The Hite Report on Shere Hite (25 page)
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Authors: Shere Hite
When I was growing up I remember reading her and also Ruth Benedict, plus Jesse Bernard â I heard about de Beauvoir â and thinking how interesting their work was. I also read
Nation
of
Sheep.
Strangely enough, I think I also got some of my inspiration and ideas from Eleanor Roosevelt; although she was not officially studying society, I saw her as a woman (remembered vividly by my grandmother, and in pictures) getting a view of what went on in society during the Depression, and speaking up about what she thought could help.
Also, I was very much influenced by psychologists, such as Bruno Bettelheim and Karen Horney. And even Freud. I also loved Dostoevsky and Proust, kind of psychological novelists, in a way, and
The
Magic
Mountain
by Thomas Mann, and
Look
Homeward
Angel
by Thomas Wolfe.
You are not living in the United States. What was it like to grow up there, and what is your relationship to it now?
I think I was very lucky to be born in the US, when I was, because it offered me such diversity. When I went to college, we were still benefitting from the intellectual and artistic
émigrés
that came to the US and especially New
York, during and just before World War II. This included brilliant scholars from around the world. And I think too the US imbued me with a deep belief in the importance and beauty of equality as a political system and a way of life. Even though we may not always live up to it. For example, the discrimination against blacks and women in the US. But the idealism we learn in school, how we want the country to function, is what highlights these defects so we can begin to see and change them.
So, I thank the US for my idealism and a very broad cultural and artistic education.
You studied not only history, but also music?
Yes. Piano and clarinet and composition. But that's another story.
Let's get back to where you live, or don't live. Where
do
you live?
For the last three years, I have never lived in one place for very long, moving between London, Paris, Amsterdam, Germany and Italy â mostly staying in hotels! I love hotels, if they are good, because in a hotel, someone else takes care of you, it is not always the woman taking care of everything else. Someone else makes up the bed, sends out the mail, watches over the staff who take the telephone calls, sends out parcels, and every other item of life that I'm sure you,
chère
amie,
know all too well.
So you rarely or never cook your own dinners?
No, but I don't miss that! Although, I used to like very much to give dinner parties. But most of the time I go out to eat.
Are you lazy?
Yes! But I work on my research fourteen hours a day lots of times. It's like having my own business, it's full-time. There's no way to half do it. My greatest occupational
hazard is too many hours of sitting still at a desk. I try to compensate for this by exercise, walking, breathing.
So what's a normal schedule like?
I still stay up late, trying to get some serious writing done, so I get up late too. There's usually a lot to be attended to right away in the mornings, a few urgent phone calls, a delivery, something to do with the bank â I don't know. All the stuff everybody does.
What about Friedrich?
We get up at the same time, sometimes he's up before me, but then he comes back to wake me up when the alarm goes off. Then sometimes he's away giving concerts or rehearsing, other times I am travelling away from him and he can't come because there is no piano.
You seem very much in love.
I have to admit I'm crazy about him. And he does so many wonderful things. Once when I had just published a book and had a lot of really exaggerated press problems in the US, he came with me and we travelled everywhere together, he was like a physical and psychological bodyguard. He was majestic, heroic. Most people couldn't have handled it, because it was nerve-racking, not to mention some men would have had an ego problem with me getting all the âattention' or whatever it was, and him being the âsupporting cast'. He was fabulous, but he's also extremely intellectual and well educated.
He looks so brilliantly masculine. Is he?
He has two sides; he can either wear a suit and look like the most straight man around (but
really
straight in the way only Germans and Americans can look!) or he can wear a T-shirt and look like a sexy rock star. And he's not afraid to say anything!
How did you feel with all those press problems? The
press has said some crazy things about you. Well, some of them say you are a great social scientist, but others â¦
I was exhausted and depleted, especially after my last book came out in the US, because the media seemed determined to misunderstand and sensationalize what it was all about. The media frightens me, it is like trying to have a conversation with a many-headed dragon. Sometimes the face near you is friendly, but later, every personal trait of yours is taken and ripped apart, like some kind of spiritual rape. Then I feel all of myself close down, and even with myself I cannot perceive the world as clearly or as openly as before. It takes a long time to recover. Music, classical music such as Prokofiev, Puccini or Mahler, restores my spirit and is a great inspiration.
You like Puccini? He's very Italian!
I love Italy because Italy is beautiful â by the way, there's another reason I left New York. I experienced the death of some of those nearest and dearest to me, which made me value life more, and those I love, no matter how far away they are. I realize how much simple pleasure I get in just seeing their faces, seeing them smile with delight. Time has become more important. I have to look ahead and choose my projects carefully, decide which ways in the future I can contribute the most â to society and to the liberation of women â directions to go for myself so that I won't feel I missed out on something I cared about.
Are you going back to the USA? Or have you left permanently?
I'll let you know next time we talk. OK? Ciao!
In Europe I was thriving. I loved it. I had many friends, and was learning about other cultures and ways of life. It was great.
At the same time, while I made fun of myself and my situation and was always laughing, I was sometimes full of anxiety. I didn't know what the future held, and I had been badly frightened.
My friends brought me through this. They sustained me all during the early 1990s, as I gradually settled down in Europe and the UK, living for a time with some of them, including Joanna Briscoe, Chris Grandlund, Johnny Mundane, Catherine Rihoit, Anselma dell Olio, and Giovanni Russo. The loving and close times we had were so important for me, to feel human, grow to feel comfortable in new surroundings, and just basically have fun, that I can never be grateful enough. How much generosity they had, to open their homes and hearts to me!
I began to pick up on some of my long-term growing female friendships in Europe (women I had met on earlier book trips) and to become more close, especially with Delphine Seyrig. Delphine was a great feminist and actress, being best known for her starring role in
Last
Year
in
Marienbad,
in which she played a mysterious
femme
fatale.
