 |
|
|
|
Reviews of books by some of the hottest writers working today, exclusive author interviews, literary news and criticism.
 |
|
|
|
|
Fill out your email address
to receive our newsletter!
|
|
|
|
|
 Get new reviews the instant they are posted to the site with RSS
What is RSS?
|
|
| Search Box (type in author's last name or one key word) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
<img src = "images/intertwined.jpg"align = "left"> In this book the usual too-muchness finds complications in the effort to recount the backgrounds of the Meads and the Benedicts simultaneously. The focus is lax and there is a feminist preoccupation that threatens to engulf the subject.
Reviewed by Bob Williams
Intertwined Lives: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict and Their Circle
by Lois W. Banner
Knopf 2003, ISBN 0-679-45435-7, $30.00, xii + 540 pages
Biography is a surly art. It does not reward its practitioners who are merely able to organize material and sift evidence. Thus few biographers can match the artistic brilliance of a Boswell or an Ellmann and the biographer that ventures on a multiple subject biography is bold indeed.
Lois W. Banner is the author of five previous books, all on subjects that fall into the category of women's studies. Her preoccupation with this area is very apparent in this book.
The cost to the reader of a biography is endurance of the preliminary description of the family background. However unavoidable this is, it is often overdone and of more interest to the writer than to the reader. In this book the usual too-muchness finds complications in the effort to recount the backgrounds of the Meads and the Benedicts simultaneously. The focus is lax and there is a feminist preoccupation that threatens to engulf the subject.
Even when Banner focuses better and tells us about Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, there are snags. The paintings of the sybils by Michelangelo had great importance to Benedict but Banner casts so many speculations at the reason that her explanation succumbs to its indeterminacy and collapses.
Even on the happier basis that occurs when she separates the narratives of Mead and Benedict, the promise succumbs to strange fumbling. Benedict sees herself as a Theseus in need of an Ariadne to lead her from a labyrinth. Banner makes the following excursion: "Or did the reference to Ariadne refer to an actual woman, to a lover that she had lost? A letter from Ruth to Stanley Benedict during these years mentions someone named Jean, with whom she went to a ranch to pick pears and to listen to Beethoven and Mozart. The sensuality of these activities - their association with leisure and pleasure - suggests that Ruth escaped from her regular life with a female companion, but Stanley's reference is the only hint of such episodes."
"Stanley's reference" is certainly a clumsy way to describe a reference that was in a letter written, not by him, but by Ruth Benedict. (It helps the reader little that Banner will sometimes write "Ruth" and sometimes write "Benedict.") But it is conspicuous how from a bare mention Banner can sketch out an entire situation that surely demands more of a basis. "The sensuality of these activities" is faulty. Is Banner talking about listening to Beethoven and Mozart or about picking pears? The haphazard choice of words and phrases appears throughout and results in fuzzy prose that tells me that Banner has not troubled to do that work which a reader has a right to expect.
But Banner's description of the society of the 1920s is good and here her feminist preoccupation - elsewhere something of a nuisance - becomes a valuable investigative tool. She draws on a well-organized and fascinating picture of the status of women in the United States after the Great War. She successfully relates this general background to the more particular situation of Mead as a Barnard student. Out of this adroit performance the first meeting of Mead and Benedict has great impact.
Sometimes - like Gonzalo in The Tempest - her end forgets its beginning. On one page she writes of the relaxed attitude towards Jews in Germany and the United States during the last years of the nineteenth century. But some thirty pages later she writes of Boas: "He came to the United States [in 1886] because of growing anti-Semitism in Germany." She further details his early experiences in the United States where he was unable to secure a position because of anti-Semitism.
She derives much biographical information from Benedict's poems. This is a dangerous game and her interpretations are tedious to read with her constant tendency to say too much in a way that condescends to the reader in an objectionable manner. Benedict's poems are, by the way, very enjoyable.
But Banner is at her best in her examination of the controversy over Mead's research in Samoa. Her manner is judicious and her conclusions carry conviction. Despite criticisms - some of which Mead acknowledged as just - the value of her work is not seriously diminished. Banner further draws an interesting picture of Mead as scientist whose private sexual proclivities - she was bisexual and Benedict was homosexual; they were friends constantly and sometime lovers - determined the contours of her professional positions.
Banner is not at home with classical antiquity. She refers to the Latin poet Lucretius as Greek. Euripides - spelled correctly in the text - appears in an endnote (that invention of the devil) as Euripedes. In the case of Tiresias she writes that Zeus struck him blind. There are two stories to explain his blindness in neither of which was Zeus the cause.
The book ends with Benedict's death in 1948. Mead did not die until 1978 so there is a bad gap in the book's professed intention. The close is flat as if the author felt guilty of shirking her duty and offered a counterfeit and unconvincing emotionalism in the last paragraph to cover her omission.
Although I have been remorseless in describing faults and flaws and although I found it a hard book to read (at one point I brushed one of my cats rather than continue reading), it has merits and I have described them also. If you are interested in this period of our history and in an important area of its intellectual life, you will find much in this book. Otherwise, it has little to offer to the general reader.
For more information visit: Intertwined Lives
About the Reviewer: Bob Williams is retired and lives in a small town with his wife, dogs and a cat. He has been collecting books all his life, and has done freelance writing, mostly on classical music. His principal interests are James Joyce, Jane Austen and Homer. His writings, two books and a number of short articles on Joyce, can be accessed at: <a href="http://fracman.home.mchsi.com/"" target="_blank">http://fracman.home.mchsi.com/
|
|
|
|
|
|
