THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 26, 1997 TAG: 9701270200
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DIANE SCHARPER
LENGTH: 64 lines
ORNAMENT AND SILENCE
Essays on Women's Lives
KENNEDY FRASER
Alfred A. Knopf. 247 pp. $25.
Kennedy Fraser began writing professionally in the late 1960s as a reviewer for The New Yorker. As Fraser explains in her latest book, Ornament and Silence, her office was a modest, somewhat shabby, 8-by-12-foot room on the 18th floor.
It consisted of a battered wooden desk with what resembled cigar burns on top, an Underwood typewriter with chipped round keys, an old black telephone (the number was Oxford 5-1414), several sharpened pencils - courtesy of editor William Shawn - and a pile of new books.
Her job was to write short reviews of these books for the ``Briefly Noted'' section. Her editor for these apprentice years was Rogers E.M. Whitaker. An old curmudgeon. But Fraser found him inspiring.
Fraser admits a great debt to ``Mr. Shawn,'' whom she calls a ``patient developer and staunch supporter of women writers.'' It was Shawn who observed that women writers often don't come into their own until their 40s.
The remark applies to Fraser: She ``lost her context . . . after Shawn's New Yorker came to an end.'' She found that context when she was in her 40s and began writing about women and their lives, from a woman's perspective.
This is the territory of Ornament and Silence. The book is a collection of 14 essays, which blend reporting and personal anecdote in a pleasing, though somewhat unusual manner. A good example occurs in ``My Sister, Myself,'' where Fraser loosely reviews several books about sisters while commenting on her bond with her own sister.
Fraser develops her subjects - Nina Berberova, Vermeer, Edith Wharton, Flaubert to name some - using a narrative framework. The essay, ``Love, Longing and Letters,'' is especially engaging. The story teller's art shows itself from the beginning: ``One July day in 1846, an obscure 24-year-old country gentleman named Gustave Flaubert met a famous 35-year-old Parisian woman of letters named Louise Colet. There followed an eccentric and turbulent liaison that would last for eight years on and off.''
Even more pleasing than Fraser's engaging style is her ear for the rhythms of language and her eye for its images. Both ear and eye are evident in this description of Germaine Greer's memoir: ```Daddy, We Hardly Knew You' is the title, and its lisping music-hall charm may seem at odds with the ferocious psychic need and volcanic energy that drive this combined memoir, detective story and travelogue from first to last. . . . The book is a jolting, poetic, broken-winged exhilarating sort of thing.''
Psychic need and volcanic energy characterize Fraser's writing also. But her work is not broken-winged or jolting. It's crafted, smooth as fine wine.
After all, Fraser was introduced to the writing life at The New Yorker where she and Whitaker ``would sit there shoulder to shoulder thinking up the perfect word.''
Through him, she writes, ``I learned that truth, clarity and making readers see things mattered very much. . . . The solemnity with which he unscrewed the cap of his huge black fountain pen and marked our changes on the proof, made me feel that what he and I were doing was somehow grand: a moral act.'' MEMO: Diane Scharper is a poet who teaches memoir writing at Towson
State University in Maryland. ILLUSTRATION: Photo