The Baltimore Sun from Baltimore, Maryland • 126

10F AMIS A tPi I tM I MiNMtN I THE SUN SUNDAY, MARCH 81987; BOOKS i Rich has closed 'the gap between poet and woman' r9 her role as mother of three sons and toward a closer Identification with the feminist community: "To write directly and overtly as a woman, out of a woman's body and experience, to take women's existence seriously as theme and source for art. was something I had been hungering to do, needing to do, all my writing life. It placed me nakedly face to face with both terror and anger; It did Indeed imply the breakdown of the world as I had always known It. .1 felt for the first time the closing of the gap between poet and woman." While there more truth In Ms. Rich's essays than a white male reviewer Is comfortable admitting to.

there are occasional problems of intensity and focus. "Compulsory Heterosexuallty and Lesbian Existence" argues an Issue that Is controversial even among ardent feminists, while her promising and provocative essay on Elizabeth Bishop. "The Eye of the Outsider," uses clunky antl-capltallst rhetoric to fit Bishop Into a category she found distasteful while alive. But the essays "Split at the Root." "Resisting Amnesia" and "Blood. Bread, and Poetry" are Invaluable for men and women who wish to live lives that are self-assigned.

"Your Native Land, Your Life" represents Adrienne Rich at her finest as a poet. Although her poetry has already brought her many distinctions, including a National Book Award In 1974, all of it seems work in progress when compared with the recent poems. But this is not surprising for a poet who believes It her responsibility "to keep searching for teachers who can help me widen and deepen the sources and examine the ego that speaks In my poems not for political but for Ignorance, solipsism, laziness, dishonesty, automatic writing." Nevertheless, In a poet who Is so strongly politically committed, It Is rare to find poetry full of Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985. Adrienne Rich. Norton.

238 pages. $7.95. Your Native Land, Your Life. Adrienne Rich. Norton.

1 13 pages. $6.95. In reviewing Adrienne Rich's second book of poems. The Diamond Cutters," nearly 30 years ago. Randall Jarrell wrote, "Everybody thinks young things young, Sleeping Beauty beautiful and the poet whom we see behind the clarity and gravity of Miss Rich's poems cannot help seeming to us a sort of princess In a fairy tale." Later on In the review Jarrell remarked that liking Adrienne Rich "for what she Is Is a way of liking her even better for what she may become." Even a critic and poet as perceptive as Randall Jarrell could not have Imagined that In the almost 30 years since his review Adrienne Rich would become one of the most articulate, compassionate and unswerving voices behind the feminist movement.

Taken together, her two most recent books. "Your Native Land, Your Life," a collection of poems, and "Blood. Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985." chart much of the radical and uncompromising trajectory that led Ms. Rich away, as she writes In the essay "What Does a Woman Need to "from the world the Fathers taught me to see, and had rewarded me for seeing," and toward the world "that came through the eye of the outsider." As an outsider Ms. Rich was "able to do the work I truly wanted to do, live the kind of life I truly wanted to live, Instead of carrying out the assignments I had been given as a privileged woman and a token." In the title essay, Ms.

Rich writes movingly about the changes that took place In her as she moved away from her marriage of 17 years and so much luminous and retracting language. LyrK cal moments such as this one from "Edges" are frequent In the volume: "Outside In the world where so much Is possible sunrise rekindles and the kingfisher the living kingfisher, not that flash of vision darts where the creek drags her wetness over stump and stone." One feels that In these poems the "clarity and gravity" Jarrell noticed in Ms. Rich's earlier poems have returned to her work and that once again, to use Jarrell's phrase, her language Is "easy and limpid, close to water, close to air." But, of course. Adrienne Rich does not return In these new poems as the fairy princess or Sleeping Beauty: rather, she comes as that woman she describes In "Split at the Root," who has seen life from many "disconnected angles: white, Jewish, anti-Semite, racist, anti-racist, once-married, lesbian, middle-class, feminist, expatriate Southern-. er." When one reads this list and thinks how successfully Ms.

Rich has worked through the differ-' ent aspects of her life and has brought them together In her poems, one realizes that she has worked extremely hard to disprove W. B. Yeats' lines, "the Intellect of man Is forced to choose Perfection of the life or of the work." In her Insistence not to choose one over the other, Ms. Rich Is able to tell us that "the worst affliction" is not to be "forbidden pencil and paper," but "the worst affliction is not to know who you are or have been." MICHAEL COLLIER Mr. Collier is a Baltimore writer and poet whose latest book, "The Clasp and Other Poems," was published by Wesleyan University Press.

