(2 of 2)
Means of Liberation. At this point Mrs. Gray abruptly switches from the first-person "I" narrative form that has preserved whatever degree of credibility the story maintains. Stephanie in the third person, Stephanie as "she," makes fairly ludicrous fiction. She turns up, not drowned but hinting darkly at the presence of terminal cancer, tooting around the Southwest with a genial young homosexual whom she patronizes, mothers and seems to be weaning away from a fear of feminine flesh. Meanwhile she scribbles notes to her husband and communes with herself about nurturing and whether women can ever be happy free of it, about sex and whether androgyny would be better, about writing a novel as a means of liberation. Her conclusion: "The magic word is the jailor's name. Identify the enemy and you may begin to love him."
This is an age that has learned any grievance must be accepted as both genuine and significant if the public weeping and wailing are long and loud enough. It would therefore be wise to take seriously Mrs. Gray's passionate meditation on the tyranny of love. Not as a novel, though.
The real enemy in Lovers and Tyrants is a lack of the rare alchemy needed to transform ideas and raw experience into a story that will believably carry its own truth. ("If one day they find their way into a book," Graham Greene wrote about the details of a novelist's life, "it should be without our connivance.") Successful biography, and autobiography, are less demanding than fiction. They mainly require qualities that Francine Gray clearly possesses: eloquence, extraordinary intellect and a fascinating life to exploit.
Timothy Foote