Fear of Fifty (22 page)

The audience tittered at the obsessive sex scenes. There was palpable discomfort in the air. They did not want to know that fantasies could invade our lives and turn them toward darkness. They did not want to believe in the destructive, obsessional power of sex.

And yet we all live balanced on a beam above chaos. We try to keep our lives in order, but chaos calls to us through sex, through illness, through death. AIDS and cancer lurk under our pleasures. The skull leers beneath the skin.

 

At nineteen, I went to Italy for the first time and stayed in a Florentine villa overlooking the Arno from the hill of Bellosguardo.

There, having gone to study Italian, I studied Italians instead, learning what so many American girls learned, that sex was better in a foreign tongue because guilt could be left at home.

In the somewhat ramshackle garden of the villa, between the boxwood hedges, and overlooking the twinkling city, I and my classmates learned the old approach-avoidance dance of passion.

Under the crickets' recitative, in the blue moonlight, I felt for the first time the sweet danger of sex.

I wrote a poem that summer as sharp as any poem I have since written. Even today, I do not know how I knew what I knew.

“When did the summer censor choiring things?” the poem asked. And it answered its own question.

“We know the blood is brutal—though it sings.”

 

Where does politics enter in all this?

Some women I know have given up men because they cannot stand the pain.

What pain?

The pain of seeing fifty-year-old men going out with twenty-eight-year-old “stepdaughters,” the pain of waiting for telephone calls that never come, the pain of needing too much, wanting too much, the pain of being sick of needing too much, and so deciding, once and for all, to stop wanting men.

You can train yourself to this. You can be like the man who trains his horse to need less and less food, and who is astonished when at last the horse dies. You can live without hugs, without fucks. You can seal off your skin, your eyes, your mouth.

But sooner or later love will come to claim you. You will dry up like a brittle flower and a breath of wind will blow your pale powder away.

I would rather stay open to love even though love means disorder, possibly pain. How many times have I redone the curtains and bookshelves ? How many times have I undone my life?

I hate the chaos, but it has also kept me young. Anarchy is the sacred fount of life, and sex breeds anarchy. The pagans understood this better than we do. They made spaces in their ordered lives for anarchy. All we have left of this is Mardi Gras.

I hate the American way of sex. One decade we pretend to fuck everyone, the next decade we pretend to be celibate. Never do we balance sex and celibacy. Never do we acknowledge the search for Pan and the search for solitude—the two poles of a woman's life. Never do we acknowledge that life itself is a mixture of sweets and bitters.

Feminists can be the worst puritans of all. Since maleness is a force for disorder, let's get rid of maleness altogether, some would say. Only impotent men pass muster. Only gay men are thought to be pure. Women today find themselves in a tautological trap. Bad boys turn us on, but bad boys are politically incorrect. Does this mean that being turned on is politically incorrect? To some, it does.

I have also run from sex at times in my life. I can be a puritan too. But I know it is important to fight my own puritanism. I know that the mouth of Bacchus is full of purple intoxication. His mouth may also be full of pointed teeth—but beauty lives there. Beauty is always intimate with danger. Beauty is always intimate with death.

Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch's wife,
He would have written sonnets all his life?

—George Gordon, Lord Byron, Don
Juan

A more important form of optimism concerns your attitude to your work.... Try to get away from that “succeed or fail” attitude... get absorbed in it, as you are in a window box or an interesting conversation or redecorating a room...

—Antonia White, Diaries
1926-57

 

 

When did I first discover that sex and creativity were allied? It was 1969 and I was twenty-seven. I'd had three and a half years of analysis in Germany—an analysis that focused on my writing blocks and on my marriage. If it did not make me wholly free, at least it gave me a taste for freedom.

Nineteen sixty-nine was the year sex was discovered. (Philip Larkin says it was 1963.) It was the year of the moon shot, of male astronauts walking on the female moon and planting their spikes in what was called “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Womankind was not much thought of in all that phallic blasting, phallic thrusting. We were an afterthought, born out of rebel ribs, but the times they were a-changin'. With the Beatles romancing the radio, with astronauts seducing space, with civil rights marchers fucking the Old Confederacy, with campus protesters screwing the Vietnam War, it wouldn't be long before feminism reared its Medusa's head.

After a sojourn in my own Third Reich, I was primed for protest. On August 26, 1970, I marched through Central Park with my sisters, celebrating women's rights, decrying women's wrongs. Hope was rampant. We expected nothing less than to change the world. Instantly.

By the time my first book of poems,
Fruits & Vegetables,
came out in 1971, the second wave of feminism was crashing on our shores. Women were in again—and sex was in again. But not for long.

I had come back from gray and rainy Germany to a brilliant world I hardly recognized. On the streets of New York: afros, bell-bottoms, dashikis, Nehru jackets, tie-dye, platform shoes, Zuñi jewelry, the scent of marijuana, headbands to hold in blitzed brains.... The world had gone wild while I was in Heidelberg learning to write. I wanted to go wild with it.

Sartorial madness was something I knew from my mother's taste in clothes—clothes that could double as costumes for her portrait sitters. And wildness was incipient in my Music and Art days. I dressed like a beatnik then, but I had made the decision to turn preppy in college. Because my parents had been Provincetown bohemians in the thirties, my early rebellion was to be square. I had become a “good wife” (who cooked steamed rice for her Chinese-American husband). I had repressed my rebellion. Now I wanted more than anything to be bad!

There had been previews of my fin de sixties madness in Heidelberg. I'd smoked hashish at student parties and wished to God I weren't married. I'd watched the students hurling cobblestones, mimicking their Parisian counterparts, as they chanted Ho Ho Ho
Chi Minh,
Ho Ho Ho Chi
Minh,
Ho Ho Ho Chi
Minh
(with German accents) down the Hauptstrasse. But it was not my culture, and by New York standards, Heidelberg was as provincial as Schenectady.

