The process by which a young girl becomes a woman is often fraught with perils both immediate and nameless. Filter that through the nouveau roman, add a hefty dose of the gothic and a touch of surrealism, throw in a moribund Mitteleuropean backdrop and the looming banalities of midcentury American girlhood, and you might arrive at something resembling Susan Taubes’s novella, “Lament for Julia.”
Written in the early 1960s, when Taubes was living in New York and later in Paris, “Lament for Julia” remained unpublished during the author’s brief lifetime. (Taubes was 41 when she died by suicide just days after the 1969 publication of her second novel, “Divorcing.”) Éditions de Minuit had proposed publishing a French translation, on the recommendation of no less a figure than Samuel Beckett. But, in the U.S., “it seems undefined, implied Central European settings make American editors uneasy,” Taubes groused to a friend. This edition, a New York Review of Books Classic, includes an illuminating introduction by Francesca Wade, and is followed by a selection of Taubes’s short fiction: demented fairy tales and horror stories of hallucinatory intensity, with nary a happy ending among them.
Yet to read Taubes is to enter a singular imagination, caught between worlds Old and New, and wandering amid the ruins of belief and belonging that are common to both. It’s tempting to consider “Lament for Julia” as the author’s first, very oblique stab at an autobiography, before the more overtly personal “Divorcing.” But this book is more parody than memoir, reveling in the inevitable divisions and conflicts of selfhood.
Its narrator is a disembodied spirit — part guardian angel, part leering Humbert Humbert, yet suffused with quasi-maternal anxiety as it watches over a little girl’s gradual transition to adulthood. The girl, Julia Klopps, is the only child of elderly parents who sit surrounded by taxidermy, assuming “a rigid posture like wax dummies.” When “in this paralytic stupor, they seemed as much part of the still life of the interior as the stuffed heads of moose, grizzly bear, rhinoceros and entire specimens mounted along the wall and decorating the mantelpiece.”
There are shades of “Psycho” in the Klopps household, including a streak of absurdist comedy — but Julia, at least, is no murderer. Unless, that is, you count the way that a person’s growing up inevitably murders the child she once was.
During their “best years” together, Julia and the spirit are partners in crime, secret playmates in “a kind of child marriage.” After the dullness of the school day, “we roamed through the woods,” the spirit recounts. “I did not care if the mud splashed up her legs and the wind made riot in her hair. That was my Julia! A leaping faun. A forest nymph. A sister of the sodden earth.”
But everything changes with the onset of Julia’s “monthly flow.” The adolescent girl increasingly escapes the spirit’s clutches, abandoning her former playmate, who alternately whines like a spurned lover, chastises like a Prussian nanny and indulges in despair, like countless mothers of teenagers. (The mixture of envy and contempt also recalls nightmare visions of a Freudian superego.) For a time, the spirit struggles to free itself from the obsession with Julia, turning to revenge fantasies, or seeking solace in religion and cosmology. Still, it rallies to oversee a comic series of Julia’s affairs, heaving a sigh of relief when at last she marries and becomes a mother. Yet the spirit is mistaken in believing that these roles can contain her.
Susan Taubes was born Judit Zsuzsanna Feldmann in Budapest in 1928. Though her father was a psychoanalyst and her grandfather an eminent rabbi, she seems to have taken no comfort in either religion or Freudianism (her fiction is studded with psychoanalytic satires).
Father and daughter fled to the United States in 1939, leaving her mother, who had remarried, behind in Budapest. (Her Jewish mother somehow survived the war and later managed to emigrate to the United States; other family members died in the Holocaust.) Father and daughter settled in Rochester, N.Y.
But being American seems never to have quite stuck with Taubes. She remained divided, with a foot on both continents and a mind preoccupied with the world to come. Taubes studied philosophy as an undergraduate at Bryn Mawr and married at 21. She spent the next decade studying at the Sorbonne and Hebrew University, mingling in distinguished intellectual circles in Paris, Jerusalem and New York, while raising two children and pursuing a doctorate at Harvard/Radcliffe with a thesis on Simone Weil. She taught briefly at Columbia, but in her final years she moved away from academic pursuits to devote herself exclusively to fiction.
“Unassimilable” was how Susan Sontag described her friend. (Sontag was fascinated with both Susan and her husband, the intellectual impresario Jacob Taubes; Sontag’s story “Debriefing” contains a veiled portrait of a woman she called Julia, who takes her own life.) She fascinated, and — as this novella and these stories ably demonstrate — her work does, too.
In recent years, academics of varying stripes have sought to reclaim her. It’s tempting to think that feminism might have saved Susan Taubes, and to class her with that other motherless child Mary Shelley, whose veiled autobiography took the form of a portrait of a monster and his tortured creator. Taubes, the author of tantalizing fragments, might well have disdained these interpretations, waiting, like the heroine of her haunting story “The Last Dance,” for the arms of Death to embrace her.
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