FLORENCE HOWE

Last week, for the first time, I was in the middle of three Iris Murdoch novels at once: The Red and the Green (1965), The Good Apprentice (1975) and Jackson’s Dilemma (1985). I didn’t plan the dates—all was “accidental” (the quotation marks in honor of Iris). Because I was to make two separate train trips to Washington, D.C. within two weeks, I selected two paperbacks I could carry—the ones twenty years apart. And once again I seem to need a useless paragraph to get to the heart of what I want to say about Iris.

I don’t want to write about The Red and the Green because it is perfect Iris: characters you want to love and those you want to shake because they are either wimps or too good for their own or anyone else’s good. This, I believe, is her only historical novel, and if you know the history of the Irish Easter Sunday/Monday rebellion, you my find this back stage view wonderful if improbable. I was delighted to see the way in which she worked out the fates of a very small band of people who were clearly not in historical view.

But I was especially eager to read Jackson’s Dilemma because I knew that it was her last novel before she became ill with Alzheimer’s. So my question became: Is this final novel different from all the rest? Can one see clues in it of her decline into an illness of the brain? No, because it is as well-plotted and as filled with a variety of the usual/unusual variety of characters. One can say that it’s just like the others. Indeed, one can find bits and pieces of the others in this novel: the long walks through London, for example, may remind you of her first novel. There is a precocious child. While there are no dogs, there are characters’ loving relations with two horses, a pony and, more movingly, a very old horse.

Yet, the novel seems different to me in two ways: It is shorter and it is almost breathless in its switches from character or groups of characters, sometimes back-tracking, as though in haste. I felt the haste as I read it. Second, the main character is not introduced at once, and he is seemingly a servant who presents himself to a character named Benet, who turns him away several times before he is employed. Who is he? What are his origins? What, even, is his full name? We are never told, and, indeed, we don’t care. He is fascinatingly magical and that’s enough.

More to the point: I’m sure that if one went through the novel again--I have read it only once—one would find more similarities despite the differences I have pointed to. I have the sense—and perhaps this is a sentimental view—that the magician in Iris knows that this is the end of her novel-writing, that she has been our servant, manipulating characters along the streets of her novels, causing them to meet or miss each other and to live or die at least on these pages. I think—and this may be crazy—that Jackson is Iris, not in the usual way that authors place themselves inside one of their characters. I mean something more improbable.

I am leaping off the page to consider that Iris had super sight, that she knew—somewhere in her mind/body—that this was to be her last book, that Jackson was her last great invention. Here’s how she leaves him—in the last lines of the book:

My powers have left me, will they return—have I simply misunderstood? At least I had called Benet to the bridge. Is it all a dream, yes, perhaps a dream—yet my strength remains, and I can destroy myself at any moment. Death, its closeness. Do I after all fear those who seek me? I have forgotten them and no one calls. Was I in prison once? I cannot remember. At the end of what is necessary, I have come to a place where there is no road.

As, casting off all this, he began to rise, he felt something strange. The spider had discovered his hand and was now walking upon it. Gently he assisted the creature back into its web. He walked down towards the river and crossed the bridge. As he came nearer now to Penndean he began to smile.

A postscript that will send me to the library tomorrow. After I had written this blog, I looked in the index of the one book I own on Iris, a biography by Peter J. Conradi called Iris. He makes only one statement about the novel, calling it “confused.” I am going to look at his literary book on her novels. I don’t think the novel is at all confused.

Yes, I’m still stuck on her, still continuing to read novel after novel. I actually bought five used hard covers in the Strand Bookstore (in person), and then decided that I needed them in paperback so that I could take at least four with me to Turkey in June, and so I found those at Powell’s (online). Now I am missing only a few.

I didn’t want to write the opening paragraph; it was avoidance behavior. It is difficult to write about a novel that so infuriated me that more than twice I gave up reading it and then, a few days later, picked it up again. Insufferably, I thought, Murdoch has outdone her own predilection for creating unpleasant characters. Here was a man, a philosopher, so physically repugnant, so intellectually off-putting, so emotionally undeveloped, who nevertheless, is, at the same time, the one person who is loved secretly by many of the major characters, male, female, young, old. Some love him romantically, though we are often reminded of his physical grossness. How can this be?

