though it may be...

...Such women, still believing the myths, started playing more roles--not less...

...Instead of Matthau, this film gives us William Devane as the absentee father of a member of the team...

...When Jane, writer and actor in her own dream, exaggerates her own importance or the sweep and significance of her emotions, she quickly calls attention to her romantic mythologizing with the sharplyhoned scalpel of realistic undercutting...

...There are more things I don't understand than I do...

...Commonweal: $JJ...

...Like the classical Penelope, another Weingarten archetype, she waits, endures and contemptuously calls herself "a moron Griselda...

...It's always a younger woman, too...

...as a poet laureate of the "terrible meek," the middle-aged "Marthas" who, whatever the attitudinal baggage of women raised in a certain way at a certain time, know - - a s surely as Jay Gatsby did not: "You can't repeat the past...

...Painfully mocking her dedication to what she recognizes are her own frailties, Jane calls herself "Lady Chatterley, Ignoramus," a "female chauvinist sow," and sharpest indictment for so many women, particularly of Weingarten's generation but even of younger women embracing the Great Romantic Myth of Undying, All-Fulfilling Love, "Mrs...

...But she has an engaging way of turning language back upon itself~and herself--as a form of self-flagellation...

...The Weingarten world is divided into "Marthas" and "Marys...

...Weingarten talks too much about the difficulties of transmuting experience into fiction, is too much given to the vignette, the cinematic fade-out without establishing logical or psychological connections...

...She writes it several times, from several attempted points of view, never quite finishing each ostensible false start and inset story, as form follows function and reflects her agitation...

...But Weingarten enjoins ~ ~ [ ] | her protagonists to "play-act," and I finds the games worth the candle, at om.l Ilml | | least for the middle-class woman who has been raised with no other modus vivendi...

...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...

...The novel is about what happens when the "plague" infects the middleaged marriage, within the general context of the decay of marriage as an institution, the loss of love, honor, obey--or even cherish--as ideals...

...Much as her Jane wears the scarlet letter "A" for "Abandoned," "Alone," "Ability attentuated," much as she longs for that communion symbolized for her by their double bed, Jane finally dares ask Jason for a divorce, to "hang u p - - first...

...Or if they had, they were the wrong dreams at the wrong time...

...Hollywood always used to be accused to making movies for adults that were, morally and philcsophicaUy, too juvenile...

...If her values ever did pertain in that remote past known as youth, no longer are those values the verities, eternal or Commonweal: 533 temporal, Middle-aged, Weingarten's women are that middle generation whose parents told them to sit up ~ ! straight( and they obeyed), whose chill dren tell them not to be so "straight," i | not to b u t t i n a n d n o t t o let theink ' I on ohook o par ents ("Was it ever possible to talk to _9 i [ a parent without feeling guilty...

...Jane's husband Jason leaves his wife to "find himself" and the Golden Fleece, in Someone else's bed...

...Nobody writes about these women, now in' their forties and fifties, still running in place, trying trying to catch up...

...And the uneasy acceptance of a truce which is the best that can be gained...

...Not yang and yin, or good and evil...

...wife, mother, were added seductress, sex-object, career-woman, but the world kept changing, never noticed that these women were trying to change with it...

...Feigning gaiety at parties, she seeks men to affirm herself, but they 19 August 1977:534 tell her about their affairs with other women...

...A commitment to pinning down the truth about what she feels and thinks, though her women usually are afraid to voice their thoughts and feelings because they are obsessed with being liked...

...John Fisher College in Rochester, New York...

...Firestone when she is grateful for Jason's return), but she is jealous of the female marriage counselor who is too understanding of Jason's philandering...

...And for the first time in months, I make the blunder...

...It's amorphous, loose ends and contradictory truths, no foundation all the way down the line," she writes in Hal~ a Marriage...

...Ja~e Robbins, the central figure and controlling intelligence ("It's hard enough to write your own story, let alone someone else's...

...It certainly isn't a reminder of the original Bad News Bears, for in that film Walter Matthau supplied a lot of vinegar as the dipso ex-ballplayer who took on the coaching of the Bears only with the greatest reluctance...

...What she settles for, she knows to be second best, but Weingarten implies that half a marriage is better than none, better than the quarter or sixteenth that most people half-heartedly manage, and better than "divorce on principle...

...In Half a Marriage, Weingarten criticizes this kind of woman's way of life, tries to see the forest for the trees, yet ends "together on the darkling plain"min a clearing, but not through the forest...

...Beheker, a Loving Wi]e, a Woman o/ Feeling and Hal/a Marriage, titular ironies all, portray a certain kind of middle-aged woman caught between transition and tradition, living well but nervously in New York and its environs, highly-educated at Ivy League or Seven Sisters' Schools but without job skills, sexually-ignorant and sexually-cloistered, deracinated Jews acutely conscious of being lonely outsiders in a non-Jewish world, but having no sense of belonging to an EuropeanJudaic heritage...

