Newsday from New York, New York • 174

Me, Myself And They DIFFICULT WOMEN: A Memoir of Three by David Plante (Atheneum, 173 Reviewed by Caryn James duces him to literary society and visits at his summer house in Italy. We see her as a'depresBed, middle-aged woman, constantly going to parties and getting drunk. Orwell's unfathomable darkness seems to intimidate Plante, to restrain his imagination, and this portrait is the least convincing. Greer, however, takes command of his actions and at the same time encourages his imagination to run free. Traveling with her in England, Italy and Oklahoma, Plante seems to follow her around, as iff he enjoys being taken charge of by a person he describes as "a large, imposing woman.

Some of Plantes most humorous scenes involve Greer. He gleefully recreates a visit when she croons while feeding her cats. "Oh, darlings, she said, 'youre so lucky. Heres testicle. Here Plante reveals his own attitude most dearly.

"I felt guilt towards, not all women, but difficult women I had done something, perhaps simply said something, which was wrong, which had hurt them, and the only reaction possible for them to what I had done or said was to be difficult. I had made them difficult. Intentionally or not, this is self-pity and needless martyrdom, masquerading as heroic understanding and responsibility. Plante does not allow these women to exist, or even to be difficult, on their own terms. Despite its contemporary twist, his view that the man determines what the woman is remains hopelessly traditional and sexist This book is not really a personal memoir of three friends; it is another of Plantes autobiographical works, using these women as mirrors to reflect his own image.

Freelancer Caryn James is a frequent contributor to Newsday. Greer and Plante, inset: A mans sensitivity or self-pity? Jean Rhys, Sonia Orwell and Germaine Greer are literary women connected by mutual friendhip with David Plante. Rhys was a fashionable 1930s novelist, rediscovered after decades of obscurity. Her friend Sonia was the widow of George Orwell and a socialite in British literary circles. And Greer is the feminist author of "The Female Eunuch.

Plante, an autobiographical novelist, turns these portraits into self-examinations, occasions for questioning his own responses. Why are these women his friends? Why is he so drawn to difficult women? Are the friendships self-serving? At first, Plantes overwhelming egotism is simply offensive. He reveals every twist of his own thoughts, and very little about the women who provoke them. But his descriptions are so vivid, his affection for these three so strong and genuine, that eventually the portraits become compelling despite Plantes misplaced focus. Hia strategy, carried over from the novels, is to let his descriptions speak for themselves.

He makes no final judgments, draws no definitive conclusions about other people. He finds only tentative, ambiguous answers to his soul-searching. Plante emerges as a man clearly absorbed by what he sees as hiB cheer me up, she tells Plante during one visit. Plante finally decides that he is attracted to Rhys because she is a writer. He sees this as a betrayal and accepts his guilt, thinking, "But Bhe might forgive me my cheap literary curiosity she might, perhaps, tell me that my literary interest.

the deepest possible interest. Perhaps. Yet we know much more about Plantes need for forgiveness than about Rhys tendency to grant it. With Orwell, famous only for her last name, Plante is even more reluctant to provide the necessary details about her life. She is Plantes patron, who intro own guilt and responsibility in these relationships.

Rhys was a frail but resilient old woman when she met the hopeful young writer. Wearing fancy dresses and heavy make-up, a pink wig put on backwards or a hat often askew, Rhys would have lunch with Plante or work on her autobiography with his help. Soon, she was drunk and sobbing. With mascara running down her cheeks she talked about her marriage or cried, "I'm over eighty And what have I done? Nothing! Nothing! Mediocrity. At other times she was warm, humorous and maternal.

"Lets pretend you're my son. Thatll For Readers Who Can9t Tell a MIRV From a GILCM whom Tobias is one of four to recommend a defense policy of their own or to lay out an idea of what they consider a sane level of expenditure. All they have done is to address the knowledge gap and give an intelligible account of what is going on, leaving the reader to draw hfe or her own conclusions. In talking about the book, Sheila Tobias says that, at an early point in her thinking about feminism and international peace, she was struck by i In most departments of life, the idea that enough is plenty is not a proposition to argue about. In the councils of the military, it apparently is.

