Before November 1969, Susan Taubes' name had never appeared in the New York Times. In the space of a week, however, we found it there twice, in two different sections. The first time, on Sunday 2, it was in the Books pages: Hugh Kenner had devoted four columns to Divorcing, Taubes's first novel has just been published by Random House, a text generally of little interest to the critic which, at best, perhaps hid behind the pale imitation and the tics of the “feminine literature”, “the shadow of a novel” more traditional, deserving of publication. The second time was seven days later, on the 9th, in the news: the daily mentioned the suicide of a woman, found drowned on Long Island, “identified as Ms. Susan Taubes, a Hungarian-born teacher and writer whose first novel was published last week.”
“Life and death of Susan Taubes” could be summarized if the story had stopped there, but on the one hand it would be to reduce it a little quickly to that of an author destroyed by a bad review (Taubes, who (this was not his first attempt, struggled with depression throughout his existence) and on the other hand consider death – even if it were tragically seductive, like that of a Sylvia Plath or a Virginia Woolf – like the end of all things. Because Susan Taubes had obviously not said her last word when she threw herself into the Atlantic Ocean on November 6, 1969, at the age of 41. Rediscovered in the United States when New York Review of Books republished it in 2020, she had for herself and post mortem all the praise that she had not received during her lifetime: avant-garde, original, daring (until the New York Times, of course, who this time devoted a laudatory paper to this book “notoriously” published in the same newspaper half a century earlier).
“I was coming out of the hairdresser’s”
*Beware of the Dead affirms through its return the trajectory of Susan Taubes – retrospectively compared to Susan Sontag (they were friends) or Anne Sexton – because death is sometimes only the beginning. Divorcing, which reaches us at the start of winter under the title Lives and deaths of Sophie Blind (note the plural), translated and prefaced by Jakuta Alikavazovic, does not tell anything else. To begin with, Sophie Blind, the narrator, is dead herself, and this is how: “I died on a Tuesday afternoon, hit by a car while I was crossing Avenue George-V. It was raining heavily. I was coming out of the hairdresser.” The rest tells us that she was hit by a car. “Woman decapitated in the 8th arrondissement”, announcement France Evening the day after. Thus Sophie immediately loses her head, a pure spirit who will nonetheless be in these pages body and soul, capable of traveling in space and time and of escaping, everywhere “free woman”, with costumes that were cut too quickly.
Who is Sophie Blind, née Landsmann? Her husband, Erza Blind, who refuses her a divorce, thinks she is “an irresponsible, childish woman, seething with malice and resentment, driven by impossible dreams, devoid of any connection to reality”. As a child, her mother thought she was a “funny little girl”. By getting to know her, we could say of her: impetuous, changeable. “You are not one woman, you are many women,” murmurs elsewhere a man with a mustache in a sort of parody of analysis and we note it as if it were a clue. Susan Taubes and Sophie Blind had a lot in common. Both were Jewish. Both were daughters of psychoanalysts and granddaughters of rabbis. Both had grown up in Budapest before the war. Both divorced – Sophie from Erza Blind, Susan (born Judit Zsuzanna Feldmann in 1928) from Jacob Taubes, German Jewish philosopher and controversial man.
“A radical of the rupture”
As the original title indicates, it is a question of a separation and the long road to achieve it, but the word “divorcing”, whose suffix in English expresses the action, the movement, goes further. “Sophie Blind is a radical of the rupture, writes Jakuta Alikavazovic in his preface. Everything goes: marriage, indeed. But also patriarchy, philosophy, time, origins and even the very idea of being a “person”.” What Susan Taubes divorces from, for her part, is a certain tradition of the straight-line narrative novel. Like Renata Adler of Outboard (published in France in 2014 by l'Olivier), it undulates, multiplies the means of transport, fragments, varies the tones, the narrative forms, and seems to constantly reroll the dice – even if it means losing us along the way (and that's undoubtedly the idea: any more than we can make a person entirely intelligible, the novel cannot exist without chasms and breaks). We will in fact understand one chapter, less another, more the next, etc. We will sometimes legitimately have our minds elsewhere, we will sometimes feel more accompanied. The dream is a recurring motif in the book and it is with this cubist logic that it must be approached – and towards the end, this semblance of instructions (it could be Schnitzler and it is Taubes): “She who rose is no more me than she who dreams.”
If it wasn't clear, Lives and deaths of Sophie Blind is not an easy text. However, it becomes much more accessible in its last third, when the time comes for childhood and the story of the years in Budapest, before the narrator fled Hungary with her father. To this extent, the novel functions a bit like a Freudian psychoanalysis: in reverse, the twists and turns of adulthood being understood in the light of the knots of youth. Sophie Blind (blind in English, and one of the challenges will be to open your eyes) “must reproduce the life of [s]”to mother”, who had divorced and started a new life with another man. Sophie has three children (Susan Taubes had two, it would be wrong to over-impress them altogether). To her son Joshua, who tells her that the world belongs to men, she replies: “Come on…” But the son insists: “When you think about everything one man can do, I mean…” And the mother replied: “But Joshua, do you imagine yourself still living? Really?… It’s wonderful.”
