Portraits of Two Ladies
BELL, PEARL K.
Writers &Wfating PORTRAITS OF TWO LADIES by pearl k. bell T M he European generation that reached early adulthood during World War II is now approaching the crest of middle age; and the threats...
...Now voluntarily unemployed, Leni spends her days playing the same two Schubert sonatas, and laboring at a quasi-scientific painting of the "Left Eye of the Virgin Mary alias Rahel"-an ex-Jewish nun who deeply influenced Leni during her convent-school days, and who was quietly starved to death by her Order in the name of "protection from the Nazis...
...But Lessing says it all in negatives—her heroine's mess of gray hair imparting as little about her "true self" as the defiantly unshorn heads of the young reveal of the singular minds and beings within their obligatory shag-giness...
...Her ordeal has also shocked her into recognizing some familiar Lessing cries of Chicken Little woe: the imminence of doomsday, the predatory Darwinian horror of modern life...
...The 1972 Nobel laureate's new work is a brilliantly satirical cross section of Northern Germany in the last half-century, and the most impressive of the 13 Boll works so far translated into English...
...It is no accident that Boll frequently suggests a resemblance between Leni and the Virgin Mary...
...Leonard may live to eat his extravagant words...
...Leni's neighbors and her landlord, an old family "friend," openly vilify her because her irregular and rather disreputable life strongly offends their German piety of order...
...Yet it is precisely the //lability to make original and convincing distinctions that she has so artlessly displayed in her recent work...
...reminiscent of Thomas Mann...
...One must experience the rich virtuosity of Group Portrait with Lady to realize how fully Boll deserved the Nobel Prize...
...Lessing's The Summer Before the Dark (Knopf, 273 pp., $6.95...
...her illegitimate 25-year-old son Lev, whose father was a Russian POW, is in jail for forging checks...
...The crowded German reality, its beautifully commonplace and fascinating breadth, is finally apprehended and contained, set down with the mock-systematic statistical zeal of a German social scientist blessed, in this case, with a caustically remorseless sense of irony...
...Aside from the untamed hair, however, and Kate's determination not to do any more mothering of any sort, we get no sense of what the real Kate is...
...When she announces she is thinking, what she is in fact doing is ideologizing her despondent emotions, labeling them with fashionably spurious "truths" that testify not to the cogency of her thinking but to the lack of any real thought at all...
...After a few weeks in a lucrative job abroad, she finds herself at the end of July ill and forlornly alone, in a London hotel room...
...Emaciated and disoriented, she falls into a crucifying madness in which her entire "normal" life is exposed as a demented suppression of her true self— a false Kate had succored husband and children, bent her spineless will to the endlessly demanding needs of others, and offered her speciously adaptable image to the world for its fickle approval...
...so magnetically that he must obstinately pursue each minute clue about her life, and interview more than 60 people who have known her...
...Two of the most heatedly discussed and contrarily reviewed European novels published this spring, by Heinrich Boll and Doris Lessing, have at their centers desperately beleaguered women who, in their mid-40s, are feeling critically besieged as much by the self as by the world...
...These two writers represent separate, if at times complementary, archetypes of the 20th-century novelist...
...Kate's obstinate refusal to do any more caring also tells us nothing about the positive qualities of purity and freedom that supposedly accompany the new Kate Brown into the cinematic sunset...
...The latest Lessing, on the other hand, strikes me as one of her more muddled performances, even though it has prompted John Leonard, editor of the Times Book Review, to hail it as "the best novel to have appeared here since Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude" came out in 1970...
...What would become of liturgical reform . . . ?" Why does the elusive Leni fascinate the Au...
...The artful disorder that appalls Leni's neighbors is a family heirloom...
...At 45, Kate Brown, "a pretty, healthy, serviceable woman," has been left on her own for the summer by her husband and four grown children...
...She is an unfathomable, persistently vague woman of astounding grace, with "an unrecognized genius for sensuality," who is at the same time deeply innocent, proud, generous, and reckless...
...Communist and Nazi who employed Leni as a funeral-wreath maker during the War...
...finally assembles is less a clear picture of Leni than the group portrait of the book's title...
