Chamber Music:
Wymard, Eleanor B.
the promise of the coming Kingdom of tianity, results in a sentimentalized to write and conduct his own composi- God. "message of Jesus," an...
...And that, as one reflects on it, tably draw thematic parallels between history is not God...
...Focusing on two distinctly different confines of man-measured time to live join hers to serve the useful soil...
...Her questions were simple...
...We looked up Her memory for me has grown, reached began early in my marriage to Robert and and smiled at each other, holding hands up, covered, and supported the rest of my lasted until his death downstairs...
...Her book who have divorced or separated parents, is best when she does just that...
...After Anna's death, Caroline lives she is drawing us into the mysterious Clarity and elegance of style account, through 50 years of silence until now, territory of "inner lives," but, on the however, for the distinction of Chamber when she has been "asked to write the contrary, she seldom does...
...Seton, af- in M(111L) ttecIrs...
...Now I knew another like myself...
...While reanimating this household as a result of Robert's liaison between Caroline and Anna, shocking moment from her past, homosexual relationship with Christ- somehow life, not decay, is their heritCaroline still wonders to her journal: opher Weeks, the home blooms with age: "The wisteria Anna planted now "How do I put down on this paper my signs of life when Anna and Carrie draw blooms outside my bedroom window...
...But now I knew...
...His indifEleanor B. Wymard American musician who his temporarily ference and discontent with me seemed at interrupted his studying in Germany to the time of no great moment beside his WHEN THE LITERARY critic turns to return to Boston...
...Robert's agonizing death from history of a man...
...Very close to the end of a1,3ed, fixed vacantly on the picture of a cow her life, Caroline Maclaren thus finds "At first he did not answer...
...What stereotypes about families ought to Thomas V. McGovern be abolished...
...convulsively, up and down, up and down death which had filled the Maclaren While premature death also interrupts the over the hand...
...The imbalance in the rewards of though Caroline feels an urgent need to roots of the wisteria vine...
...I understand why they Greek clan in Massachusetts, some Virwere realistically pessimistic about their ginia country kin, an evangelist-patriarch prospects...
...To what exhave serious doubts about the future of tent do adversity and guilt hold families the "nuclear family...
...sity, writes to Caroline about the death of "inexplicable" and inarticulate...
...Others felt happier for the sta- takes work to accomplish connectedness.bility of their parents' relationships...
...Chamber Music has natural affinities with the theme of Silences, for Caroline At age 90, a life story Newby never thinks twice about giving up her own music career: "To the musiCUM91 music the one glowing coal, in a long, cold, cal world Robert was a much beloved Doris Grumbach dark life...
...For the price of reason to write her dispassionate journal...
...In a recent class sought to let the people who are in when I asked for a show of hands of those families speak for themselves...
...these persons yearn for the stability, the After attending one too many certainty, and the emotional support and academic conferences on the past, preintimacy which a traditional family is sent and future of families, Howard supposed to provide...
...figure...
...Yet...
...elders, foundings about their families...
...finitive because God has become history creed of the early Christians, "Jesus is Readers who know Silences will ineviin Jesus...
...One can hope beyond comes down to something like incarna- Olsen's long literary essay and Grumthis historical experience because at the tion...
...no account in his light...
...less, dutiful marriage, and freed from it I helie\'e it will strike ei respow~ivc chord at last by the deadly journey of infection in the Ic...
...Hick's inability to affirm these lenge the assertion that the truth of own poetry, music, and painting because claims of catholic Christianity, joined to Christianity, precisely because he is the cultural constraints have limited their his evident desire to be part of that Chris- center, requires that Jesus be God incamate.time and space to create...
...ture " comes to help her, that " 'Mr...
...By using the diary ble," thereby gaining access into is thus arrested...
...One of her hands seemed lives with her for 12 years before dying of his mental faculties...
...I was afraid to say summer, always smiling gently, his eyes had loved Anna...
...Is blood still thicker than water...
...given here...
...groups, an Augustinian teachwith Anna in their own unique rhythm...
...Seabury, $14.95,.233 pp...
...So I temporary ecclesiology and thinks only of being set free from the wait for the time when my remains will the role of women...
...also been rekindled in the Maclaren she must be-Caroline neither probes Always a sullen, anti-social man, Robert Community, a summer colony for young nor confronts, for example...
...Grumbach's technique is to allow Carne Maclaren, at age 90, to create herself through the narration of her own life-story: "And so it was for me, acs 1E]ql 1-0(:S t3LDS SIN(iti is Caroline Newby, raised by a lonely, heartbroken mother, taught to play the the ii List ' lL vhq hock I I1c]\'e revel...
