One winter evening not long ago, my friend Tina and I went to see The Post at a little movie theater out in the west of San Francisco, where the sky is darker and the wind is stronger and everything seems a little dreamier. The movie told two intertwined stories, about the Washington Post’s decision to report on the Pentagon Papers, the material leaked by Daniel Ellsberg to make it clear that the Vietnam War was based on a lie, and the way that Katharine Graham, who had recently taken over as publisher when her husband died, simultaneously seized hold of her business and herself, sweeping aside the men who condescended to her as she swept aside her own self-doubt about her qualifications to take power and make decisions with world-changing consequences.
We enjoyed the drive, and the crisp night air, and before that the popcorn and the vintage Republican decor and wardrobe of the cinematic Ms. Graham and the scenes of printing presses running. When we exited into a very black night, I somehow found myself talking about my own early struggles with publishing. It had been a long time since I’d recalled how bitter my early endeavors to put out books were, in their own small way, or rather how fervently men had sought to prevent me from publishing. I was lucky in that I overcame the obstacles they erected, but I presume others did not. And now I can see how white the world of publishing was and is, and that though some doors slammed because of my gender, others remained open because of my race.
Some of the damage was funny in its own way. There was an editor who one day changed things at random in the manuscript of my first book, so the French artist Niki de Saint Phalle became Niki de Saint Paul, iconic to ironic, 1957 to 1967. The reason for this desultory sabotage I do not know, but when I fought it I was treated as though I should take random errors inserted into my manuscript more in stride. Another editor, I recall, wrote me a scathing note about that book’s inconclusive ending; he’d lost the last chapter of the manuscript, but did not imagine the error was his. The process of producing the book dragged out an extra year because of my inexperience and inability to advocate effectively for myself against odd interventions like that.
And then there was Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the figurehead of that publishing house and enterprise. It is now more than thirty years since I signed a book contract with City Lights Booksellers & Publishers, and during those first few years I was very often in the editorial offices in the back of the top floor of the bookstore, which I’ve returned to often as a browser, a friend of some of the staff, and occasionally a reader at events. In these decades Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who floated around there regularly, has never spoken a word to me, including under circumstances where speaking to me would be the normal thing to do. I was never sure whether it was that he wouldn’t or he couldn’t. Sometimes I thought that he might possess a sort of Venn diagram in which City Lights authors or historians were not a group that intersected with young blondes, so that I was categorically nonexistent.
Once, when I had been working with City Lights for more than two years, Ferlinghetti came with City Lights’ editor in chief to a book party I’d helped organize for my friend Brad Erickson’s activist handbook. A week later Brad and I met at City Lights and Ferlinghetti came down the little staircase next to the famous bookstore’s front door and looked at the two of us, one he had met once briefly, one he was publishing and had crossed paths with dozens of times over the past few years, and said to us, “Hi, Brad.” I didn’t particularly want to be pals with him, but it is normal for your publisher to say hi to you. Thinking back, that peculiar business makes me believe that my urge, years earlier, at the Allen Ginsberg photography show, to shout about my nonexistence had a basis.
Some of it was less funny. Talking to Tina in the winter air, I remembered for the first time in years how another powerful old man attempted to destroy that first book altogether. John Coplans had been a cofounder of Artforum, the most daring of the major American art magazines, when it began life in San Francisco in 1962, and he had written about Bay Area artists for the magazine. In the 1980s, he had some success as a photographer. His subject was his own sagging, hairy, aging, nude body depicted up close in black and white as a sort of monolith that took up all the room in the picture.
When my book appeared in 1991, Coplans had a lawyer write a letter to City Lights accusing me of libel. Wally Hedrick, one of the six central subjects of that first book, had painted American flags starting in 1953, and one way or another he’d lost or destroyed all the paintings that might’ve had some minor status as landmarks of American art, since New York painter Jasper Johns was famous for having begun painting American flags slightly later. (He painted a lot of them black to protest the Vietnam War.) One of Hedrick’s paintings, I wrote in my book, “survived until 1963, when (according to Hedrick) the art critic John Coplans borrowed it from a ten-year survey of Hedricks’s work and never returned it. He had asked to bring it to a woman interested in buying it, and the work has never been seen since.”
Coplans claimed that not only did this make him out to be a thief, but that he’d never met Hedrick. As I recall it, the lawyer’s letter suggested that if we destroyed all copies of the book, no further action would be taken. The desire to casually annihilate the years of work and the moment of arrival that a first book represented was stunning. It didn’t help that, so far as I could tell, the editor who received the letter seemed to think it quite plausible that I had gotten my facts gravely wrong. I rarely seemed to be regarded as in possession of much competence and credibility in those days, whether it was about a personal interaction or about history.
