Hindsight is not just twenty-twenty, it is usually invidious. And even if it weren’t in this case, I want to manumit Taubes from her admirers. She was far more than the doomed artist, or some early recondite precursor of Renata Adler (though in a certain sense she was indeed that as well). Yet it is difficult not to read most if not all of Taubes’s work—the only obvious exceptions being African Myths and Tales and a book of Native American myths called The Storytelling Stone, which she compiled between 1963 and 1965—as episodes in a series of rehearsals in prose of her own death. She had always been fascinated by the memoir from beyond the grave—the title, in fact, of Chateaubriand’s masterpiece of that genre—and her work, beginning with her university thesis on Simone Weil, her still-unpublished novella called A Lament for Julia, and the handful of stories she produced, has death as its driving force. Even in reviews, the leitmotif of the grave is given pride of place, as when she wrote about Jean Genet’s play The Blacks and called her review “On Going to One’s Own Funeral,” though the play is broadly about white racism, and specifically about a murder and a trial, at the conclusion of which there is death but no funeral per se. Later, a revised version of this review would appear in The Tulane Drama Review under the more appropriate title “White Masks Fall.” The editors’ choice in that case was surely correct. But despite what one presumes was the obvious commercial rationale—Divorcing may not be the most inviting of titles, but as Taubes’s editors surely pointed out to her, To America and Back in a Coffin is a profoundly off-putting one—her original title actually does justice to the book she wrote, if not necessarily the book her editors wished she had written.
It is important to be careful. Divorcing is not only about the end of a marriage and a woman’s struggle to extricate herself from the various holds, psychic, sexual, and otherwise, that her husband continues to try to maintain over her, but neither is it only a novel about death. To the contrary, the book assembles several narratives under one novelistic roof, sometimes masterfully, sometimes unsteadily. In it, the relatively straightforward, almost memoiristic story of the attempt of the narrator, Sophie Blind—Taubes had a weakness for giving her characters somewhat didactic names—to extricate herself from her marriage fades in and out of a modernist conjuring act in which what is dream and what is reality are made deliberately unclear. The book actually begins with a section in which Sophie informs the reader that she is dead and that only thanks to this can she tell the truth. Alive, she insists, she just wanted happiness, adding that all women do (for all its originality and the antinomianism of its narrator, Divorcing can be jarringly of its time). But dead she can care about power and about truth. And with that prologue, the novel begins in earnest.
Sophie, of course, is not dead, not in the next part of the book anyway. This first section of the novel is an anatomization of Sophie’s marriage to Ezra, and flits from parts of its beginning to parts of its end. For those who remember Jacob Taubes, or have read the many recollections that have been written about him, the portrait of Ezra is an uncannily accurate description of him in all of his charm, intelligence, cruelty, and priapism. The man who would later write boastingly to a friend, “I am impossible,” was just that and worse, especially toward women. In the novel, Ezra berates Sophie, then tells her that he loves her for precisely the qualities he is berating her for, then berates her again. Meanwhile Sophie is tallying up the legacies of her marriage all the while imagining her own death, at one point fantasizing that she has died and that Ezra and her lover Nicholas have come to identify her body and as they wait exchange erudite views about Judaism, Heidelberg University, and a painting in Chartres Cathedral. Such exchanges are everywhere in Divorcing. It is in many ways a novel about erudite people written for erudite people, to the point that Sophie notes that when she spanks her son Joshua in front of Nicholas, the way that her lover formulates his distress over her having done so is with a reference to Franz Kafka.
It should be too much, above all for a reader in the 2020s when the large consensus among even non-woke academic intellectuals is that these forms of erudition and this inventory of references mask all sorts of oppressive structures, and badly need, as the jargon of the day has it, to be interrogated. And even for the reader who is indifferent or hostile to such contemporary proscriptions, and I’d wager that there are many more of these than are willing to show their heads above the ideological parapet at this particular moment, the range and sheer quantity of intellectual and philosophical references are likely to be overwhelming. This should not be confused with pretentiousness. Divorcing is a novel overflowing with arcana, but its portrait of psychological pain is so searing, so universally recognizable, and Sophie’s efforts not to succumb to it so convincing, that the cultural references are more like background music than barricades, background music to a funeral that is also a movable feast. Contemplating not just her former husband and her former lover but her own family from beyond the grave, Sophie is sardonic. “I am dead,” she comments. “They can all relax and celebrate.”
To the