We are told, for example, that one Poseidon submarine can fire 160 MIRVs, which have the capacity to wipe out every Russian city of more than 100,000 inhabitants and kill 30 million Soviet citizens in all. To the layman, thin sounds like enough, but what does the layman know? He probably, to begin with, doesn't really know what a Poseidon is or what a MIRV is. He cant tell a GLCM (pronounced glickum) from an ATB. The vocabulary of contemporary warmaking is as unfathomable as the concepts behind it. This is the problem which inspired Sheila Tobias to form the idea for the book called "What Kind of Guns Are They Buying for Your Butter? (Morrow, a work which she had originally planned to give the title, "The Intelligent Womans Guide to Defense Weaponry and Military Spending.

She was smart to change the name because the one first planned would have scared off the men who need to read the book. It is a compendium of pure information which cant fail to enlighten a U.S. citizen of either sex. Sheila Tobias is a feminist who helped to found the National Organization for Women and who regards the cause of peace as a feminist issue because "women have traditionally been focused on peace rather than war. She therefore had an axe to grind in conceiving the book, but she has increased the effectiveness of it by never indulging in preachment.

At the end of "What Kind of Guns there is an apology to the reader for the failure of the authors of ers, which works out to $523 million per plane. This and similar information is delivered without editorial comment, partly for the reason that the four authors of the book were not perfectly in agreement on all the issues raised. They were united, however, about the big issue in the arms races, which is that the public doesn't know enough about it and that militarists can take advantage of that ignorance. Even the President, Tobias points out, has to rely on what the experts tell him. "I have sympathy with the President in his difficulties, she says, "because hes only a generalist.

On ffie information he is giyen, hes compelled to say, let's nave it all, and thats whats driving up the military budget Were buying it all. As riie sees it the seductiveness of technology has no limit "If it can be done, she says, "the experts want to do it They are trying now to weapon-ize every scientific concept The Pentagon has already spent $1.6 billion working on lasers, which are like the ray gun in science fiction. Laser weapons can be used to attack enemy satellites in orbit Both sides in the arms race are now thinking about war in space. All of this is going on, Sheila Tobias points out on behalf of a citizenry which is unaware of it She sees signs, however, that people are Bhowing a desire to know. "I was talking about the arms race, die says, "at a luncheon meeting of a womens alumnae group in Los Angeles.

I brought along several copies of the book for anybody who was interested. It surprised me when a man turned up after the talk to ask fin: a copy. "I said, 'Who are you? He said, Tm your waiter. complete a team, she recruited Peter Goudinoff, a professor in the political science department at the University of Arizona. The gang of four all equipped with doctoral degrees worked on the book separately and, at one point, jointly for a month in Tucson.

All receive equal credit as authors, although Tobias was the organizing fdtee. At first, she supposed that the book would be about military spending and that the weapons for which the money went would be described in a glossary. Gradually, the all-powerful gadgets drew the spotlight to themselves. The leader of the team admits that she was not above feeling awe at what the weapons could do or responding to their appeal as "big toys for big boys. It is marvelous, she concedes, that men have created missiles which are accurate over a projected path of 6,000 miles and can hit within 500 feet of the target after traveling at 20,000 miles an hour.

"The cruise missile, she notes almost proudly, "can be guided 200 feet off the ground, following the rise and fall of the terrain. An educator by profession, Sheila Tobias is former associate provost at Wesleyan University and is now a visiting scholar at the University of Arizona. She is an unmarried brunette with a warm manner and no suggestion at all in her personality ofthe ideological zealot. Her only previous book is "Overcoming Math Anxiety, a subject she chose because, she says, "Women more than men are intimidated by mathematics. In the new book, there is mathematics to intimidate everybody.

We are reminded, for example, that the Defense Department has requested $3.9 billion in the 1983 budget to build seven B-l bomb 22ldeas newsqay. sunoay. FEBRUARY 13. the idea that it is much easier to form baby carriage brigades to protest nuclear tests in the atmosphere than it is to understand whether or not such experiments can be justified as necessary. "I thought how come, she soys, "that women don't know anything about military weapons and that Tm a prime example.

So I made the decision to write the book I needed to read. I realized I needed it to make sense of the news. She also realized that the primer she envisioned for beginners couldn't be written by a beginner. In her search for expert help, she discovered Stefan Leader, a consultant on national security affairs to private firms and organizations, and his wife, Shelah, who teaches courses in public policy at George Washington University. To.