Pressured Lives
MERKIN, DAPHNE
Writers &Writiiig PRESSURED LIVES BY DAPHNE MERKIN a quiet room in a peaceable kingdom most conducive to artistic creation? To accept this we have only to look at Jane Austen, flourishing her...
...she envies it, yet in the end it goes against her grain...
...Margo Philipson, who comes to Vermont all the way from an "ugly, dun-colored frame house on a side street in Michigan" to search for her runaway minister husband, has a kidney attack and is brought to the same hospital...
...Aided by a well-connected Afrikaner liberal—someone directly but elegantly opposed to her father's commitment and intrigued, therefore, by the opportunity to subvert the daughter's familial allegiance—Rosa procures a passport...
...For us—coming from that house—that was the real definition of loneliness: to live without social responsibility...
...anyway, and by God that's what it would start being when he got the new road through...
...Odd doings meanwhile in the woods: A young couple is found murdered and sexually mutilated on the Long Trail...
...It's possible," she says at one point, "to live within the ambit of a person not a country...
...Or are the most desirable conditions those of stress, of irremediable suffering...
...Rosa, the daughter of politically activist parents, is torn between the lure of private desires—the "navel-fluff-picking hunt for 'individual destiny'"—and the lure of living for public, socially-accountable ends?outside self...
...Until the age of eighty...
...to eat without hunger, mate without desire...
...How to end suffering...
...It could be that I am just a city slicker and fail to understand these country folk, but it seems to me that Clark has misjudged the telling of her tale by making most of the characters sound either like varmints out of 'Lit Abner or unhinged congregationalists out of Hawthorne...
...Rosa lingers on for months, finds a lover in Bernard Cha-balier, a Parisian professor who drinks sour lemon juice and delights in her for reasons having nothing to do with her inherited aura of heroism: "He might never have been presented with a woman before, or she a man...
...I am teaching them to walk again, at Baragwanath Hospital...
...Earlier she has explained: "I have no passport because I am my father's daughter...
...A sickness not to be able to ignore . . . other people's suffering...
...Less an indictment of the situation in South Africa than an agonized comprehension of human liability, Burger's Daughter is one of those increasingly rare books that will haunt you beyond the page...
...she'd read that once long ago...
...Creation, then, follows no calculable route...
...But then, suddenly, Burger's daughter decides to return home...
...Plans are made to set her up in a little apartment near Cha-balier's lycee...
...It is only now after the death of her father, when she is already in her late 20s, that Rosa begins to reassess her parents' bequest of total engagement with the welfare of others: " I was living alone for the first time in my life: without a stake of responsibility in that of anyone else...
...Tremendous sweet possibilities of renewal surged between them...
...De Quincey...
...Her ambit is South Africa, where nothing can be avoided...
...Kafka, for one, viewed the writer as a "survivor," someone who with one hand "can jot down what he sees among the ruins...
...the word she could recognize was 'Paris'—a place far away in England...
...know it's possible to be happy while damaging someone by it...
...This angry young nihilist cares nothing about "useful...
...Her new novel, Burger's Daughter (Viking, 361 pp., $10.95), isa revelation: Gordimer is telling us about nothing less than our inclination or disinclination to attend to others...
...The decadent immediacy of Nice, the gigolos and lesbians and homosexual couples, the endless wining and dining all point to a dream that has nothing to do with the dream Rosa has been taught at her father's knee: "It's about suffering...
...She explains her decision to go back with a characteristic reticence that transcends modesty: "Like anyone else, I do what I can...
...The novel suggests undidactically but impassionedly that each person's well-being entails some obliviousness...
...Happiness," muses the narrator, Rosa Burger, "is not moral or productive, is it...
...This woman?brilliant blue dabs under clotted lashes, wrinkled made-up lids, tabby hair"—signifies everything that Rosa has not known: luxe, calme et volupte, "the rich clutter of private ends pursued...
...And it ends in suffering...
...Rosa has had to test this possibility out for herself...
...Gordimer's craft is precise —page after page is filled with richly rendered detail—without detracting from the magnitude of her themes...
...To accept this we have only to look at Jane Austen, flourishing her wicked pen amid the reassuring hum of family life...
...Motels jammed, airports ditto...
...Some voices thrive on contentment, others on certain kinds of discontent...
