War Between the Sexes
EDWARDS, L. B.
War Between the Sexes He And She. By Edward Le Comte. McDowell, Obolensky. 243 pp. $3.95. Reviewed by L. B. Edwards Associate Editor, "East Europe" NOTHING BETTER illustrates the much-cited...
...John (the He), the product of a stable but lonely and loveless upbringing, believes in self-sufficiency and personal responsibility, and scorns the paternalistic power and pretensions of government, unions and organized minorities...
...His mastery of Latin, which eventually determines his choice of a profession, is originally motivated by an adolescent yen to read classical pornography, and he is an inveterate Peeping Tom...
...How such views are characteristically formulated and used, the tone in which they are expounded—high-pitched liberal, grumbling conservative—and how they harden in the heat of controversy—all are astutely depicted...
...There is no exploration of the ideas themselves, nor any judgment of their merits...
...and this incident becomes an "ideological crisis" in the marriage of a conservative-minded teacher of Latin and his fiery wife, a Jewish war refugee from Vienna...
...Their social philosophies are (of course) linked to their sexual experiences and attitudes...
...But they are not abstracted into "cases" or spokesmen for ideologies: They are alive and palpably kicking...
...John is the repressed, unreconciled American bourgeois male par excellence...
...Their sharp opposition on the justice of this case climaxes a series of clashes between them on political and social issues...
...Herta has an oversize father complex and a clinical record of desertion—actual and symbolic—by the men she trusts...
...Thus, Herta (the She), uprooted and deprived by Nazi persecution and the war, sees victimized innocence and social injustice wherever she looks...
...The central pair are often referred to simply as He and She, underlining the polarity of their sex and their viewpoints...
...The ideological views of the pair are not more extreme nor more consistent than would be plausible for two educated, concerned but essentially "amateur" intellectuals...
...Much later (after other experiences of humiliation and betrayal at the hands of ruthless males), her one great love, a gentle, idealistic Socialist, leaves her out of a genuine but harsh altruism...
...In the end it seems—for one reader—that it is He who emerges as the more sympathetic if not more justified, figure...
...But this is not a "novel of ideas" in the usual sense...
...rather Le Comte tends implicitly to a mechanistic Marxist-Freudian view (perhaps the genuinely operative ideology of the 20th century) that ideas and beliefs have no meaning or validity in themselves but are simply an expression of character which, in turn, is determined by environment and experience...
...Her father first "deserts" her by making a second marriage, and again, in fact, when he is taken from her by the Nazis...
...The novel opens with the televised execution of a union agitator convicted of murdering a company boss during a strike...
...For all its obvious artifice of structure and scheme, the novel is keenly realistic...
...but his direct encounters with the female sex are few and furtive...
...But the author's own ironic tone toward both alike seems to mean that we are excused from having to make any such choice...
...Reviewed by L. B. Edwards Associate Editor, "East Europe" NOTHING BETTER illustrates the much-cited skepticism of our times toward ideological creeds than their reduction, in this entertaining novel, to weapons in the war between the sexes...
...for if he is faintly priggish, She seems more spiteful than generous in her "leftish" inclinations...
Vol. 43 • October 1960 • No. 40
