In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens/Mr. Bedford and the Muses/Pitch Dark
Mort, Jo-Ann
radical expressing dismay at a nonpoliticized America and an audience which doesn't have politics in its soul; a radical discussing what he doesn't like in A prose , o f her own IN lURCH OF...
...Not every reader will be familiar with the ambiance of "Elaine's...
...a response to Letty Cottin Pogrebin's article on anti-Semitism in the women's movement...
...Arizona (pre-police interrogation warnings of fights) still stand, Why was there no counter-revolution, since most present Justices would not have voted with Earl Warren had they been on the Court during his tenure...
...Pitch Dar k is about a journalist, Kate, who is getting over a love affair with a married man...
...In this book, Walker goes on an expedition, in search of the missing voices of women and black writers...
...or "So there is this pressure now, on every sentence, not just to say what it has to say, but to justify its claim upon our time...
...First, she goes to Ireland, and then to her destination where she will find solitude for healing, to Orcas Island...
...Conservative & activist TIlE BUR|Ell fJ|ilT Edited by Vincent Bhud Ytde, $25, 3~6 pp...
...This collection, however, is especially instructive for writers and for women writers in particular -- if only because Walker's prose makes one feel less isolated in a wodd which is not very accepting of writers...
...This is a volume which should be read over and over again for sustenance...
...Walker castigates the toleration of anti-Semitism in the black community, but also describes the black sense of identity with the underdog, explaining the current growth of solidarity with the Palestinians...
...Another story tells o f a successful novelist who has taken refuge in a mountain community and is benignly accepting of his typist's habit of wearing women's clothes when I~e types I June 1984:345 at home...
...Since the laity is not familiar with the subject matter, in context the essay has little relevance to the professed theme of the work...
...She includes the writer's thoughts in the story, as if to unmask the creative process: "Do I need to stylize it, then, or can I tell it as it was...
...A people do not throw their geniuses away...
...These stories are deceptively simple...
...For too long, we have collectively ignored the voices of our past and our present...
...We read Pitch Dark with the sense that we are unraveling a precious secret and even when we get to the core, we are not wholly satisfied...
...If Malcolm X had been a black woman his last message to thewodd would have been entirely different...
...Walker takes on the women's movement with the same verve she uses on the black revolutionaries who condemn her mainstream civil rights work while "consuming quantities of wine and cheese at our house...
...Whether the story is about a woman, man, young, or old writer, the author's voice is intelligent aa~Ujoyable...
...The second part of the book is devoted to essays dealing with the civil rights movement...
...The first point is demonstrated by the nine "subject matter" essays, each of which was penned by a law professor, each manifesting inevitable temptations toward parochialism, comprehensive listing of cases (with brief commentaries), and a preoccupation with analysis of the idiosyncratic views of particular Justices...
...magazine, Walker challenges the white, middle-class nature of much of the women's movement, though she criticizes as a member of the clan...
...Nil...
...In answer to America by dissecting and condemning the consciousness industry that contributes so significantly to the state of that soul...
...Renata Adler's second novel, Pitch Dark, will undoubtedly be held up to the toughest scrutiny since her first novel, Speedboat, received overwhelming praises even years ago...
...This collection of eleven essays admirably succeeds in explaining what the Court has done and why few today -- except in the pages of Commentary and The Public Interest -even expect judicial deference to other branches of government...
...Has there, instead, been guerrilla warfare...
...The Burger Court (a misnomer) has continued to be a feisty and "activist" body which is, at times, even more unrestrained than was its famous predecessor...
...We take our Muses where we find them," writes Godwin...
...a radical discussing what he doesn't like in A prose , o f her own IN lURCH OF ORB NOTHERS' GARDENS WOMANIST PROSE Alice Walker Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $14.95, 397 pp...
...Once I was twenty-one and terrified I woOkl not get the most out of life...
...Adler is a pro at transmitting Kate's frenetic urban lifestyle...
...I wantedto marry, to travel, to be a writer," says one character...
...An editor at Ms...
...Board of Education (desegregation), and Miranda vs...
...But what is refreshing about this essay is Walker's statement decrying the treatment of blacks in Arab countries, since it has recently become acceptable for radical blacks to embrace not only Palestinian rights, but the Arab governments and the PLO: As for those who think the Arab world promises freedom, the briefest study of its routine traditional treatment of blacks (slavery) and women (purdah) will provide relief from all illusion...
...Cart ("one man-one vote"), Brown vs...
...The insiders' nature of this novel makes it less interesting than it might have been...
...We follow our character through her international jaunts as she begins to rid herself of the anguish of this broken love fffair...
...But then the storyline is not the point in this writer's fiction...
...o . A n n Mort i l l , UNDERSTAND that each woman is i capable of truly bringing another into the world," writes Alice Walker in her,new collection of essays, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens...
