The American novelist Susan Taubes drowned herself off the coast of East Hampton in 1969 at the age of 41. She had suffered from severe depression for a long time, but many friends thought the proximate cause of her death was a savage New York Times review of Divorcing, the only one of her novels to be published in her lifetime. The review had come out just a few days earlier. The critic, Hugh Kenner, had dismissed the work as the pretentious noodlings of a “lady novelist.” Kenner was cruelly, unforgivably wrong. Divorcing—reissued in 2020 by NYRB Classics, this time to high praise—is a masterpiece: witty, raw, and outrageous. More than half a century and a feminist revolution later, it still feels utterly original, and is still shocking. That readers now are likely to come to the novel knowing, either from reviews or the preface, that most of it is autobiographical makes the shock even more acute.
Divorcing’s protagonist, Sophie Blind, has been given more or less Taubes’s story: childhood in Hungary; flight to America ahead of Nazi occupation; a father who was a famous psychiatrist and raised her by himself; a lifelong sense of estrangement from both her adoptive country and herself; an attraction to anonymous sex. Like Susan, Sophie has studied “philosophy, epistemology, published papers.” And then there’s the husband Sophie is divorcing, Ezra Blind, a brilliant, seductive, philandering philosophy professor and point-for-point replica of Susan’s husband, Jacob Taubes.
The big difference between Susan and Sophie is that Sophie is dead. Her story is told by a nameless narrator after her decapitation by an oncoming cab on the Champs-Élysées, a death she experiences as a liberation. “My body growing enormous, its thousands of trillions of cells suddenly set free, spread, speeded, pressed jubilant, rushing to the seven gates of Paris, out Porte de Clichy, Porte de la Chapelle, Porte d’Orléans, Porte de Versailles,” says Sophie, breaking out for a moment into the first person. The rest of the novel weaves between this exuberantly surreal hereafter and the life that preceded it.
Before she died, Sophie had been trying to lay hold of herself. She’d been too acquiescent; she’d let Ezra borrow her, as it were. She played the parts that he assigned to her, including the masochist in the sadomasochistic scenarios he liked to enact, with other women as well as her. “She couldn’t even be properly jealous or offended,” Taubes writes. “Her father had explained to her when she was a girl why men needed obscenity to get pleasure.” Sophie and their three children trailed Ezra around the world, from New York to Jerusalem and back again, while he failed to finish the book that would secure him a stable academic appointment. When they fought, Sophie made mental notes that have the slow-motion beauty of the dissociative state: “Sophie watched his index finger: it was tracing circles or stirring some mysterious brew. It launched on a vertical course to the sublime. Loopdiving into the horizontal it stood pointed at her. The index finger started wagging at her increasingly menacingly as if it didn’t know what to do with itself,” Taubes writes. (According to Jacob Taubes’s acquaintances, Susan captured him perfectly.) Sophie leaves and sets up her own apartment in Paris but still can’t shake off the sense that “there was not much difference really” between life and dream.
Her afterlife is outlandish, hallucinatory. The writing falls just shy of pornographic but is redeemed by a manic vitality. Nightmarish scenes flash by as if strobe-lit by self-loathing. More detached than ever, Sophie seems to observe her own wedding both from a pink-satin-lined coffin and from on high. It’s a satanic affair, including rites of consummation by the male guests. Later she watches her own joyous funeral: Ezra “receives condolences with a festive air; positively aglow, he waltzes through the crowd on waves of sympathy. He holds a large handkerchief over his mouth to cover a leer.” Her corpse looks good, its viewers say: “‘… done by big-name experts. Latest American techniques,’” she hears Ezra’s sister boasting. “‘The sunglass are haute monde.’”
Before Divorcing, Taubes wrote Lament for Julia, in the early 1960s. No one would publish Lament then, so NYRB Classics is bringing it out for the first time, accompanied by nine short stories, some of them published in magazines during Taubes’s lifetime. Lament appears to be both a trial run for the later novel and completely unlike it, or much else. Its narrator isn’t dead, but he isn’t alive. He’s a homesick angel, or demon, or imp—even he isn’t sure what he is. Some unspecified force has “garrisoned” him, as he puts it, in the mind and body of a girl named Julia. She’s a rebellious beauty being raised in an unnamed Central European town sometime in the early 20th century by parents so grotesque they might as well be monsters in a Brothers Grimm fairy tale.