I can’t tell you except that I wish to report on my own response to John Robert Rozanov. About 30 pages before the end of the book—a stout 576 pages—Iris kills him. Whether he actually commits suicide or is murdered by his “pupil,” is irrelevant inside and outside the novel. As we all know, the author of a fiction, in this case Iris, decides which characters are, by the end of her novel, to live or die. And Iris kills the philosopher, leaving 30 pages in which to tidy up the lives of a dozen other characters whose lives had to greater or lesser degree, revolved around John Robert’s.

When I got to that point, I stopped reading. I could not touch the novel for five days. I felt outraged. Was I, too, under the spell of this ugly brute of a man? I have just finished the unread pages, and though they tell me about all the remaining characters in the fiction, I am still not pleased. I don’t want to think of John Robert Rozanov dead. He has become more interesting to me than all the other characters combined. Why so, since he is so obnoxious much of the time, so pig-headed, even sub-human? While he lives in the novel, he asks impossible questions and demolishes both easy and difficult responses. He seems implacable, invulnerable, inhuman. Why, then, beloved—usually in secret, and essentially without his knowledge—by so many?

If you’ve read this book, I’d like to hear from you.

Come for a book talk and lunch. See the details here: http://www.florencehowe.com/events.htm

Adrienne Rich

I know precisely how I first met Adrienne Rich. It was 1963, and I had invited Robert Lowell to read at Goucher College, where I ran a poetry series. He arrived with a small woman in tow, and announced to me and the audience that Adrienne Rich would share his platform. I can even remember the outrage I felt at that moment, though most of it dissipated once she began to read from Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, her about-to-be published book. The next day I learned that Adrienne had been at Harvard when Elaine Hedges had been there and that they were “friends.” A few days later the Baltimore Sun asked me to review Adrienne’s new book.

We must have become friends as well, for my next sharp memory is of a ringing phone in my bedroom—perhaps a decade later—and it’s Adrienne on the line. She’d just had a call from a man who had just realized, he said, that though the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education had commissioned 100 books, not one of them included women or addressed the “problems” of women in higher education. The man who had called her had been a colleague of her former husband, an economist at Harvard.

She had told him she would find someone else who could take on the assignment, and she said she had thought of me at once, since I was involved with the MLA. I agreed to take it on only if she would work with me. I remember Adrienne’s brief response in her clipped tones: “I cannot write prose.” And I remember my response: “Nonsense. Your poetry is in sentences. Of course you can write prose. I won’t do it without you.”

We chose two other people to work with us, and so sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, and lawyer Aleta Wallach joined us in writing Women and the Power to Change, published in 1975 in a small cloth edition, and a year later in an unattractive paperback. Adrienne’s essay, “Towards a Woman-Centered University,” deservedly became a classic, as did Arlie’s essay, “Inside the Clockwork of Male Careers.” Mine was the title essay, and perhaps the most important essay long-range was Aleta’s, “A View from the Law School,” which argued that we live under “the rule of men, not the rule of law.”

Most unusual, from the point of the man who had asked us to write this book was the Introduction I wrote, which was a product of our meetings: it placed us in our personal lives as well as our academic professions, and it was forthright about our commitments to activism and political work. Interestingly, it was the personal material that the editors of the Carnegie series wanted cut. We refused of course, and the book appeared as we had written it.

****

Amy Swerdlow

Amy Swerdlow came into my life along with Bella Abzug and Judy Lerner, in part because of my move to New York in 1971, and later, because of beach house summer life in East Hampton, and chiefly because of the Feminist Press. Amy was on the Board of Directors in the first years of the Press’ life in the 1980s, and she was one of the people who helped imagine the 12 books in the series called Women’s Lives/Women’s Work. With Joan Kelly, Renata Bridenthal, and Phyllis Vine as contributors, she edited the volume called Household and Kin, and took on the writing of an important chapter on utopias.

