Old Wars in New Women
DAVIS, HOPE HALE
Writers & Writing OLD WARS IN NEW WOMEN by HOPE HALE DAVIS Leafing through my notes for this review of / Have Come Here to Be Alone by Ingrid Bengis (Simon & Schuster, 268 pp., $8.95), I came...
...It would be unfair to select one passage from such a wide-ranging book, except for the light—or the shadow—it casts on the novel that followed...
...In the night the boat horn reaches into her dreams "like a minesweeper . . . touching off a thousand tiny time bombs of association...
...Fallaci is famous for her interviews with celebrities (one collection, The Egotists, appeared here in 1968, and another, Interview with History, last year...
...Bengis does begin with an "I"—a girl returning to a Greek island, scene of an intense love affair, savoring her memories as she searches them for clues to "what went wrong...
...Give her credit for that...
...Why can't it be possible just to let things be...
...when recreating the recent idyll she calls the lovers Lola and Stefan, she and he...
...The last one breaks out of its mold to reveal in raw anger what must be the source of Fallaci's prejudice against the United States...
...Her power is such that she could bring to heel the Duchess of Alba, with all her 63 titles, by threatening to choose another Spanish aristocrat as her subject...
...The heroine of her novel has the same problem and feels the same need to analyze it...
...Writers & Writing OLD WARS IN NEW WOMEN by HOPE HALE DAVIS Leafing through my notes for this review of / Have Come Here to Be Alone by Ingrid Bengis (Simon & Schuster, 268 pp., $8.95), I came upon the solemn Socratic queries: "Why always first person...
...Bengis approached fiction with a firm background of critical respect...
...The action of every period occurs in the present tense...
...I could have sworn the whole novel was in the first person...
...With nothing to look at, you'll hear me better...
...This longing for the "little things" is rather astonishing in an author whose sense of herself as part of the sexual revolution leads her to try anything once and to report explicitly on the experience...
...Even its brevity seems less by design than by default...
...This is regrettable, for in brilliant flashes Bengis selects details that speed the pulse, make the mouth water, and fill one with yearning for a Greek island...
...The novel neatly encapsulates the battle between an old longing that may be irresistibly instinctual, and the urge of women toward outer fulfillment, worldly success...
...she slips back into the self-indulgence that has flawed so many first novels —the assumption that whatever has been important to the sensitive author will surely fascinate the reader...
...Both men and women have been guilty of this solipsism...
...I'll make you a concession: I'll put on weight, I'll give you my body, but my mind, no...
...How hard you're working, Child...
...Her Combat in the Erogenous Zone (1972) had shown in every line the struggle to reach precise truths about a specific situation between a man and a woman—or between a woman and a woman—and to learn whether it confirmed or contradicted the new notions of female liberation...
...If the "little things" seem too little to warrant his attention with one woman, how on earth are they going to warrant his attention with several...
...In fact, I'm now drinking a good slug of whisky and smoking a pack of cigarettes one after another, and getting back to my work, my existence as a person and not as a container, and crying, crying, crying, without asking you if it hurts...
...Episodes from childhood, and of day-to-day life, are told in first person...
...These tales, involving social inequities and apparently based on her own childhood, grow increasingly bitter...
...Curiously, that applies even more strikingly to another first novel brought out by the same publisher, Letter to a Child Never Born by Oriana Fallaci (Simon & Schuster, 113 pp...
...I have a delightful and disturbing suspicion: the suspicion that they see through me...
...Describing the varied and often funny complexities that could result from a couple's attempt to carry on a trendy number of simultaneous love affairs, Bengis concludes: "It's hard enough to convince a man of the value of making one affectionate phone call a day, let alone try to convince him that he should be capable of making five...
...Why must everything be a drama...
...And the method was justified by her success in boldly laying open sensations and motivations few people are able to identify...
...Stefan himself is in awe of her: "Again her face has that purity and absoluteness which he saw in it when they were swimming together, though now the look seems to have expanded beyond her into some realm he cannot even touch...
