"The Beheading of a Brilliant Mind" by Michael Barron
Since her birth in Hungary in 1928, the writer and philosopher Susan Taubes has experienced four deaths and one resurrection.
The first death is of Sophie Blind, a fictionalized version of Taubes, in her debut novel Divorcing. Sophie is a woman coming to terms with shattered marriages, that of her own, and of her parents, and yet immediately it demonstrates that the novel is more than that.
The opening of Divorcing begins with Sophie Blind’s birth into death. It is beautiful. A most lyrical omniscient death.
She opens her eyes with enormous effort but it’s in another time; then she is hurrying down a busy street past fine shops, the window displays on Place Vendôme attract her, watches flat as coins; but she knows this is wrong, she knows she must open her eyes as she lies in bed in a room.
A few paragraphs later Blind assumes direct narration to confirm the truth: she has died by vehicular decapitation on a Parisian street. “It’s quite certain I am dead,” she tells us. “It’s in the newspaper… Femme décapitée en 18 arrondissement.” And she is after the truth: “Now I am dead I care only for truth.”
Seeking truth after death is like trying to take control of a dream. While you have eternity to come to some conclusions, the narrative time of the living has no place among the dead. It is an unstable plane. And so Divorcing does not proceed linearly, but in hypnagogic quantum leaps between scenes.
As a literary device, it is a disorienting and intriguing way to capture a reader’s attention. Vladimir Nabokov put it to use in his story “Details of a Sunset,” where the protagonist, unknowingly killed by a tram, becomes increasingly disoriented during a phantasmagoric dinner party being hosted by his fiancé. He realizes he is dead before falling forever “into what other dreams, none can tell.”
Unlike Nabokov’s unfortunate protagonist, it is the grasping of her death that prevents Sophie from fully succumbing to it. She is instead tormented by what could be described as an eternal psychoanalysis. Sophie may have been decapitated by a motorist, but death for her began in marriage. The truth she seeks isn’t buried in a coffin, but in a hall of mirrors.
Sophie’s preoccupation, at least for the first half of the novel, is the pending divorce from her husband Ezra Blind. For her children’s sake, she remains civil to Ezra who is adamantly opposed to divorce, and yet she is growing impatient. By the time we meet her, she has already moved on to other lovers.
In a chain of dreamlike sequences, the novel comes to resemble metaphors for the psychological strain this situation puts upon her. One interior monologue is written in disembodied phrases. A memory of a grandmother is divvied up as a sequence of subtitled vignettes. In “How Old Women Urinated in Galanta on the Street” for example, she recalls how elderly women would piss in place as they chatted, leaving little puddles behind.
Funerary boxes make many appearances. In a wedding that doubles as a funeral, Sophie appears in a bridal gown and casket. She is in a casket again during a trial rendered as a surrealist play, where Sophie defends her right to a divorce. To America and Back in a Coffin was Taubes’s original title for the novel. Divorcing was her publisher’s.
When Sophie wins her divorce, it changes the book’s trajectory. Her death and Ezra fall into the background as Sophie shifts her focus to a different kind of truth. The truth of personal history. Her childhood in Budapest, her Jewish ancestry, her immigration/evacuation to America with her father (an overbearing psychoanalyst), and her eventual return as an adult to Europe (first to England to see her mother, and then on to a Budapest under Russian occupation.)
Divorcing ends with Sophie and her children undergoing therapy in a sleep deprivation chamber. One child, emerging, is asked to describe heaven. He calls it a maze. Sophie sees visions of hell. The therapist suggests that she has had a “rebirth experience.” Maybe it was all a dream.
*
The three deaths of Susan Taubes occurred in one week.
The first death, enacted by readers of Divorcing, occurred the week of the book’s publication, on Sunday, November 2, 1969.
That same day, a review appeared in the New York Times by Hugh Kenner, then arguably the leading scholar on literary modernism. Kenner was vicious, conceding few points of merit, while attacking Taubes as “a quick-change artist with the clothes of other writers” and using Divorcing to exemplify what he saw as the noxious indulgences of woman writers.
Here is the review compacted into its first, middle, and final sentence:
This contains mild rewards once you fight down the rising gorge that's coupled to your Sontag-detector […] lady novelists have always claimed the ability to transcend mere plausibilities […] there’s a thin ghost of a novel crying for release, a very old-fashioned novel indeed, of a kind that transcends the with-it cat’s cradling of lady novelists.
The misogyny here is obvious but so unfortunately is an equation: Big name critic assessing a relatively unknown debut novelist = a make-or-break review. Kenner didn’t just break Taubes, he stomped on the shards. That was the second death of Susan Taubes as she saw it: the death of her career.
Susan Taubes’s third death happened on Friday, November 6, 1969, less than a week after Kenner’s review appeared in print. That weekend, while in East Hampton, she drowned herself. Susan Sontag, a close friend, identified the body. Sontag’s son, the writer David Rieff, recounted that her mother took Taubes’s death personally. “I will never forgive her… and never recover from what she did.”
Neither did her publishers. Not long after its publication, Divorcing went out of print, becoming the fourth and final death of Susan Taubes. The novel’s resurrection over fifty years later is owed to New York Review Books. Rieff provides an insightful introduction where he notes that Divorcing has “yet to become a cult classic, though it has all the qualities of one.”
And it’s getting there. Recent reviews have cited it as a precursor to Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights and the works of Renata Adler. If we’re lucky, NYRB may bring out Taubes’s unpublished novella A Lament for Julia along with uncollected stories published in her lifetime. I’d like to think Taubes would be pleased, watching from beyond the grave.
Michael Barron is a writer and editor who lives in New York.
