by Olivia Laing
SPF—Why do you avoid yourself?Huh?
SPF—Why do you avoid yourself?What?
SPF—I mean you almost refuse your own existence. You know- Uh—it’s just easier SPF—No I mean I like, I like to know you (talking very quietly) I always think of you as being hurt. Well, I’ve been hurt so often I don’t even care anymore.SPF—Oh sure you care. Well uh, I don’t get hurt anymore . . . SPF—I mean, it’s very nice to feel. You know. Uh-no, I don’t really think so. It’s too sad to do (opera) And I’m always, uh, afraid to feel happy because then uh . . . just never last . . . SPF—Do you ever, do you ever do things by yourself? Uh no, I can’t do things by myself.
Talking so much you horrify yourself and those around you; talking so little that you almost refuse your own existence: a demonstrates that speech is by no means a straightforward route to connection. If loneliness is to be defined as a desire for intimacy, then included within that is the need to express oneself and to be heard, to share thoughts, experiences and feelings. Intimacy can’t exist if the participants aren’t willing to make themselves known, to be revealed. But gauging the levels is tricky. Either you don’t communicate enough and remain concealed from other people, or you risk rejection by exposing too much altogether: the minor and major hurts, the tedious obsessions, the abscesses and cataracts of need and shame and longing. My own decision had been to clam up, though sometimes I longed to grab someone’s arm and blurt the whole thing out, to pull an Ondine, to open everything for inspection.
It’s here that Warhol’s recording devices take on their magical, transformative aspect. Plenty of people have over the years felt the need to portray him as damaged and manipulative, needling confession out of the vulnerable and drug-addicted as a way of filling gaping holes in the fabric of his own being. But that isn’t the whole story. His work around speech might be better understood as a collaboration, a symbiotic exchange between the citizens of too much and not enough, between excess and paucity, expulsion and retention. After all, it’s just as painful, just as isolating, to talk into a vacuum as it is to be stoppered in the first place. For the logorrheic, the compulsively communicative, Warhol was the ideal audience, the neutral dream listener as well as the bully with what Ondine called his ‘Prussian tactics’.
This is what the filmmaker Jonas Mekas thought was really driving the Factory’s grand project of exhibition and exposure. He figured people participated because of Warhol’s knack for paying non-judgemental attention to those who were otherwise rejected or ignored.
Andy was the chief psychiatrist. It’s the typical psychiatrist’s situation: on the couch, you begin to be totally yourself, hide nothing, this person won’t react, just listen to you. Andy was such an open psychiatrist with all those sad, confused people. They used to come and feel at home. There was this person who never disapproved of them – ‘Nice, nice, good, oh, beautiful.’ They felt very much received, accepted. I have no doubt it helped some not to commit suicide – some committed . . . Also they felt that when Andy put them in front of the camera, they could do and be themselves, thinking that this is what they can contribute, now I’m doing my thing.
The critic Lynne Tillman also felt that the exchange went both ways. In her essay on a, ‘The Last Words are Andy Warhol’, she weighs the charge of manipulation against the notion that Warhol offered insecure and unhappy people ‘something – work or a feeling of significance for that moment or a way to fill time. The tape recorder is on. You are being recorded. Your voice is being heard, and this is history.’
It wasn’t just a question of contribution, though. If all of Warhol’s work, a included, is antagonistic to received notions of value, if it participates in a tearing down of sentiment and seriousness, it is at the same time engaged in a project of building up, of giving status and attention to the deviant and neglected, to the aspects of culture that have become invisible, either because they lurk in shadows or because they’ve drifted into the blind spot of excessive familiarity.
While a is at pains to show that a heartfelt confession has no more intrinsic value than a conversation about 20 milligram bi-phetamine or mouldy Coca-Cola, it simultaneously testifies to the importance, the beauty even, of what people actually say and how they say it: the great jumbled inconsequential endlessly unfinished business of ordinary existence. This is what Warhol liked, and this is what he valued too, a fact attested to by a’s closing line, in which Billy Name, summing up the whole chaotic expulsive endeavour, cries ‘Out of the garbage, into The Book’ – the vessel, that is, by which the transient and trashy will be sanctified and preserved.
