DOWN AMONG THE WOMEN
by FAY WELDON 216 pages. St. Martin's Press. $6.50.
As Lit. 73 lecturers like Tom Wolfe keep saying, any number of mod subjects are better served by the New Journalism than by that creaky old party, the novel. But the condition of women does not happen to be one of them.
Even readers who agree with the parajournalists of Women's Liberation are often embarrassed to find their positions taken with so much self-pity and self-righteousness, with such bloated excesses of tractarian rhetoric. In stark contrast stand the lean, sharp novels of British writers like Edna O'Brien and Margaret Drabble, and American fictionists like Joan Didion.
To those names must now be added (on the British roll call) Fay Weidon, novelist, playwright, and not incidentally mother of three. In her brief, brilliant, occasionally comic second novel she has squeezed two decades and three generations of Englishwomen into a corner far too tight for good manners.
Feminist. The oldest generation is brassily represented by Wanda—44 when the narrative begins in 1950. She is "a large, heavy-boned, unpretty woman with a weathered skin, and eyes too deep and close together for their owner to be taken as anything other than troublesome." A 1930s-style feminist —and ex-Communist who left her artist-husband when he began to go commercial—Wanda virtuously teaches her daughter the credo of what used to be quaintly called "free love."
Scarlet serves Mother Wanda right by disobeying with stubborn chastity, then becoming pregnant the night she loses her virginity. With her friends, she constitutes a kind of neither-nor generation. Rebellious against their parents, rebellious against their children, they are rebellious, above all, against the men they off-and-on love, and yet they still seem unable to organize their lives without them. Weldon men are talkers rather than doers. The aesthetes end up in ad agencies, the back-to-nature idealists wind up turning a profit on battery-stimulated hens. Seldom, if ever, do they make decent lovers.
"Men!" Wanda cries, and "the force of the expletive shatters even her." But men, finally, are not the enemy. Mrs. Weldon can even pity them. "Man seems not so much wicked as frail," she writes, "unable to face pain, trouble and growing old." What she cannot forgive is nature. "A good woman," she concludes with supreme bitterness, "knows that nature is her enemy. Look at what it does to her." Down Among the Women is a passionate diatribe against the cruel specialities of female mortality, against a "terrible world, where chaos is the norm, life a casual exception to death" — and the listing goes on — "where the body is something mysterious in its workings, which swells, bleeds, and bursts at random."