Half Light

By Patricia Blake

DIFFICULT WOMEN by David Plante Atheneum; 173 pages; $9.95

"We owe respect to the living; to the dead we owe only the truth," said Voltaire. David Plante has given very little of either to the subjects of this memoir. Among the three "difficult women" in question, only Feminist Germaine Greer emerges from Plante's portrayal with a shred or two of personal dignity. Novelist Jean Rhys, who died in 1979, and Sonia Orwell, George Orwell's widow, who died a year later, have been observed in the distorting half-light of their declining days, when illness and alcoholism had served to dim the mind and obscure the spirit.

Jean Rhys was almost 80 when she first encountered Plante, a young American writer living in London. Plante, who later became an accomplished novelist (The Family, The Woods), set out to help Rhys write an autobiography. He candidly recalls, "I wondered if my deepest interest in her was as a writer I could take advantage of." But the sentient novelist who had written the melancholy Good Morning, Midnight in 1939 was long gone. She spent most of their time together drinking gin and sweet vermouth and babbling away in a pitiful parody of her once considerable style and charm. Plante spares us few of the clinical symptoms of her senility. Emblematic of the mode of his memoir is a page-long account of the time that Rhys fell into the toilet when he failed to lower the seat after using it.

When Plante became friendly with Sonia Orwell she was in her late 40s, subject to spells of depression and illness. Invariably smashed at the literary parties she gave or attended, Sonia yelled insults at her friends, including Plante. Where was the luminous, vital woman whom Or well had been moved to marry, three months before his death from TB in 1950? Only in an appendix does the reader learn that Sonia was prodigiously well read, wrote petitions on behalf of imprisoned intellectuals around the world and paid her friends' medical bills.

From the outset, Germaine Greer's irrepressible liveliness, not to say stridency, cuts through Plante's dispiriting view of women. Her earthiness seems to have tickled his sensibility: "Germaine will clutch the fat at her tummy and shake it and say, 'That's alcohol.' " But there is a touch of malice in his portrait of the au thor of The Female Eunuch. When Greer rummages in her refrigerator for some thing to feed her cats, she exclaims, "Oh, darlings, you're so lucky. Here's testicle." Plante pointedly fails to specify the species from which it was cut.

One wonders why he expended his remarkable literary gifts on women he found so uncongenial. Though he purports to have given them a sympathetic hearing, Plante seems curiously ambivalent, not only about this trio, but about the entire sex.

--By Patricia Blake This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.