*
Of course, all this is assuming that your words are wanted in the first place. In the spring of 1967, the final year of a’s taping, a woman came to see Andy about a play she’d written. He took the meeting, intrigued by the title, Up Your Ass, but then got cold feet, worried about the potentially pornographic contents. He thought the woman might be an undercover cop, trying to entrap him. On the contrary, she was as far from the system as it is possible to be, an outlier and anomaly even amidst the flamboyant freak-show of the Factory.
Like Warhol, Valerie Solanas, the woman who once shot him, has been eaten by history, reduced to a single act. The crazy woman, the failed assassin, too angry and unhinged to be worthy of attention. And yet what she had to say is brilliant and prescient as well as brutal and psychotic. The story of her relationship with Andy is all about words – about how much they’re valued and what happens if they aren’t. In her controversial book, the SCUM Manifesto, she considers the problems of isolation not in emotional terms, but structurally, as a social problem that particularly affects women. And yet Solanas’s attempt to make contact and build solidarity by way of language ended in tragedy, amplifying rather than relieving the sense of isolation that she and Warhol shared.
The early life of Valerie Solanas is just as you might expect, only more so. A disordered childhood, parcelled between relatives. Sharp as a knife, so sharp you’ll cut yourself, a sarcastic, rebellious girl. Abused by her bartender father, sexually active from a young age, first child at fifteen, raised as her sister, second child at sixteen, adopted by friends of the father, a sailor lately back from the Korean War. An out lesbian at school, where she was bullied, then a psychology major at the University of Maryland, where she wrote witty, caustic, proto-feminist columns for the student paper.
What was she like back then? Angry, sometimes physically aggressive, very poor, determined, isolated, radicalised by the circumstances of her own life – the suffocating expectations, the limited options, the galling hypocrisies and ruthless double standards. Unlike Warhol, who combated his exclusion passively, Solanas wanted active change, to smash things up rather than redecorate and rearrange.
After an abortive stint at grad school, she dropped out of the educational system entirely, hitchhiking around the country. She started writing Up Your Ass in 1960 and the next year moved to New York, where she drifted between boarding houses and welfare hotels. I have said that both Hopper and Warhol were poor, but Solanas existed in a marginal world that neither of them ever experienced: panhandling, turning tricks, waiting tables; never resting, never taking her eyes off the ball.
In the mid-1960s she started work on what would become the SCUM Manifesto. The word scum appealed to her. Scum: extraneous matter or impurities; a low, vile or worthless person or group of people. Like Warhol, she was attracted by the excessive and neglected, the rubbished and rubbishy. Both liked turning things upside-down; both were inverts, imaginative upenders of what the culture held dear. As for the SCUM of the manifesto, Solanas’s definition describes just the sort of women Warhol liked, at least from the other side of a camera: ‘dominant, secure, self-confident, nasty, violent, selfish, independent, proud, thrill-seeking, free-wheeling, arrogant females, who consider themselves fit to rule the universe, who have free-wheeled to the limits of this “society” and are ready to wheel on to something far beyond what it has to offer’.
Still shockingly violent now, the manifesto was so far in advance of its times politically as to be almost unreadably strange, written in an alien language, a language that is palpably buckling and rupturing, exploding out of silence, splattering itself on to the page. When Solanas wrote SCUM, second-wave feminism had barely begun. Betty Friedan’s reasoned and reasonable The Feminine Mystique was published in 1963. In 1964, the Civil Rights Act barred employment discrimination with regard to race and gender; in addition, the first woman’s shelter opened. But a nascent acknowledgement that the lot of women included violence and financial exploitation was still a world away from the systemic, furious, radical upheaval that Solanas was proposing. ‘SCUM,’ she wrote, ‘is against the entire system, the very idea of law and government. SCUM is out to destroy the system, not attain certain rights within it.’