I’m still in the habit of amassing evidence to back me up, and that’s what I did then: I went to the SFMOMA museum library and photocopied a pile of material about the two men’s published conversations and collaborations back in the day. My editor, I believe, forwarded the material to the lawyer. All the copies of my book were not destroyed, though it had a very quiet life and is now out of print. One of the two write-ups attributed authorship of the book to poet and critic Bill Berkson, who’d written a very gracious foreword, opening with a quote by Mina Loy: “The common tragedy is to suffer without having appeared.”
In 2008 I wrote an essay called “Men Explain Things to Me” that contains the sentence “Credibility is a basic survival tool.” In a way, credibility is also my profession or at least part of the necessary equipment of any writer of nonfiction. I had to fight for it in the beginning. That is, I had to fight to convince others, in both personal and professional life, to grant me the capacity to perceive events with a reasonable degree of accuracy, and the frequency of this experience sowed self-doubt in me, so the struggle was not only with others.
It is not always possible to say that a given weather event is due to climate change, but that climate change shapes the trends is clear, and the same can be said of discrimination—that this particular event may or may not be due to someone’s attitudes about people in your category, but the cumulative effect suggests a pattern. Looking back now, it seems that had I not lived in a culture where the threats against me and the violence against women around me were real and pressing and the disdain of those writers who were so lionized in my youth wasn’t so scorching, then these actions against me might have seemed a series of unfortunate, unrelated incidents.
My second book was a very different book, and it had an auspicious beginning: I sent a proposal on a Monday in 1991 to Sierra Club Books, was called by an editor on Tuesday, and met with him on Wednesday. The book contract came soon afterward. I sold my battered Datsun B210 and spent part of the $12,000 advance on a used white Chevy S10 pickup truck with a camper shell to better pursue my research across the West. My life had changed while I was writing Secret Exhibition, and if that first book laid the foundation for me to understand recent and local history just before my era, this second book would be a broader and deeper inquiry into the American West and its myths, wars, blind spots, wonders, criminals, and heroines.
This book, Savage Dreams: A Jou
rney into the Hidden Wars of the American West, was about how invisibility permits atrocity. The war at the center of the book’s first half was at the Nevada Test Site, where the nuclear wars generally regarded as a terrible thing that might happen someday were in fact happening at the rate of about one nuclear bomb detonation a month from 1951 to 1991, more than a thousand in all, with dire impact on the local environment and the human beings downwind. The second half of the book was about Yosemite National Park, where the Indian wars widely regarded as something bad that happened long ago were going on in the present by other means against Native people who had not, contrary to what was then conventional belief, disappeared, vanished, reached the end of the trail, set off into the sunset, or been the last of their kind. Native people had been rendered invisible by representations or rather nonrepresentations—in signage, in the more visible of its two museums, in land management practices, and in the depiction of Yosemite by environmental organizations and artists as an uninhabited wilderness recently discovered by white people and a place people only belonged as visitors.
That is, I was arguing that the wars of the future and the past were overlapping in the present, and that they were largely unrecognized because of how we thought about things like war, and the West, and nature, and culture, and Native people. I was the beneficiary of a revolution of ideas under way about all those things. Native people were asserting that they had never gone away, never given up on their rights, never forgotten their history, and that the land had a history, a history of cultures that were not separate from or destructive of nature. It was a revolutionary realization for non-Native people like me, a recuperation after what has sometimes been called symbolic annihilation, a term for the nonrepresentation of a group—a gender, an ethnicity, an orientation—in the popular culture or the arts and official versions of their society or region. Among other things, it undid the tidy nature/culture binary that was so widely used to organize ideas back then.
My editor was encouraging. But when the manuscript was finished, in 1993, he sent it out for peer review to two men who’d written Western histories. One was Evan S. Connell, whose own history of Custer and the Battle of Little Bighorn was experimental enough that I thought he’d have a positive reaction, but he seemed to regard my book as incoherent and objectionable, which was disappointing, but fine as an opinion. The other guy, who’d written a book about a national park, was upset about my ideas on Yosemite, insisting on reading what I described as cultural blind spots as intentional conspiracies whose existence he denied. The book’s epigraph was James Baldwin’s spectacular sentence “It is the innocence which constitutes the crime,” meaning that it’s not cunning but obliviousness, willful or otherwise, behind so much brutality. In a long, indignant letter, he accused me of, among other things, “intellectual dishonesty” and a “hidden agenda,” and he wrote, “I have taken the liberty of copying my remarks to a few respected colleagues, among them park officials in Yosemite.”
I wrote him back that my agenda was not hidden and that “I spoke with my former professor Ben Bagdikian about the matter today, and he condemned the action as wrong. Bagdikian, former ombudsman for the Washington Post, currently a professor of journalism at UC Berkeley, and a national authority on journalistic ethics, said that although it is customary to circulate unpublished academic writing within academic circles for review, the circumstances here are different: your attack on my book was sent not to impartial authorities but to concerned parties who also happen to be governmental officials, an unheard-of compromise of journalistic independence for writing dealing with social and political issues. A likely effect of such an act is to create pressure on the publishers to withhold publication.” Recruiting a powerful man was, like throwing published data into a conflict, another chess move to compensate for my own lack or sense of lack of credibility in the conflict. And I pointed out to my editor that in raging about my sins of interpretation—and only those sins—this reader had apparently found no factual errors worth mentioning.
