Going Too Far

by Robin Morgan

  These letters span a period of eleven years. I was twenty-one years old when I wrote the first one, thirty-two when I wrote the last. The first was written before I was married, the last when my child was four years old. The bulk of the letters, those to my husband, Kenneth Pitchford, herein referred to as “K.,” were written out of those thoughts and feelings I feared I could never actually speak aloud to him. I thought of them as diary leaves—written mostly for my own sake, with the remote possibility of someday perhaps being able to show them to him. Beyond that, I admit that I secretly hoped the letters would be found after my death, and then could be seen by the whole world, should it care. I confess this last because to do otherwise would be hypocritical; the driving, voracious, irrepressible, and brazen desire of a writer is, after all, to write, and yes, to be read.

  As becomes evident in the later letters, I did eventually let K. read them, and that reading opened up new channels in our relationship. Publishing them is another step altogether. They are, to say the least, embarrassing. They reveal both pleasant and unpleasant truths about myself, K., and our marriage, which inclinations toward complacency would rather leave unsaid, or at least unprinted. I know that there will be those who will be surprised that we remain together; those men who will wonder why K. never left me, and those women who, from a superficially “correct” feminist position, will have only contempt for me, for not having left him. Some readers will be voyeurs and some will be judges. There will even be some, perhaps, who disbelieve the validity of the letters; who will insist that I wrote them all recently, specifically for publication in this book, as some sort of gimmick.

  One cannot require that the world understand one’s actions. One can only try to proceed honorably, and to explain those actions one feels it necessary to clarify. The letters are real, and were written at the time of their dates. I publish them now because I feel they are an important part of my life, and because I am convinced that they name truths, trace patterns, and expose attitudes which in one way or another every woman who has ever lived under patriarchy has experienced.

  The sharing of that experience is at the heart of the feminist metamorphosis—and for every reader who willfully misunderstands the letters there will be more women who will recognize this voice as their own. That would be sufficient reason for making myself vulnerable. Indeed, it is merely a measure of residual patriarchal identification in me that I still feel embarrassed about this at all. But such are the ironies inherent in the process.

  “Love is more complex than theory,” I wrote once in a poem. The letters are ultimately about love, in its various and terrifying and life-sustaining forms—and about the griefs that accompany it, today, for a woman, although I could at the time of writing most of them give no name yet to those griefs. But I could not know what I know now, however little that is, had I not dared to begin at that point.

  Awkwardly, then, I affirm these letters, claim them for my own, and send them forth on their own. And I affirm the woman who wrote them, the man who finally read them and later courageously supported the idea of their publication, and the relationship which so far has endured and which continues to pay the costly price of growth.

  The personal is political, I know as a feminist. The personal is also the pure ore to be mined for literature, I know as an artist. There is no way, then, that I cannot dare publish these letters.

  1

  The first letter in this series is both naïve and prophetic; it was written to myself one week before I married Kenneth Pitchford. He and I had met almost four years earlier, when I was seventeen; we met through a poetry anthology in which we each were represented by some poems. The relationship deepened and intensified during the following years, when we formed a poetry workshop together. There are references in this letter to various friends’ and relatives’ opposition to our marriage; indeed, my mother was greatly upset, as were most close family friends. Surprisingly, most of K.’s friends—a supposedly less conventionally minded circle of artists—were also opposed. Hardly anyone saw much of a future for such a couple: the man a poet and an unashamed homosexual (this, years before Gay Liberation), the woman a virginal former child actress ten years his junior who claimed she wanted to be a writer.1 Such a marriage, buzzed the consensus, in traditional, or Freudian, or even bohemian terms, was going too far.

  12 September 1962

  SO I AM, after all, going to marry K. And for my own benefit, I want to put into words below what that—and the very living of my life entirely, which only really begins now—will entail:

  I will learn to love him even as he loves me, from knowledge and not abstraction. I will use him to find more of myself, and be at his hand for the same purpose. I will not lie to him, or deceive him, no matter what the cost. I will insist on mutual honesty between us, whatever it discloses. I will not be subject to his life or work, be beset upon by him or any other; neither will I ask that of him. I will assert my selfness, my work, my desires and hours, not at the cost of his but to bring about between us a separate wholeness, threatening neither, reinforcing both. I will not play the girl-child to his father, nor will I patronize him, emphasizing his impracticalities or awkwardness in technicalities of this world. I will work toward becoming a woman rather than a wife, knowing that the latter need not include the former, but rather the former can with ease and a whole graciousness bring about the latter. I will remain me. I will fight all images that sprout between us of unconscious making. I will find the strength to be with him, or without him, as the case may be. I will try never to hurt him, within the bonds of loving or awareness. I will try to make him love me more each day, surprising his own limitations. I will not be overly dependent upon him, his potential as an artist, or his opinions—nor allow him to be tricked into leaning overly much on me. I will respect his actions all, his motives all, his ideas all, reserving that individual right of persons to differ.

