by Marge Piercy
Other books by Marge Piercy
POETRY
The Hunger Moon: New & Selected Poems, 1980-2010
The Crooked Inheritance
Colors Passing Through Us
The Art of Blessing the Day
What Are Big Girls Made Of?
Available Light
Stone, Paper, Knife
The Moon Is Always Female
Living in the Open
Hard Loving
Breaking Camp
Early Grrrl
Mars and her Children
My Mother’s Body
Circles on the Water (Selected Poem)
The Twelve-Spoked Wheel Flashing
To Be of Use
4-Telling (with Bob Hershon, EmmettJarrett and Dick Lourie)
NOVELS
Sex Wars
The Third Child
Three Women
Going Down Fast
The Longings of Women
Summer People
Fly Away Home
Vida
Woman on the Edge of Time
Small Changes
Storm Tide (with Ira Wood)
City of Darkness, City of Light
He, She and It
Gone to Soldiers
Braided Lives
The High Cost of Living
OTHER
Pesach for the Rest of Us
So You Want to Write: How to Master the Craft of Writing
Fiction and the Personal Narrative (with Ira Wood), 1st & 2nd editions
The Last White Class: A Play (with Ira Wood)
Sleeping with Cats: A Memoir
Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt: Essays
Early Ripening: American Women’s Poetry Now: An Anthology
Dance the Eagle to Sleep
Marge Piercy
© Middlemarsh, Inc 2012
This edition © 2012 PM Press
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-60486-456-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2011927958
Cover by John Yates / www.stealworks.com
Interior design by briandesign
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
PM Press
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Printed in the USA on recycled paper, by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan.
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Published in the UK by Green Print, an imprint of The Merlin Press Ltd.,
6 Crane Street Chambers, Crane Street, Pontypool NP4 6ND, Wales
ISBN: 978-1-85425-103-9
Contents
Introduction to the New Edition
Shawn’s Reality Trip
Corey Receives the Buffalo
Billy Batson and the Teentsy Revolution
How Joanna Accepts a Chain
Back to the Soil with Shawn
Billy Assumes the Offensive
Corey Holds on to the Ball
Joanna in Harness
Shawn Rides the Tiger
Billy Storms the Sun
Marcus as an Underdeveloped Country
The Eagle Stoops on Corey
Shawn and the Holy Ghost
Introduction to the New Edition
It felt strange to read something I wrote so long ago when I was not only quite young but as much an organizer as a writer. While rereading it after forty years, at times I admired my younger self, sometimes I sighed in exasperation, and sometimes I remembered exactly how I had felt during the time I spent writing and rewriting the novel and all that was happening in the New Left then.
I find that the characters I created still seem vital and convincing to me. I knew my fellow activists, their strengths, their weaknesses, their hopes and fears. Corey, Shawn, Joanna, Ginny, Billy—they all still satisfy me. I find nothing off in their characterization. Creating characters that are convincing has been all along one of my strengths as a novelist.
I am not somebody who has turned against the ideals and politics of my youth and rejected them, as so many previously radical writers have done. I have modified some positions, discarded some strategies, and developed others, but I remain a woman of the Left and a feminist. I have no room in my life for mea culpa for my political beliefs or actions.
I find my glorification of youth in the novel rather naïve, but not a lot of my analysis of how the society channels people and the willingness of the powers that be to use violence as well as covert means on anyone who defies them and tries hard to change things.
One element of the rhetoric of that era that influenced the novel was a slogan: BRING THE WAR HOME. I thought what that would really mean, if the government acted with the same brutality against its citizens as it does against countries it chooses to invade. I wanted to make that vivid and real.
I would have created a more optimistic novel had I come to create such a novel in 1967, but by the time I was working on it—it was written rather quickly in a kind of obsessive blaze—I could see forces from within and from the government that were squeezing the life out of Students for a Democratic Society. I did not understand the degree to which the Nixon COINTELPRO program had infiltrated the New Left, but I saw the results quite clearly.
COINTELPRO was not a new program of the government, but under Nixon, it was greatly expanded. The aim of the program is to maintain the status quo socially and politically. Under President Nixon, the activities of this covert branch of the FBI were exponentially increased. Besides the wiretapping and surveillance, agents joined groups that the FBI did not like. What undercover agents did was infiltrate and subvert organizations from Students for the Democratic Society to civil rights groups, groups opposed to the Vietnam War, women’s liberation organizations, socialist groups, liberal lawyers groups and individuals who came under suspicion of harboring or implementing ideas that J. Edgar Hoover did not approve of.
The agents assigned to infiltrate political groups would act to try to undermine the aims of the groups and would act divisively, often employing extremely militant rhetoric in order to push people out of the group or persuade members that others in the group were their enemies. The infiltrators would sometimes lobby for illegal actions, with the aim of moving the group or at least some members into areas where they could be arrested and thus create the impression that the group was dangerous. They were big on bombs.