...We are a people," she writes...
...In short, just your typical eighties' woman...
...One of the odder tales,"A Father's Pleasures," revolves around Rudolf Geber, a world-renowned concert pianist who rewards his son with the ultimate prize, the father's own wife...
...Another story, "Amanuensis," chronicles a less-perverse, but equally sinister turn of events...
...The most quirky discussion, though easily the most readable and enjoyable (to a professional in the field) is Martin Shapiro' s discourse on the changing modes of academic criticism of the Court...
...The reason for the failure to fully engage the issues outlined above is twofold: first, the book's organization -eleven essays, only two of which (along with Anthony Lewis's brief foreword) even purport to be overviews of the Court's general performance -- and secondly, the peculiar personal and judicial characteristics of the present Justices...
...I s i d o r e S i l v e r W HAT are we to make of a "conservafive" Supreme Court which, in the last thirteen years, (a) "constitutionalized" the fight of a woman to have an abortion, (b) unanimously curtailed some egregious claims of the "imperial presidency" by telling its most notorious exponent that he had to turn over documentary evidence of criminaiity to a judge, and (c) in one authoritative swoop of the judicial pen, invalidated parts of some 200 federal laws permitting a legislative veto over presidential activities...
...Inevitably, the quality of the essays differ -- especially since two appear to have been written several years ago (they call 1977-79 cases "recent") and were not revised or updated...
...PITCH DARK Rengta Adler Knopf, $12.95, 145 pp...
...The second point above is exemplified by scattered references to Warren...
...Burger's inability to either intellectually, politically, or administratively master Commonweal: 346...
...Will the Court's present mood of benign acceptance continue if Ronald Reagan has the opportunity to appoint a batch of new Justices should he be re-elected...
...Indeed, Adler's writing style is masterful, But finally she is too ungenerous with her readers...
...Good literature is both sexless and colorless...
...Bedford and the Muses, Gaff Godwin offers us five stories which are fictionalized accounts of a writer's experiences...
...The first story is about a young American writer living her "formative years'" in England, in a rooming house run by American expatriates...
...While in Godwin's stories we are always sure that we are reading a fictionalized account of a writer writing about being a writer, in this book, we are more aware of reading Adler's ruminations on her own life as a writer...
...In fact, the storyline isn't all that different from Adler's previous work...
...She creates a character, though, who is not y o u r everyday female New York writer, since her character's travels take her around the world and her conversations are sprinkled with ruminations on everything from Nabokov to Resolution 242 to the PLO...
...The brotherhood of Moslem men -- all colors -- may exist there, but part of the glue that holds it together is the thorough suppression of women...
...One article is especially timely in these days of tension between blacks and Jews...
...As in Godwin's collection, Adler's'novel is laced with the stuff of fiction...
...And if they are thrown away, it is our duty as artists and as witnesses for the future to collect them again for the sake of our children, and, if necessary, bone by bone...
...Professor Robert Burt's important discussion of the current Court's attitude toward the family is, in contrast to most of the others, mainly philosophical and a bit thin on data (it is also one of the dated ones...
...BEDFORD AND THE NUSES Gall Godwin V|kin~ $14.95, 229 pp...
...Her gift allows her both to explain the chore of writing and capture the magic of fiction simultaneously: "In here, in the confines of my fiction, we are all still alive...
...Black Power critics, she defends her own involvement in Martin Luther King's struggle...
...According to the publisher's promotional copy, Kate's world was "the house in the country and the house in the city, the almost daily visits from Jake, the dinner parties, the neighbors and friends (senators, doctors, ambassadors, poets...
...In Mr...
...The rediscovery of black writers, as well as the proliferation of women writers, works to the advantage of all of us...
...Less interesting is her writing on Cuba, where she falls into commonplace revolutionary rhetoric, with her insistence that the Cuban revolution will triumphantly bring freedom and dignity to that country's citizens...
...It is as if these tales come together to applaud the muses in Godwin's life, but also to lay claim to the terrifying occurrences in the life of the writer: loneliness, emptiness, visits from onlookers and thieves of creativity...
...There is an underlying perversity, in several of them almost a petrified quality...
...The book's an-, swers to the first two questions are unclear, while, of course, any response to the third must be speculative...
...In "The CNil Rights Movement: What Good Was It...
...Some of us are still young, plotting our favorite versions of the love, accomplishment, beauty, elegance, and wealth we hope to win for ourselves...
...Since an "activist" and conservative Supreme Court can readily demolish precedent, we can join in the collective amazement that the great Warren Court constitutional landmarks, Baker vs...
...The familiar and unique prose style pervades this second novel...
...Walker explains the territory she charted previously in her novel, Meridian...
Vol. 111 • June 1984 • No. 11
