The Devil at Large (25 page)

In some ways, controversial women writers bear the brunt of this confusion between art and advocacy, because not only are they outside the societal norms of conformist behavior, they are also outside the societal norms of rebellious behavior. The male rebel-artist’s way is never open to us. Henry is banned, deprived of publication in his native land, made literally a beggar for his art, but inevitably he becomes a hero because of his very rebellion and renunciation. Rebellious women tend to vanish, to be dropped out of the review media, the anthologies, the college courses. Witness the de facto ban on Andrea Dworkin, in effect for many years; the official eclipse of the once wildly popular Edna St. Vincent Millay; the obsolesence of Anna Wickham, Laura Riding, Muriel Rukeyser, and others too numerous to list.

There is some sign that this is changing in popular art. Feisty women private eyes, trained female killers, and outlaw women are beginning to populate our movie screens and bestseller lists, but they, too, are stereotyped from a male point of view. And only rarely do they outlive their plots. With a third wave of feminism gathering, we must honestly look at the fact that, since the seventeenth century, for every rise of feminism there has been an equal and opposite reaction. Patriarchal attitudes go underground, change terminology, but do not vanish: on the contrary, women creators
do
vanish—except for those few tokens that prove the rule.

We must ask why. And perhaps Henry Miller’s work is a clue to that puzzle. Like any underclass, women are denied not only their rights to parity in the arts, but the right to their own subject matter. Their anger is deemed unacceptable, their sexuality hemmed in by male definitions, their place in the academy determined by males or male-identified women. Women critics and academics (who are often defending their token status) tend to be even less kind to them than men. Even the spate of feminist academics seems not to have benefited the position of contemporary woman creators—many of whom remain eternally beyond the pale—unless they espouse the trendy “politically correct” positions that will doom their work to be ephemeral.

Even if we look at Henry Miller vis-à-vis his female contemporaries, we see that his reputation eclipses the reputations of everyone from Anaïs Nin to Kay Boyle. Nin poured much of her essence into helping Henry fulfill himself as a writer. As for June, the writer she might have become was also submerged in Henry. When she arrived in Paris to find Henry involved with Anaïs Nin and writing
Tropic of Cancer
, she felt cast aside. And she was always furious with Anaïs Nin for rewriting history in her expurgated journals.

And what of Louise Nieting Miller, who is remembered mostly for her rages? What if those rages had been put on paper in her own hand, thereby powered by her own rage to live beyond her time? We shall never know. Women of Louise Nieting Miller’s generation were rarely writers as well as mothers. We have in place of what she might have written her son’s immense creation in response to her rage. Her rage was his motor, his motor-mother.

It is impossible to break the barriers of convention unless one is propelled by rage, a fuck-everything attitude toward literary censors that says, in effect: let them ban or burn me, publish me or punish me—whatever happens I must get down on paper
what is left out of books.
Henry’s history as a writer was utterly dependent on his finding the courage to fuck everything.

First he cuts himself off from New York, from his family, from his first wife, Beatrice Wickens, and their daughter, Barbara. Then he takes up with June the taxi dancer, June the rebel, the renegade, the debtor, the conniver, the flagrant and unapologetic bisexual. Then he goes to Paris and becomes a bum, a beggar, a kept man. Under conditions of utter self-abnegation, stripped of his dignity, of all his supports, the Paris book explodes.

I have compared Henry’s odyssey to the male initiatory odyssey described in
Iron John: A Book About Men:
a descent into the underworld to find the wildman in oneself and “steal the key from under the mother’s pillow.” Many women have been offended by Bly’s book, thinking it excludes them from the quest for selfhood, but in truth the initiatory odyssey it describes is no different for women in today’s world. Female heroism depends on a similar sequence of events. Women must claim their sexuality (and their wildwoman) in order to claim their creativity. But claiming sexuality has never been easy for women. One’s own self-censorship is hard to break through, and, if one breaks through, the world is still brutal in its denunciation. Even Anaïs Nin has only published her sexuality from the grave.