...In the course of the novel, she learns what she wants, and writes it all down...

...The Weingarten woman's world is anarchic, despite its Lord and Taylor's' well:kept" apImarance (a facade that incorporates the woman herself, who knows she is kept, knows she is financially dependent...

...In a workaday world geared to the young, she looks for a job and hears, "Don't call us...

...All four of Weingarten's novels, Mrs...

...In between, you split the difference...

...She "expands" rather than "shrinks" with her psychiatrist ("You ought to have your head examined," says Dr...

...The appetite voracious for reassurance...

...Are Marys born or made...

...The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training has, if possible, even less to recommend it...

...Although she knows she doesn't believe it, "Not even now," ironically, "Jason is delighted with the gift...

...The relationship between Devane and his kid in the sequel doesn't...

...talking to her children who are more interested in living their own lives than in listening to hers, she finds understanding from her divorcing daugter-in-law ("You're horny, Jane...

...The only sequel with any originality and wit you might get a chance to see this summer is Another Thin Man, which provided the only laugh you ever got out of Marry Feldman in the first place...

...If he's fifty, she's thirty...

...Before her premature death in the summer of 1976, Violet Weingarten already had begun to achieve that full voice which does not have to, or care to, settle for half a novel...

...Whatever its deficiencies, marriage is still the only path through the forest for modern middleaged women untrained to be trailblazers...

...The relationship between Tatum O'Neal and Walter Matthau in the original Bears made the grade in this regard...

...Thinking she means it, she tells him, "Love isn't a tight little box...

...Or a Martha...

...Literature as process, the necessity of role-playing, sexual fantasies, connecting everyday life with her reading and writing, all reflect the confines of her age, her education, her social class...

...Jane yearns tO be a Mary, "The kind who looks at a man and says, 'I like that...

...Maybe it's Oedipal...

...For Weingarten, the function of fiction, the great lie which tells the greater truth, is for the passive woman to assume an active voice...

...It spreads from house to house, and you never know when it's going to hit next...

...If the man is fort'y, the girl is twenty...

...In one weekend he turns a bunch of stumblebums into a crack team and makes up eight years of neglect to his kid...

...Yet her lMt completed novel goes much further than most contemporary American novels about women's lives, and establishes Weingarten...

...For Weingarten's Jane, writing lends purpose and structure to a life apparently deprived of meaning by Jason's departures...

...It's like the plague in the Middle Ages...

...I'll take i t . ' " Insecure, dependent, frightened, she compromises, wondering, "how I got sold that bill of goods about being a Martha, belonging and not belonging, mistress of the house and still afraid to venture into that front room without the excuse of a platter in my hand...

...Far from adding a bi.t of vinegar, the adult is the pre-sweetening on this film...

...But one day, they woke up to find that they were pushing, or passing, or past forty, and somehow all the dreams hadn't come true...

...Jane says, "I am so pleased with him I decide to give him a present...

...Not so funny as Erica Jong nor so bitterly disappointed as Lois Gould, Weingarten is more allusive, more literate, less comfortable with the street argot which often vulgarizes contemporary fiction...

...These women were getting older, not better, and the men in their lives, by whose specifications they had defined those lives, were as restless and harassed as they, but the women thought that the men had more options...

...Once in a while,' "he admits, and "he goes off to the bathroom," the favorite escape (after television )of the pro /orma, sealed-off Married...

...Weingarten anatomizes the self-delusions-and-illusions, the alarms and confusions, and forces her Jane to see herself with a clarity lit by wit...

...Absolutely,' he says, ~11 smiles . . . . 'You've finally grown up, Jane.' I am demolished...

...Constantly,' he replies...

...To daughter, NANCY YANES HOFFMAN is a n essayist and an adjunct assistant professor of English at St...

...if such an understanding can be effected in the chaotic modern world...

...In the final analysis, Jane learns little, does not change, offers neither a prodigious understanding of marriage or of divorce, of "staying'" or of going...

...T~frOSe women who were graduated college in the forties and fifties knew that if they studied hard enough, wore their white gloves to _9 luncheons and interviews, met the right men and knew how to make them think they were interesting enough, so these men would offer the job of a lifetime or a house in the suburbs--then the dreams of the glossy magazines would come true...

...II In Hal/ a Marriage, the abandoned wife Jane compulsively babbles, "It was never like this before . . . almost everyone I know has left his wife . . . Nearly everyone, that is...

...the living-together arrangements of the ~ ~ I young ("No matter what you did, you couldn't win), the questioning of ~" ~ ~'~ a too-facile political "gliberalism," the _9 ~ ~ *~ II creature comforts, the intellectual mus~ ~ i cular dystrophy, and the varietist urge "'~ :~ I of a successful middle-aged husband to ~ ~ ~ I prove he stiU is young and attractive-these are the vines, the underbrush, the ~ ~ ~ ~ i trees Of weingarten's forest' central "r ~ ,~ metaphor and structure of her last o . ~ novel, Half a Marriage...