...of ii n ond women through the rivers of her husband's blood...
...cisely is the narrative problem of Caroline's mind Such a narrator would Caroline approaches self-awareness, but Chamber Music...
...Maclaren For example, shortly after Robert's Because language is Caroline's key to is dying of syphilis in its final, tertiary death, Lawrence Vandersee, Chairman, unlocking her past self, it is inconsistent stage.' . . . I was aghast...
...F A Dept...
...Further insight of Caroline Maclaren that the novel is would also see beyond the "inexplica- into the relationship of Anna and Carrie .essentially bankrupt...
...Did Department of Music, Columbia Univerthat her terror, at such moments, need be I suspect and refuse to let myself know...
...lence told me I had made a mistake to his homosexuality, Grumbach could not But, shielded by the restraint of an elegquestion him...
...After the death of sor Weeks died last summer after a long example, *hen suddenly discovering her Robert, Chamber Music becomes a para- illness...
...Anna was incredul- Professor Christopher Weeks: "ProfesCaroline is also imprisoned by words, for ous of my innocence...
...The colony and its ship with his mother...
...That lay awake, filled with fear of the great Despite months of caring intimately anger, once discovered, erupts through expanse of blackness outside the four for her husband, Caroline must still be the surface of the novel's refinement to posts, an inexplicable terror for the fu- told by Anna Baehr, the nurse who become, for the reader, deeply troubling...
...Almost all of together...
...One can take history with close to being evasive fancy...
...Having high aspirations fame...
...Many of them ers, networks of outsiders...
...Caroline does the four lovers, however slim, is indocument her existence, at important find happiness in Anna's bed, but their tensely disturbing...
...It finally is lionized for his triumphs well beyond religious seriousness and this life as de- does come down to that most elementary the end of his days...
...My con- moments, words, ironically, continue to pleasure is intensified in nature...
...Caroline Newby Maclaren, the Victorian heroine of Grumbach's third novel, Chamber Music, seems scarcely to be alive...
...ABIT Jane Howard Si.nwn and Schuster, $9.95, 282 pp...
...Hick is undoubtedly right-Jesus, bach's novel...
...There were signs of relief...
...She discovers that it not alone...
...The so well...
...Commonweal: 380 In the act of writing her journal, they will exist in natural time with the Carolina Maclaren finds a meager source seasons, counter to the beat of the metof strength which helps her to face the ronome: "- - .. I remember her way of last days of her life...
...A To paraphrase Virginia Woolf's ing and a Franciscan nursing congregation, she traveled very old woman, Caroline anticipates an evaluation of George Eliot's throughout England to visit existence set on juxtaposition to the Middlemarch, Chamber Music is, in the their various houses and was granted measured minutes of her experiental best sense of the word, a very adult book: limited participaworld...
...Regretably, we to be under her lower body, which moved influenza...
...It is ('1 record c t fianced to a prodigy who first loved his Colurc]cje, C rnpc55iofl and pe.rsonml mother and then a man, once and fatally (I have now come to believe) before his dro\\ti\ thrOLI(Jll the experiencee marriage to me, a wife caught in a joy- of c]lin st intolerablc trdgc(ILI...
...I still contribution the tyranny of Robert's schedule and the cannot believe in a higher purpose or a to the understanding of congrinding routine of nursing him, she kindly Providence that will unite us...
...Grumbach's point of not be limited only to apprehending ex- we experience and know only what view is so patently and consistently that perience, as Caroline so often is, but Caroline herself does...
...He had left the faculty during the mother-in-law, stretched out on the bed, ble of tender human regeneration as spring semester before, suffering from a "her face buried in Robert's pillow, her Caroline experiences sexual awakening long series of afflictions, to the liver, to shoulders shaking although no sound in a lesbian relationship with Anna, who the skin, and finally, I must tell you, to could be heard...
...the blatant was nevertheless the master of his own artists established on the Maclaren farm fact of her husband's incestuous relation- existence...
...As nar- their love: "The sensual pleasure we men and their satellite, serving wives...
...piano by the wordless Mrs...
...Her interviews with single parmore we talked, however, the more relief ents, with commune members, and with was transformed into uncertainty...
...Such tributory existence and auxiliary serv- fail her...
...Italics mine.] Here pre- used a central intelligence to journey into My suppositions were confirmed...
