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Book Review

From Place To Place. By Hannah Tillich. Stein and Day Publishers, 1976. 223 pages.

Shortly after her 80^th birthday, Hannah Tillich’s second book found its way to bookstore shelves. She described the volume as an attempt toward “reconciliation” with those who had been hurt or offended by her first autobiography, From Time to Time, released three years prior and which detailed Hannah’s life and turbulent marriage to theologian Paul Tillich. Around that time The New York Times published an interview about Tillich’s “olive branch,” and in which she described her second biographical piece From Place to Place as a collection of saved travelogues, unpublished essays, a play, poems, and fragments from the family’s individual travel diaries. This was an effort to clarify, not mitigate, the previous work that was received by some as vengeful and even pornographic—the Tillichs’ daughter among those deeply offended.

It is difficult to be sure how literally to take Mrs. Tillich’s story. Everything signifies, but whether by interpretation of facts, metaphor, or through creative fabrication, remains unclear. In fact, there is very little clarity in this patchwork of travel reports and notes prepared by this skillful poet and deft playwright. However, these fragments lifted from the sedimental layers of Tillichian life found in these pages should either be carefully interpreted as intentionally arranged or placed back on the shelf amongst other, dustier esoterica. Happily, the dull prospect of leafing through an apparently simple but fragmented memoir need not be feared, and Tillich immediately prompts her readers to interpretation and participation with a few early signals. Why, for instance, does Tillich speak for nearly fifty of the opening pages in a (somewhat unsettling) third person voice? The awkward and artificial effect is spectral. Tillich’s stressed and frustrated attempt to repair relations with her daughter in this chapter is haunted by the voyeur readers as much as by Paulus’ ghost and her painful memories in From Time to Time. Here, she calls Paulus a cathedral, a gothic tomb in which no one could really live, fit only for ghosts. The reader is given secrets—not juicy gossip—the hard and painful realities of love. Hannah’s idiosyncratic opening reads with a cool detachment, as if the narrator exerted little or no influence at all on her story, a sensation which may have been channeled through the daughter who “felt she had taken no part in her life; it had simply occurred” (37). One wonders again if Hannah felt similarly when she writes, “she [Hannah] had somehow always just managed to come into her own, landing, after the fall, on her feet like a cat, bruised but surviving” (45).

One need only read her first book to know Tillich is partial to the concept of time. Here, though, she writes on space and place with styles suddenly passionate or detached. Without reading too much of Paulus into Hannah’s text, place has an estranged quality to it. Travels in Egypt, Israel, Mexico, India, and Japan among others mark very little time besides a few broad dates or the sometimes vague presence or absence of Paulus. In fragments by Paulus Hannah is sometimes missing from the story altogether. Even while in Egypt, Israel, and Japan, where the couple is most obviously present in the same place, they are mostly estranged from each other. In Israel, on Rosh Hashanah, the Tillichs visited a Caesarea kibbutz and its synagogue. There Hannah recalls Paulus’ dancing with the Chasidic Jews while she watched from behind the women’s cordon, clapping. In one moment, both are enraptured by the Jewish tradition and its passionate exercise. Later she would describe the Orthodox Jews of Jerusalem, “only [as] weird relics from a dead past” (72).

In Japan Paulus gave several lectures. During their travels the couple discussed with their hosts topics ranging from post-war politics to Zen Buddhism and its relationship with Christianity. They made time for good, traditional meals (Paulus was lousy with chopsticks) and for clubbing (Paulus was better with strippers than with chopsticks). In Egypt Hannah records she and Paulus attempted to keep cool while visiting the tombs of ancient kings, both of them entranced by the corpses as much as the Egyptian treasures. She writes of her travels, “it had all been in being there, standing and looking, following the prearranged path,” she says, a little cryptically. They were travels, especially the final trip with her daughter, “of not remembering and not forgetting; the short pause between inhaling and exhaling when all motion is suspended” (44). Indeed, travels and memories were time framed and punctuated by space and vise versa. This feeling reached an apogee following Paulus’ death and her encounters with Indira Gandhi and the Dalai Lama, “I experienced a great shock” she writes, “I was all in one piece and aware of it. My own being—my bones and flesh, eyes ears, mouth, and digestive system. It was all there and it was mine. My physical reactions had been haphazardly piecemeal, never as a unity. Now I was, all by myself, all in one piece and knowing it. I was scared” (132). Again, Tillich floods the text with seemingly irrelevant facts and items each, when taken as specifically chosen, becomes saturate with meaning. It is not for nothing, then, that following this experience she includes in her notes on the Indian temple sculptures that “I had no film left for the king putting his hand nonchalantly on the shoulder of his elected, while she looked up to him inflamed” (133).

Among the memories, journal entries, and lists of souvenirs chosen by the author is a peculiar play. Presumably penned by Hannah, she gives us a particularly terse and poignant rendering of the transition from paganism to Christianity with a cast of the Greek gods, their mortal lovers, and the metamorphoses of thanatos, eros, and philosophy under the new religion. The bizarre drama seems ambivalent about both the old and the new, pitting merciless Greek deities against a compassionate Christ who then seems to give false hope to the weak and broken. The play is worth reading on its own terms. Its placement, however, seems to prove the frustrating fact that although her buoyancy as an artist is strong, ballasted or not by her husband’s fame, neither Hannah nor we can say what her independence from Paulus would have yielded. The couple was a complex and dramatic tangle of strong identities.

When read alone From Place to Place is what it promises to be: travels with and without Paul Tillich, plain and simple, with poems and drama for flavor. When read with the depth and rage of From Time to Time in mind, one sees that even the most ecstatic of passions plateau after a few years. This is no secret to those who, driven by mad obsession, read, write and love with their chosen emotional poison tucked closely by the book the, pen, or the bed. Only on the best days can the passions be dealt with in due order. Thus, whereas the slow attrition of the marriage built by the Tillichs was tragic, Hannah’s mild ambivalence and resignation following his death seems even more troubling. It is as if a gradual transfusion after years of passion finally sapped the last of it and replaced some wild, bohemian blood type with the clear substance and temperature of tap water. Like the gray mummies that fascinated the couple on their Egyptian journey only a year before Paulus’ death— the glory fades, preserved, leaving only ruins. As Hannah said in India when offered massage to make her breasts more youthful, “I do not want to be loved any more, I am glad I am no longer young” (127).

In the end, this fragmented text leaves me asking what can generate a love so fierce with the feelings of time and space and death but not, I wonder, stronger than them? Hardly appropriate speculation I admit, but one called forth nonetheless by a narrative voice at times so acerbic that one detects a recent note of bile on its breath, while at other points, it is as kindly as one might imagine a devoted grandmother. The effect this textual ambiguity delivers transfers a sense of sorrow that would be incommunicable in direct, self-critical prose. This is especially true as she closes the book with a walk through Paul Tillich Park writing, “the Spirit would find new words to express the needs of the day; new words to guide us through the mazes everywhere” (223). Exiting with Hannah this labyrinth of travels, the reader, at least this young reader, couldn’t feel more in step with the narrator as she articulates both freedom and weariness, the wisdom of age and subtle forgiveness. Even so, although she chronicles journeys both with and without Paulus, I get the feeling that at least along the main roads of her life, this Tillich went mostly alone.

Josh Hasler
Boston University
Fall 2010

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