...Inevitably, such differences of focus dictate interestingly divergent esthetic forms and resolutions...
...He would have sold his children to save his neck, but he turned a blind eye on Leni's affair with the Russian, and provided a snug haven for her and her baby in an enormous cemetery crypt during the worst of the bombing raids...
...Lessing's intelligence as one of her significant qualities as a novelist...
...and the threats to its life, security and sanity are posed not by enemy bombs or soldiers but by the more subtly ravaging transfigurations and decay of the aging body and soul...
...He is that rare old-fashioned novelist who can be at once humane and ruthless, affectionate and acid...
...In these books each is reflecting on the peculiar stresses of that perilous stage in life they have themselves recently passed through...
...Her romantically self-destructive father owned a booming construction business until he tried, with endearing incompetence, to make an illegal killing during the War by setting up a fictitious cement company in Denmark manned by nonexistent Russian prisoners named Raskolnikov, Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Tolstoy, et al...
...His scene is the social milieu: the foibles, corruption, and ludicrous rigidities of postwar Germany...
...Walter Pelzer, a one-time pimp...
...This very with-it Bride of Christ is intensely embarrassed by the roses that keep blooming in December on the grave of Rahel...
...not the dramatic persuasion, of Kate's reborn self, we are left with the soap-operatic meretriciousness of unearned confidence and groundless hope—which is as good a definition of sentimentality as I know...
...Having noted this, one must immediately go on to say that no two novels could be more antipodally dissimilar in tone, mood and texture than Boll's Group Portrait with Lady (McGraw-Hill, 405 pp., $7.95) and Mrs...
...Once again, as in such recent novels as The Four-Gated City and that flying-saucer tract Briefing for a Descent Into Hell, her theme is regeneration through madness, her posture an anthologized mysticism combining bits of Laing and Sufism...
...Leni's sleekly prosperous landlord (Boll's devastating caricature of the German "economic miracle"), believes her stubborn indifference to money is her most venal sin...
...Boll's huge cast of saints, fools, existential brooders, crooks, and scoundrels gives one as clear a sense of the modern German temperament, in all its terrible and ludicrous variety, as anything I have read...
...The Rhodesian-reared Lessing concentrates, with the psychological tools of Lawrence and Woolf, on the internal chaos and suffering of isolated individuals, particularly the sensitive, intelligent, vaguely despondent modern woman...
...He has set out to discover everything there is to learn about one Leni Pfeiffer, an eccentric, still beautiful woman of 48 on the verge of being evicted from her apartment in Cologne...
...Most critics single out Mrs...
...She simply will not fit any of the classificatory niches so dear to the orderly Teutonic heart, and the dossier that the Au...
...Both the 56-year-old Boll and the 53-year-old Lessing are older than their heroines...
...she decorates her walls with graphic medical charts of unmentionable human organs...
...It may be true that, as Women's Lib urges us to acknowledge, being a wife and mother is not enough...
...is a strange mixture of rapacity and kindness...
...By the end of the summer's "long interior journey," Kate presents her new, real self to her family—the symbol of her metamorphosis being the gray and unkempt hair that she had always dyed and pampered...
...Because Doris Lessing in the end gives us only the hollow assertion...
...In Group Portrait with Lady, Boll mockingly assumes the guise of a passively neutral investigator— part journalist, part sociologist, part coldly objective novelist—namelessly called "the Author" (and tersely abbreviated throughout to "the Au...
...and he has written a marvelous book, translated into flawless American by Leila Vennewitz...
...Saint Teresa and Saint Carl Gustav Jung...
...Boll's fellow-Catholics also get an abrasive drubbing in his astringent account of the sternly intellectual young nun Klementina...
...Boll, the Catholic Rhinelander from Cologne, casts a wide social and philosophical net...
...To acknowledge the miracle "would be a regression into Heaven knows what century...
...T B n the wake of Boll's achievement, how synthetic and self-indulgently petty the problems presented by Doris Lessing appear...
...An indubitable Aryan, she had, all through the Hitler years, "never bothered to distinguish between Jews and non-Jews...
Vol. 56 • June 1973 • No. 12