In the late seventies, when I lived in Ohio for a year and had no apartment in New York, Amy’s huge and gorgeous apartment in the Beresford on Central Park West and 79th Street became my home. I’m certain that she knew she was teaching me how to dress, what kinds of clothes and shoes to buy. The year I went to India, she handed me half a dozen dresses from her closet, though I had to try them on first to see whether they were “right” for me. She even took me to her hairdresser. I was too old to be her daughter, but I longed to have her style, her good taste, her ability to be a forerunner. I especially admired the way in which she controlled her space and loved her family. I, too, loved Stanley, her husband.

Amy was very proud of her family, and I remember the moment when both she and her son Ezra were enrolled somewhat competitively in Rutgers’s doctoral program in history, that she eschewed the prize that could have gone to her, saying that it would be better for Ezra’s future that he win it. I never tired of hearing her brag about her children and her grandchildren.

***

What connects both these women, apart from their deaths within days of each other and their age, less than ten years apart? Their activism, not only on behalf of women, but the complex nature of their political thinking, their consciousness about connections among women, racism, war, class bias, gay and lesbian bias. I was a better activist in their company. I also loved them for their wisdom, Adrienne, for the beauty of her utterance and Amy, for her generosity and humor. Both of them could be blunt. Both of them could be kind. I will miss them.

This past Monday night I saw my friend Dagmar’s first film, a labor of love she had begun two years ago. She called the film “Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years.” I knew Audre as poet, novelist, activist, professor, friend. I knew Dagmar as sociologist, professor, and friend. And then I remembered the photographs Dagmar sent me for my office walls, brilliant snapshots of wild horses on a western beach off the coast of Washington, magnificent blooming trees in Berlin. She had an eye.

More than her eye, for the film she had a vision and she had a story. She would present her view of Audre’s eight years in Berlin. There were many themes—friendship, activism, teaching, and of course Audre’s illness.

She wanted to portray the energized Audre, the activist poet, now reading for a German public eager to hear her, now sitting in a small group with Afro-German women, talking about what it felt like to grow up Black in a white German world. Around her, several groups began to organize, hold their own meetings, and come back to talk with her. The Audre we see in Dagmar’s film is in motion, buying flowers, walking through beautiful parks or crowded city streets, alone or with friends, smiling, smiling, and sometimes laughing as well. And if she is indoors, she is sometimes dancing, other times deep in conversation.

Several times we see the poet reading and hear her clear voice. Sometimes we hear the voice and see Audre’s mobile face in many different kinds of close-ups, seemingly full of spirit. Only towards the very end of the film do we meet the young naturopath who has been treating Audre, and only then do we become aware that her life is ebbing. Even then, she greets her friends are there with energy and a resilient spirit.

The film includes a strong handful of Afro-German women who speak about Audre’s influence on them—as organizers of their own movement, and as poets and writers. On screen they are beautiful to see and to listen to, some of them in German, with English translations. But it is Audre’s mobile facial features that the camera makes love to in close-ups that I never tired of, and that I am eager to see again.

At two moments in the film I remembered the Dagmar I first knew 40 years ago: the sequence of ocean waves introducing Audre’s love for swimming; and the sequence of the flying gulls, the presaging of Audre’s death. These were rhythmically correct at the moment they occurred, and they suggested to me that behind the camera putting the film together was the mind of an artist as well as a friend.

Plans are to screen the film on August 10, 2012 at the Second Annual Black German Convention at Barnard College (contact: Prof. Tina Campt, director of Africana Studies) and mid-October in a cooperative effort of Hunter College and John Jay College.
If you want to see this film (the trailer and information on future screenings), go to the website www.audrelorde-theberlinyears.com.

Or you can watch the video here:

AUDRE LORDE - THE BERLIN YEARS/ TRAILER from AV on Vimeo.