In New Left groups, this push coincided with great frustration that the massive marches and rallies, sometimes attended by 250,000 people, and the many demonstrations all over the country had not ended the war. In fact, the war escalated and the carpet-bombing and use of napalm intensified and moved into neighboring countries, Laos and Cambodia. The less effect we felt we had, the more intense and violent our rhetoric grew. As we talked and acted more vehemently militant, we ceased being able to communicate with those who had not already joined us, and thus we grew more isolated. We were arguing as time went on not to persuade or neutralize others, but only with each other. In a relatively short time, we went from “brothers and sisters” and consensus to “I’m more revolutionary/tougher/more of a street fighter than you.”
Still we finally did manage to put sufficient pressure on the government, on the university, on various professions to change things. I still meet people who hate the ‘60s and everything that it stood for in their minds. Often they seem angry that all that sex was going on and they were left out. It was a period in my life like none other, in which we actually did live in a different way. Communities were created and thrived for a time. We tried to move past patriarchal marriages and relationships into greater freedom and somet
imes it worked. Sometimes it did not. Music was important to us. We waited for new songs as if they were speaking directly to us. We believed in the liberating power of psychedelic drugs with a fervor few would share by now. As the years progressed, we saw the damage that certain of those drugs could do personally and socially.
We were not as obsessed as people are now with outward appearance, with what clothes to wear and with thinness, with constantly dieting and losing weight, with abs and surgically perfect faces. We enjoyed our bodies as they were, we danced, we made love, we thrust ourselves into danger. I still bear consequences from being beaten and being gassed. We believed we could create revolution. We believed in ourselves and each other. Those experiences help mold what I think people are capable of.
If we were sometimes silly and sometimes dismissive of those who did not agree with us, we were also brave and willing to take risks for what we believed in. If we were sometimes mistaken, we also saw the structure of power and property in a way that few do now. We brought up, debated, and sometimes created alternate institutions, dealing with problems that are still critical. We wanted to make a better world, and in some ways, we did.
I chose not to write a realistic novel of the New Left, but to transpose it into speculative fiction in part so as not to give the government more knowledge it could use against groups seeking change, and in part in order to broaden the impact so that it was not about a small or large organization, but about a struggle against capitalism and imperialism. If readers find it relevant now, it will be because I chose that genre rather than a roman a clef or a realistic novel about any of the groups that formed that New Left in the late ‘60s.
Marge Piercy, 2011
Shawn’s Reality Trip
At age eighteen, Shawn was officially loved by sixty thousand four hundred and eleven girls registered in his fan clubs. His parents found this bizarre and in questionable taste, along with the change in spelling of his name from Sean. If they had been less permissive, they would have stopped the whole episode. Shawn was the second generation born out of the Church, and his name was a sop to the quarter Irish in him. His father was a partner in a prestigious Philadelphia law firm. His mother owned buildings, had studied psychology and been analyzed by Jung, and was still beautiful in a gaunt silvery way. For a rock singer, Shawn was enormously protected and counseled and underexploited.
All three members of The Coming Thing—Frodo and Shep and Shawn—went to the same prep school, where they roomed together and kept up their grades to acceptable levels. When they had to miss exams, they made them up as a group. Their concerts were scheduled inside the rhythms of the school year, and they recorded intensively over vacations. Of course they had their share of bad scenes—oversold concerts in dingy halls with mushy acoustics and twitchy lightshows, and now and then a producer would try to chisel them out of their take. But on the whole, they were exploited as a careful investment, not as a quick-turnover commodity.
Falmouth was ossified in comparison to the primary school they’d all gone to as kids. That was a school almost without walls, a beautiful place with human teachers, and they had played mathematics and music and rattled on in French and German together since they were fat sloppy toddlers.
I am not an ice cube or a stone,
I am not an ice cube or a stone.
Honey, even teddy bears don’t like to sleep alone.
At Falmouth, they were popular but aloof. Frodo called it the Pimple Farm. The lead guitar, Frodo was small and squat and mean-looking and by far the most talented musically. He saw the world as a series of references to earlier rock and rhythm and blues. He was rough with the groupies sometimes, and perhaps Shep and Shawn could only remain in contact with him because they had had that common childhood. Shep was slender and fair with long fine brown hair, as much dandy in his dress as he could get away with at any given time, the only one who ever took an interest in their finances.
At Falmouth, the other boys had hang-ups. Shawn was at ease with his creativity, at ease with his brain, at ease with his body. His first sex had happened with Melanie Clinton, whose father made airplanes. She was a year older but in the same language group: they had no formal grades. They got undressed under the sprinkler in the garden of the Clintons’ summer home on the Jersey shore. Melanie was as blond as he was, and they had both just begun to have pubic hair, golden under the sun as tiny wires from jewelry making. She had no breasts, and they were both coffee-tan and fishbelly-white.
“It’s so cunning,” Melanie said. “I wish I had one like it.” They both laughed, because they understood she was saying something the school psychologist would seize on. They tried to perform what they understood of the sex act. The water made her slippery, and there really seemed to be no extra room. Still, it was pleasant and exciting as he lay on her cool slippery body with the droplets from the sprinkler and the sun on his back, warm and cool, warm and cool.