The ghost (although Taubes doesn’t specify what class of being he is, a working title of the novel was The Ghost) represents himself as Julia’s guardian angel, but his drooling effusions make him sound like a pedophile. He swoons over Julia and deplores her sexual development. Her surging breasts strike him as a “tumescence.” Her periods revolt him. Her vagina alarms him too: “Julia was a glove with the thumb turned in, a wrinkled purse. A mere repository, a trench, a sponge that absorbed everything; whatever she touched seemed to impregnate her.” To his horror she throws herself at local boys: “Put her in a convent! It seemed the perfect solution.” He squirms at being forced to be a “female impersonator,” though he knows he couldn’t find a more luscious host. He’s a parasite, he says, feeding on her “like a hermit feeding on grubs and roots.”
Lament starts slowly, which may be one reason Taubes couldn’t find a publisher for it. We’re dropped into the story in mid-lament: Julia has run away. A chapter goes by before she comes into focus. The narrator calls her a “storybook princess with golden tresses” as well as a “witch child,” but her real charm lies in her power of refusal. She struggles bitterly against the maid who tries to force a starched petticoat and pink taffeta dress over her head. Or is it the ghost inhabiting her who does the fighting? He takes responsibility: “I think that is when I threw my first fit. Several windowpanes were broken, a flowerpot smashed, a bottle of ink poured over Julia’s dress. They thought she had a devil.”
She does have a devil, of course, or so says the devil. After a while, though, we start to wonder. He’s curiously nebulous. Julia never seems to address him directly. Everything he claims they do together she could just as easily be doing alone: reading, making up plays, pouring ink over a dress. He calls himself her mentor, but she ignores him. They squabble; she’s “sublimely vague.” “I can’t even be sure whether Julia willfully scorned me when, in fact, she simply acted as if I wasn’t there,” he says. “Judging from her behavior at the time one would believe she thought herself the only person in the world.”
Does the ghost exist or just think he does? And what would it mean for a ghost to be mistaken about his existence—as opposed to a person like, say, Descartes? This is the kind of metaphysical problem Taubes liked to build her stories around. She had the wherewithal. She did her graduate work in religion and philosophy at Radcliffe and published articles on the influence of Jewish gnosticism on Heidegger and Simone Weil, among other topics. Gnosticism is a nihilistic heresy, an inside-out and upside-down theology, according to which God is an absence rather than a presence, creation the interment rather than embodiment of the divine spark, and man a creature divorced from himself. In all the varieties of gnosticism, Taubes wrote in a 1954 essay on Heidegger, “one motif prevails: man is not ‘at home’ in the cosmos.” She goes on to describe a “gnostic self” who sounds a lot like Lament’s plaintive incubus: a “stranger in the world” thrown into it willy-nilly from somewhere beyond.
I’m afraid I’m making Lament sound like a dry, ontological parable. It is a parable, and it has an existential dimension, but it’s anything but dry. What makes it powerful—what makes Taubes’s whole body of work powerful—isn’t the ideas, though you can lose yourself in them, but the affect. Lament’s gnosticism channels radical discomfort. The ghost’s clammy unease with the flesh-and-blood Julia has the feel of body dysmorphia. He could be the split-off version of a hypercritical self she won’t acknowledge. Julia can defy sexual norms with abandon as long as the spirit takes upon himself the recrimination that might otherwise follow; once she grows up and begins to drift away from him, life goes less well for her.
Fear and abhorrence of female sexuality pervade other stories in the collection too. “The Gold Chain” is a monstrous folk tale about a simpleminded but dissatisfied wife who finds her pleasure in a field with a lover whose face she never sees: “If I look it’s sin,” she thinks, “but if I keep my eyes shut it’s like it happened in my sleep.” Needless to say, when the men of the village learn of the woman who has sex with strangers with her eyes closed, they rejoice, and not because they have her happiness in mind.
