The New York Review of Books - USA (2021-03-25)

46 The New York Review

mind remains impenetrable, and—
maybe because it is impenetrable to
him, too—he seems just as bewildered
and trapped as Tove. Sometimes she’s
able to write, sometimes not, and
sometimes she loses interest in writing
entirely. Between the drugs and with-
drawal she’s almost always sick. If the
situation becomes truly intolerable,
she thinks, she’ll call Geert Jørgensen,
a psychiatrist who helped her separate
from Viggo F., and tell him everything:
“I wouldn’t do it just for the sake of my
children, but also for the sake of the
books that I had yet to write.”
One night when Carl is asleep she
does call Jørgensen, but she’s incoher-
ent. “He’s putting water in the syringe,”
she says. At Jørgensen’s demand, she
puts sleepy Carl on the phone: “It’s
Geert Jørgensen, I say. He wants to talk
to you. Oh, is that it, he says quietly, rub -
bing his unshaven chin. Then my career
is ruined. He says it without reproach.”

If addiction is the ninth circle of

Tove’s hell, rehab is the tenth, and

the months of excellent care she re-

ceives entail unspeakable and vividly

described agony. But she is finally re-

leased with a tentatively clean bill of

health; Carl has fortunately left the

scene, but she will still have to be un-

flaggingly vigilant against temptation,

she is told.

Jabbe is ecstatic to have her back and

healthy, the garden blossoms, and the

children become accustomed to her

again. The idyll lacks a man, but during

Tove’s hospitalization Ebbe’s longtime

friend Victor has been stopping by to

visit the children, and to make a short

story shorter, Victor drops by again.

He adores Tove’s poetry; he’s wanted

to meet her for years; in her opinion,

he’s perfect, he’s beautiful; she’s never

believed in love at first sight before,

but now she does. Within a matter of

minutes they’ve vowed never to sepa-

rate, sent the children out to buy candy,

and fallen into bed: “What about your

wife? I asked. We have the law of love

on our side, he said. That law, I said,

kissing him, gives us the right to hurt

other people.”

Excuse me? Am I the only reader

who clutched her head here?

The story of one’s life—the story that

one tells oneself and others—is bound

to differ according to where one stands

when telling it, the season, the time of

day. Tove and Victor married in 1951,

as soon as she could divorce Carl, and

they stayed married for a good long

time—until 1973, three years before her

suicide. But she describes the mortal

struggle with relapses during that mar-

riage, when she returns to writing pre-

scriptions for herself and hunting down

doctors who will give her Demerol. Vic-

tor, for his part, threatens—eternal love

notwithstanding—that he’ll leave if she

doesn’t stay clean.

But during the 1960s and 1970s she

also suffered episodes that landed her

in psychiatric hospitals and survived

various suicide attempts. Some of this

was reported by the press, but it is

elided in the book. What is not elided

at all is terror. As it goes about its

unique concoctions, nature is indiffer-

ent to the torments suffered by any in-

dividual. In Ditlevsen it produced some

wildly enviable results, though none

that would ensure her safe passage

through life. The haste with which The

Copenhagen Trilogy concludes—its

declaration of the provisional triumph

of love—leaves one’s heart pounding.

It’s as if demons were nipping at the

author’s heels and she’s just barely

managed to throw a ragged red flag

over something fearsome looming in

her path—the intricate razor-wire rig-

ging of fate—both as a warning about

the future and as a bit of protection

against it. Q

LETTERS

INTEGRATION VS. ‘CHOICE’

To the Editors:

In her insightful review essay “The Dark
History of School Choice” [NYR, Janu-
ary 14], Diane Ravitch alludes to southern
states in the 1950s and 1960s that “enacted
voucher and tuition tax credit plans to sub-
sidize white families fleeing integrating
public schools.” Having been in a favorable
position to witness the carnage, I write to
amplify Ravitch’s insights at ground level.
In 1970 I became “field supervisor in
secondary English” for the practice teach-
ing of Miles College seniors. (Miles is a
historically Black college in Fairfield, Ala-
bama; my students were Black, I am not.)
The high school districts we visited, north
and west of Birmingham, were under court
mandate to integrate enrollment. Up to half
of their white students would transfer into
formerly all-Black schools, and up to half
the Black students into formerly all-white
schools. My students, assigned randomly to
formerly Black and formerly white schools,
observed an experienced English teacher
(their “mentor”) twice a week and taught
the class once themselves. My role was to
observe their teaching and then huddle with
the mentor for a collaborative evaluation.
Ravitch would be surprised by nothing I
saw. Every formerly all-Black school had re-
mained almost entirely Black as white par-
ents built Christian academies for their chil-
dren and organized campaigns for tax relief.
Severely under-enrolled, the public schools
lost state funding proportionally and then
local funding as whites voted down every
proposed school levy. At these decaying,
dispirited still-Black schools, my students
and I did our work and left, barely noticed.
At the formerly all-white schools, white
students remained a strong majority but
bitterly resented having to share space with
alien others. As public education was no
longer “theirs”—their bastion, their Ala-
bama, their America—they envied friends
attending Christian academies and pressed
their parents to sign them up too. The mere
existence of “choice”—the still-segregated
but conveniently religious alternative—sty-
mied the effort to integrate school and soci-
ety in Bull Connor’s backyard.
Inside the formerly all-white schools,
my students and I attracted toxic atten-
tion wherever we went. Buzzing cafeterias
and clattering hallways went ominously si-
lent when we arrived; in class, white kids
sneered, giggled, and shot hard stares. My
students—among the first Blacks ever to
teach white students in the Deep South—

were oddities, and I just didn’t belong: a

hippie outside agitator, likely a Communist,

carrying a briefcase likelier full of bombs or

dope than the notebooks and red pens of

my trade. Often the white administrators

made plain how unwelcome my students

and I were. One principal (in Hueytown, I

recall) snarled at a student teacher, “Girl,

don’t you ever mention the Thirteenth,

Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to

the Constitution in this school!”

