One century after her birth, Toronto author Helen Weinzweig’s award-winning novel Basic Black With Pearls has just been reissued by House of Anansi, the Toronto-based publisher that first released the book in 1980.
In the novel, which won a City of Toronto book award, a somewhat deranged, unhappily married female narrator tells her story of a series of liaisons with a mysterious lover who is a foreign spy.
Although many of the trysts occur in exotic locations around the world, most of the novel is set in Toronto, especially the city as remembered by the narrator, Shirley Kaszenbowski, also known as Lola Montez. The backdrop for the story is an exacting cityscape of the old downtown district of the 1940s and 1950s, featuring many familiar and iconic shops, restaurants, bakeries, department stores and city institutions, including Shopsy’s and the old Yiddish theatre at Dundas and Spadina.
The novel’s strange premise and experimental surrealistic style did not prevent it from gaining a reputation as a minor feminist classic. Kaszenbowski’s modus operandi is to check into a prearranged hotel where an envelope is waiting for her. Inside her room, she tears open the envelope and examines the contents, usually some money as well as several pages of a recent magazine such as the National Geographic. Somewhere in the pages of the magazine, she believes, is a coded message telling her where she can meet her secret lover, Coenraad.
“This is the point I am driven towards – that exquisite instant when I receive word of our next meeting,” the narrator informs us. “I pack and unpack; find my way to airports, bus stations and railway terminals; shiver or swelter; go hungry or vomit in public toilets. Sometimes I travel half around the earth to decipher a message that instructs me to leave the next day for yet another distant destination.”
As she progresses in her lonely and solipsistic romantic quest to join her idealized lover, Kaszenbowski seems to interpret all casual interactions, such as with a saleslady at a scarf counter in a department store, as having immense hidden significance that could help her interpret the clues from the magazine. Romantic illusions, even delusions, seem essential to her inner sense of self and purpose. Is she psychotic or merely driven, as many of us are, to escape from unhappiness into the arms of pleasure?
No matter what momentary pains and anxieties the narrator experiences, however, the journey is rarely without its pleasures for the reader. Weinzweig is an exquisite stylist with a refreshing and often funny way of observing the world. The joy is often in the small details. Here she is, passing through an anonymous convention in the King Edward Hotel, and venturing en passant, as she often does, into a subtle observation of social manners:
“Men in turtlenecks and pipes; women in slacks and shoulder bags, all wearing plastic-covered name tags over the left breast. Those not in line milled about, the women coming up close to the men’s chests to read their names, but men keeping their faces at a distance from female breasts, lowering their heads a little if necessary in order to read. A harassed clerk called for reinforcements…”
Life for our narrator does not always occur in the present moment but is often deflected into the past; like many a modern hero, she seems to live largely within her own head. Much of the narrative is filled with reminiscences of previous trysts, her experiences as a girl and a young women, and second-hand Scheherezade-like tales within tales of other lives in European locations, some involving ugly encounters with Nazis.
The narrator’s peculiar odyssey leads to a dramatic confrontation with her husband, Zbigniew, and the woman who replaced her in his bed. Ultimately, she decides to trade in her adventuress’s basic black travelling dress for another swing at domestic life.
Weinzweig, who died in 2010, was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Poland in 1915 and came to Toronto with her mother at the age of nine after her parents divorced. Inflicted with tuberculosis as a young woman, she spent two years in a sanatorium, where she was a voracious reader of works by Conrad, Barthes, Beckett and others (likely Virginia Woolf among them), who became major influences. As the wife of noted Canadian composer John Weinzweig, she focused on supporting her husband’s career and did not launch her own literary career until relatively late in life.
Like many women of her generation, Weinzweig seemed “torn between a commitment to family, and a very real need for freedom and experience,” John Frizzell wrote in an introduction in Anansi’s new edition of Basic Black With Pearls. Among other possibilities, the book may be interpreted as “an expose of the emptiness of traditional marriage, yet simultaneously a cry for family love, its strengths and support,” he observed.