Tales of Two Women

...While the material of legend is indispensable to recapturing the past, the words we choose, as Schwarz-Bart sometimes unwisely forgets, must always be our own...

...Many took refuge from liberty, equality, and fraternity in the deep dark woods, where they rested from their new-style torments...

...Moreover, because of a literary coincidence that is maddeningly obtrusive even if the author can scarcely be blamed for itone keeps remembering that other lusty Irishwoman, Molly Bloom, who counted lovers before falling asleep at the end of Ulysses the way most people count sheep...

...To destroy them in the name of the French Revolution, "the guillotine haunted the countryside...

...The comparison, unfortunately, is no help to Miss O'Brien...

...Like slavery itself, Schwarz-Bart's story begins in Africa, with the beautiful Diola girl Bayangumay, who was torn one calamitous day from her tribal village and thrown into the stinking hold of a slave-ship bound for Guadeloupe...

...His wife was born on Guadeloupe, and he is the sole survivor of a family of Polish Jews who emigrated to France in the '20s, only to die in the Nazi gas chambers...

...Although Miss O'Brien has always been intrigued with the city fate of Irish country girls, here the peasant lass has long since waved goodbye to her rackety youth...

...In a remarkable feat of stealth and courage, the band led by Solitude managed to evade the French for several years, until the spring of 1802, when its last member was captured and killed...

...Nevertheless, I wish that he had abstained from trying to reproduce the folk-myth tone of oral simplicity that sounds so incongruous and labored coming from a sophisticated literary Frenchman writing in the present...

...It climbed the steep, desolate hills in pursuit of citizens who did not understand their new duties...

...Her only real, yet increasingly fragile, connection with the human world outside her rag-bag of memories is Tutsie, now grown and gone, exploring the world in a jeep with three buddies...

...Today, of course, a female novelist's unblushing candor hardly rates as news, so it is not Miss O'Brien's impudent plain-spokenness about modem women adrift on the sea of sexual freedom that makes her new novel interesting but the difficult technical challenge she has set for herself: Night (Knopf, 179 pp., $5.95) is a rough-tongued crazy quilt of free association, a night-long soliloquy by its heroine, Mary Hanrahan...

...Writers & Writing TALES OF TWO WOMEN BY PEARL K. BELL l n the engaging novels and stories that she has published over the last decade, the Irish writer Edna O'Brien has brought a special charm to her blunt accounts of sexually aggressive and discontented women...

...Across the waste of hours during one long sleepless night, Mary's mind flits like a fickle, neurotic bird through the unweeded garden of her past: her veterinarian husband's insolent pomposity, the smells and sounds of her rural Irish childhood, her mother's long and terrible dying of cancer, the vanished boyhood innocence of her son Tutsie, and above all the lovers, a horde of eccentric, exciting, dangerous men...

...I am still snooping around, on the lookout for pals, pen pals, pub pals, cronies of any kind...

...When I come to a crossroad and see the ways ahead, the bushes, the little brown birds, the fortress in the distance, and I ask does it have to be made, and then a terrible fever takes hold of me and I go on unwittingly as if to the sound of bugles, though very often it is to the sound of curs...

...She thinks back on a recent fiasco, a visit with her widower father: "There is no magic, no homecoming, no handshake, no loving cup...

...I have had unions, tete-a-tetes, ripping times, gay collisions...

...What is a woman to do at this anomalous stage of a squandered life...

...When slavery was technically "abolished" a few years after the French Revolution, Solitude's soul slowly found its way back to her...

...Each new transient lover seems weirder than the last, making her feel ever more lonely, friendless, oversexed, and undernourished...

...the light-skinned child who later called herself Solitude, with one dark eye and the other light-green, was born on the du Pare plantation in 1772...

...Unready and self-mocking, she must face the treacherous unknown of middle age...

...But the seeds of insurrection started to sprout, and one night Solitude fled into the forest with a group of runaway blacks...

...The Brits, the painted people...

...As infamous lessons in evil, the economic cupidity of the 18th century and the genocidal insanity of the 20th have a repugnant sameness in Schwarz-Bart's imagination...

...Too young to cast out the appetites and hopes of the past, too old to misread the shrinking future, Mary swings from resignation to expectancy, then back again, filling the night with bitter blasphemies, at once keening and scorning the lachrymose imperatives that she cannot bring herself to live by...

...Do I mean it...

...From girlhood she was And still is, for that matter A free-larking trollop, on the prowl for any easy-come-easy-go adventure...

...Born and raised on a poor farm in the Irish village of Coose, Mary years ago shook off the dust of her drab homeland to live, as she says, "Among the foe...

...In the epilogue to A Women Named Solitude, he writes that the mind of a contemporary traveler to Guadeloupe "will people the environing space, and human figures will rise up around him, just as the phantoms that wander about the humiliated ruins of the Warsaw ghetto are said to rise up before the eyes of other travelers...

...At first the life of the black citoyens was no different from what it had been, although the ex-slaves were called "agricultural workers" and the National Guards decorated their whips with the tricolor...

...In reading Orlando Patterson's recent novel, Die the Long Day, a brilliant account of slavery in 18th-century Jamaica, one discovers that a modern writer brings not only moral indignation to this re-creation of past injustice but also the accumulated knowledge and experience of the intervening century, and that of necessity these refine and complicate the writer's judgment as he shapes his new version of an old story...

...they were still alive, but the soul was gone...

...Strange from birth, so the legend runs, she became, after her mother escaped up the mountain, one of the zombies"humans whose souls had deserted them...

...In a sardonic backward glance, she mutters: "There are so many waysides that one mistakes them sometimes for the real route...

...Apparently not...

...Following a feckless existence of odd jobs, a casually discarded husband and numerous kinky lovers, she finds herself, deep into her 40s, crouching like an intruder in an elegant English house in the Malvern Hills, its hired caretaker while the rich owners are traveling abroad...

...When the thought of death nags like an idle fishwife inside her head, Mary can rise to its bait and face herself with ruthless honesty: "I want to be by myself at last and to be robbed of that stupid, suppurating malady they call hope...

...In the course of the ocean journey Bayangumay was made pregnant by a drunken French sailor...

...And still the journey is not without its come hithers, not without its challenge, not without incentive...

...Mary somehow fails to become a personality...

...It is the bleak and chilly time of year just after Christmas, and Mary's halt-spent life is at a particularly low ebb...

...In this melancholy trance, Solitude was bought, branded, and sold by three different masters...

...Oddly, for all the funny, anguished, bawdy, and lyrically nostalgic fragments that Miss O'Brien has skillfully woven into Night, the book does not move us as she meant it to do...

...All sickeningly predictable like a do re mi fa...

...Schwarz-Bart has written this loathsome episode in the unending history of man's inhumanity to man with a grace that contains yet never suppresses his deeply personal rage...

...Schwarz-Bart is trying to make us hear the universal resonance of timeless storytellers, but his imitation of their diction is awkward, an in-authentic distraction from the horrifying vision of black slavery that he has been given the life to achieve by virtue of his own miraculous escape from the Holocaust...

...we never manage to glimpse the face in which these tattered pieces of a life have been assembled, and we can feel neither the pity nor the recognition being asked of us...