The reasons that led to my writing
Fear of Flying
were remarkably parallel to those that led to Henry’s writing
Tropic of Cancer
, and it seems he intuitively knew this when he “discovered” my first novel. He felt the kinship between us even though he could not then know how parallel our lives had been: bourgeois families; a renounced first marriage; a second marriage that made possible a flight to Europe and provided both subject matter and muse; many attempts to write “literary” books; and then an explosion, a fuck-everything, a descent into the cave of the wildman (or wildwoman) in the self.

Most commentators stop here in their exploration of both Henry and me. But, releasing the wild one, as Bly knows—it can be male or female—is only the beginning. The wild one takes the hero-writer down to the depths. Then the ascent must begin. And the ascent is everything. Most writers, most heroes, never make it. Henry did.

We live in a time of immense gender-anxiety, a time when both women and men are searching for new definitions of gender and there is such testiness on the subject of femaleness and maleness that it often seems the sexes do not know how to act with each other at all. Witness our current debates about definitions of date rape, sexual harassment, feminism, and backlash.

If this happens in life, imagine how much worse the problem is in literature! Literature presupposes certain societal agreement about what constitutes reality, and there is no such agreement between men and women today. Men live in one world of privilege, women in another world of want.

Literature mirrors this. At one extreme are Andrea Dworkin’s fictions anatomizing female abuse; at the other is Bret Easton Ellis’s evocations of male violence and brutality. How can such divergence make for a common literature? How can such divergence make for a common voice?

It wasn’t always this way. When I began searching for my voice as a writer, it was absolutely clear what a writer’s voice was supposed to sound like: male.

As a literature student at Barnard in the sixties, I studied the prescribed curriculum and it was at least 95 percent male. I remember using a book on Emily Dickinson that was from a series subtitled American
Men
of Letters. (Nobody seemed to get the joke.) The Modern American Novel meant: Bellow, Roth, Malamud, Updike. Modern poetry meant: Yeats, Auden, Pound. Even at a college founded by feminists, which prided itself on its affirmation of all things female, there was no question raised about the patriarchal nature of the curriculum. Not yet.

When in 1962, a famous male critic, the late Anatole Broyard, came to my writing class at Barnard and asserted: “Women can’t be writers; they don’t have the
experience
to be writers,” not one female voice was raised against him. We all sat there—we budding female writers—with our eyes modestly downcast, listening to the male voice of authority telling us what we could or could not write. Nobody laughed out loud. Nobody challenged him. And nobody thought it strange at all that a man should be dictating to a room of promising young women writers, many of whom have by now published dozens of distinguished books. Why were we so timid? Why did we find it so difficult to raise a voice?

In my first poems, I assumed a male poet’s persona. In my first attempts at fiction, I assumed the voice of a male madman. I loved Nabokov and this male madman’s voice was my homage to him. None of this was conscious, of course. I struggled for several years after college and graduate school, searching for a voice that was mine—since I seemed to know even then that no writer is truly born until she finds a voice.

Sylvia Plath’s
Ariel
and Anne Sexton’s
To Bedlam and Part Way Back
were important books in my life because they released me to find my own experience valid, to stop slavishly imitating Auden and Roethke and become a
woman
poet, taking pride in her own femaleness. That was a long road to travel, because femaleness was mocked, disregarded, and invisibilized by the New Critical Orthodoxies of the academic world in which I found myself. It was not easy for a woman to raise an authentic voice. There were no models, except Colette and de Beauvoir, who were almost unavailable in my college days.

As a young teenage poet—thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old—I adored Dorothy Parker and Edna St. Vincent Millay, found their work in my mother’s bookshelves and appropriated their books to my own room. I loved Parker’s mordant wit and Millay’s female lyricism. I identified with these poets in a special way that encouraged me to think I could write myself. I did not know their status (or lack thereof) in the “literary world.” How could I?