...Walt is smitten with the woman, old and plain as she is, and they take up, shyly and fumblingly, with each other...
...Last weekend before Labor Day, millions on the move, migratory, swarming, all over the Green Mountains and the Rockies and Europe, by land, water, air...
...The emotion's my own...
...They put one foot before the other...
...She leaves the country to pursue images from childhood she has retained, bedside prints of brightly-colored worlds: "taxis, people sitting drinking at little tables, and girls with high heels and poodles...
...But from there he has a chance to give a signal leading to his rescue...
...Phil Johnson, a good looking new man in town with a suspiciously young wife, goes into a religious frenzy when he happens upon the crime, delivering "a sudden torrent of evangelical phrases, about the lamb and the father and the communion of saints, like a sermon delivered in a dream...
...Philipson on a bus would be thinking a little later: 'The Revolt of,' by Thos...
...From that it follows naturally it's possible to feel very much alive when terrible things—dread and pain and threatening courage—are also in the air...
...it depends, finally, on the individual rather than the specific predicament...
...Walt tries to kill himself and ends up in the hospital for psychiatric observation...
...to explode in that familiar tender explosion all that has categorized sexuality, from chastity to taboo, illicit license to sexual freedom...
...Like Tartars, a certain Mrs...
...When I feel there's no 'we,' only 'I.'" Before Conrad, Rosa had seen but one alternative to political commitment: "the bourgeois fate...
...Rosa read very well but the shop signs in these pictures were in a foreign language...
...Similarly, Walter Benjamin imagined the artist as a sailor "who keeps afloat on a shipwreck by climbing to the top of a mast that is already crumbling...
...This is an astonishing novel...
...The right to be inconsolable...
...the more one chooses to see, the unhappier one is...
...There are many other sub-plots, murders, foul doings, etc...
...One can decipher a plot—as violent as the unfolding is oblique—which concerns a bunch of native New Englanders and the encroachments on their inbred rural community...
...The sights and smells of Madame Bagnelli's existence first daunt and then seduce Rosa...
...Nadine Gordimer's voice comes out of South Africa and it is plangent with the sorrow and hardship of that land...
...E JL^leanor Clark's GloriaMundi (Pantheon, 214 pp., $8.95) is a strange novel about strange people, written in the most jaggedly elliptical of styles: "As if they'd had time to notice, those hurriers-by...
...And so, with the instinct of each generation to defy the preceding one, Rosa attempts to escape her history: "Perhaps it was an illness not to be able to live one's life the way they (the bourgeoisie] did . . . with justice defined in terms of respect for property, innocence defended in their children's privilege, love in their procreation, and care only for each other...
...She has an affair with one Conrad, a fringe member of the group that used to hover around her revered father's Sunday afternoon gatherings by the swimming-pool...
...Her father, Lionel, a white South African doctor, has died in prison, a martyr to the cause of black liberation...
...The will is my own...
...The Banks farm has been sold as part of the property and Walt Hodge, the hired hand, is left without even a dog to keep him company...
...She is brought up on the precepts of her parents' Communist radicalism and is enlisted in its behalf whenever necessary, serving as a go-between while still a school girl, passing messages to an incarcerated party worker by acting the role of his betrothed...
...She is provided now with a glimpse of another choice, not the bourgeois fate which has been presented to her as the only alternative but the life of bonhomie, of sensuous apprehension: "To be alive day by day: the same as in Bonard—tout voir put la premiere fois, a la fois...
...Avoiding the European network of comrades and friends associated with Lionel's dissident politics, Rosa seeks out instead the most unlikely of connections: her father's first wife, an ex-dancer living in Nice, now going by the name of Madame Bagnelli...
...Jim Pace, the sort of man who compensates for a negligible childhood by becoming a loud adult, has bought up some highly developable land in Boonton, Vermont: "Room there for the biggest ski area in the world, in the eastern U.S...
...Phil turns out to be none other than John Philipson, and his young wife is the same big-breasted Penny who the good-hearted Margo had brought home when she was still living with John...
...It is to him that Rosa addresses her thoughts, for although they are no longer seeing each other, it is his fierce privatism that has galvanized her out of her acceptance of her parents' viewpoint...
...In a drop of saliva there was a whole world...
Vol. 62 • October 1979 • No. 20