Fatima Sadiqi and Moha Ennaji, two of the editors of the Northern region’s Women Writing Africa, came into New York this week not only to have brunch with me, but to attend meetings at the United Nations (Fatima) and at Pace University (Moha). They are also seeing one of their three sons, who is now working in New York—and talked of the other two, in Seattle and London. For the first time in their married lives, they are alone together, and rattling around in their large home in Fes.

Fatima Sadiqi	Moha Ennaji

We talked of depression, both personal and political. I was most interested in their view of the Arab spring, not only in peaceful Morocco, but in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria.
They are close to friends in Tunisia and they are taking an optimistic view that sense will prevail and that the Islamists will remain moderate and permissive towards the secular members of the country. Moha’s latest piece, to be found on the web in Project Syndicate, “The Maghreb’s Modern Islamists,” contends that sensible people—in Morocco and Tunisia—will realize that their first goal most be strengthening the economy. As Moha puts it in his essay, “These governments’ first major test of economic stewardship will be how they treat the tourism industry . . . [as] a critically important source of employment and foreign currency.”

Fatima has recently written about issues of gender and language “at the heart of the new Moroccan constitution.” A major feminist issue she has espoused for several decades is the marginalization of women who speak Moroccan Arabic and/or Berber. While the new constitution, Fatima contends, “institutionalizes gender equality through reinforcing the presence of women” in various public domains, still more important is the recent establishment of Berber as an official Moroccan language. She understands, however, that statements or labels are not enough. How to implement the promotion of Berber is a major feminist political issue.

Their views of Egypt are far less sanguine, and about Libya and Syria, they are frankly frightened, not to mention Iran and Israel. Most of all, they are aware that, in the ten years or so we have known each other, their region has been turned upside down. I have long admired them for many reasons, not the least of which is their stable marriage. I also envy their multi-linguist talents: they can converse or write—and in the case of Moha, translate on the spot—in Berber, Arabic (both Moroccan and Standard), French, and English.

I should have taken photographs on the street in front of my building, but alas, I didn’t. But the photos above are a couple I happen to have.

I thought it had gone, and last week I had said so to Dr. D. I felt good, had written several new blogs, was reading again—whole issues of NYRB and the New Yorker, as well as the NYT daily, and novels, of course. I’ve begun Lessing’s four novellas called The Grandmothers. I had even begun on the income tax, spent two nights sorting, and knew I would need only three or four nights more. (All best done while watching television.) I had also taken some initiatives: had made one appointment with a friend coming to town from Maine, and another with a young colleague to begin work at the New York Public Library on a book together. I had also gone to my first appointment with the “balance doctor,” who had assured me that I did not need a cane. I needed to work on some exercises he was giving me.

And after my appointment with Dr. Jamey, I went for a walk on Third Avenue and bumped into the Mephisto shop. I was, I thought, feeling great. So I went in and bought three pairs of shoes. This is the first time I’ve done anything like that since returning from Vietnam. Yes, I was feeling good. So what happened?

Sunday afternoon, when I had planned to do grocery shopping, I sat down at the computer instead, answered a couple of emails, and then, perhaps a fatal move, went on to my Scorpion game. Why? I don’t know. I thought I’d play for ten minutes, but I should have known better. I played for two hours, occasionally asking why, but not stopping. I even broke the rules I had long since made for stopping. What was going on? And then it came to me and I thought, “It was back.”

The next thought was that it had slipped in, the depression had slipped in. “Slipped in?” I said aloud, with a question mark at the end of it. “How could it slip in? Had it been out having a good time and had come home too late to announce its return?”

Well, I was still waiting for Marietta, my god-daughter, who had come up from Washington on her own two-day agenda, but was spending her only evening having dinner with me. I would quit Scorpion and write a blog. Maybe writing blogs sends the depression away. Maybe it would have to back off again and get lost.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt the depression before as a “presence.” As a quilt, yes, a heavy blanket, yes. But not a presence. But this afternoon, I felt it as a presence and an enemy, something that is both inside me and outside, something that does not wish me well, that scares me, that itself is scared of something, and of course the first thing that always comes to my mind when I think of fear is not my father’s suicide, but my mother’s Alzheimer’s.