  I will survive my mother’s hurt and horror, until such time as she can know me—and him—again. I will never stop a barrage of love toward her that must someday break her hatred and despair, and bring her to me. I will watch her always and be there when she needs me. I will find the strength and humor to cope with friends and acquaintances and their shock or disapproval. I will not let them touch me deeply, where I dwell, but will retain a compassion, with action, toward those I care for. I will not be ashamed of what I am doing, but will compel acceptance on my own terms. I will not justify, excuse, explain, or plead. I am what I am, in pride and excitement.

  I will follow him into any paths he chooses, however alien or dark, or blinding, and at the same time seek my own paths. I will respect myself and my work, alone and to his face. I will strive to enjoy his bed truthfully, his work critically, and our life, with all the endurance, passion, and honesty I, as a separate me, can bring to them.

  And I will love him enough, and more. And that will make everything possible.

  R.M.

  1 I had been working, primarily in theater and television, since the age of two, managing to extricate myself from this busy precocity when I was sixteen.

  2

  At the time of this letter’s writing I had given up hope of reconciling my mother to my marriage, and had not spoken to her for over a year (it would be two more years before we resumed knowing one another). During the middle sixties, K. was working at a publishing house as a lexicographer, and I was doing free-lance editing and proof-reading, as referred to in this letter. The reference to my father stems from my not having met him until I was eighteen years old—and then infrequently, and disappointingly; my parents had been divorced when I was born. My maternal aunt, who had lived with my mother and me until I was twelve years old, was dying of cancer in Florida when this letter was written.

  13 July 1965, Midnight

  DEAR K.:

  This will be the first in a series of letters I’ve been wanting to write you for a long time. I shrink somehow from keeping a diary; it seems solipsistic or self-conscious, at
least the way I would go about it, I know. And so many times I want to say things to you that I don’t. Not because I can’t—I really think we have an extremely rare ability and will to communicate with one another—but because the time isn’t right, or the mood, or simply because the thought doesn’t actually form itself until flowing out on paper. It’s absurd to begin a one-sided correspondence to the person with whom one is living, I know, seeing every day, lying beside every night. Especially absurd since we so often sit and talk, long and animatedly, about everything important or unimportant, talking just as we did before we lived together, with the same earnest desperation as if one of us had to leave in a few hours. But whatever the real reason, which may only become clear to me later on, I write to you instead of to a diary or journal. Perhaps it’s just the pompous thought that this medium will be more interesting to posterity. I wouldn’t put it past me.

  Tonight, you are sleeping, and since we’re on slightly different schedules, I’m wide awake, not quite alert or detached enough to really write or read; not lazy enough to watch television or goof off. But my mind is teeming with ghosts and realizations and ideas, unbidden and not quite welcome. That’s why I write this, instead of the first draft of a poem.

  I’ve finished proof-reading the Jo Mielziner memoir for Atheneum, which was filled with recollections of his having done the set for Death of a Salesman. This sent me back to the play, of course, which I’ve just now reread for about the fifth time, weeping again like a fool. The terrible love between Biff and Willy makes me realize how desperately I want to work with that subject matter I so fear and so desire: the awful love and struggle and noncommunication, and that same hopeless belief in one another—despite all the awareness of the heavy embroidery of lies that makes it possible—between my mother and myself. I think, too, of my Aunt Sally, dying slowly in Florida between her pitiable letters to me, trying to love me in some compromise between the way she knows how to love (possessiveness, gifts, guilt, harangues) and the way she somehow glimpses I want to be loved and to love (honestly, communicatively, with respect and some honor—oh, impossibly, I guess, with everyone in my life until you). I love and pity her in her little dying, and can do nothing. Nothing but go down and live with her and wait on her and love on her terms, be possessed and give up all that I have fought to learn and be. And even that would be nothing, because I couldn’t give it up or hide it successfully, so that she would soon be disillusioned about the person she thinks she loves but could never understand.

  Why is there still this interminable ache in me, in all of us, cut the bonds as we may, to try to love and know those of our own blood? I mourn my living mother tonight, for the more than a year we have lost of each other. I mourn my living father for the twenty years we never had of each other. I mourn myself as a torn child and adolescent, still trying feverishly to act upon that love and understanding and forgiveness that I am now wise enough to put only in a letter which may never be seen, or a poem which will. How many years do we go on using against ourselves the same knives our parents have bequeathed to us, still red with our own blood that they drew early in our lives?

  You’ve just awakened and trotted out past my desk, naked, in that sleep-potty summery way of yours that is so foggy and bewildered at being awake, and so endearing. And for the thousandth time, your presence in the room, simply as that, all unaware, drives old ghosts back to their graves, your love for me wrapping me round in itself as protection against all their haunting cries, all my failed loves.

