Art and Ardor

by Cynthia Ozick

  Still, to teach at a university is not simply to teach; the teacher is a teacher among students, but he is also a teacher among teachers. He has colleagues, and to have colleagues is to have high exchanges, fruitful discourses, enlightening quarrels. Colleagues, unlike students, are not merely literate but breathtakingly literary; not merely educated but bent under the weight of multitudinous higher degrees; not merely informed but dazzlingly knowledgeable; not merely unprejudiced but brilliantly questing. And my colleagues believed exactly what my students believed.

  My colleagues were, let it be noted, members of the Department of English in the prestige college of an important university. I was, let it be revealed, the only woman instructor in that department. Some years before, the college had been all male. Then the coeds were invited in, and now and then in their wake a woman was admitted, often reluctantly, to the faculty. Before my own admittance, I had been living the isolated life of a writer—my occupation for some years had consisted in reading great quantities and in writing embarrassingly tiny quantities. I was, I suppose, not in that condition generally known as “being in touch with the world.” I was in touch with novels, poetry, essays, enlarging meditations; but of “the world,” as it turned out, I apparently knew little.

  I came to the university in search of the world. I had just finished an enormous novel, the writing of which had taken many more years than any novel ought to take, and after so long a retreat my lust for the world was prodigious. I wanted Experience, I wanted to sleep under bridges—but finding that all the bridges had thickly trafficked clover-leaves under them, I came instead to the university. I came innocently. I had believed, through all those dark and hope-sickened years of writing, that it was myself (“myself”—whatever that means for each of us) who was doing the writing. In the university, among my colleagues, I discovered two essential points: (1) that it was a “woman” who had done the writing—not a mind—and that I was a “woman writer”; and (2) that I was now not a teacher, but a “woman teacher.”

  I was suspect from the beginning—more so among my colleagues than among my students. My students, after all, were accustomed to the idea of a “woman teacher,” having recently been taught by several in high school. But my colleagues were long out of high school, and they distrusted me. I learned that I had no genuinely valid opinions, since every view I might hold was colored by my sex. If I said I didn’t like Hemingway, I could have no critical justification, no literary reason; it was only because, being a woman, I obviously could not be sympathetic toward Hemingway’s “masculine” subject matter—the hunting, the fishing, the bullfighting, which no woman could adequately digest. It goes without saying that among my colleagues there were other Hemingway dissenters; but their reasons for disliking Hemingway, unlike mine, were not taken to be simply ovarian.

  In fact, both my students and my colleagues were equal adherents of the Ovarian Theory of Literature, or, rather, its complement, the Testicular Theory. A recent camp follower (I cannot call him a pioneer) of this explicit theory is, of course, Norman Mailer, who has attributed his own gift, and the literary gift in general, solely and directly to the possession of a specific pair of organs. One writes with these organs, Mailer has said in Advertisements for Myself; and I have always wondered with what shade of ink he manages to do it.

  I recall my first encounter with the Ovarian Theory. My students had been assigned the reading of Wise Blood, the novel by Flannery O’Connor. Somewhere in the discussion I referred to the author as “she.” The class stirred in astonishment; they had not imagined that “Flannery” could connote a woman, and this somehow put a different cast upon the narrative and their response to it. Now among my students there was a fine young woman, intelligent and experimental rather than conforming, one of my rare literates, herself an anomaly because she was enrolled in the overwhelmingly male College of Engineering. I knew that her mind usually sought beyond the commonplace—she wrote with the askew glance of the really inquisitive. Up went her hand. “But I could tell she was a woman,” she insisted. “Her sentences are a woman’s sentences.” I asked her what she meant and how she could tell. “Because they’re sentimental,” she said, “they’re not concrete like a man’s.” I pointed out whole paragraphs, pages even, of unsentimental, so-called tough prose. “But she sounds like a woman—she has to sound that way because she is,” said the future engineer, while I speculated whether her bridges and buildings would loom plainly as woman’s work. Moreover, it rapidly developed that the whole class now declared that it too, even while ignorant of the author’s sex, had nevertheless intuited all along that this was a woman’s prose; it had to be, since Flannery was a she.