Perhaps it is my birthday coming up very soon now. Perhaps that frightens me, the idea that I am getting closer to the losing of faculties. But why do I continue to fear when so many doctors have said I have nothing to worry about—a neurologist, an ear/nose/throat doctor, and my dear therapist. But how could they know? I ask myself. Aren’t they simply being kind?

My neighbor said the other day, seemingly for no reason, that her dentist was the most expensive in New York. Would you like a referral to someone more reasonable? I asked, just to be responsive, even friendly. Oh, no, my friend said, I couldn’t leave him, he’s an artist, a perfectionist. I couldn’t do without him.

No, I didn’t return to the question of cost. I simply dropped the subject, though I was tempted to ask what he had done for her mouth that was “artistic.” I would have been glad to see the work. But I have discovered that few people will talk about their teeth in any detail, though those I have tried to question are quick to praise the worth of their particular dentists. The dozen people I have talked with recently consider their dentists irreplaceable; they would not go to another dentist even if his service were free.

I am not surprised, for after moving from Baltimore to New York in 1971, I continued to see my two Baltimore dentists (teeth and gums) for the next 16 years, as though there were no possible replacements in all of New York City. Only when my dentist, Dr. Smith, died did I search for one in Manhattan, and then asked Dr. Nemerov to send me to his periodontist for my gums. He sent me to Dr. Pollack, who is still my gum doctor and surgeon, and who, after Dr. Nemerov retired, sent me to his dentist, Dr. Murphy.

I raise this subject in a blog because I would like to collect anecdotes of good and bad dental treatment—names are not essential, indeed, probably ought to be omitted. I’m writing a long essay on “Teeth,” for a new memoir to be called What I Left Out,
and I’d like to include experiences beyond my own.

You can comment here or you can write to me at howe.florence@gmail.com if you’d rather.

I have been reading Iris Murdoch’s fiction since last summer, perhaps before then. I took three novels with me to Vietnam on November 1, and bought another there (which I gave away, for I had a copy at home). I began to read in order, thinking I would stop at novel seven, The Unicorn, when I would read the review I had written in the mid-sixties for the New Yorker, which William Shawn paid for but never printed. But I couldn’t find my old Iris file and simply went on reading those novels I had on my bookshelf.

Why was I reading her at all? For years since my mother’s Alzheimer’s and death, and since Bill Hedges’ similar illness and death, I had avoided all films, books, even television programs focused on Alzheimer’s. I never saw the film about Iris, and though someone gave me Iris, a biography, I never read it. And though I owned a full 13 of her 26 novels, I had not read more than the first seven.

If you have read my memoir you know how I got to Iris Murdoch in the first place. In an effort to please William Shawn, the editor of the New Yorker, I had agreed to write a book review for the magazine and had chosen The Unicorn. The only thing I remember about that review is that I knew I had to read the first six novels she had written in order to evaluate and analyze the seventh. I then wrote a review in the manner of a graduate student, taught not to retell plot, but to analyze. My review was nine-tenths analysis and one-tenth content, exactly the reverse of what the New Yorker would want to print.

Recently, I found five of Iris’ novels in the Strand bookstore, all of them cloth-bound first editions, each of them less than the price of a new paperback. And yesterday I finished The Sea, The Sea which won the Booker Prize in 1978. It’s a novel in the guise of an autobiography by a London-based actor/producer/director who has retired to a small house on the Northwest English coast to live alone and write a book about one particular relationship with an older woman who was an actress and his first lover. Fairly early on I grew to dislike the main character, and a bit later wrote on a page at the back of the book, “Iris is able to make me believe that this dreadful little man is writing this dreadful little book. The illusion is magnetic and keeps me reading.” I could have added, “very slowly, far more slowly than any volume of hers thus far.” But then I decided to take the day off and read straight through to the end.

