HER MOTHER'S STORY
SISSELA BOK DRAWS A PERCEPTIVE PORTRAIT OF A WOMAN WHO ACTED
ON HER PASSIONS IN 'ALVA MYRDAL: A DAUGHTER'S MEMOIR'

Author: By Otile McManus, Globe Staff

Date: Wednesday, May 29, 1991
Page: 53
Section: LIVING

After years of struggling to balance work and family, after years of subsuming some of her interests to those of her husband, Alva Myrdal decided the time had come. She had already accomplished much, writing a highly charged book about the population crisis with her husband, supporting him through the writing of "An American Dilemma," his classic study of race in America, founding a college to upgrade the teaching of preschool teachers in Stockholm, pushing for more enlightened social and economic policies to benefit families in her country. And she would accomplish much more before her death in 1986, including serving as Sweden's ambassador to India and winning the Nobel Peace Prize for her disarmament efforts.

In her new book, "Alva Myrdal: A Daughter's Memoir," Sissela Bok, one of the teen-agers Myrdal left behind for the UN job in New York, describes this pivotal moment in her mother's life with a clearsighted understanding of its complexity. Bok writes that her parents' marriage had changed, and that her mother "wanted to flee the illusion, now a caricature, of the complete partnership she had clung to for so long." Bok also describes the true happiness and freedom that her mother found on her own in New York -- and later in Paris and India -- happiness and freedom that was occasionally marred by maternal guilt. And Bok does not shy away from the difficulties that her mother's first move created for the Myrdal marriage -- her parents did not divorce -- and most especially for her younger sister, Kaj, who ached with loneliness, while the 15-year-old Sissela distracted herself with an adolescent romance.

Seated in the serene and comfortable library of her Cambridge home last week, Bok says that for a philosopher who has studied the way people make moral choices, scrutinizing her mother's major life decisions came naturally. And she has already heard from readers whose reactions to Myrdal's choice in this instance are strong.

"They tell me that they find they disapprove of what my mother did, while at the same time they are cheering her on. I think that may not be an uncommon reaction," Bok explains. "I think there is a degree of sympathy. Women today have had to deal with those really hard choices and we all know that it's impossible to be two places at once. So we have to choose one place, and then face the consequences, which are never easy in either case."

Bok, who is married to Derek Bok, outgoing president of Harvard University, has taught ethics at Brandeis, Harvard Medical School and the Kennedy School of Government. She has three other books to her credit: "Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Live," "Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation" and "A Strategy for Peace. " Even though this biography is more personal than her previously published work, she has approached her subject -- her mother -- with the same respect and care and attentiveness to truth.

The book presents Alva Myrdal whole. Not as some kind of cardboard heroine, but as a woman who made compromises, a woman who pushed herself to grow, a woman who made mistakes and suffered for them, a woman who cared passionately about the fate of the world and who acted, albeit rationally, on those passions. Alva Myrdal not only lived life on a grand scale, a life peopled with characters like Ralph Bunche and Jawaharlal Nehru, but she also embraced the daily-ness of its details as women have from the beginning of time. She cared about clothes, about her house, about food and her embroidery and what kind of wedding her daughter would have.

The 56-year-old Bok is modest about the remarkable, shimmering portrait that she has created. She is pleased, of course, to add this book to the growing body of women's biographies that have been generated in recent years. And she hopes her mother's life story will resonate for those readers, men and women both, who are grappling with the questions of how to make a life, how to weave the strands of love and work, how to achieve and maintain some balance and identity as an individual within a marriage, a family and a community. But she says she essentially undertook the biography to frame Alva Myrdal's life for her own children: Hilary, now 32, Victoria, 29, and Tomas, 22.

"I just wanted to write things down for them and for her friends," Bok says from the armchair where she looks every bit as elegant as her mother does in the photograph that looks out from the book jacket. Bok's black and white print dress is simple, virtually every gray-blond hair is in place and her blue eyes look out directly and clearly.

Before her death, Alva Myrdal lived with a brain tumor that deprived her, off and on, of speech. One day she plaintively asked her daughter, "What happens if I can no longer explain myself?" Bok decided then and there that perhaps she could help her mother by pulling the pieces together into some kind of organized whole.

"When I heard her say that, I remember walking out of the apartment where she and my father were then living in Sweden near an inlet on the Baltic. And I walked out by that inlet and there were the pine trees and the sun was coming through the trees, sun and shade, and I was walking so fast and thinking could I somehow help in some way to explain," Bok recalls. "At first I thought she's the one who should have written her memoirs. And then I decided that I would try, and over that summer the memories began to come flooding in."

Bok supplemented those memories with interviews with Myrdal's friends, colleagues and relatives, some of whom were still living in the small villages where Alva and Gunnar had been born. She reread her parents' books along with the papers that they had saved from the early days of their marriage when they began throwing letters, articles and drafts of speeches into an old peasant trunk that they moved around with them from household to household. Not surprisingly, Bok secured her mother's permission to proceed with the project, but she did not finish until after her mother's death. The first version of the biography was published in Sweden in 1987, in Swedish.