Adrienne Rich has fulfilled her early promise in an unexpected way. Book publishing becomes just another business She lives in a world of dreams, '50s style publishing's earlier era had many regrettable aspects, some of the worst of which persist to this day: Royalties still are calculated archaically only twice a year, and then are "belatedly paid to au- thors." Distribution of books "remains the Incredible mess it has always been, and books are sold to the retail trade in basically the same way they were in the 18th century." For all of the supposedly hard-nosed, bottom-line mentality of today's publishers, books "are still thrown on the market with little or no preliminary research, a minimum of advertising and promotion In most cases, and are left to sink or swim; the retailer still has the privilege of returning what he cannot sell." It is astonishing to learn that nearly 80 percent of published books today are financial failures. The blockbusters. In other words, carry the load. Consequently, as Dr.

Tebbel writes, some observers believe that the publishing Industry's steady tilt toward mass production and consumption "is a good thing, if only because It helps to stem the growing tide of illiteracy in the nation Better to have readers who buy only mass market books, it is said, than to have the total number of readers reduced to a mere trickle And while Dr. Tebbel laments the fact that the big bookstore chains "virtually determine what will be published" because, in part, every publishing house "quite naturally wants to sell as many of its titles as possible to them," nevertheless "there are still thousands of personal bookstores where books are looked upon as something more than profitable pieces of meat." and about 14,000 small publishing houses still produce books with potential for only modest sales. Even some of the larger houses are willing to gamble now and then on an unknown author or a first novel, he writes, "to keep the stream of literature flowing." It should be remembered, apropos of Russell Baker's observation about the publishing behemoths, that Mr. Baker's own Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, "Growing Up." was an atypical success, published by a small house (that has since gone bankrupt), and boosted to Its heights by great reviews, word-of-mouth praise and small booksellers, who promoted It. William Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize-winning "Ironweed" was turned down by a dozen or so publishers, and only reconsidered by a major publisher after novelist Saul Bellow went to bat for It; and Marylander Tom Clancy's "The Hunt for Red October," Improbably published by the Naval Institute Press (and given an even more Improbable boost by President Reagan, who praised it publicly), is now published by a big commercial house In New York.

"Between Covers" Is a one-volume condensation of Dr. Tebbel's earlier, four-volume "History of Book Publishing In the United States." It brings together the biographical and anecdotal material about the publishers themselves and the houses they founded with a briefer, overall view of the industry from Colonial days to the present. He concentrates on so-called "trade" publishing the printing of popular books, which. In reality, Is only 20 percent of the industry. His writing Is smooth, clear and unadorned, but his tone tends to become monotonous at times, as well as tedious, with its seemingly endless recitation of names, dates and titles.

Despite that, the dutiful, persistent reader occasionally Is rewarded by droll Insight or charming anecdote. For example, an overriding concern with profits Is not an entirely modern development. Dr. Tebbel notes that the pioneering publisher Daniel Apple-ton wrote'to his son and protege William In 1835: "The only misgiving I have regarding your success after I am gone, arises from my having noticed in you some symptoms of literary taste." NEIL A. GRAUER Mr.

Grauer is the author of "Wits Sages," a book about columnists. Between Covers: The Rise and Transformation of American Book Publishing. John Tebbel. Oxford University Press. 514 pages.

$24.95. Columnist Russell Baker of The New York Times (and formerly a reporter for The Sun) once privately observed that publishing houses in New York had all gone mad. They are only Interested In a proposed book, he said, If It can later be transformed by merchandising wizards "into T-shirts, lunch boxes and bubblegum." The final chapters of "Between Covers." John lebbel's history of 350 years of American book publishing, seem to bear Mr. Baker out. "Many publishers today are little better than paper salesman." according to Dr.

Tebbel, a professor emeritus of journalism at New York University. "What is between the covers hardly matters as long as it tan be sold by modern marketing techniques." Dr. Tebbel says that no industry In America has changed as dramatically as publishing In the last 35 years. In the past, he writes, book publishing even among the large, prestigious houses in New York "was like a small town where everyone knew everyone else and felt a kinship that was not found in ordinary commercial enterprises." Publishers shared "a love of the printed page, the book," and even when a book was not a financial success, which was the case far more often than not. there still was "seldom regret for liaving published it." Today, however, "sales rather than merit" Is the controlling factor in the industry.

The greatest postwar change has been "the Imposition of the eprporate mentality on a business dramatically opposed to It in the past. Money and power, the key words of the '80s, have never been consistent With the character of book publishing until now," Dr. Tebbel writes. 'y This is not the sentimental view of a dewy-yed academician, pining for the halcyon days of yesteryear. Dr.