It’s not an easy position to inhabit, that of the outlier, the iconoclast. ‘Valerie Solanas was a loner,’ writes Avital Ronell in her introduction to SCUM. ‘She had no followers. She arrived too late or too early on every scene.’ And Ronell is not the only one to see the manifesto as a text that both arises from and exists in isolation. According to Mary Harron, the writer and director of the biopic I Shot Andy Warhol: ‘It is a product of a gifted mind working in isolation, with no contact with but also no allegiance to academic structures – isolated and therefore owing nothing to anyone.’ As for Breanne Fahs, who wrote the wonderfully restorative biography of Solanas published by the Feminist Press in 2014: ‘SCUM Manifesto was witty, intelligent, and violent, sure, but it was also lonely. Isolation followed Valerie, however much she recruited and connected, attacked and provoked.’
This is not to say, however, that isolation was what Solanas desired. In fact, isolation was one of the things she blamed on men: the way they separated women from each other, hauling them off to the suburbs to form self-absorbed family groups. SCUM is deeply opposed to this kind of atomisation. It’s not just a lonely document; it’s also a document that seeks to identify and remedy the causes of isolation. The deeper dream, beyond that of a world without men, is revealed when the word community is defined: ‘A true community consists of individuals – not mere species members, not couples – respecting each others individuality and privacy, at the same time interacting with each other mentally and emotionally – free spirits in free relation to each other – and cooperating with each other to achieve common ends’ – a statement with which I am in complete accord.
After Valerie finished the manifesto at the beginning of August 1967, she worked frenetically to publicise its existence. She mimeographed 2,000 copies and hand-sold them on the streets, $1 for women, $2 for men. She distributed fliers, conducted forums, posted adverts in the Village Voice and made recruiting posters.
One of the recipients of these posters was Andy Warhol. On 1 August, Valerie mailed him three copies, two for the Factory and one ‘to keep under your pillow at night’. It was a gift for an ally, not an enemy. They’d met earlier that spring, while she was trying to get Up Your Ass produced. At the time, she’d been arranging dozens of meeting with producers and publishers, but they all passed, some expressing anxiety about its pornographic contents (the play is extremely bawdy, centring on the exploits of a hard-boiled dyke called Bongoi).
Valerie hadn’t wandered or drifted into the Factory. She’d come deliberately, looking for amplification of her voice, her work. She was focused and intent; ‘dead serious’ in her own words. That spring she’d sometimes come to sit at Warhol’s table in the backroom of Max’s Kansas City, braving the stares, the drag queens giving her the once over. She was a fast-talker, a hustler, and he liked that, regularly taping their phone conversations and apparently lifting a number of her lines for later movies.
Their conversations were playful and often very funny. In one of them, reported in Fahs’s biography, Solanas asks: ‘Andy, will you take seriously your position as head of the men’s auxiliary of SCUM? Cause you do realise the immenseness of the position?’ Andy: ‘What is it? Is it that big?’ Valerie: ‘Yes, it is.’ She pretends to be in the CIA, quizzes him about his sexual practices and, like the Sugar Plum Fairy, interrogates him about his own silence, his abnormal reticence.
Valerie: Why don’t you like to answer questions?
Andy: I really never have anything to say . . .
Valerie: Andy! Did anyone ever tell you you were uptight?
Andy: I’m not uptight.
Valerie: How are you not uptight?
Andy: It’s such an old-fashioned word.
Valerie: You’re an old-fashioned guy. You really are. I mean, you don’t realize it but you really are.
Back in June, she’d given him a bound copy of Up Your Ass. He’d expressed interest in producing it; in fact their conversations had progressed as far as suggesting venues and possible double-bills. But some time that summer Warhol lost or discarded it. As a kind of apology, a way of getting her off his back, he cast Valerie in his film, I, a Man. In it, she refuses the sinuous femininity of most of the Superstars, male and female alike, performing instead an aggressively anti-sexual androgyny, awkward, jittery and amusingly contemptuous.