"Well, it just seemed natural. I was writing about my own mother and I was talking to all these people and all my notes were in Swedish," she says. "It took a certain amount of struggling with a dictionary. Not that I don't speak Swedish but I really had never thought of writing in it. That worked out very well and helped me see who she really was as well."

The book was well received in her native land, and soon after publication Bok contracted with Andre Shiffrin of Pantheon Books to expand it for publication in this country. Once Shiffrin left the publishing house during the upheaval there, Merloyd Lawrence persuaded Bok to publish it with Addison- Wesley as part of the Radcliffe Biography Series. The series also includes Sara Lawrence Lightfoot's biography of her mother, "Balm in Gilead," and Susan Quinn's biography of psychiatric pioneer Karen Horney, "A Mind of Her Own."

Throughout the book, Bok's ability to see her mother clearly -- to set aside her own biases, prejudices and predisposition -- is stunning. She writes not without love, but she never glosses over the more difficult chapters in Myrdal's life either.

"I didn't want the book to be soupy," she says in her quiet, and still accented voice.

For instance, Bok's older brother Jan had a troubled relationship with both his parents caused to some extent by Gunnar Myrdal's egocentrism. Jan left home early and there was no reconciliation even in later years. Alva grieved this loss, but could not salvage the relationship. The hurt on both sides went too deep. Bok also points out that her parents' marriage was difficult to the end, and that her father, who won his own Nobel Prize in economics eight years before her mother won hers, was sometimes jealous of the public recognition accorded his wife in later life.

One of the ironies that emerges from the biography in which daughter sees mother so clearly is Alva Myrdal's inability to see her own mother's humanity. Myrdal had a very unhappy childhood. Her mother thwarted her initial attempts to pursue an education. She wouldn't allow library books in the house for fear of germs. And she was an extremely negative force in Alva's life.

"Her childhood still lived as bitter, even 'hellish,' in her memory . . .," Bok writes. "It should nevertheless have been possible for Alva to learn to see her parents as fellow human beings, to feel for their problems, perhaps truly to acknowledge them not just as parents but as equals and thereby become fully adult herself in relation to them."

For her part, Bok says that with the exception of some typical adolescent skirmishes, her relationship with her mother was basically harmonious. But it was also one that thrived especially in adulthood after her marriage to Derek Bok in 1955. Mother and daughter corresponded regularly and spent hours in each other's company in Sweden and in Cambridge. Bok says now that she understood early in her own life that her mother was forging a new path for women, and she says she always considered her mother to be her father's equal.

When Bok, as a teen-ager, was asked by Eleanor Roosevelt if she was Gunnar Myrdal's daughter, during the course of an interview with foreign students for American radio, she answered that she was "Alva Myrdal's daughter as well."

Bok has come to believe that people, by and large, invent their own childhoods. They remember what they choose to remember. They cast past events in certain lights depending on who they have grown up to become. Some people choose to focus on the pain, if there has been pain, and refuse to let it go. Others integrate what is past and move forward. But it is always a selective and deliberate process.

"This came to me because I was picking and choosing what to include and what to leave out. Am I going to mention this? Am I going to mention that," she says. "I compare it a little to a dream. Just as you know you wake up and this dream is so clear and by the time you start telling it, you've already made choices about what details you will share."

Bok says that she chose not to go into detail about the years of illness before her parents' deaths because she felt that would have amounted to an embarrassing invasion of their privacy. But she does not flinch from other aspects of their life together, alluding to her father's infidelity.

"In some ways their marriage was a conversation which started when they first met and really went on as long as it could be despite the ups and downs," Bok says. "My mother always used to say that she had never met another man who was as interesting to talk to, and that she felt to the end of her life."

Bok is delighted that some of Alva Myrdal's lesser known accomplishments may come to be known through the biography. Myrdal cared very much about her domestic surroundings. She helped design a radically modern house for the family outside of Stockholm, including a movable partition to divide the main bedroom into separate quarters should husband and wife require time alone. Bok says her mother brought color and her prized possessions with her, no matter what her living arrangements. And she played a significant role in designing the Swedish embasssy in India.

"She said she wanted it to be democratic, that is, in parentheses, cheap. She didn't want the Indians to have to be impressed by great luxury. And she filled it with the best of Swedish design," Bok recalls. "Swedish design really was part of the social reform movement that aimed at making it possible for people to live better. That went along with an encouragement of beauty and style, of color. She cared very much about that."

It's impossible not to notice the touches of color in Bok's own house. A branch of orange azalea in a glass vase on the desk in her third-floor office. A bowl of pale green apples and purple grapes on a table top. A blue-blue cloth of Scandinavian origin on the counter in the kitchen that has served a university and a family.

The publication of her mother's biography comes at a pivotal point in Sissela Bok's life as well. Her own children are grown. She and her husband are about to embark on a new life. After Harvard's 340th commencement next week, she and Derek Bok will leave Cambridge and spend a year at Stanford University's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. She has two projects under consideration and says that Derek, who was at Harvard Law School before assuming the university presidency in 1971, has several projects under consideration as well.

"It's a very moving experience to be part of ending this period in our lives. But it is hard right now to focus on California," she says. "There are people to say goodbye to and there are arrangements of various sorts, packing and so on, the kind of thing my mother could probably get done with her left hand."

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