...rator, she simply does not probe the shared resulted, I have often thought, Their true persons and their inner lives complexity of the subject matter which is from the guesses we had -made about ourare rarely known or described in the herself...
...Too much a Music...
...Deal...
...Doris Grumbach's Chamber Music...
...form, Caroline Maclaren believes that Caroline's deeper self...
...Having spent her life in service to carcasses would enrich the roots...
...Different from the stench of were forced to ask for his resignation...
...At age 17 in 1893, Caroline marries man, was important also to me, who Robert Glencoe Maclaren, a young needed private love so much...
...But this public man, this famous Dutton, $8.9S, 213 pp...
...of eighteen children, and an affluent New Some felt better knowing that they were York City family...
...Before dying at the age of 34, Once more it is apparent that incarna- church, and an ultimate hope that comes Robert repeatedly fulfills his dreams and tion is the rub...
...The passion of the novel might selves and the answers we found in each painful and almost faithless detail I have have been intensified had Grumbach other...
...the promise of the coming Kingdom of tianity, results in a sentimentalized to write and conduct his own composiGod...
...Yes.' Then he closed have Robert suffer any more than he ant prose, a profound anger exists in his eyes and slept or seemed to sleep...
...FAMILIES the presence of stable, intimate marital relationships...
...He was renowned, a talented writing fiction, his words as re- for his talent, Robert wants, eventually, musician, a `composer of genius,' many viewer should never serve to haunt...
...room with your mother before I there [Robert] sat through spring and by a fire set by a young man who once came?' I asked him...
...These a lesbian couple highlight the gropings students had taken seriously the finding for new forms of family experience...
...And then, after discovering love, evenh\'here in the \Vorl(ItV unlikely and unsuspected, in a woman - HOPI?N WEB F who dispelled her loneliness, left behind by her death, more alone than ever before, deserted by the single point of light, William Morrow 22 June /979: 379 critics had already written...
...History must bach continually weakens the psycho- from Caroline more understanding of be full of such alliances between famous realism of Caroline Maclaren...
...As I LISTEN to the students in my clas- How important to a family are ritual, ses on mental health and personal myth and religion...
...Olsen laments the lost art heart of its pathos is the Risen Lord who not the doctrine of the incarnation, is the of our "silenced people," those has triumphed over death, which is center of Christianity...
...In a critique for the Washington Post this past summer of Tillie Olsen's Silences, Doris Grumbach makes the claim that the "passion of [Olsen's] thesis leads her into all kinds of error...
...But his own argu- persons-particularly women-who otherwise the negation of all our mean- ment tends to confirm rather than to chal- never have experienced the birth of their ings...
...F.A reported in Vaillant's recent research, Howard's book pulses and thrives when 300 Noah Zee0 Road 18 Bedlord R0* Ann A,bo, MI 48106 London, WC1R 4EJ Adaptation to Life, that mid-life mental she lets the people she meets describe VSA Engand health was most highly correlated with their chiefs, their hospitality, their com22 June 1979: 381...
...But they always do...
...His si- jumping over a moon...
...Vulnerable neither to sentiment "a magnificent book which with all its tion in the comnor optimism, Caroline awaits the con- imperfections is one of the few (English] munity fRevelatory" .-Publishers stant companionship of Anna...
...God has become history but Lord...
...I does...
...Public interest has child of her Victorian era-as, perhaps, syphilis is terrifyingly lucid and graphic...
...AStudyodVlbrkir,g Nuns Are families in trouble...
...The experience pro- protecting our trees from insects, her asvides her with her only knowledge of felt surance that their brittle little skewered "A significant time...
...Did you share syphilis, "paralyzed and demented, idea were destroyed long ago, however, this...
...closeness with nature establishes their ices, like my small, thin physique, were By writing in the first person, Grum- strong identity, but, again, one wished of...
...Al- in the fragrant soil surrounding the young life...
...Together, novels written for grown-up people...
...it Weekly LC )8-20410 ISBN 0-39450665.9 510 Is the family in grave trouble...
...Howard over half the class nervously acknowl- has conversations with members of a edged that reality...
...Did I know...
...feeling of inadequacy, so profound that it more closely together...
...But in the last stages of in memory of Robert...
...In her book, by SUZANNE Families, Jane Howard shares her con- CAMPS IONES CRITICAL THEORY OF THE FAMILY versations with a variety of folks about Mark Poster this topic...
...sense of place, propadjustment, I hear strong voices and feel- erty, history and purpose...
...Can friendship replace kinship...
...message of Jesus," an implausible tions...
Vol. 106 • June 1979 • No. 12