I stopped once again at one of those magical/ludicrous/comical moments in an Iris Murdoch novel that only the existence of her prior 324 pages prevent one’s desire to toss the book out the window. Here is the famous retired actor/director/producer in his small house by the sea, having “freed” his long lost love by locking her in his bedroom, even though she wants to go back to her tyrannical husband. He also has to manage four other guests, some of whom arrived for an arranged weekend which he had forgotten about. The local hotel is full and he has but one real bedroom:

That night we slept as follows: I slept in my bedroom,
Hartley [the woman] slept in the middle room, Gilbert [cook]
slept on his sofa. Peregrine slept on the cushions in the bookroom,
James [cousin] slept on a couple of chairs in the little red room, and
Titus [son] slept out on the lawn.

There are wild and crazy happenings in all of Iris’s novels. Perhaps she specializes in them. And wonderful dogs as well. I am expecting a dog to turn up here and somehow reorganize the novel, especially since the absent male—the husband of Hartley and the father of Titus has just gone off to acquire a large, full-grown collie. Well, yes, there is at least one scene with the dog, a scene I read with an insight that escapes the autobiographer, who continues to believe that the “old” woman (probably in her sixties) still loves him (and not her brutal husband). As he writes, “…love seeks its own ends and discerns, even invents, its own charms.”

Should you run right out and buy this novel? Possibly, since it won the Booker, and since one might find it a cautionary tale for those who may wonder whether they have sufficient self-knowledge with which to write an autobiography. At the end, Charles confesses that he “cannot now remember the exact sequence of events in those prehistoric years.” He continues, “…that our memory, which is our self, is tiny, limited and fallible, is also one of those important things about us, like our inwardness and our reason. Indeed it is the very essence of both.” Charles, alone at the end, is somewhat wiser, somewhat kinder. He’s given up the dangers of the sea and the small house to return to life in London.

If you’ve read this novel, I’d enjoy hearing from you.

The Cleft, a novel of Lessing’s nineties, is portrayed both as a gigantic rock edging the sea on one side and a noxious cavern on the other, and the distance between male and female. It is also descriptive of female sexuality. Lessing has always been free to speak her mind about the sexes and to refuse to be labeled either feminist or anti-feminist. Here, she speaks from the persona of an aged Roman man, who is trying to write a history out of bits and pieces of recently recovered, and often incomplete, records of people called Memories. The early humans he writes about seemingly have no conception of time, nor does their land seem seasonal. At first the women bear babies from some mysterious concatenation of ocean and moon, and all babies are female. Then a baby, born with different sex organs, is placed on the Cleft to die, but is rescued by a giant eagle and taken somewhere. That place, which intrepid females uncover holds “monsters” the narrator knows were men, and from that time forward the two groups couple both for sex and for procreation, though they continue to live separately.

What drives the brief novel is the tension between the male’s desire to explore new territory, even to risk venturing out on a rough sea to reach perhaps another shore, and the female’s desire for the safety of the babies and small children. Possibly as interesting is the Roman narrator, who considers his world the best and most enlightened possible, and here Lessing cannot resist writing from an allegedly Roman point of view that resonates loudly for a twenty-first century British or American (or Chinese) reader. Here is a piece of that passage (p. 216):

I sometimes imagine how all the known world will be Roman, subject to our beneficent
rule. . . . Truly we make deserts bloom and the lands we conquer blossom. . . . Some
greater power than human guides us, leads us, points where our legions must go next.
And if there are those who criticize us, then I have only one reply. Why, then, if we lack
the qualities needed to make the whole earth flourish, why does everyone want to be a
Roman citizen? All, everybody, from any part of our empire and beyond, wants to be a
free man inside Roman law, Roman peace.

Do I recommend this book to you? Yes, if you are a Lessing addict as I am and have somehow missed it. Yes if you like imaginative recreations of the two sexes, and life without the New York clutter of the Glass apartment where Franny and Zooey live.

Yesterday I had lunch with an 86-year old sociologist who lives in my building and who was reading a copy of Lessing’s The Grandmothers, another recent volume I have missed, but will gather up soon and write about here. Yes, the blog is unleashing me.