“I don’t know anybody who isn’t in love with me.” —Susan Taubes in a letter to her husband
there’s something tragically compelling about an artist whose life was cut short by suicide. Sylvia Plath, Kurt Cobain, Virginia Woolf, Robin Williams, Ernest Hemingway, Vincent Van Gogh*. even deaths that aren’t strictly suicides, such as the overdoses of Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and Jimi Hendrix often skyrocket the fallen artist to even greater levels of fame and cast the reverberating question of what else could they have created if they had lived?
Susan Taubes (born Judit Zsusanna Feldmann in 1928 to an old rabbinical family in budapest) has long been left out of the canon of brilliant writers of the 20th century, her suicide in 1969 leaving her forgotten rather than elevated to fame. her death came just days after her first novel, Divorcing, was published by Random House to lackluster reviews (namely by the New York Times, who deemed it the nonsensical meanderings of a “lady novelist”¹). Susan Sontag, Taubes’ closest friend, identified her body after it was fished out of the East Hampton sea.
Taubes and her father, a freudian psychoanalyst, moved to new york from budapest when Taubes was eleven years old, leaving behind her mother (who had divorced her father and married a younger man) and her entire family. Divorcing’s main character, Sophie, who shares almost identical biographical traits with Taubes, later learns of the horrors her jewish family endured while she and her father were safe in new york. psychoanalyst fathers pop up often in Taubes’ fiction as well, one story detailing the father attempting to convince his young daughter that she suffers from an electra complex, and engages in other sexually inappropriate one-sided conversations with her.
what fascinates me most about Taubes is her own fascination with philosophy & religion, while not subscribing to any one religious doctrine. in one of her letters to her husband Jacob Taubes, a philosophical & judaic scholar, she stated “i want to build my own altar.”² this eclectic approach to spirituality was decades ahead of its time and is how i view my own spiritual practice. Taubes went on to study religion & philosophy in jerusalem, sorbonne in paris, and radcliffe. her dissertation was titled An Absent God: A Study of Simone Weil, on the unique atheism of Weil. she became a professor at columbia and published academic articles on topics such as gnostic influences in philosophy, but her fiction writing proved more difficult to land a publishing home.
she had the support of her writing group, which included Susan Sontag, and a reference from Samuel Beckett in which he encouraged publishers to take a chance on her work, but her novella Lament for Julia was rejected and left unpublished until decades after her death. when Divorcing was finally published, it received harsh reviews and faded into obscurity.
Divorcing is a book that moves between dream and reality in a way that the reader cannot always decipher which is which. Lament for Julia is told from the perspective of a disembodied spirit who has attached itself to Julia (i like to read it as a dual personality). reading Taubes’ work feels like a combination of a Clarice Lispector novel and a David Lynch movie, and i loved every word she wrote. i don’t like when introductions give away the plot of the book before i read it, so i’ll leave the summarization at that, and let you discover Taubes’ heroines in your own way.
in 2020, NYRB classics re-published Divorcing, followed by Lament for Julia in 2023. Taubes’ work has been introduced to a new generation and is finally getting the recognition she always deserved.
and i do have to wonder, what else could she have accomplished if she had been recognized for her talent when she was alive to witness it?
“One motif prevails: man is not ‘at home’ in the cosmos.” —Susan Taubes