The German students of the sixties were protesting their Nazi parents; the American students were protesting their World War II daddies (who'd really believed that Vietnam was the same as the Land of the Rising Sun). A generational war was raging. It hardly mattered whether your parents had been Nazis or not; it was enough that they were parents. And parents had to be crushed.

We called their country
Amerika.
What was our country? Woodstock? Haight-Ashbury? Beatlemania? The Whole Earth
Catalog?
The Forest of Arden—with love beads? Marijuana was our weapon; so was long hair; so was sex. Had our parents settled down to have babies after their war? Well then, we would never settle down. We would have sex, sex, sex, and refuse to grow up! We followed our leaders—or at least our lead singers: All
you
need is love, love,
love...

In 1969-70, I went back to Columbia, this time to the School of the Arts, to study poetry. I also taught at City College again, as a lowly instructor, then as a lowly assistant professor—sans health insurance, sans job security, sans everything. I grew to love my students. I was moved to lie down on the streets of the West Side with them to protest the Kent State massacre. Eyes to the sky, we stretched out on the blacktop of Amsterdam Avenue outside the Riverside Funeral Home. Corpses dying to get buried, and we were holding up the hearses. I will never forget the policemen circling and the street lights flashing green then red then green then red as we kept that silent vigil outside the funeral parlor. Even death stopped for us.

I had just encountered the brave new world of open enrollment at City College. Bright students whom no one had ever bothered to teach to read and write, not-so-bright students who proved ultimately ineducable, were thrown at us to rescue. Remedial teaching at the college level infuriated the tenured staff—which was odd because they didn't have to do it. They had us for that.

Sometimes it was exhilarating; sometimes it was impossible. My best times were always with my older students: the housewives and office workers who'd come back to school at night. They got it when Othello killed Desdemona in a jealous rage, or when Lady Macbeth egged Macbeth on to bloody his hands. They'd seen plenty of Othellos and Lady Macbeths by this time. They could easily relate Shakespeare to life in the ghetto. These students were survivors. Learning turned them on.

“Miss Mann,” they'd say, “does all
littershure
have so much sex in it?”

The bourgeois day students from the Bronx couldn't be bothered to ask.

At the Columbia School of the Arts, I promptly fell for both my poetry teachers—Stanley Kunitz (another literary grandfather) and Mark Strand (a beautiful bad boy, the only poet in America who is a dead ringer for Clint Eastwood). I used to stare at Mark in class—his perfect, chiseled profile, his chilly, cynical eyes, and begin poems to him that would turn out never to be about him.

“The Man Under the Bed” (described in that stanza) became the universal bogeyman, vampire, night crawler every girl hears breathing under her bed, waiting to entrap her—she hopes. Mark was that fantasy man. He was also Gulliver striding through Lilliput, aloof to all us scurrying Lilliputians. We frantically threw tiny ropes around his huge legs.

Mark taught in a chilly, almost disdainful way—as if students were hardly worth bothering about. But he turned us on to Pablo Neruda and Rafael Alberti, and he freed me from compulsive rhyming, encouraged me to try prose poems and to jump into my images. He also excited me—which taught me more about poetry than anything. I would go home and write poems to the impossible he—the he of my dreams—Adonis, father, grandfather, with Clint Eastwood and the exhibitionist on the subway thrown in. What we fear we also desire, and what we desire we fear. Masculine menace was in those early poems, but also a real yearning for an unknown lover. Allan and I fucked, but we had long since ceased to be lovers—if a lover is defined as someone you yearn for. I was writing poetry and madly yearning. Those yearning poems went into Fruits
&
Vegetables and
Half- Lives.

The more I yearned, the more I wrote. Yearning is an essential emotion for a poet.

Is the yearning spiritual or sexual? Who's to say the two are not the same? Rumi and Kabir and most of the Persian poets see them as aspects of the same force—but then, of course, the Persians invented love. Héloise and Abélard discovered how close the two were—to their infinite regret. Only Protestant puritanism has built a wall between physical yearning and the yearning for God.

In Mark's class, I yearned for God in man, and in Stanley's class for man in God. I was less terrified of Stanley than I was of Mark. Stanley was cuddly; Mark was aloof. At twenty-seven, I found aloof sexier. Even my then-husband was chilly and distant. I couldn't imagine a lover who was not like my husband—a more frequent occurrence than we care to admit.

That first year, back from Germany, I worshipped weekly at the 92nd Street Y. The poetry flavor of the week had my undivided attention. I also haunted poetry festivals, poetry cafés, poetry bars.

In love with poetry, I thought I could live on air. In love with poetry, I thought I could live with Allan.

When Yehuda Amichai, the Israeli poet, came to New York, we read poetry together at Dr. Generosity's, passed the hat, and collected $121—mostly in silver. We split it, both agreeing it was the best money either of us had ever earned. It still is.

Dr. Generosity's was dark, beery, full of sawdust and peanut shells. Poets, wannabes, and sad sacks turned out. Also crazies. Poetry readings were always well-supplied with crazies. One such threatened to shoot me before one of my first readings in Philadelphia. He had written me a yearning letter that I had failed to answer. His blood boiled and he vowed revenge. It can't have been fatal attraction: I'm still here.

The truth is: Nobody
botbers
to kill poets in America. It's enough to bury them in universities. Undead.

It was a time of festivals for women poets. Carolyn Kizer and I met en route to one. We were seated right behind the driver. Carolyn began a wonderful monologue about her life as a woman poet. I was proud to be her confidante.

“Then I woke up, with Norman Mailer sitting on my face!” she said at the end of a long tale.