Women Cast Adrift
BELL, PEARL K.
Writers & Writing WOMEN CAST ADRIFT BY PEARL K. BELL Half a lifetime ago, Jean Rhys proved herself a novelist of rare and penetrating insight into the phenomenon of modern woman, free and uneasy...
...Mackenzie moves in for the kill...
...For no apparent reason, however, the book begins to shift toward a different focus altogether...
...Yglesias forgets that we cannot judge or even understand Mary's behavior in illness if we are not told what she was like in health...
...She bobbed about England and the Continent like a cork at sea, and the waves??the marriage that went to pieces in a succession of glamorous European capitals, the very odd jobs and random encounters??figure prominently in the lives of her luckless heroines...
...Mary's marriage to a weak and handsome architect has soured into an acrimonious nonstop battle about sex, money, adultery, and children...
...Mackenzie (191 pp., $5.95...
...The young woman dying of cancer with such savage haste through the course of this novel is Mary Moody Schwartz, the only child of the famous Communist martyr, Isabelle Vance Moody, who was sentenced to life imprisonment for passing wartime secrets to the Russians...
...She is a truly sinister writer who commands, and gets, one's absolute assent to her dark vision while under her spell, and I know no greater praise for any novelist...
...After too many reckless, hysterical scenes, her most recent protecteur, Mr...
...Yglesias still has a great deal to learn and master about the craft of fiction...
...What a marvelous book she could have written about those decrepit Party stalwarts...
...Going from man to man had become a habit...
...Like Stepan Trofimovitch Verkhovensky, in Dostoevsky's The Possessed, they will be the last to realize, much less admit, that far from posing any kind of threat to American capitalism, they have been condemned to comic oblivion by both the SDS and the FBI...
...She is secretly contemptuous of these pompous intellectuals, "of their innocent and lofty point of view that there was something useful and active to be done about every situation...
...Writers & Writing WOMEN CAST ADRIFT BY PEARL K. BELL Half a lifetime ago, Jean Rhys proved herself a novelist of rare and penetrating insight into the phenomenon of modern woman, free and uneasy in a hostile world...
...When Mary's rage against death drives her into increasingly irrational acts and ideas??she concocts a wild Utopian scheme for revolutionizing American society by mass withdrawal from the cities into self-subsistent rural communes...
...Early on, one assumes that the novel will concern itself primarily with the cruel price that the children of Communist leaders must pay, as adults, for the steel-trap certitudes and sacrosanct principles they ingest from birth...
...As a child, Mary was their principal fund-raising tool...
...Mary's mother??the once imposing La Pasionaria of the cold war, now a trembling hulk wrecked by Parkinson's disease??has been released after serving 15 years to wait angrily for death in a small room of Mary's apartment...
...Yglesias wanted to, or thought she should, write about all the trite agonies of loneliness, promiscuity, love, and the difficulties mothers have communicating with their children...
...petitions, meetings, raffles, demonstrations and talk, talk, talk...
...Just what accounts for the impassioned friendship between these very different women is never made clear, since Jean is fundamentally bored with Mary's politics and the Committee's endlessly renewable list of burning causes...
...An absent-minded cook who puts everything into the meat loaf except the meat, Mrs...
...On the one hand, out of what is obviously a long and intimate familiarity with the New York radical world, she wanted to write an affectionate but unsentimental account of the old-line unregenerate Stalinists, those drab puritan fanatics adrift in these permissive times, dismayed and humiliated by the distance between their antique revolutionary ardor and the alien radical style of the Woodstock young...
...Despite Jean Rhys' ferociously purgatorial and desolate view of human experience...
...Yet, incomprehensibly, her four stunning novels written between 1928 and 1939??Quartet, After Leaving Mr...
...A small-town girl superficially toughened by New York, Jean is uneducated, divorced, curiously neglectful of her own young sons while selflessly devoted to Mary and her disintegrating family...
...To be touched by how she died, one must begin with how she lived...
...An Englishwoman of loose virtue, Julia is unmistakably entre-deux-guerres in her flighty emancipation from the middle-class morality she was born to, but she finds herself wholly without rudder or resource when the easy-come-easy-go men and money begin to dry up...