  My second encounter with the idea of literature-as-physiology was odder yet. This time my interlocutor was a wonderfully gentle, deeply intellectual young fellow teacher; he was going to prove what my freshmen had merely maintained. “But of course style is influenced by physical make-up,” he began in his judicious graduate-assistant way. Here was his incontrovertible evidence: “Take Keats, right? Keats fighting tuberculosis at the end of his life. You don’t suppose Keats’s poetry was totally unaffected by his having had tuberculosis?” And he smiled with the flourish of a young man who has made an unanswerable point. “Ah, but you don’t suppose,” I put it to him cheerfully enough, “that being a woman is a disease?”

  But comparing literary women with having a debilitating disease is the least of it. My colleague, after all, was a kindly sort, and stuck to human matters; he did not mention dogs. On the other hand, almost everyone remembers Dr. Johnson’s remark upon hearing a woman preacher—she reminded him, he said, of a dog dancing on its hind legs; one marvels not at how well it is done, but that it is done at all. That was two centuries ago; wise Lady Mary was Johnson’s contemporary. Two centuries, and the world of letters has not been altered by a syllable, unless you regard the switch from dogs to disease as a rudimentary advance. Perhaps it is. We have advanced so far that the dullest as well as the best of freshmen can scarcely be distinguished from Dr. Johnson, except by a bark.

  And our own Dr. Johnson—I leave you to guess his name—hoping to insult a rival writer, announces that the rival “reminds me of nothing so much as a woman writer.”

  Consider, in this vein, the habits of reviewers. I think I can say in good conscience that I have never—repeat, never—read a review of a novel or, especially, of a collection of poetry by a woman that did not include somewhere in its columns a gratuitous allusion to the writer’s sex and its supposed effects. The Ovarian Theory of Literature is the property of all society, not merely of freshmen and poor Ph.D. lackeys: you will find it in all the best periodicals, even the most highbrow. For example: a few years ago a critic in The New York Review of Books considered five novels, three of which were by women. And so his review begins: “Women novelists, we have learned to assume, like to keep their focus narrow.” And from this touchstone—with no ground other than the “we have learned to assume”—falls his praise and his censure. The touchstone, of course, is properly qualified, as such touchstones always are, by reverent asides concerning the breadth of George Eliot and the grasp of Jane Austen. Ah, indispensable George and Jane! They have come into the world, one concludes, only to serve as exceptions to the strictures of reviewers; and they are exceptions. Genius always is; it is how genius is defined. But if the exception is to be dragged into every routine review of novelists and poets who are women, then the rule must drop equally on all. Let every new poet, male and female, be reviewed in the shadow of Emily Dickinson and Coleridge. Let every unknown novelist, male and female, be reviewed in the blaze of Anna Karenina and Wuthering Heights. If this seems like nonsense, then reviewers must take merit as their point of concentration, not stale expectation, and not the glibbest of literary canards.

  Still, the canards are, in their way, small fun, being as flexible and fragile as other toys. A collection of canards is bound to be a gaggle of contradictions. When, for instance, my bright e
ngineering student identified Flannery O’Connor as “sentimental,” she was squarely in one-half of a diluvial, though bifurcated, tradition. Within this tradition there are two hoary views of woman. One: she is sentimental, imprecise, irrational, overemotional, impatient, unperseveringly flighty, whimsical, impulsive, unreliable, unmechanical, not given to practicality, perilously vague, and so on. In this view she is always contrasted with man, who is, on the other hand, unsentimental, exact, rational, controlled, patient, hard-headed, mechanically gifted, a meeter of payrolls, firm of purpose, wary of impulse, anything but a dreamer. Description One accounts for why throughout her history she has been a leader neither of empires nor of trades nor of armies. But it is also declared that, her nature having failed her in the practical world, she cannot succeed in the world of invention either: she is unequipped, for example, for poetry, in that (here is Description Two) she is above all pragmatic, sensible and unsentimental, unvisionary, unadventurous, empirical, conservative, down-to-earth, unspontaneous, perseveringly patient and thus good at the minutiae of mechanical and manipulative tasks, and essentially unimaginative. In short, she will wander too much or she will wander not at all. She is either too emotional or not emotional enough. She is either too spontaneous or not spontaneous enough. She is either too sensitive (that is why she cannot be president of General Motors) or she is not sensitive enough (that is why she will never write King Lear).

