Mothers and Masochists

By Melvin Maddocks

DOWN AMONG THE WOMEN

by FAY WELDON 216 pages. St. Martin's Press. $6.50.

As Lit. 73 lecturers like Tom Wolfe keep saying, any number of mod subjects are better served by the New Journalism than by that creaky old party, the novel. But the condition of women does not happen to be one of them.

Even readers who agree with the parajournalists of Women's Liberation are often embarrassed to find their positions taken with so much self-pity and self-righteousness, with such bloated excesses of tractarian rhetoric. In stark contrast stand the lean, sharp novels of British writers like Edna O'Brien and Margaret Drabble, and American fictionists like Joan Didion.

To those names must now be added (on the British roll call) Fay Weidon, novelist, playwright, and not incidentally mother of three. In her brief, brilliant, occasionally comic second novel she has squeezed two decades and three generations of Englishwomen into a corner far too tight for good manners.

Feminist. The oldest generation is brassily represented by Wanda--44 when the narrative begins in 1950. She is "a large, heavy-boned, unpretty woman with a weathered skin, and eyes too deep and close together for their owner to be taken as anything other than troublesome." A 1930s-style feminist --and ex-Communist who left her artist-husband when he began to go commercial--Wanda virtuously teaches her daughter the credo of what used to be quaintly called "free love."

Scarlet serves Mother Wanda right by disobeying with stubborn chastity, then becoming pregnant the night she loses her virginity. With her friends, she constitutes a kind of neither-nor generation. Rebellious against their parents, rebellious against their children, they are rebellious, above all, against the men they off-and-on love, and yet they still seem unable to organize their lives without them. Weldon men are talkers rather than doers. The aesthetes end up in ad agencies, the back-to-nature idealists wind up turning a profit on battery-stimulated hens. Seldom, if ever, do they make decent lovers.

"Men!" Wanda cries, and "the force of the expletive shatters even her." But men, finally, are not the enemy. Mrs. Weldon can even pity them. "Man seems not so much wicked as frail," she writes, "unable to face pain, trouble and growing old." What she cannot forgive is nature. "A good woman," she concludes with supreme bitterness, "knows that nature is her enemy. Look at what it does to her." Down Among the Women is a passionate diatribe against the cruel specialities of female mortality, against a "terrible world, where chaos is the norm, life a casual exception to death" -- and the listing goes on -- "where the body is something mysterious in its workings, which swells, bleeds, and bursts at random."

For girls -- some of them middle-aged -- who have not lived in this messy world, the book offers only irony and scorn, the scorn of the combat veteran for the rear-echelon soldier. Yet Author Weldon feels a kind of terror in the presence of the scarcely helpless woman of the future, as projected by Scarlet's daughter Byzantia. Condescending to her mother's generation, Byzantia sees men as the symptom "of a fearful disease from which you all suffered" With Byzantia, "nothing is hidden, nothing is feared. " Everything is discussed -- that is, "rendered harmless" -- and then "simply forgotten."

Cool, cool Byzantia, Mrs. Weldon decides, "is a destroyer" in a generation created to destroy forever a certain sort of female image. A bit melodramatic, even scifi, perhaps. Yet beside Fay Weldon, all the Germaine Greers, all the Kate Milletts, all the non-fictionists of Women's Liberation pale into abstract theory.

-- Melvin Maddocks

"I get rid of all my unpleasantness -- my vision of reality, that is -- in my writing. That lets me live in the myth of a cozy and pleasant everyday existence."

As she says that, Fay Weldon's smile couldn't be pleasanter. A tall, tousled blonde with ample, maternal proportions, she seems the picture, if not the caricature, of a busy 41-year-old wife. Her children are aged 18, nine and two, and she is immersed in the chores and joys of middle-class domesticity.

The Weldon manner, however, is basically deceptive and only partly because Housewife Weldon is also a novelist and a well-known TV writer. The author, for example, has supreme literary confidence. Not a whit daunted by the inevitable comparison between her novel and Mary McCarthy's The Group, she believes Down Among the Women is superior. "Mary McCarthy's girl problems seem to be unrelated to the boring problems of ordinary women," she says. "What I write seems to be the common experience, rooted in children-washing-shopping-cancer-death and all the rest of the messy things women are caught up in. I like women, and I am aware of their wasted potential." Her aim is to help recondition women so that they no longer "believe that if they don't get married it's a dreadful moral sin."

Chauvinist. For years Fay Weldon was anything but confident. She is a doctor's daughter who was brought up in New Zealand. After her parents' divorce, her mother brought her back to England and a period of "hardship and deprivation." She won a scholarship to St. Andrews University, where, oddly enough, she read economics while failing English exams, graduating to a job in advertising and eventual psychoanalysis. "Scarlet is a portrait of me when I was younger," she readily confesses, "a mess--oh yes, totally and completely. I messed up my life hopelessly until I met my husband." He is a London antique dealer named Ronald Weldon, whom she happily describes as a male chauvinist. "I'm very devoted to him, and I couldn't actually live with any other kind," she explains. "I'm a masochist that way."

She tries to get through the domestic chores by midmorning, and then turns to the typewriter, only to combat phone calls and visits (frequently from "runaway wives and their troubled husbands"). Though Down Among the Women has had considerable critical success in England, Fay Weldon cannot see herself becoming writer-activist of the Women's Liberation movement. She does refuse to wear a wedding ring, regarding it as a symbolic insult to other women, but she does not subscribe to all the secondary rituals of Women's Lib. For one thing, she thoroughly enjoys being called "Mrs."

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