Lilithographs
Loathsome Women. By Leopold Stein and Martha Alexander. (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 21s.)
Or else I thought her supernatural; As though a sterner eye looked through her eye At this foul world in its decline and fall. . .
THE numinousness of Dr. Stein's `Witches' is of narrower scope. Neurotic women, like neurotic men, destroy others as much as themselves. Para- sitical on the victim's vitality, they even sink those little white teeth into the jugular vein of the analyst himself. And Dr. Stein, still rubbing the sore spot on his throat occasionally, gives us four imaginary women, distilled from a number of real cases—a legitimate fictional device, it seems to me, and the authors have not quite gone too far in making their characters flat personifications of the formula (in this case Jungian). The main point missed is what a bore neurosis is : but then the appetite of the analyst for such things is, in a way, another of those unhealthy vampiric ones.
More interesting than the four women them- selves is this feeling Dr. Stein has about them— that they are possessed of and by destructive powers of an almost preternatural sort. It is true that each case is cleared up in the end by a set of professional tours de force, but these Victorian Happy Endings are flat and mechanical compared to the evocations of tension and unease which precede them.
And don't we all know it? When women get really loathsome it is in that demonic way. From the prehistoric Venuses to Brigitte Bardot, the numinous has always found its main focus in them : the alienated child or cat magnetism—`And particles of gold, like finest sand, Star vaguely their unfathomable eyes'; the beauty-cruelty girl, Nature or Cybele, who appears in a vulgarised ver- sion in tobacconists' windows offering French lessons; the celestial harmony of that `glad kind- ness'; the full-breasted Earth goddess or the small- breasted naiad: it is all the stuff of transcendence. The Witch, it appears, is the price we have to pay for the others. We can be thankful they are so rare.
ROBERT CONQUEST
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