Warhol wasn’t by any means the only publisher or promoter Valerie was pursuing that summer. At the end of August, a few days after the premiere of I, a Man, she signed a contract for $500 for a novel with a notoriously sleazy publisher, Maurice Girodias at the Olympia Press. As soon as the ink was dry, she began to fret. Did the contract mean she had inadvertently signed away the rights to both Up Your Ass and SCUM Manifesto? Who actually owned her words? Had she given them away? Worse, had they been stolen from her?
Warhol was sympathetic to Valerie’s worries about the Girodias contract, even arranging for his own lawyers to look it over for free. There was no problem, they all agreed; the contract was vaguely worded and in no way binding, but their reassurances did nothing to ameliorate her growing anxiety. Words were what counted for Valerie; they were the flung rope between her and the world. Words were a source of power, the best way of making contact, of reshaping society on her own terms. The idea that she might have lost control over her own writing was devastating. It plunged her into the isolation chamber of paranoia, where the self is necessarily armed and barricaded against incursion and attack.
But as the old adage goes, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you. Solanas was not mad in thinking that she could see oppression everywhere she looked, or that society was a system dedicated to excluding and side-lining women (1967, the year in which SCUM was first published, was also, one might remember, the year in which Jo Hopper donated her life’s work to the Whitney, which subsequently destroyed it).Valerie’s growing loneliness and isolation was caused not just by mental illness, but also because she was voicing something about which the community at large was in denial.
Over the course of the next year, Solanas’s relationship with Warhol soured. Her attempts to have him produce the play or make a film out of SCUM became more aggrieved, more desperate and deranged. She’d been evicted from the Chelsea Hotel for non-payment of rent, and was drifting around the country, homeless and broke. She sent him hate mail from the road.
One addresses him as ‘Toad’; another reads: ‘Daddy, if I am good will you let Jonas Mekas write about me? Will you let me do a scene in one of your shit movies? Oh, thank you, thank you’ – not, one might imagine, a tone or attitude to which Warhol was much accustomed.
Things came to a head in the summer of 1968. Back in New York, and more paranoid than ever, she began to ring Andy persistently at home, a number almost no one in his entourage even had, let alone used. Eventually, he stopped taking Solanas’s calls at all (one of the ongoing threads in a is the necessity of establishing this sort of protocol, so that calls to the Factory could be screened and unwanted advances avoided).
On Monday 3 June, Valerie collected a bag from a friend’s apartment and then went to visit two producers, Lee Strasberg and Margo Feiden. Strasberg was out but Valerie spent four hours at Feiden’s apartment. At the end of an exhausting and exhaustive discussion about her work, she asked if Margo would be willing to produce her play. When Margo refused, she pulled out a gun. After some persuasion, she left, saying she was going to shoot Andy Warhol instead.
She arrived at the Factory just after lunch, carrying a brown paper bag containing two handguns, a Kotex pad and her address book. This was the new Factory: a glossy loft on the sixth floor of 33 Union Square West, at the northernmost tip of the square. The old Silver Factory had been demolished that spring and with the shift in location the personnel too had begun to change, the speed-heads and drag queens gradually replaced by sleek and suited men, the business-minded associates who would shepherd Warhol into increasingly lucrative pastures from now on.
When Valerie arrived Warhol was out, and so she hung around outside, going up and down in the elevator at least seven times to check she hadn’t missed him. He finally appeared at 4.15, encountering both Valerie and his then boyfriend Jed Johnson in the street outside. The three of them took the elevator up together. In POPism, his memoir of the 1960s, Warhol recalled that Valerie was wearing lipstick and a heavy coat, though the day was very hot, and that she was bouncing a little on the balls of her feet.