Tebbel readily acknowledges that Bobby's Girl. Rochelle Ratner. Col-fee House. 1 16 pages. $9.95.

want to be Bobby's girl. I want to be Bobby's girl. That's the most important thing And If you don't remember this song by Marcie Blaine, or the early "Mickey Mouse Club" on black-and-white television, or the real "American Bandstand" with Dick Clark presiding out of Philadelphia, or an oldie but goodie Rochelle Ratner has missed the evening Alan Freed got cut off the air at WABC in New York, for playing "Happy, Happy Birthday, Baby" on Pearl Harbor day, well, then, you're probably too young for "Bobby's Girl." But If you're of that "certain age," you'll understand "Bobby's Girl," the anorexic first novel by the poet who is executive editor of the American Book Review. It would probably take more time to listen to the top 40 songs listed chronologically at the beginning of each of Ms. Ratner's eight chapters than It does to read this volume, but if the years 1959-1970 don't seem antediluvian to you, and if "Dream Lover," "Downtown" and "Leaving on a Jet Plane" evoke a few memories, you're in business.

The nameless heroine, who Is always referred to as "she" or "her" (even by her parents, which hurts), went from age 10 to age 20 In course of the narrative. She was not always Invited to the best parties. So she made "friends" with the people, to whom she felt closest: Bobby Ry" dell, Frankie Avalon, Annette Funl- cello and Fabian. i "She was living In one room of her parents' house, keeping the curtains drawn and the door locked, eating her meals alone. And yet she was supposed to build a house for her parents now that she was mous." She wasn't famous, of course, ex-.

cept, perhaps, to shrinks in the Atlantic City-Ocean City-Philadelphia-area. Her parents saw to it that she consulted doctors who might exor-; else her phantoms, but it didn't' work. She did some California dreaming and ended up on the Coast with relatives. She was out of school, disillusioned and wanting to be leaving on a jet plane but for where? There are problems. I'm still try-', ing to find the two hours that are lost between the time Uncle Steve drops our heroine off to see her shrink in Philly and the time he picks her up.

And was psychoanalysis truly so primitive two decades ago? But the atmosphere is there, all the time. Our heroine is a survivor. KAREN MONSON Ms. Monson is a Baltimore writer. 'Laundry' includes dirty linen, wounded characters lidwives populate figes' feminist novel The Seven Ages.

Eva Figes. Panthe rs on. 186 pages. si4.yt. he phrase "feminist historical in might seem to be 'self-contradictorv.

After all. ifftist 'historical novels deal with father's deathbed bequest, a detective's report of his mother's long-past liaison with Duffle's father. At this point, the novel becomes explosive: Randy, searching for more men in his mother's life, stumbles upon a social and professional error perpetrated by his father's grandfather, which destroyed two generations of McCalla men and reverberate still in the tragic life of his friend Babs. The book's early episodes now set off echoes of their own, some of them foreshadowing the end, others functioning as elegies before the fact. There's more than a hint of Hemingway here, in substance rather than style.

The characters all are wounded somehow: Crispen, and then Lolly, visibly handicapped, become exemplars of grace under pressure. For the men, in general, mascu- Unity is in question; for the women, sexuality Is a problem. And for the narrator, the now-grown Randy, the absence of father becomes the basis for his discovery of self and the foundation for his independence. GERRI KOBREN Ms. Kobren writes for The Sun.

Family Laundry. Dorie Friend. Beaufort. 300 pages. $17.95.

In the McCalla family compound in a wealthy Pittsburgh neighborhood, the family laundry is hung out to dry In concrete pits so that the neighbors can't see the flapping underwear. Unmentionables of other kinds are also well hidden, and It is not till Randall McCalla is in his 20s, fatherless In fact as well as In effect, that he begins to discover, and air. the dirty linen. Author Dorie Friend takes his time In getting Randy to that point. For the first 100 or so pages, in fact, the book seems little more than a series of vignettes from the growing-up years of a group of little rascals.

Randy's father is emotionally distant, ineffectual and alcoholic; his mother is prim, proper and, we later learn, adulterous. His best friends are the butler's daughter Babs, whose mother is in an institution; the neighbor boy Duffie, who lives with his grandmother, and the neighbor girl Lolly, whose father, a Jew who married into a Catholic family, is always away on business. The only articulate male in Randy's world is his father's harellpped cousin Crispin. DORIE FRIEND Insulated, Immature, living with a family that is protected and also outnumbered by the servants, Randy is startled when he receives, as his Charles Manson candidly tells his side of the story such men have existed or that Ms. Figes has the right to invent them if they hadn't.

Neither can anyone deny that feminist sympathies can successfully inform a novel, as In Marilyn French's "The Women's Room." But since Ms. Figes lacks Ms. French's ability to sustain a compelling narrative, "The Seven Ages" eventually begins to read like a tiresome political tract. Nowhere does the female chauvinism become more apparent than in the last pages, when the retired midwife finds herself strengthened by the memories of her ancestors and begins to aid members of a "women's peace camp" gathered outside a missile base near her country home. The clear inference is that women in general and midwives In particular are more peace-loving because of their closeness to the act of giving birth and thus, also, to death.