In another even more chilling story, “Dr. Rombach’s Daughter,” a psychoanalyst projects onto his teenage daughter uncontrollable sexual desires, both for him (she has a “strong oedipal attachment,” he tells her) and for young men she has yet to meet. He dwells on these supposed feelings while he fondles her: “‘What were you thinking right now?’” he asks, then answers his own question. Marianna must be tired of him, he says. She’s longing for a young man to walk in. “Of course, you’re a growing girl, your glands are beginning to work, your breasts are developing—’ he studied her breasts, ‘they could be a little, well, shapelier. Don’t you wear a brassiere?’”
Dr. Rombach leaves Marianna numb, empty, and silenced. She’s a bookish girl, and when Dr. Rombach interrupts her, she has been sitting with a notebook in her lap and a pencil in the air. After he leaves, Marianna can’t remember what she’d been about to write: “The page of the notebook before her was blank. She was trying to think of something to write in it. A beautiful phrase. She looked around the room but she did not see anything that wanted to be put into words … Blank was the only thing she could think of.”
One hopes that this story is purely fictional, though some portion of it seems likely to be true. To go by Divorcing, generally considered a reliable source on Susan’s life, her father did tell her from a very young age that she couldn’t help being in love with him, did talk to her about sex in very graphic terms, was emotionally invasive. Her depiction of their intense relationship, especially in the wake of his divorce from her mother, is frankly creepy. Whatever Taubes’s father was like, though—and there is no evidence that he molested her—she was not silenced. She became an important intellectual, though it has taken five decades for the world to appreciate that. In the past few years, her philosophy has enjoyed as much of a revival as her fiction; several scholarly papers on her essays have recently appeared, and a book called The Philosophical Pathos of Susan Taubes: Between Nihilism and Hope, by Elliot R. Wolfson, an eminent scholar in Jewish mysticism, came out this year.
Taubes would be particularly gratified that her genius is finally being acknowledged because when she was alive, it was her aching beauty that garnered attention, at a moment when intellect and beauty were seen as incompatible. She had the pale skin, elfin eyes, and raven locks of a “Belle Dame sans Merci.” Taubes knew that most men couldn’t hear, didn’t want to hear, what went on behind that mask, no matter how brilliant she was. Nor did many women; extreme beauty does strange things to people. “I don’t know anybody who isn’t in love with me,” she wrote her husband, apparently not exaggerating. As a result, she added, “I don’t have a single friend, only scenes + complications.” (This was not quite true; right at that moment she was getting to know her fellow Harvard graduate student Susan Sontag, who would be Taubes’s best friend for the rest of her life.) Even Taubes didn’t take herself as seriously as she should have, working harder to drum up jobs for her difficult husband than to advance her own career.
When Taubes became a novelist—she was divorced by then—she began to wrestle with the throttled female voice. She called it “the problem of first-person narrative by women” in a journal entry in 1965, not long after she’d finished Lament. As late as the 1960s—who remembers this anymore?—stories written by women in the first person were still uncommon. Women weren’t publishing much fiction in any voice, compared with men—hence Kenner’s sneering epithet, “lady novelist.” Taubes must have worried that the female I would be perceived as impertinent or absurd, and she wasn’t wrong to think so, as Kenner’s review also confirms. Lament sidestepped the female-first-person problem by making the ghost the narrator. But he’s a wraith at best, not even sure he’s real, and he, too, feels self-conscious about saying “I.” It seems uncouth, embarrassing. “My predicament dates from the moment I began thinking in the first person; seriously, that is,” he says. “Let us assume that it is I who speak, I proposed to myself, let us drag the hidden author on the stage, uncombed, in his nightclothes, and turn the spotlight on him as he blinks and stammers.”
Taubes never took full possession of the first person. She got close, though. Divorcing employs a mode of address known as “free indirect,” in which the narrator’s voice floats in closer or less close proximity to the characters’. Divorcing’s narrator is lodged deep in Sophie’s head, and on rare occasions simply is her. Maybe Taubes would have used I more consistently if she’d lived. Or maybe her great subject was always going to be the non-integratable self. There was more to Susan Taubes than could be contained in a pronoun. As Lament’s ghost says of his and Julia’s strained cohabitation, “If she were simply a body and I simply a mind. If only it were as simple as that. But we are a jumble of odd bits and between us we do not even make a person.”
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