My most serious problems were with

mentor teachers, all white women. Often

the review became a battle of wills barely

constrained by professional courtesy. The

teacher would proclaim unacceptable the

work of, say, Cleavonne Singleton (my best

practice teacher ever). Hauling out the dis-

trict guidebook, she’d glare at Cleavonne,

shake her head, and explain again “the way

we’ve always done it down here.” Finally bid-

den to speak, Cleavonne would defend doing

something in class besides grammar and pro-

nunciation drills, some work with expression

and ideas. This always evoked more glaring,

some clucking, and more headshaking.

Then there always came the threat:

“Professor Zorn, we know what works

down here. Cleavonne is going to have to

do it our way, or I won’t pass her practice

teaching.” Incensed, I would define “your

way” as school-site resegregation, isolating

Black kids in low track and special ed with-

out cause, just for speaking a recognizably

Black dialect. The mentor then would lec-

ture me huffily on what I was saying and

how I was saying it.

At that point I would excuse ourselves,

walk Cleavonne out to the hallway, and

think it through: How badly do you want

this credential? Where will you draw the

line? We talked until we agreed, then went

back in. Sometimes we apologized for get-

ting agitated. Sometimes we cited research

findings. Sometimes we gave strategic

ground, and sometimes we dug our heels in

and fought. Three times I threatened legal

action, naming U.W. Clemon as the NAACP

attorney in Birmingham ready to file for re-

lief. Ravitch again would not be surprised:

all three negotiations improved markedly

after U.W. entered the conversation.

Jeff Zorn

Palm Springs, California

WRITING WHILE PARENTING

To the Editors:

In her wonderfully affecting discussion of

women writers and their relation to being,

or to not being, mothers, Daphne Merkin

writes that “tackling the chores of mother-

hood while also trying to find the time and

concentration to write or sculpt or paint is

a supreme juggling act” [“‘A Very Lonely

Business,’” NYR, February 11]. About “the

decision to become a mother while pursuing

a career as a writer or artist” she quotes Vir-

ginia Woolf: “How any woman with a family

ever put pen to paper I cannot fathom.”

As a man who was single parent to his three

children while pursuing a career as a writer,

I can vouch. When I was in my early forties

(in the 1980s), my wife and the mother of

our three children left me and our children.

And so, like many women, I didn’t make a

“decision” to raise my children while pursu-

ing my career as a writer, but had the deci-

sion made for me. Consider—one example

among many—the career of Penelope Fitz-

gerald, who published all nine of her novels,

and all but one of her books of nonfiction,

only when, after her husband’s death, and

without any financial wherewithal, she be-

came the sole parent to their three children.

That Fitzgerald did not write her novels until

her children were grown may (or may not)

re inforce Merkin’s assertion that

the matter of motherhood and artistic

creativity remains an either/or ques-

tion, a deeply conflicted issue even

now, despite the fact that the advances

of feminism have helped women pursue

occupations and goals that were once

out of grasp. It is as though we have

not yet reconciled ourselves to the idea

that the one generative desire need not

necessarily preclude the other—that

we can, within reasonable bounds, have

it all, even if imperfectly, which creative

men have pretty much taken for granted

right along. [italics added]

Point well taken. Though there were

many days when I kept telling myself,

“Today you’re not a writer—you’re a par-

ent...Today you’re not a writer—you’re

a parent,” and though for many years my

youngest son would, on the second Sunday

in May, even when he was away in college,

wish me a happy Mother’s Day, it occurs to

me that I was able to juggle the compet-

ing demands of writing and parenting not

because I drew on some latent womanly/

maternal instincts, but because I was a

man—because my life as a twentieth- century

American man had given me a particular

and large sense of entitlement, a habit of be-

lieving and acting on the belief that I could

have and do anything I wanted if I wanted

it enough and worked hard enough to get

it. So, yes, I did take it for granted that,

“within reasonable bounds,” I could “have it

all.” And having it all meant I could continue

in my career as a writer while also continu-

ing to raise my children, though now—what

proved to be the great good fortune of my

life—doing so on my own, thereby gaining a

small measure of understanding about what

women’s lives, like Merkin’s and the women

she writes about, are often like.

Jay Neugeboren

New York City

BIRDS DO IT BETTER

To the Editors:

Buried in Robert O. Paxton’s otherwise fas-

cinating article about birds [“Intrepid Nav-

igators,” NYR, February 25] is a seriously

misleading statement about humans: “Birds

can also detect the earth’s magnetic field, a

sense that humans lack entirely.”

Humans do sense the earth’s field. As

early as 1963 correlation was found between

human mental disorder—represented by

increased admission to psychiatric wards—

and changes in the earth’s magnetic field

caused by solar disturbances; around the

same time, humans who lived in a field-free

bunker for extended periods responded

with disturbed biorhythms to the exclusion

of the earth’s field. Thirty years later re-

searchers found self-synthesized magnetic

particles in the human brain. In the interim

a flood of studies demonstrated that hu-

mans were affected by both the earth’s field

and, more significantly and negatively, by

artificial fields created by power lines, cell

phones, microwave antennas, and other

electronic technologies.

Joel Ray

Ithaca, New York

Robert O. Paxton replies:

Joel Ray is right that humans are now known

to be affected by magnetic fields, but ac-

tively orienting oneself by using the earth’s

magnetic field, as some birds can do but hu-

mans generally cannot, is a different matter.

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