“Divorcing”—the only published book by Susan Taubes, who died shortly after its release, in 1969—is, as the title suggests, about a divorce. But it is also about the problem of being.
Sophie Blind is dead. Her head was cut clean off her shoulders as she made a dash for a taxi and was hit by a car. She doesn’t seem to mind, though it is a little awkward. “I knew I was dead when I came,” she admits, “but I didn’t want to be the first to say it.” Besides, the event didn’t leave much of a mark: “in less than half an hour,” she informs us, “normal traffic was resumed.
But first, “Divorcing” is about divorcing, in the plain sense. Sophie Blind is leaving her husband, Ezra, a Jewish scholar of flexible intellect, domineering personality, and unsatisfiable libido. They have three children, partly because in pregnancy Sophie feels happy. But the children also bring about the collapse of the marriage. Sophie can accommodate herself to Ezra’s erratic, abusive, and sometimes violent behavior, but she cannot allow him to act that way with her kids.
It was beautiful to be always busy, harried; being used up, this was what life was all about, she was becoming almost transparent. But now she is stuck with herself, a grubby phantom that fattens on her days. It’s like the unmarried girl, her hair all snarls, big as a house—the old shapeless woe, panting for a man to find some use for her. Rubbish. She was the best student in . . . She played Salome in . . . And if not for Ezra, she’d be . . . Rubbish.
“Divorcing” resists placing responsibility for its heroine’s feeling of dislocation purely on historical events. Sophie’s plight is not the fault of the Holocaust, of her early emigration from Hungary to the United States, though these are, of course, contributing factors. The trouble is that her father married the wrong woman—he should have married her mother’s sister—and so Sophie is the child that shouldn’t have happened.
Art is one attempt to evade death: make a monument to what is true and beautiful, and hope it will outlast you. Children are another attempt, perhaps more sensible than art. And then there’s sex , which offers its participants the ability to forget about death and, in moments of self-erasure, accept it, too. But orgasm lasts a few seconds, and children a few decades. People are still reading poems from thousands of years ago.
In “Divorcing,” one solution to the wrongness of life is to write a book. “In a book,” Sophie thinks, “she knew where she was.” But the book itself, as a project, remains vague. Sophie is never writing it, only about to. Her relationship to intellectualism, meanwhile, is frankly antagonistic. “I find a woman who can take philosophy seriously after twenty-five pathetic,” Sophie remarks to a man attempting to woo her.
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