LOVERS AND TYRANTS
by FRANCINE DU PLESSIX GRAY
316 pages. Simon & Schuster. $8.95.
Francine du Plessix Gray, 46, is a tall, blonde woman with large eyes and elegant cheekbones. The daughter of a French aristocrat and a White Russian emigré, she lived in Paris as a child, moved to the U.S. in 1941, went to a fashionable New York girls' school (Spence) and Barnard. After college she had a fling in Paris, then returned home and settled down to life in the country with her painter husband and two sons, now 15 and 16. A sporadically lapsed Catholic, Mrs. Gray demonstrated against the war in Viet Nam, was busted, got involved with the Berrigan brothers and wrote Divine Disobedience, a splendid book about priestly radicals.
Masquerade. Subtract Divine Disobedience, substitute an architect for that painter husband and Radcliffe for Barnard, and the above details, cheekbones included, pretty well describe Stephanie, the heroine of Mrs. Gray's first novel. This may be why Lovers and Tyrants flourishes only when it is masquerading as a memoir. The author has no trouble persuading the reader that there was once a small girl in Paris named Stephanie. She loved her father and was shattered by his death early in the war. She longed to be a boy and a naval hero, but was stifled by the clinging care of a lachrymose governess. "I never ran or sang or mothered dolls ... My temperature was taken twice a day."
Francine Gray knows the French. Stephanie's remembrance of things past flashes with literary style and wit. Remarkable siblings and sexual suitors are summoned up, often in hilarious detail, though they are mostly kept frozen at the edge of caricature by Stephanie's satiric perceptions. The author is at home in emigré salons and ancient country holdings—where the landscaping is by Le Nôtre and the new power mower is by John Deere. When the ancestral crypt, where Stephanie's father lies, gets too crowded, the family simply shifts the bones of those who had made "bad marriages." The flavor of refugee New York in the '40s, classy but cashless, also comes to the reader engagingly filtered through the pride and prejudice of a precocious, lonely girl trying to make it hi a rich and snobby school.
It is when Stephanie marries Paul and settles into an American country wifehood that the teasing promise of her intricate and highly individual childhood declines toward case history, and static, predictable domestic woe. Stephanie's cries rise to heaven like those of De Sade's Justine, a girl, one recollects, with far more justification for complaint. Paul, Stephanie grants, is a splendid lover, a fine husband, a kind man, a devoted father—as handsome, she reports, as Jimmy Stewart. But he doesn't want to live in the city. And he doesn't talk to Stephanie enough. "Our silence festers," she confides to her journal. "Our silence swells. Our silence lies between us like a heap of garbage." Within a few years, "I knew I would rather die brutally, prematurely, than lead the life my husband would have preferred for me." Eventually, in the throes of what an earlier age might have charitably called cabin fever, she runs through the forest clutching leaves, moaning with thirst, and finally plunges into a lily-filled river seeking death and freedom.