  But none of this is to imply that woman is damned, and damned from every direction. Not at all. The fact is that woman qua woman is more often celebrated. If she cannot hear the muse, says Robert Graves, what does it matter? She is the muse. Man Does, Woman Is is the title of Graves’s most recent collection of poetry. If we are expected to conclude from this that woman is an It rather than a Thou (to use Martin Buber’s categories), why deplore it? The Parthenon too is beautiful, passive, inspiring. Who would long to build it, if one can be it?

  And even this is unfair, since it is simultaneously true that woman is frequently praised as the more “creative” sex. She does not need to make poems, it is argued; she has no drive to make poems, because she is privileged to make babies. A pregnancy is as fulfilling as, say, Yeats’s Sailing to Byzantium. Here is an interesting idea worth examination. To begin with, we would have to know what it cost Yeats—I am speaking physically—to wring out a poem of genius. Perhaps we cannot know this. The writing of great and visionary literature is not a common experience and is not readily explorable. A. E. Housman—a lesser poet than Yeats, to be sure, though as pure a one—said of the genesis of a poem that it affected his flesh: that if a wisp of a line came to him while he was in the middle of shaving, for instance, he could sense the bristles standing on end. Most poets, if they speak of it at all, report extreme exhaustion accompanied by supreme exaltation. Yeats himself spoke of the poet living amid whirlwinds. Virginia Woolf, a writer of a kind of prose very near poetry in tone and aspiration, was racked in the heat of composition by seizures of profoundly tormenting headaches. Isaac Babel called himself a “galley slave.” Conrad was in a frenzy for weeks on end—“I turn in this vicious circle and the work itself becomes like the work in a treadmill—a thing without joy—a punishing task. . . . I am at it day after day, and I want all day, every minute of a day, to produce a beggarly tale of words or perhaps to produce nothing at all. . . . One’s will becomes a slave of hallucinations, responds only to shadowy impulses, waits on imagination alone.” Dostoyevsky said plainly: “I worked and was tortured.” Flaubert wrote, “You don’t know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word.” Tolstoy told a friend, “One ought only to write when one leaves a piece of flesh in the ink-pot each time one dips one’s pen.” For Isak Dinesen, the “great and difficult task” was pursued “without faith and without hope.” And George Eliot said of the writing of Romola—it occupied two years—that she began it young, and finished it old.

  That is what “creativity” is. Is a pregnancy like that? The fact is, given health (and one must never assume the abnormal, since being a woman is really not like having a disease), the condition of pregnancy is—in the consciousness—very nearly like the condition of non-pregnancy. It is insulting to a poet to compare his titanic and agonized strivings with the so-called “creativity” of childbearing, where—consciously—nothing happens. One does not will the development of the fetus; one can be as dull or as active, or as bored or as intense, as one pleases—anything else is mere self-absorption and daydream: the process itself is as involuntary and as unaware as the beating of one’s own heart. Of course, it is a miracle that one’s heart goes on beating, that the fetus goes on growing—but it is not a human miracle, it is Nature’s miracle. If we want to talk about Nature, very well—but now we are talking about literature. To produce a new human being out of a pair of cells is a marvel, but it is not our marvel. Once we, male and female, have joined two disparate cells by our human wills, the rest is done for us, not by us. The woman’s body is a vessel, thereafter, for a parasite. For the presence of the zygote she is thereafter no more responsible than she is for the presence of her heart and lungs. To call a child a poem may be a pretty metaphor, but it is a slur on the labor of art. Literature cannot be equated with physiology, and woman through her reproductive system alone is no more a creative artist than was Joyce by virtue of his kidneys alone, or James by virtue of his teeth (which, by the way, were troublesome). A poem emerges from a mind, and mind is, so far as our present knowledge takes us, an unknowable abstraction. Perhaps it is a compliment to a woman of no gifts to say of her in compensation, “Ah, well, but she has made a child.” But that is a cheap and slippery mythology, and a misleading one. It induces the false value of self-inflation in mediocre women. It is scarcely our duty to compliment the mediocre for their mediocrity when we are hardly employed enough in celebrating the gifted for their gifts, wrung out by the toil of desire and imagination. It takes something away from Yeats to compare a mediocre child—and most children, like most parents, are mediocre—with Sailing to Byzantium. But it is just as irrelevant to compare a brilliant child with a brilliant poem. Biology is there: it does not need our praise, and if we choose to praise it, it is blasphemous to think we are praising not God but ourselves.1

