Silences (48 page)

                  
There was no place in his universe for women who did not either sincerely, blindly, follow; or play up and make him believe they were following. All the others were merely pleasant or unpleasant biological material. Those who opposed: misguided creatures who must not be allowed to obstruct. The majority played up: for the sake of his society, his charm, the charm of enjoying
and watching him enjoy the pranks of his lightning-swift intelligence. The temptation was great.

                  
She knew she had not always resisted it.

—Dorothy Richardson,
Pilgrimage

A man whose work I revered . . . [my] book a serious, original contribution

            
When
The Hours of Isis
was published I sent it to the greatest authority on Egyptology at that time, a man whose work
I revered, and whose knowledge filled me with awe. I wanted to make some return for the inspiration his books had brought to me, and I was filled with astonishment and joy when he acknowledged the gift with an invitation to meet him. He asked me to come to his office in the late afternoon when he would be at leisure.

                  
I was shown into a room which was not so much an office as
a private library, with books from ceiling to floor, armchairs and reading lamps and a large desk on which I could see
The Hours of Isis
beside a great tome which I recognized as Sir Wallis Budge’s
Osiris.
The sight of them together overpowered me and I could hardly stammer “How do you do?”

                  
“Come here,” he said. “I have something to show you.”

                  
I went round
to his side to look down at the books.

                  
“You know what all this is about, don’t you?” he asked. “It’s a phallic myth. You know what a phallus is?”

                  
He proceeded to show me. The shock was enormous. Not so the
object. I had seen those before . . . indecent old men in the Paris métro exposing themselves at the rush hour in the hope of getting a reaction. Once a
sturdy fishwife standing next to me turned the tables superbly by saying loudly: “
Quand on n’a pas de marchandise on n’ouvre pas sa boutique,
” which I suppose can be translated roughly: “If you’re short on goods don’t open up the shop.” The crowd laughed and he edged over to the door and got out quickly at the next station.

                  
What shocked me was that this great man could insult
Isis and Osiris by behaving in that way. The book was a serious, original contribution to his own field.

                  
By this time he had seized me and was pawing and nuzzling my breasts. I managed to squirm loose, shaking with rage and shame, and after a moment, during which he probably saw me clearly for the first time, he began to mutter something, excuses, justification. The gist of
it was that no nice girl would fill her little mind with phallic myths. A girl who wrote a book about Osiris was fair game, obviously asking for it. . . .

—Evelyn Eaton’s autobiography,

The Trees and Fields Went the Other Way,
1974

What They All Need
. . .

            
One of them was complaining about the number of female writers.

                  
“And they’ve all got three names,” he said,
“Mary Roberts Wilcox, Ella Wheeler Catheter, Ford Mary Rineheart . . .”

                  
Then someone started a train of stories by suggesting that what they all needed was a good rape.

                  
“I knew a gal who was regular until she fell in with a group and went literary. She began writing for the little magazines about how much Beauty hurt her and ditched the boy friend who set
up pins in a bowling alley. The guys on the block got sore and took her into the lots one night. About eight of them. They ganged her proper . . .”

                  
“That’s like the one they tell about another female writer. When this hard-boiled stuff first came in, she dropped the trick English accent and went in for scram and lam. She got to hanging around with a lot of mugs in a speak, gathering
material for a novel. Well, the mugs didn’t know they were picturesque and thought she was regular until the barkeep put them wise. They got her into the back room to teach her a new word and put the boots to her. They didn’t let her out for three days. On the last day they sold tickets to niggers . . .”

               
Miss Lonelyhearts stopped listening. His friends would go on telling those
stories until they were too drunk to talk. . . .

—Nathanael West,
Miss Lonelyhearts

Climate; Critical Attitudes; Exclusions

The Ground of Departure

            
I have a terrible confession to make—I have nothing to say about any of the talented women who write today. Out of what is no doubt a fault in me, I do not seem able to read them. Indeed I doubt if there will be a really exciting woman
writer until the first whore becomes a call girl and tells her tale. At the risk of making a dozen devoted enemies for life, I can only say that the sniffs I get from the ink of the women are always fey, old-hat, Quaintsy Goysy, tiny, too dykily psychotic, crippled, creepish, fashionable, frigid, outer-Baroque,
maquille
in mannequin’s whimsy, or else bright and stillborn. Since I’ve never been
able to read Virginia Woolf, and am sometimes willing to believe it can conceivably be my fault, this verdict may be taken fairly as the twisted tongue of a soured taste, at least by those readers who do not share with me the ground of departure—that a good novelist can do without everything but the remnant of his balls.

—Norman Mailer (
Advertisements for Myself
), in “Evaluations

—Quick and
Expensive Comments on the Talent in the Room” (1959). This is the one paragraph considering women in ten pages, twenty-eight paragraphs.
^*

Subtler Exclusions

            
In the first stages of his development, before he has found his distinctive style, the poet is, as it were, engaged to language and, like any young man who is courting, it is right and proper that he should play the chivalrous
servant, carry parcels, submit to tests and humiliations, wait hours at street corners, and defer to his beloved’s slightest whims, but once he has proved his love and been accepted, then it is another matter. Once he is married,
he must be master in his own house and be responsible for their relationship. . . .

