Divorcing

SUSAN TAUBES (1928–1969), born Judit Zsuzsanna Feldmann in Budapest, was the daughter of a psychoanalyst and the granddaughter of a rabbi. She and her father emigrated to the United States in 1939, settling in Rochester, New York. She attended Bryn Mawr as an undergraduate, and in 1949 married the rabbinically trained scholar Jacob Taubes. Taubes studied philosophy and religion in Jerusalem, at the Sorbonne, and at Radcliffe, where she wrote her dissertation on Simone Weil. She and her husband had a son and a daughter, in 1953 and 1957, and in 1960 she began teaching at Columbia University, where she was curator of the Bush Collection of Religion and Culture. During the 1960s, Taubes was a member of the experimental Open Theater ensemble; edited volumes of Native American and African folktales; published a dozen short stories; and wrote two novels, Divorcing and the still-unpublished Lament for Julia. Her suicide came shortly after the publication of Divorcing, in November 1969. Two collections of Taubes’s extensive correspondence with Jacob while they lived apart in the early 1950s were published in Germany in 2014: the letters appear in their original English with German annotation.

DAVID RIEFF is the author of ten books, including The Exile: Cuba in the Heart of Miami; Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West; A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis; Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir; and, most recently, In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies.

DIVORCING

SUSAN TAUBES

Introduction by

DAVID RIEFF

NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

New York

THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

www.nyrb.com

Copyright © 1969 by Susan Taubes

Introduction copyright © 2020 by David Rieff

All rights reserved.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank the Radcliffe Institute for its generous help and encouragement toward making this book possible; and also the Ingram Merrill Foundation for its very helpful support.

First published as a New York Review Books Classic in 2020.

Cover image: Eva Hesse, An Ear in a Pond (detail), April 1965; © The Estate of Eva Hesse; Ursula Hauser Collection, Switzerland; courtesy Hauser & Wirth; photograph: Stefan Altenburger Photography, Zürich

Cover design: Katy Homans

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Taubes, Susan, author. | Rieff, David, writer of introduction.

Title: Divorcing / Susan Taubes ; introduction by David Rieff.

Description: New York : New York Review Books, [2020] | Series: New York Review Books classics | Originally published in 1969.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020010234 (print) | LCCN 2020010235 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681374949 (paperback) | ISBN 9781681374956 (ebook)

Classification: LCC PS3570.A88 D58 2020 (print) | LCC PS3570.A88 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020010234

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020010235

ISBN 978-1-68137-495-6

v1.0

CONTENTS

Cover

Biographical Notes

Title Page

Copyright and More Information

Introduction

DIVORCING

One

Two

Three

Four

INTRODUCTION

AS THERE are cult books, so are there cult people. What mysterious alchemy vaults people who were largely ignored, or at least by their own lights insufficiently valued, in their own time to this privileged niche in the imagination of their posterity is never fully explainable and is not to be confused with reputation in the conventional sense. For viewed coldly, the accomplishments of these cult people are almost always slim rather than thick. But this only adds to their fascination and to the aura that surrounds them, as if their lives were meant to illustrate the acuity of Mies van der Rohe’s dictum that less is more. These are men and women who attract the interest of posterity through some combination of charisma (always), physical beauty (more often than not), and, at the risk of sounding somewhat heartless, also more often than not death at a comparatively young age. Musing on one of these cult people, their admirers often exclaim, “Think what she would have accomplished had she lived.”

Divorcing, quickly forgotten after its publication in 1969, has yet to become a cult book, though it has all the qualities of one, but its author, Susan Taubes, was very much the sort of brilliant, glamorous, doomed person I have been describing. Indeed, the typology of the cult figure fits her so well as to be almost discomfiting—her charisma, her Garbo-esque beauty, but above all, that sense, universally subscribed to by those who were close to her, that she found the burden of being itself too crushing and that her relation to the world always was a radically contingent one. Candor is called for here: I am not speculating about this. In the early 1950s in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Taubes and her then husband, the rabbi and philosopher of ideas Jacob Taubes, were the closest friends of my parents, Susan Sontag and Philip Rieff. Their children, Ethan and Tania, were my friends and contemporaries. And after both the Taubeses and my parents divorced, and after both had moved to New York, Susan Taubes and my mother remained intimate friends, a friendship that was only ended by Taubes’s suicide in November 1969, barely a week after Divorcing was published. It was left to my mother to identify her body. Much later, she told me: “I will never forgive her...and never recover from what she did.”

A book, the Romanian aphorist E. M. Cioran once wrote, is a suicide postponed. But in the case of Divorcing, not postponed by much. A few weeks before her death, Taubes wrote in her journal: “I am sitting in my room. I go out. I come in waiting for time to pass. In about two weeks I will drown myself.” My mother, though, always thought that the proximate cause of Taubes’s suicide was the bad reviews the novel received, above all a savage and, from the vantage point of today, a startlingly misogynistic notice from the critic Hugh Kenner in The New York Times, in an era—how long ago it seems and what a good thing it is that this is no longer reliably the case!—when a thumbs-up or thumbs-down in that paper made all the difference to a book’s chances. But whether this was true or not in the most immediate sense, all