  So I will speak of another realization I had tonight, which has rocked me somewhat. I don’t know yet whether it’s good or bad, but it’s frightening. That same silly Mielziner book (such petty things can set off such thought processes) rambled on about the theatah, and actors and rehearsals and the comradliness of it all and the nervousness before openings, etc., all so familiar to me, both from the cliché of it and the actual knowledge of having done these things for so long, that I was deeply shocked to find it all totally foreign to me. I mean, simply, that although I could remember those experiences and even recall those very feelings, I suddenly knew as an absolute fact that I could never know them again. I don’t believe I can act any more. I don’t mean this as a rehash of all the old disillusionment I went through when I first left acting, which I’ve since coped with by looking at it simply as a job. I mean I know I can never really act again. Nor does having been away a long time explain it. I don’t think I can perform a character before an audience any more. That schizophrenic temperament—the weirdness of being onstage or before a camera, speaking, and meaning, mind you, lines—and still knowing that you are yourself, at least partly, aware of both in the same instant, is now … not incomprehensible quite, but foreign, alien, impossible to me. I’m too much myself, too integrated, to exorcise myself from my own body successfully. The thought terrifies me, as if I were a schoolgirl afraid of standing in front of people to say my piece. And all the techniques and tricks that I can still call up to aid me don’t help if, in that moment, a real and a fictional character strive for existence in the same body. The real one wins, the performance is false, the tricks are just tricks. I really don’t think I can ever act again. This has nothing to do with wanting or not wanting to, it’s quite beyond both. Does this mean I’ve become realer as a human being, more vivid in my own personality, more introspective as a person or a better poet? I think not, but don’t know. I’ve lost one thing, and don’t know if I’ve gained another in its place or, to be more exact, don’t know what has thrust the first thing out. Perhaps I’ve indeed lost the world, but gained my own soul.

  This letter—or entry—has served its purpose and comforted me. Sometimes I think that all writing is just an expression of frustrated love, but at least I’ve learned to turn (most of the time) that frustration on thinking of the past into something constructive in the present, or at least something self-revealing, or even merely sedating, to the pain. Strange that I should write this first letter tonight. So many times I’ve been about to start it, either in a mood of great mushy Schubertian love and yearning, or simply to number in writing the one hundred reasons why you should go to hell. Neither, tonight, but calmly, confidentially, as to a friend. My dear, my dear, you’re still the only friend I have.

  R.

  On rereading this, I feel I should add that I don’t intend to polish these letters (if I ever write another one), but just let the thoughts come as they will in what language they will. Hence the striking lack of immortal prose. With all my secret hopes that you, or posterity, will read this, for the sake of truth—and my own sanity—I had better assume nobody ever will.

  3

  This letter refers to the writing of the first draft of K.’s novel, The Beholding, which was ultimately completed in 1976. “Killing off Leonard Porterfield” is a reference to his writing the death scene of one of the major characters in the novel. Hektor, the cat mentioned throughout this letter, was born on the day we were married. One of a circle of cats all named for Homeric characters, he is at present alive and well, thirteen years old, and extremely dignified at such a venerable age.

  27 July 1965, 1:00 a.m. (actually 28 July)

  DEAR K.:

  Tonight you are killing off Leonard Porterfield at last, and before I set to work myself I thought I would put down the “Leech Dream” we’ve so often discussed—probably the most beautiful and terrifying dream I’ve had.

  It’s been almost a year since the dream, but I still can recall it quite vividly, partly from our many talks about it, and partly from the clarity of its symbolism.

  I was in a small stone cottage in a tiny clearing, in the midst of dense, almost jungle-like woods. You, already my husband, were away, on a space mission actually, although it was not so much for the government as a private, personal expedition to some planet—Venus, I believe. I was confident of your safe return, and I lived quietly, without fear, despite my solitude. My only companion was Hektor, our orange tiger cat, still young and lean and
affectionate. He didn’t live in the tiny cottage, but in the woods just beyond. He visited me daily. It was summer, the sun was warm, and I took a mat outside (just beyond the house, in the little clearing) to lie on and enjoy the sun. Hektor came up as I was doing this, and after I had taken off my shoes (which, for some reason, were brown loafers—the kind kids put pennies in) and set them a little away, at the edge of the woods, he lay down beside me to sleep. Somehow he was much larger stretched out beside me, reaching from my breasts, where he nestled his head, to below my knees.

  As he lay there, a strange snake-like creature, part lizard, with a head like a snake but with squat legs and claws, and a long tail, appeared from out of the surrounding growth. (I somehow knew, in the dream, that he was a leech, although an actual leech looks much different.) He hissed out a warning to us, saying that he hated us and would destroy us.

  In the passage of time in the dream, this scene seemed to have occurred a number of times. Then, one day, as Hektor and I lay in the sun, both thinking of you with confidence and love, we began to shift positions. He now lay on top of me, long, silky, luxuriant, and quite without hurting or clawing, he entered me. As we made love, it was somehow an offering, a tribute to you away on your planet or star. But the leech appeared, more malevolent than ever, and sidled over to one of my shoes, hissing that whatever he touched became poisoned, and that he would destroy us now. He said that the instant one of us moved off the protective mat, he would sting or even just touch us, and we would die. He said that he would avenge you for our unfaithfulness.