I arrived at Barnard to find these poets considered not kosher. Who among women poets
was
kosher? Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore—women who neutered their voices, who did not wear their ovaries on their sleeves. At that point, I did not have the historical (
her
storical some would say) perspective to understand that these women poets whom I loved had undergone the usual invisibilization process that women creators are treated to under patriarchy. I was given Pound, Eliot, Auden, and Roethke to study and I did so—dutifully and well—but I could never identify much with the women poets allowed into the canon. I was not sophisticated enough to understand that perhaps that was precisely why they—and not the others—were allowed into the canon: so that young women would not identify with them and come to believe they could be writers themselves. Instead, everything was done to make it appear that writing was a male preserve.

I got a degree in literature with honors, won numerous fellowships to graduate school, and toiled for two years on an appropriately unreadable master’s thesis about women in the poems of Alexander Pope. It was typical of my generation of women graduate students to express their nascent feminism in searching for traces of androgyny in male writers accepted by the orthodox canon. It would only be the next generation of feminists who would have the guts to rediscover invisibilized writers—from Aphra Behn to Kate Chopin, from Charlotte Perkins Gilman to Adelaide Crapsey. Surely the rehabilitation of Parker and Millay must be at hand.

I give all this background to show what a torturous road I had to travel to find the voice of
Fruits & Vegetables
, my first book of poems, or
Half-Lives
, my second. I had to throw out my literary education and accept my own life. Whatever may be said of my first two books of verse, they do break through to an authentic female voice. This, in itself, was against the odds, and a triumph of self-liberation.

I then sweated for several years on a derivative Nabokovian pastiche called
The Man Who Murdered Poets.
When I brought it to Aaron Asher, my then editor at Holt, a man who had published an unknown young woman poet twice before being rewarded with a novel, he wisely said: “Go home and write a novel in a voice you’ve discovered in those poems.” That remark proved to be the boot in the pants I needed to release
Fear of Flying
from my psyche.

Writing the book was terrifying, another exercise in self-liberation. I truly never expected the book to see the light of day. I wrote with the wind at my back, full of fear and trembling, promising myself that if it were never published—I didn’t expect it to be—I would at least be proud of myself for having tried. The book’s ending cost me the most sleepless nights. I had internalized the paradigm of the sexual heroine who dies for her sexuality—a paradigm unchallenged in books as diverse as
Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina
, Kate Chopin’s
The Awakening
, Mary McCarthy’s
A Charmed Life
, and even her
The Group.
You will find the same paradigm in such comparatively recent movies as
Fatal Attraction
and
Thelma & Louise.
If you examine sexy heroines in recent literature you will see that either they lose their lives or their children for expressing their sexuality. Sue Miller’s
The Good Mother
punished the heroine for her sexuality by allowing her to lose her beloved child.

As I sat writing and rewriting the ending of
Fear of Flying
(twelve times in all), I found myself wanting to kill off my rebellious alter-ego Isadora, or make her pregnant and have her lose the baby to a botched abortion. After all, she had left her “good” husband and gone off with a “bad boy.” Didn’t she deserve something terrible?

I did not know why I was drawn to such catastrophes. How could I know that I myself was a walking paradigm of sexism? How could I know that I had internalized the values of patriarchy and was expressing them even in this supposedly liberated and liberating (as it eventually proved to be) book?

Patriarchy is within us; that is why it proves so inexorable. We must eradicate it first within ourselves; after that we may be able to eradicate it in the world.

The only way feminism will ever triumph politically is if all women—young, old, gay, straight, black, white—understand that solidarity is our only choice. We may not always agree about everything, but to fight each other to the death—however compelling the surface reasons—is to relinquish our power, to give it away to the patriarchy. My generation of women—aging baby boomers—has, alas, sometimes fallen into this trap. We have divided along essentially meaningless lines. The fact is that all women are politically oppressed under patriarchy, just as all men are spiritually oppressed, and only our honesty can save us. First we must see the problem inside ourselves; then we must see it in society; then we must fight to change it. Perception is everything here. All change starts with perception.