A Tender Intelligence : A CHORUS OF STONES: The Private Life of War, By Susan Griffin ; (Doubleday: $22.50; 363 pp.)

Each “solitary story belongs to a larger story,” muses Susan Griffin early in her ambitious, intricate and lyrical “A Chorus of Stones,” as she yearns for “a land of listeners, where all that had happened might come to rest, in the intelligent and curious mind of a shared grief.” Later in the book, observing that there is “a territory of the mind, vacant and endless as the miles and miles of rubble the city of Hiroshima had become,” she notes that to “grasp the meaning of the explosion of one atomic weapon at Hiroshima would take more than one lifetime. One would have to hear every story, and take in the memories too, how the vanished repeat themselves in the minds of the living.” For, as she also observes, “there is a sense in which we are all witnesses,” so that one “can find traces of every life in each life.”

I have to admit that I began reading this volume with a certain skepticism. I am a longtime admirer of Griffin’s work and have been particularly influenced by her incisive “Pornography and Silence: Culture’s Revenge Against Nature” and her moving “Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her.” But I worried at first that the strategies of juxtaposition through which she organizes her writing might be arbitrary, even bathetic.

Griffin’s own family history, for instance, is interwoven with stories of such public events as the firebombing of Dresden and the atomic assault on Hiroshima, which are in turn paralleled by tales of famous or infamous warriors and scientists (Sir Hugh Trenchard, “the man known as the father of the RAF”; Werner Von Braun; Heinrich Himmler; Douglas MacArthur). Then these are set against accounts of the tribulations of artists (Oscar Wilde, Kathe Kollwitz, Charlotte Salomon), as well as the sufferings of little-known victims of nuclear disaster or of the Holocaust (Israel Torres, a marine injured by nuclear testing; a Jewish Frenchwoman named Helene; Ota, a survivor of Hiroshima; several workers at Oak Ridge) and counterpointed by assertions of scientific “fact” (“The Cell is constantly exchanging matter with the world around it,” “The missile is guided by a programmed mechanism”).

Remarkably, the detailed “Chorus of Stones” that Griffin creates out of the historical testimony offered by such a range of witnesses--humble and famous, noble and ignoble--became utterly poignant and enthralling to me as I penetrated ever more deeply into the maze of intersecting echoes this talented writer has transcribed.

What is history? Lately, that question has been of special concern to scholars around the world, most of whom have increasingly come to understand that the story of our shared past cannot--as we were once taught--be solely recreated from what the Victorian sage Thomas Carlyle called “the Lives of Great Men.” Should we assume that history means public history, the apparently gigantic chronicle of battles and melodramatic dates (1066, 1492, 1776) that we learned in school? Is what we must know chiefly the history, as Virginia Woolf once wrote, of “King following King”? Or is history, rather, a collocation of the private narratives produced by that bewilderingly complex and all too often obscure mass of consciousness we call “the people”? Susan Griffin’s book is predicated on an intense attention to these issues and on a clear commitment to the notion that “in a different light, one can begin to perceive the edges of one shared movement in what we have called the private and the public worlds, one motion shaping and shaped by all that exists.”

What most impressively characterizes “A Chorus of Stones”--along with its successful structure of collage--is its extraordinary charity. There is a tender intelligence here, brooding over the stones of time, over the sort of (as it turns out) pathetic “Great Man” that Shelley once called “Ozymandias, the King of Kings” as well as over the priests who would lead an insurrection against him and, too, over the lowliest drifter through the streets of our cities.

Tales of Sir Hugh Trenchard’s life as an imperialist and, eventually, “father of the RAF” are juxtaposed with stories of Mahatma Gandhi and of “Leo,” a once violent and disaffected immigrant who has become a youth counselor in an effort toward “restitution” even though he believes that “There is a circle of humanity” which he is “forever outside.” Similarly, the biography of Heinrich Himmler, whose education was shaped (and deformed) by the teachings of the Nineteenth-Century German pedagogue Dr. Daniel Gottlieb Moritz Schreber, is brilliantly paralleled by the “case history” of one of Freud’s most notorious patients, the fantasy transsexual Daniel Paul Schreber, the son of the same rigid and rigorous German pedagogue who helped produce Himmler.

What makes masculinity, manliness, virility? Griffin asks throughout her mediation on history. For if masculinity has made history, then we need to know more about what constructs the supposedly masculine. About Sir Hugh Trenchard, for instance, she writes that he “thought he knew himself. He was made of hard masculinity. Tough at the core and steady. This fluttering substance . . . that which might melt, give way or undulate as it passed, this belonged to the female body and it was utterly strange that he should find it in himself. Unbefitting his manliness. And yet. Yet something unknown had opened if even for a second and this was intriguing.” The “requirements of gender,” Griffin remarks wittily, “are like the omnipresent yet partly hidden plans of a secret bureaucracy.” And thus, those categories--”public” and “private,” “masculine” and “feminine,” “scientific” and “non-scientific”--which we think so fixed, must surely be far more fluid than we can imagine.

And the woman who is used and abused by such ways of thinking? A film star like Rita Hayworth, for instance? In one of her most trenchant yet charming moments, Griffin emphasizes this woman’s indomitable alienation. “At least once that I know of, Rita Hayworth complained about the image Hollywood produced of her. What troubled her enough to speak out was the decision the studio made to put her image on a nuclear weapon. Her brothers had been in the second World War and come back different, scarred. This had made her against all war, she said, and she wept when the bomb bearing her image was detonated.”

If I have any doubts about “A Chorus of Stones,” they center on its sixth and final section, “Notes Toward a Sketch for a Work in Progress,” which focuses on connections between the Gulf War and the life-stories of Charlotte Salomon and Ernest Hemingway. Though the parallels are telling, the telling itself seems to me to be somewhat perfunctory and confused here, overshadowed by the magisterially controlled narrative I’ve become accustomed to throughout the rest of this work. “I want the boundaries of the book to be opened, letting in the atmosphere of contemporary event,” Griffin explains, yet I feel as though this story--the tale of what happened to us only a year or two ago--slides by me too rapidly and too inexplicably in comparison to the rich and complex history that has gone before it. When we’re among the trees, perhaps, it’s really all too hard for us to comprehend the contour of the forest.

Nonetheless, even when she doesn’t quite bring it off, Griffin’s “Chorus of Stones” is enormously affecting in its dramatization of what this writer reminds us is the Ibo philosophy that “nothing stands alone. Everything has something standing beside it. And the two are really one. Watching the wind blow through the field, it is as if two winds are blowing each from a different direction. But after a moment, from a longer view, one can see that it is the same wind bending and turning its trajectory.” Trenchard and Gandhi, Himmler and Schreber, Von Braun and Kollwitz, public and private, culture and nature, social structures and atomic particles: two and yet one, all stones bearing, as Griffin wistfully comments, “traces from fires suffered thousands of years ago.”