She was also known as an important abortion-rights activist in France.
We met when she sponsored a panel about
Women
and
Love.
From there, our friendship blossomed, and we began working on a play for her about Madame de Pompadour, a subject I proposed after getting to know her. I had long thought that Pompadour was much more serious and important than the mistress status most history books give her, and wanted to write about her. Delphine agreed and wanted to play her. Yet she
was also quite keen on playing Calamity Jane, the nineteenth-century American cowgirl, based on a book she had,
Calamity J
ane's
Letters
to
Her
Daughter.
Calamity Jane, on whom the famous American musical
Annie
Get
Your
Gun
was partially based, had been married to Wild Bill Hickok. They had a child, but then divorced or separated, and he took the little girl. And so Calamity Jane wrote her daughter a series of touching letters, which were found, unsent, after her death, I should have liked the Calamity Jane project, but snob that I was and am, and having studied French history and culture, I was more taken by Pompadour. I thought her contribution was greater, her struggle and sacrifice just as poignant. I liked her interesting combination of
femme
fatale
with activist woman; this was very modern and embodied Delphine (and maybe parts of me, too â the combination of sexuality and politics was there). So we worked on this.
Delphine introduced me to many French feminists and cultural figures, including Catherine Deneuve, and gave me letters and notes from Simone de Beauvoir (her friend, who had recently died). Our Pompadour project was to be interrupted by Delphine's own untimely death, from breast cancer. This left an enormous void in Paris, an intense, ineradicable sadness.
Gradually, the residual terror I felt, leftover from my experiences in the US, receded â though I rarely gave anyone my real address or invited them to my home. Fred and I kept one apartment that was publicly known and another that was not. This exemplifies the depths of our trauma at the hands of some giant corporate media.
Other things helped me through that time, too: the stability, cheeriness and sexiness of Friedrich; the sheer intellectual challenge of my work; and, a little later, working in the visual arts, taking photos with my friend Iris Brosch. With these pictures, I began to try to redefine and expand my identity (or to intergrate my sexual and intellectual identity), and to re-vision symbols of the female body and sesuality.
Around this time, also, and during all this moving around â which made my head spin, as well as my mind â I wrote a political satire,
The
Divine
Comedy
of
Ariadne
and
Jupiter
â
an autobiographical novel, a spoof on politics in combination with my spiritual quest for meaning in life. For, after all, one's politics are a matter of one's soul, the desires of one's heart for the world.
This was the book Swifty Lazar had contracted with Nancy Evans at Doubleday; it was already copy-edited when Evans was fired, and the book was not published in the US. But meanwhile Gary Pulsifer, a sexy young American publisher, was planning to push my book in England!
The main character, Jupiter, my dog-friend (who talks), has the ability to take me away to heaven where I get advice on the possibility of social change on earth from various luminaries including Marx and Lenin, Cleopatra, George Orwell, Gertrude Stein, Hitler and the Pope. I loved working on
Jupiter.
I tried to be as free as possible, to put as much of my own spirit in it as I could and somehow include all sides of my life at once â the intellectual, the spiritual, the sexual.
It has been remarked that women's autobiographies
often show fault lines; reality seems to be bifurcated. I think this is true of many women, it's the way our lives are. We are seen as either âbrains' or âbodies' (whether reproductive âmothers', or sexual) â but not both, and it is very difficult sometimes to put the whole package together even inside oneself. Also we live in two cultures: the dominent sociology (the establishment, with its mostly male heroes), and our own view of reality, often shaped in conversation with our female friends.
In my novel, I tried to put it all together â the personal and political (the famous feminist slogan!) and try inside and outside. Is my own
Divine
Comedy
perfectly politically correct? I doubt it â¦
It was published first in 1992 believe it or not in Spain (yes, in Spanish), to good reviews, then in Germany where it got even better ones, then Brazil and finally England. Not in the US, of course.
What was happening between Friedrich and me?
To be frank, our personal life was overwhelmed by echoes of the events of 1987/8, by moving, leaving the US and travelling. Friedrich had stood by me, he was always there, sexier and smarter than ever. Heroic. It is one thing for me to have felt suffocated by the media's distorting mirror, felt the clammy hands coming through the words on the paper, groping for my throat, as they described (yet again) my body and hair. It is quite another to live with these stereotypes, said over and over in public (and private whispers) about someone you just happen to be married to. And never, ever,
to complain about it. Only to complain about the people writing these things, never to blame the person for somehow invoking it or creating it.
This is quite an exceptional person we are talking about. You can hear it in his music, too, if you need further proof.
On the other hand, the events did tire us a bit! In practical terms, we needed to build a new life. Gradually, he migrated to Germany, his musical and national base. I needed to have an official room of my own (Ã la Virginia Woolf â corny, but true), and wound up commuting from city to city, trying to establish my new working and publishing bases.
During this period of our adjustment to living under new circumstances, our relationship consisted of searching for decent apartments, lovemaking, rushing apart because of work and various periods of arguments and tensions. I'm not saying it wasn't spectacular! But it wasn't normal daily life either.
Friedrich supported me emotionally and intellectually during those last years in the US. But now, the strain of our new financial worries was telling on us. We sometimes argued over small things. I had to work twelve to fourteen hours a day to make up for what had happened, both financially and in terms of reputation. Not much of me was left over for private life. He too had to build up a career, which he had put off doing while he was helping me fend off attacks. After being a child wonder and genius, he had tried to be ânormal' and enjoy hanging out together. Now he had to build his business network and forge connections in classical
music circles in Germany, his homeland and the place where he wanted to make his reputation most brilliant.