...On the other hand, since every contemporary woman supposedly has within her a novel about contemporary women, Mrs...
...Yglesias seems to have had two very different books in mind, and her attempt to unify them is doomed by their incompatibility...
...Death and madness are also at work in Helen Yglesias' How She Died (Houghton Mifflin, 338 pp., $6.95), but any similarity to Jean Rhys ends right there...
...Indeed, Mrs...
...Now in her late 30s, her beauty tarnishing rapidly, Julia is alone and penniless in an implacably indifferent Paris...
...And the doctors have given Mary herself only a few months, at most, to live...
...Although technically British, Miss Rhys was born of a Welsh father and Creole mother on Dominica, in the British West Indies, and first crossed the Atlantic at the age of 16...
...One sees her as a shockingly easy target for the senseless cruelty and suffering that life doles out with ironic generosity to the unwary...
...It is to Harper & Row's immense credit that it recently began reprinting Miss Rhys' early work and has now brought out a handsome edition of the superb and terrifying After Leaving Mr...
...Mackenzie, Voyage in the Dark, and Good Morning, Midnight??were neglected...
...And what an amateurish muddle she makes of Mary's sad and futile defiance of death...
...If her episodes are more than a little reminiscent of the calamity-choked installments of TV soap operas, it is because Mrs...
...Some of her outspoken distaste for the ugliness of Europe's metropolises, for example, may have sprung quite naturally from the contrast between them and her provincial Caribbean upbringing...
...Yglesias cannot manage to lift these catastrophes above that implausible level...
...the awkwardness of her style and her fatally indecisive sense of purpose make for an extremely uneven and unsatisfying book...
...As the novel opens, Mary is 28 and her life no longer draws meaning and order from her inherited radical simplicities and commitments...
...Mackenzie, has thrown her out, and Julia is holed up in a cheap Left Bank hotel, fending off panic as she waits for her life to resume its customary securities and diversions...
...eat or be eaten is the inexorable law of life"??her exquisitely precise and responsive prose consistently maintains its uncanny balance between abhorrence and pity...
...When Julia scurries aimlessly back to Paris, to still another sleazy hotel room, the stealthy menace of madness that has been stalking her since "leaving" Mr...
...She retired to the countryside and did not publish another book until 1966, when Wide Sargasso Sea appeared in Britain...
...Julia is an unredeemably vain egotist shrouded in self-pity, yet by the time one reaches the chilling last line of the novel, just after she has been reduced to cadging a few francs from her former lover ??It was the hour between dog and wolf, as they say" ??Miss Rhys, with miraculously unobtrusive cunning, has transformed this exasperating bauble of a woman into a poignant victim...
...In a style as spare and clean as bone, Miss Rhys follows Julia Martin's slow descent into the lonely hell of madness...
...Mary, the epigonous revolutionary, should have been the most complex and absorbing character in How She Died, but because most of its events are projected through Jean's shallow and conventionally neurotic sensibility, the dramatic power of the stricken girl is never realized...
...Though this novel won the publisher's Literary Fellowship Award, Mrs...
...she would say a couple of words at the meetings or just be around for people to see so that they'd be moved to help...
...Puzzled but unbowed, they cling in desperate pantomime to the outmoded gestures and rituals and slogans of a world that died of Khrushchev's exposures in 1956...
...Mary was then only 11, and she was reared, like an item on the CP agenda, by the conscientious apparatchiks of the Free Isabelle Vance Moody Committee...
...Amid all the picky, inconsequent yards of description??of clothes and subways and apartments and food, the East Side and the West Side??one looks in vain for the personal history one most needs to know...
...The political legacies in Mary's life were clearly meant to be the indispensable heart of the novel, but the author forces them into the background by making Mary's closest friend, Jean, the principal narrator...
...Suddenly she is summoned to her mother's deathbed, and the angry confrontation with her vengeful sister, whose years of bitter envy make her gloat at Julia's deterioration, starts the process of annihilation...
...she insists de-mentedly that cancer can be cured by a diet of clams and white wine??the Committee pays Jean to look after Mary full-time, though she would do it for nothing...
Vol. 55 • March 1972 • No. 6