He finally accomplished it with her later that summer on the shore. In the twilight, their bodies were pale and warmer than the air, though the sand was still warm under them. He tried kissing her but he was awkward. It seemed silly, faking it, as if they were pretending to be adults. It was better to play with each other. He stretched her with his fingers, and finally he got his prick to slide in. They moved around and worked out the ways that felt good. He kept at it till she got sore.
He was too young to go out with her, and anyhow they were both very busy. A liberal school didn’t mean an easy one. But they were both in band, and sometimes after rehearsals they would hang around and screw on their nested coats. Melanie did not like the word fuck. She said it had negative connotations. He thought fuck but said screw to please her. He was playing drums then, and she played clarinet. Sometimes when they were rehearsing, he would get a hard-on looking at her and hoping. In the middle of the spring her periods started, and then she was afraid to, so that ended that.
Nights spent alone you’re better dead,
Nights spent alone you’re better dead,
I need you, gal, to hold down the dark half of my bed.
My back gets cold, I might come down with flu,
My front gets cold, I might come down with flu,
Don’t want no electric blanket, all I want in bed is you!
He didn’t like going to a boys’ school, but his father had gone to Falmouth, etc., and Shawn had a girl in town. He heard the boys talking all the time in the house about how to make girls, and the talk choked him. A girl will let you know, she knows what she wants, he would have said, but they didn’t ask him. They were shy of him about sex.
The school said he was undermotivated, meaning mostly Bs. They blamed it on his success. He always had money, but it flowed in mysteriously and invisibly and went away to make more of its own. Specialists bred his money like trainers taking care of a racing stable. When he was seventeen, he insisted on buying a blue Porsche he sometimes drove fast. Otherwise, the money was a process negotiated among his lawyer and agent and the record company and impresarios of tours and the corporate package that was the group and the trust funds that silently siphoned it off.
The truth was that in classes, just enough juice flowed to light a few circuits; but when he was working with the group, every switch turned on. All the adults he knew outside the music business might imply and coerce and assume that English history and physics were real and rock was frivolous, but he knew what engaged him all the way through and what just tiddled along in the front of his brain and caused his tongue to repeat empty phrases. Besides, his future yawned like an immediate pit, like the future of everyone else his age. The Nineteenth Year of Service was coming. Since Congress had legislated it into being two years before, it had sat there like a tollbooth across his way. He knew that for him those eighteen regimented months would not be dangerous, of course, but they would be a drag.
Two things were real. Two things gave off energy: one was making the music, working it on out together; finally recording, though that was so
mething else and already into another specialist’s scene, who could mix you into his kind of salesroom baroque. The other real thing was connecting with an audience—promise and delivery into that hot maw. Yet all draggled off into bad smells. For instance, at first they’d read their publicity: what they came to call Yetch Comix, or Three Clean Boys to Cream Over. They couldn’t take it. They were weak, and it was strong—the godawful commerce of manipulating acne-fears and wet dreams. They pretended it didn’t exist. They pretended that their concerts were conspiracies between them and kids almost like them. But the serious promo fizz was poisonous too, twaddle about the sonic revolution and the great significance con. They tried to keep each other sane. They tried to remember for each other who they were. The groupies were sometimes human, and at times it all seemed nothing but a clever way to get laid a lot. Then they went back to school and crept under the damp covers of Falmouth.
Well, girl, you put me down
cause you don’t know who I am.
Behind these glasses and this nose
Look out! Stand back! Hold on! It’s captain wham!
I’m the shocking electric man.
Just let me at your socket.
Baby, I got the juice to turn you on.
Then it came, the Nineteenth Year of Servitude, shit on wheels. Right at the beginning of the White Knight’s first term, his task force on youth problems had come up with The Plan, presented as a great victory for the peace groups and the public-spirited and the draft protesters. Most guys still ended up in the Army, and a great many went into the street patrols and the city militia. But a number were channeled into overseas aid and pacification corps, the rebuilding programs in the bombed-out ghettoes, and the pollution cleanup corps. Girls who weren’t pushed into the nursing corps worked in the preschool socialization programs in the ghettoes or as teachers’ aides or low-level programmers for the array of teaching machines. Of course, students in medicine, engineering, and the sciences just kept trotting through school.
School records, grades, and counselors determined some of the channeling, but the prime tools were the mass exams everyone took, separating out levels of skill and verbal intelligence, and locating potential troublemakers. Anthropologists praised the Nineteenth Year of Service for providing a rite of passage, and sure enough, everybody could tell the nineteen-year-olds from their younger brothers and sisters, because they all had their hair cut and wore uniforms. There was an absolute gap between kids and adults, a before and an after that could never meet. The sexes were segregated and sharply differentiated in function. The elders had no more trouble telling the boys from the girls and keeping them from joining their small differences. Sex officially ended at eighteen. For two years now, the Nineteenth Year had bottled up the so-called Youth Revolution. Now it was bottling up him.