...Who says you're sleeping, rocking quietly in your fluids...
...Yet the dream of a veray parfit gentil knight who guesses and grants impossible wishes before they are expressed?a dream at odds with the independence the author takes as her right—never leaves Bengis in peace...
...the fetus as imagined from an article becomes the other main character, and is addressed throughout: "I've cut out the photograph that shows you at exactly two months: a close-up of your face enlarged forty times...
...Fallaci never hesitates to speak freely...
...The lines that caught my eye were these: "She tells herself it is all self-created, this terror at the core of things, this certainty that to be approached is to be devastated...
...But only by flashes...
...After hearing his gleeful boasts about the sickening real-life murders his films had inspired, she overcame her fashionable blindness to what she now could see as "really evil...
...What a pity...
...The real confusion, though, blurring distinctions between first and third person, is caused by the heroine's continuing concentration on what is going on inside herself...
...Elsewhere, however, Bengis places Lola on a plane far above ordinary mortals...
...When she brought out in America The Useless Sex (1964), a survey of the state of women in countries she had visited, The New Yorker said that her "quest was not fruitful, her research was not diligent, her observations are not intelligent, her style is not witty, her conclusions are not interesting, and her translator is dreadful...
...Why must beginnings always be signals launched in the direction of endings...
...It tells of a girl forced, for a few cans of beans, to wash the dirty underpants of soldiers who had been expected to bring the "tomorrow" her father had dared and suffered for all his life...
...No matter what happens, promise you'll tell me.' "He feels drained all at once...
...I'm sure that for you it's a continual rinsing, a continual pumping, panting, rustling, an explosion of brutal noises . . ." The heroine rebels at the cost of motherhood: "Child, we'd better come to terms...
...From Stefan's thoughts here it might seem that the author tends to show how fatal to love is Lola's constant probing...
...While the hovering possibility of a birth is important in each book (among many parallels), Fallaci focuses her whole novel on the child's physical presence within the heroine...
...Even at the height of the idyll—one scene of lovemaking in the Aegean is spendidly erotic—Lola worries aloud as to when Stefan will stop loving her: " 'Promise you'll tell me...
...The price of journalism, though, can be high...
...Or is it...
...She tries to fill it out with three cautionary "fairy tales" told to the baby as warnings about the world...
...It makes me sad to think that soon you'll close them...
...How was such a mistake possible...
...She tries running her hands slowly across her face and down her throat and over her breasts, tries it in an attempt at preparation...
...The vision that should be clear seems misted over with self-enchantment...
...Fallaci and Bengis do not merely show us what is going on inside them: They themselves seem to be in there, looking out through a tangle of female organs...
...Carried away as the critic must have been by syn-tactomania, there is enough truth in the blast to explain Fallaci's obvious difficulty in giving her novel depth and richness...
...Ending long hours with Alfred Hitchcock, for whom, before their meeting, she had felt only a banal admiration, she said, "With all your cordial humor, your nice round face, your nice innocent paunch, you are the most wicked, cruel man I have ever met...
...They're so large compared to the rest of your body, so wide open...
...Wouldn't third serve better for distancing...
...I've pinned it to the wall, and lying here in bed I'm admiring it: haunted by your eyes...
...At the risk of disloyalty to sisters undergoing genuine (but hardly new) conflicts, I can't help being reminded of a famous medical curiosity—a living person with a stomach window through which the working innards could be viewed...
...6.95...
...Though her tone tends to be arch, Fallaci makes the process of pregnancy marvelously vivid...
...Both Fallaci and Bengis have reported on this conflict before, in the nonfiction that first won them audiences, though probably quite different ones...
...Since the book was frankly based on her own experiences and those of women she knew,.she could hardly avoid the center of the stage...
...Yet to see two writers as competent as Bengis and Fallaci claim for themselves, in these days, the stale old female privilege of exhibitionistic inconsistency outrages one's feminist hopes...
...Then I opened the book again...
...Because I'm fed up with you...
Vol. 60 • March 1977 • No. 6