                  
. . . The poet is the father who begets the poem which the language
bears. At first sight this would seem to give the poet too little to do and the language too much till one remembers that, as the husband, it is he, not the language, who is responsible for the success of their marriage which differs from natural marriage in that in this relationship there is no loveless love-making, no accidental pregnancies. . . .

                  
. . . Poets, like husbands,
are good, bad and indifferent. Some are Victorian tyrants who treat language like a doormat, some are dreadfully hen-pecked, some bored, some unfaithful. For all of them, there are periods of tension, brawls, sulky silences, and, for many, divorce after a few passionate years.

—W.H. Auden,
Poets at Work

Exclusion: Language Itself

“Language itself, all achievement, anything to do with the human
[cast] in exclusively male terms.”

                  
But “glory” doesn’t mean “a nice knockdown argument,” Alice objected.

                  
When
I
use a word, Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.

                  
The question is, said Alice, whether you can make words mean so many different things?

                  
The question is, said Humpty Dumpty, who is to be master—that’s all.
^*

It is the saturation—the never ceasing, life-long saturation.

Man. The poet: he (his). The writer: he (his).

No, not simply a matter of “correct usage”; our inherited language; i.e.,
man,
a generic term, defined as including, subsuming, woman, the entire human race.

The perpetuating—by continued usage—entrenched, centuries-old
oppressive power realities, early-on incorporated into language:
male rule; male ownership; our secondariness; our
exclusion.

In reading Auden (“The poet is the father who begets the poem”), the effort having to be made in us somewhere to include ourselves as writer also. The reinforcement to the “ground of departure” attitudes: “a
real
writer has balls—is male. . . .”

The unconscious, conscious
harm (as well, as ill), to a woman—when writing of writing or writers or of oneself as poet, as writer—of having to refer to oneself, and to one’s activity, as masculine. As Willa Cather (quoted earlier):

            
usually the young writer must have
his
affair with the external material
he
covets . . .

Or as Denise Levertov, from “The Poet in the World”:

                    
He picks up crystal
buttons from the ocean floor

                    
Gills of the mind pulse in unfathomed water.

                    
In the infinite dictionary he discovers

                    
gold grains of sand. . . .

                    
Blind to what he does not yet need,

                    
he feels his way over broken glass

                    
to the one stone that fits his palm . . .

Why is it so hard
for us? So difficult to, naturally, state our presence in the “she” “hers” belonging to us?

(Precision of language—the writer’s special tool and task. Exact to meaning.

Man, he, mankind—
only
if meaning: exclusively male.

Humanity (two more syllables) when meaning the human race. (Ascent of Humanity, not “Ascent of Man.”) The individual (not he); the human being (not man); humankind (not mankind)—if
that is what is meant. To write naturally: the poet, she; the writer, she—if the reference is to self, if that is what is meant.

The awkwardness (and often ridicule) if we try now to be accurate. To say: she/he; her/him; or the ungrammatical “they” when referring to both-sex poets, writers, or a writing activity.)

Marks of centuries-old entrenched power realities. Measure of the heaviness of
our task no longer to abide by them,—to find and raise our various truths into truthful language.

Exclusions; Isolations; Patriarchal Atmospheres

Distinguished poet and editor A. Alvarez on assignment to meet and interview the new poet-sensation, Ted Hughes (1958):

            
I was also told that he had a wife called Sylvia, who also wrote poetry, “but”—and this was said reassuringly—“she’s
very sharp and intelligent.” . . .

                  
We arranged to take our kids for a walk . . . Ted went downstairs to get the pram ready while she [Sylvia] dressed the baby. I stayed behind a minute, zipping up my son’s coat. Sylvia turned to me suddenly, without gush:

                  
“I’m so glad you picked
that
poem,” she said. “It’s one of my favorites but no one else seemed to like
it.”

                  
For a moment I went completely blank; I didn’t know what she was talking about. She noticed and helped me out.

                  
“The one you put in
The Observer
a year ago. About the factory at night.”

                  
“For Christ’s sake, Sylvia
Plath
. . . I’m sorry. It was a lovely poem.”

                  
“Lovely” wasn’t the right word, but what else do you say
to a bright young housewife? . . .

                  
I was embarrassed not to have known who she was. She seemed so embarrassed to have [had to remind] me, and also depressed. . . .

                  
After that I saw Ted occasionally, Sylvia more rarely. He and I would meet for a beer in one of the pubs. . . .

                  
Ted occasionally dropped in and I would hobble with him briefly
to the pub. But I saw Sylvia not at all. . . .

                  
They had had a new baby in January, [this time] a boy, and Sylvia had changed. No longer quiet and withheld, a housewifely appendage to a powerful husband, she seemed made solid and complete. . . . Perhaps the birth of a son had something to do with this new confident air.

—from “Sylvia Plath: A Memoir”

Restriction (Exclusion)
Deprivation
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