Credibility is a basic survival tool. The book went through the usual editorial processes, and then in the fall of 1994 it was in print. Because it was in part about nuclear weapons and the campaigns against them, and because my younger brother was an antinuclear activist and a kind and supportive person, he helped organize a speaking tour across the American West, using his networks to set me up at colleges and radio stations and activist groups, and joined me on the 7,000-mile journey in my Chevrolet truck. We stayed with friends and acquaintances, mostly his, all the way; in Dallas, our host politely asked us what route we took there from San Francisco, and I was pleased to be able to reply to him, “Via Seattle.”
Sierra Club Books assigned an in-house publicist, a tall blond man who became more and more peculiar as I tried to work with him. It became impossible to reach him by phone or to get him to return calls, but he emailed me that he had booked me in bookstores across the West as part of that grand tour and gave me dates that fit the schedule. I’d been ignored when I’d complained to other people at the publishing house about him, and I’d gotten the impression, again, that they considered me overwrought and my concerns baseless. When we were already out on the road, I got suspicious and found a pay phone from which I called the first bookstore he was supposed to have booked me into. I found out he’d never contacted it. I made more calls.
He was a liar. None of the events he’d claimed to have scheduled me into existed. When I did radio interviews it turned out that the interviewers hadn’t received the copies I’d asked him to send, so they had no clue what we should talk about. He had, one way or another, decided to bury my book. The book remained far more invisible than it might have been otherwise, and our tour was full of gaps and dead spaces we could have filled ourselves if we’d known what he was doing. I thought Savage Dreams was an important book, or at least a book trying to look at important, urgent things in new ways. (Its title, which I regret, was after a charismatic monster named James Savage, who initiated genocidal wars in the Yosemite region in pursuit of gold-rush profit.)
If someone had listened to me when I began to distrust him out loud, his malice or incompetence might not have had such an impact. During those first few years in publishing I was writing history and being regarded, as young women often are, as not particularly capable of bearing witness even to everyday interactions. I was reading in public and being unable to make myself heard by my publishers. That evening with Tina after the movie, when I told her about Coplans and the rest, I realized for the first time how much it all felt like a genteel, disembodied version of the annihilatory rage I’d met on the streets a few years earlier. These incidents seemed intended to tell me that this was not my place and in it my voice would not be heard.
Now, I feel lucky to have gone through all that before even the internet, let alone social media, had come along. We know the malice there is distributed by gender and race, and that a lot of collective online labor is put into making people who aren’t white or male or straight or cisgender shut up and go away. If they aren’t silenced altogether, they pay this tax on having a voice, they do the extra work to overcome the obstacles that keep things unequal. On a few occasions, as I’ve watched people try to whip up hate campaigns against me on social media, I’ve thought that had they tried to do so at the outset rather than decades into my life in print, their efforts might have had an impact that would be harder to ignore or override (though maybe I would’ve also been posting publicly about my peculiar encounters with men in publishing and finding solidarity there).
Mostly we hear from people who survive difficulties or break through barriers and the fact that they did so is often used to suggest the difficulties or barriers were not so very serious or that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Not everyone makes it through, and what tries to kill you takes a lot of your energy that might be better used elsewhere and makes you tired and anxious. The process of writing and publishing nonfiction convinced
me of my own credibility and capacity to determine what was true and just more than anything else did, and that made me able to stand up, sometimes, for myself, or for others.
3
Often, when a woman says that bad things have happened to her or to women and the perpetrators were men, she’s accused of hating men, as though the reality of those events is not relevant, only her obligation to be sunny no matter what is, or as though the fact that not all men are awful outweighs the reality that some are in ways that impact her. Often what a woman says is weighed for what kind of woman that makes her and whether she’s still pleasing to others rather than its factual content. My twenties included a wonderful boyfriend who was with me from my twenty-first birthday until my late twenties, and my younger brother who drew me into his activism and supported my work that became increasingly intertwined with this activism. And gay men, as friends and as a huge cultural force in the city I lived in and models of what else being male could mean. And what being human could mean.
* * *
Every day, when Jay DeFeo was suffering from the lung cancer that would kill her in late 1989, she would call up Ed Gilbert, he told me years later.
“Ed, what are you wearing?” she would ask him. I remember his performance of her voice as soft and ethereal, floating on the air like the smoke from one of her cigarettes or the plumes of one of the objects she drew with whirling charcoal lines. Ed, the director of one of San Francisco’s leading art galleries, Gallery Paule Anglim, now Gallery Anglim Gilbert, would describe that particular day’s sartorial splendor and then she would say, “Thank you. I feel so much better,” and hang up. They had that conversation over and over, almost daily, as she declined, and each time she seemed to find pleasure in it.
Recollections of My Nonexistence Page 13