But that dubious assumption hasn't become any more credible for all the times it's been expressed in recent years; it's only become more cliched. Watching the women at the "peace camp" singing songs, the midwife realizes, "It could be a game, but it is no such thing." Does anybody really think that the deployment of deadly missiles is a game? Ms. Figes apparently thinks there are such people, and feels a need to set readers straight. This didacticism is all the more unfortunate because Ms. Figes' writing can be eloquent.

And there's the essential truth behind her impulses. Too many historical novels have depicted men who are strong, brave and true, and women who are weak, devious wimps. Eva Figes probably deserves a lifetime subscription to Ms. just for trying to give women their due. But what she has done in "The Seven Ages" is, alas, replace one set of stereotypes with another.

JANICE HARAYDA Ms. Harayda lives in Boston. epochs that far antedate the women's rjiovement. And their female cjiaracters are hardly a liberated lot, liwiited as they usually are by the roles assigned to their sex during the eftis in which they're set. Yet "The Seven Ages" can scarce-lybe called anything but a feminist historical novel.

Its author, who lives fn England, wrote the non-fiction "Patriarchal Attitudes." Now, Eva figes further explores the male domination of women by chronicling the exploits of a spirited clan of rural English midwives and practitioners (fc herbal medicine over seven historical ages. The central character is a contemporary midwife who has just retired to the countryside to pursue such simple pleasures as gardening ahd tending her hearth while contemplating what to do with the remainder of her life. The earth and fjjre stir memories of stories she's heard of her ancestors, which unfold as" flashbacks beginning shortly before Christianity is introduced into England and moving forward in time tnrough the Crusades, the early British colonial and Victorian eras, the world wars and the nuclear age. 4 In a typical episode, the newly retired midwife recalls how an ancient practitioner of her trade intentional-lyyblew ground pepper into the face ofa daughter giving birth, thus inducing a violent sneeze that helped expel the infant, whom she drew out wgh buttered fingers. Though Ms.

Figes' descriptions of such practices are colorful, they are undermined by her relentlessly negative portrayals of men as a hapless, incompetent and patronizing crew of rapists, murderers, warmongers and assorte dimwits. Nobody can deny of his Infamy had never been told. According to Manson. accounts of that August weekend when blond starlet Sharon Tate Polanski and Abigail Folger, the heiress to the Folgers coffee fortune, were butchered along with five other people In Los Angeles were largely media fantasies swallowed whole by a nation hungry for Images of sex, drugs and violence. He still denies he was the love guru who could strip young Innocents of their independence and make them do his bidding.

Truth is. the load is too heavy to carry these many years," Manson says. "I ain't nothing more than a half-assed thief who didn't know how to steal without getting caught." Maybe. But his account of the sex and love cult that made him the object of a nation's curiosity reveals a darker persona, one Incapable of maintaining human compassion. On that evening, August 8, 1969, 1 was aware being totally without conscience," he recalls of the night of the Tate killings.

"As the weeks passed our Instincts became more animal than human. We hid by day and did our moving around by night." Manson in His Own Words. As told to Nuel Emmons. Grove. 232 pages.

$16.95. Charles Manson certainly Isn't the first to attempt a dissection of the workings of a hideously criminal mind. Yet. this autobiographical narrative, the distillation of hundreds of hours of pilson interviews with Manson over six years, is the first to convey Manson's view of his own grotesque sociopathology, a fact that helps build this work's convincing, if sparse, authenticity. And Nuel Emmons, a two-time loser-turned-Journalist who met Manson twice while doing time himself, has managed to keep Manson's autobiography from degenerating into wholesale self-glorification or wallowing self-pity.

In part, Mr. Emmons managed to avoid these pitfalls by prying from Manson a relatively candid recounting of his Jaundiced life, leading to the August 1969 weekend that catapulted the third-grade dropout and two-bit car thief into perhaps the most sensational cult figure of the 1960s and 1970s. Manson long had complained that his version By the time of the murders, Manson had spent 1 7 of his 34 years in a seemingly endless string of Institutions, from a Juvenile institution in Indiana, where he was raped by four other boys, to a federal penitentiary In Washington state. Perhaps understandably, he indicts a penal system that cages more of its citizens than any other country In the world except the Soviet Union and South Africa. The book Is fairly effective in cutting away much of of the hype that surrounded Manson's life and 9'2-month trial and which was perpetuated in Vincent Bugliosl's 1974 best seller, "Hel-ter Skelter." And it provides the reader a glimpse of the sex-and-drugs, free-love lifestyle that Man-son defined in the late 1 960s.

"The Image of 'the most dangerous man alive' bears little resemblance to the man I've been visiting these past seven years," Mr. Emmons concludes. And, Indeed, by the end of the book, the Man-son monster seems almost mouselike. MARTIN C. EVANS Mr.

Evans covers Anne Arundel County for The Sun..