Myth of Helplessness
PETRIE, M. ANN
Myth of Helplessness FORTY WHACKS By Fanny Howe Houghton Mifflin. 195 pp. $4.95. Reviewed by M. ANN PETRIE Fanny Howe's Forty Whacks, a collection of six short stories, explores the condition...
...In terms of human interaction, she proves to be a very dead young woman...
...Hypersensitive to a fault, they cannot temper their emotions with compassion...
...I laughed that I didn't know," is her reply...
...They are sophisticated without being mature, psychologically hip but neurotic...
...In a letter that both opens and closes the story, the girl declares that she is "severely alive...
...It is never completely clear, therefore, whether the death was a murder or suicide...
...Dump Gull," the longest and most ambitious piece in the collection, is more successful...
...Because the story is told in retrospect, much of its dramatic potential is weakened...
...In fact, her skill is so fine that the stories often give the impression of dealing with deeper, more varied material...
...Although attractive and intelligent, these women do not know how to direct their potential in what they feel is a man's world...
...Her every action is rationalized and compulsively analyzed in the name of mental health...
...When she loses the baby, she stops the divorce...
...But the death of her lover, like a journey across the mythological river Lethe, has induced forgetful-ness-the girl cannot remember the details of the killing...
...In short, all are out of touch with themselves and the world -and they are lonely...
...After discovering she is pregnant, she begins divorce proceedings in order to marry her new lover, who may or may not be the father...
...Nor can we experience the full horror of the girl's cruelty, since through her memory lapse and detachment, she refuses responsibility for what she has done...
...Angry child-women all, they hang suspended in their self-spun myth of helplessness...
...There are moments when their marriage shows traces of warmth and love, but somehow Patrick's open nature seems to motivate Astrid to withdraw from him...
...frustrated, they aim a terrible anger at themselves or others...
...Deceivingly, she promises to join him...
...Not one changes as a result of her experience, learns who she is or what she is doing, begins to relate to the world beyond her narrow, unhappy sphere...
...This excitement, accompanied by humor bordering on hilarity, is especially characteristic of the first half of the story, which depicts the early life of the narrator, Astrid, and her relationship with her husband, Patrick...
...For at its conclusion, the reader recognizes that the heroine's claim of being "severely alive" is sheer self-delusion...
...Instead, they seem to attach themselves to men out of weakness and rage, with the inevitable result that for at least one of the lovers, the affair ends in tragedy...
...Astrid, like all of the girls in Forty Whacks once the sophistication is stripped away, is heartless...
...Whether by design or not, the first is usually rich or aristocratic, the second is always poor...
...and if she has mastered anything at all, it is the vivisection of her fellow man...
...Described simply, vividly and with complete credibility, his act is far more valuable an illumination of a complex father-daughter relationship than an "indepth" analysis...
...We are not allowed, for example, to witness the crime...
...She shows herself to be viciously manipulative and judgmental, obsessed with acting out an Electra conflict by seducing the scientist...
...Thus "Forty Whacks," the title piece, touches upon a number of promising themes, but in the end hews close to the author's narrow line...
...The story concerns a young woman who, to "master the techniques of vivisection," moves into the house of a married scientist for a period of apprenticeship...
...She has just completed a long psychoanalysis, and keeps a journal that she plans to send to her doctor later...
...Plug Body," the best of the trio, demonstrates Miss Howe's ability to control voice and plot to achieve dramatic effect...
...But it gradually becomes apparent that she is incapable of performing any warm, loving, spontaneous act, which is the essence of meaningful existence...
...Reviewed by M. ANN PETRIE Fanny Howe's Forty Whacks, a collection of six short stories, explores the condition of modern young women who have lost faith in traditional values and yet seem to have no resources of their own on which to rely...
...It is told in the heroine's own words, by way of a shallow, imitative diary filled with psychological jargon...
...But a bitter tone of near despair underlies all the gaiety and activity, so that reading this brilliantly written work becomes, paradoxically, a painful experience...
...She is repeatedly unfaithful, and one night, just before he has to leave for Mexico, cruelly tells him about each infidelity...
...Love is not the correct word, however, since it presupposes a giving of one's self in some way, and none of Miss Howe's characters has enough to spare...
...A good collection of short stories, I believe, should create a new form from the combination of all its parts...
...While Patrick drifts into an amphetamine-induced insanity, Astrid falls into an unfeeling affair with a decidely nonsensual man...
...This all too familiar pattern, the basis for much bad writing, is kept from turning into melodrama by Miss Howe's wit and masterful technique...
...Each piece should contribute some insight into an overall vision of life...
...The action is reported by the heroine at the moment it takes place, and an exhilarating effect is created by the swift movement through time and events...
...This is especially true in the case of the short story-that most compact of forms-where emotional poignancy depends upon the artful selection of detail...
...Holed up in an isolated attic of a house that is about to be torn down, she sets down her account in a calm, detached manner...
...The personalities of Miss Howe's women are of two rather limited kinds: assertive-destructive and passive...
...In this story, a successful builder burns down his childhood home, now a slum, when he discovers his daughter has spent the night there with its Negro tenant...
...And Patrick, although weak in many ways, is the strongest male character in the stories...
...Crazy and all, you still love him," a friend says to Astrid...
...And Miss Howe, using this technique, portrays her women most strongly, albeit exclusively, in "The Other Side of Lethe" and "Dump Gull...
...You still love the guy...
...Astrid herself is a virtual composite of all the women in the collection: rejected daughter-hostile, helpless and cruel-destroyer and victim...
...From what we are told, though, it becomes evident that even if the girl did not actually shoot her lover, she killed him spiritually...
...Living as they do in the 1960s, they are the true recipients of the old Chinese curse: "May you be born in interesting times...
...The objective voice, I think, yields the most gratifying fiction, for it enables one to experience a story free from the narrator's interpretations...
...On style alone, I much prefer the three pieces entitled "Rosy Cheeks," "The Last Virgin" and "Plug Body," all written in the third person...
...The reader derives much satisfaction from having to muster all his imaginative resources to absorb the full impact of the writing...
...It is possible for her to go back to Patrick only because she has ruined him as a man-to her, he is "a dying animal...
...In this sense Miss Howe's book is unsuccessful, excellent as the individual stories may be...
...For it is apparent that she cannot love Patrick or anyone else...
...Both feel helpless to change their condition...
...The first is narrated by a girl who has been found guilty of killing her lover, but acquitted on the grounds of insanity...
...The story evolves into a triumph of irony...
...Still, proper use of the first person remains the most effective way yet devised for an author to delineate a single character, even if it is to the detriment of the remaining dramatis personae...
...According to the jacket copy, the stories are about girls who are "more or less disastrously in love...
Vol. 52 • November 1969 • No. 22
