Books
Secret lives of women
Paul Ableman
Chamber Music Doris Grumbach (Hamish Hamilton £5.50) Sleepless Nights Elizabeth Hardwick (Weidenfeld £5.50) My colleague, Christopher Booker, recently proclaimed 'The Failure of Women's Lib.' in this journal. His thesis, if I understood him correctly, was that the movement had floundered largely through insisting that there are no intrinsic but only 'cultural' differences between the sexes. The two novels under ,review, in their different ways, reflect what is unmistakeably (although it remains frustratingly hard to quantify or analyse) a feminine outlook on the world and perhaps confirms that the period of strident militancy is over, Doris Grumbach announces her gentle concerns boldly: 'How many truths of the secret lives of women are lost to history in the still, social afternoon air that hovers between two women . .... quickly said, revealed in a breath . . . such special truths are quickly buried and forgotten. And yet they hold more valuable human reality for the searcher after truth than the dates of history and the narratives of the lives and deaths of kings.'
The 'cultural differences' theory was always hard to take. Dissociating oneself from Freud's sexual bigotry, one may still ask: how could beings that demonstrably differ in so many fundamentals fail to be intrinsically different? After all, a woman is physically weaker than a man and the imp lications of this indisputable fact alone are huge. But, carrying the argument far beyond the realms of mere muscle, women experience a whole sequence of primal physiological processes which distinguish them from men. Women menstruate, ges tate, have babies and suckle them. Can any man, other than dimly and empathetically, comprehend the consciousness of a being that spins life inside her body, swells and contracts in obedience to its needs, delivers in pain and nourisheis the next generation with her own secretions? Conversely, can women really conceive an erotic world geared to the quest for a spasm of pleasure, partially 'sublimated' into a career? Could anyone really have believed such crucial differences to be mere 'cultural' trivia? It would surely be as plausible to argue that a lion is only 'culturally' different from a lamb.
The 'cultural differences' theory is also " sinister. Were it true, we could anticipate, once the cultural wrinkles had been ironed out, female behaviour equivalent to male. But who can really conceive a female Hitler screaming at a baying horde of female storm troopers, a female Torquemada burning bodies to sanctify souls, a female Haig hurling young females onto machine guns? There is no doubt that women can be cruel. A handful have been concentration-camp guards, child torturers, urban terrorists, interrogators and heads of state responsible for waging war. But the most superficial mental survey of history suggests that the ruthless, the brutal, the life-denying and destroying faculties 'are predominantly masculine and that the life-furthering and enhancing qualities are predominantly female. 'Culture' can't make killers of us all. The future, without a faith in intrinsic sexual difference and, as a consequence, a redemptive and ameliorating feminity which may just inhibit masculine lust for destruction, would seem bleak indeed.
It has often been noticed that novelwriting is one of the few cultural areas in which women approach parity with men. Writers like Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Lady Murasaki, if not quite of the same stature as the finest male novelist, ensure that the novel, unlike virtually all other spheres of achievement, cannot be considered a male preserve infiltrated by a few displaced women. Why do men retain their slight lead? Part of the answer is doubtless contained in Byron's famous line: 'Man may range the court, camp, church, the vessel and the mart'. Clearly, before you can write about a thing you have to 'range' it. By now, women have made at least token appearances in most of the Byronic provinces, as well as into specifically modern ones like the laboratory and the factory, but it is still far easier for men to survey society panoramically than it is for women. However, if there really are intrinsic differences between the sexes, then it is probable that women will always be less attracted to the centrifugal, outwards-gazing, universal literary perspective than men. It is probably significant that there are very few, women SF writers.
Doris Grumbach, as the quotation above demonstrates, has used a gentle, selfeffacing, even rather quaint prose in this book, She has done so to harmonise the style with the personality of her fictitious narrator, a 90-year-old woman and the widow of one Robert Glencoe Maclaren, a famous American composer who died in his late thirites. The book is thus inevitably endowed with a flavour of Edwardian reticence and formality but so skilfully that it never suggests pastiche, Carrie Maclaren recalls her early life in Boston and tells us how she met the satur nine, ambitious composer and was perfunc torily courted and won by him. She then accompanied him to Germanyrfor his musi cal studies, was snubbed by her jealous mother-in-law and ultimately returned with him to America and swiftly-accruing fame.
At about this point, I realised that Miss Grumbach had been writing about, amongst other things, incest, homosexuality and venereal disease. But the fictitious nar rator's innocence, and the modest prose, had domesticated the lurid topics. After Maclaren's early death, Carrie Maclaren edges shyly into a Lesbian affair with the practical but tender nurse, of German origin, who cared for the dying composer through all the ghastly manifestations of tertiary syphilis. The remainder of the book is _mainly a Lesbian love story, the most lyrical, and ultimately moving. I have read.
The incorporation of real sexuality into what is stylistically an Edwardian narrative raises interesting questions. Are not most Victorian and Edwardian novels 'castrated' by the idiotic literary reticence of the times? Since these works are probably still the most-read 'classics' are we not loading our minds with distorted images of reality? Chamber Musk is, as it were, a period novel with the missing parts restored. But they have been restored without the exhibitionism and sensationalism that is almost ubiquitous, and usually artistically otiose, in fiction today. Perhaps for this very reason, Miss Grumbach's book seems more real than much modern realism. The right of fiction to discuss and represent anything human is, of course, an indispensable one. But the cynical exploitation of that hardwon right, especially since it still remains precarious, is deplorable. Chamber Music tells us all we need to know about the sexual behaviour of its characters and yet, although it would certainly have been execrated as 'obscene filth' before the first World war, now seems decorOus.
Elizabeth Hardwick has more talent than Doris Grumbach but Sleepless Nights is an inferior work to Chamber Music. Too intoxicated perhaps by the fervent anarchy of Djuna Barnes's Nightwood and Elizabeth Smart's By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, Miss Hardwick has poured out a stream of volatile reminiscences in the hope that they will ignite on contact with the reader. Nightwood scorched us but Grand Central . . failed to and so does Sleepless Nights. Miss Hardwick is the author of the study called Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature, which is essentially the subject of this book too. But here, instead of ordering it illuminatingly she has minced it into autobiographical hash, Still, the talent with language is there and the headlong narrative at least reveals that Miss Hardwick is not of the raucous 'cultural differences' school but of the authentically feminine one. Her second — no, her first — novel could be a winner.
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