  All this is, one would think, almost stupefyingly obvious. It is embarrassing, it is humiliating, to be so obvious about the quality either of literature or of woman. She, at any rate, is not a muse, nor is she on the strength of her womb alone an artist. She is—how stupidly obvious—a person. She can be an artist if she was born talented. She can be a muse if she inspires a poet, but she too (if she was born talented) can find her own muse in another person. Madame de Sévigné’s muse was her daughter, and what male muse it was who inspired Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff, history continues to conjecture. The muse—pace Robert Graves—has no settled sex or form, and can appear in the shape of a tree (Howards End) or a city (the Paris of The Ambassadors) or even—think of Proust—a cookie.

  Yet in our culture, in our country, much is not obvious. With respect to woman and with respect to literature (I refer you again to the reviewers), ours is among the most backward areas on earth. It is true that woman has had the vote for fifty years and has begun to enter most professions, though often without an invitation. We are far past the grievances Virginia Woolf grappled with in A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas—books still sneered at as “feminist.”2s In 1929, when Virginia Woolf visited Oxford (or was it Cambridge? she is too sly to say which), she was chased off a lawn forbidden to the feet of women. By then, of course, our colleges were already full of coeds, though not so full as now. And yet the question of justification remains. Only a few months ago, in my own college, a startling debate was held—“Should a Woman Receive a College Education?” The audience was immense, but the debaters were only three: an instructor in anthropology (female), a professor of history (male), and a fiercely bearded professor of psychology (ostentatio
usly male). According to the unironic conventions of chivalry, the anthropologist spoke first. She spoke of opportunities and of problems. She spoke of living wholly and well. She did not ignore the necessities and difficulties of housekeeping and childrearing; she spoke of the relations of parents, children, and work-in-the-world; she talked extensively about nursery schools. She took as her premise not merely that woman ought to be fully educated, but that her education should be fully used in society. She was reasoned and reasonable; she had a point of view. Perhaps it was a controversial point of view, perhaps not—her listeners never had the chance of a serious evaluation. Her point of view was never assailed or refuted. It was overlooked. She spoke—against mysterious whispered cackles in the audience—and sat. Then up rose the laughing psychologist, and cracked jokes through his beard. Then up rose the laughing historian, and cracked jokes through his field—I especially remember one about the despotism of Catherine the Great. “That’s what happens when a woman gets emancipated.” Laughter from all sides. Were the historian and the psychologist laughing at the absurdity of the topic the callow students’ committee had selected for debate? An absurd topic—it deserves to be laughed out of court, and surely that is exactly what is happening, since here in the audience are all these coeds, censuring and contradicting by their very presence the outrageous question. Yet look again: the coeds are laughing too. Everyone is laughing the laughter of mockery. They are not laughing at the absurdly callow topic. They are laughing at the buffoonery of the historian and the psychologist, who are themselves laughing at the subject of the topic: the whole huge room, packed to the very doors and beyond with mocking boys and girls, is laughing at the futility of an educated woman. She is the absurdity.

  The idea of an educated woman is not yet taken seriously in American universities. She is not chased off the campus, she is even welcomed there—but she is not taken seriously as a student, and she will not be welcomed if she hopes to return as a serious lifelong scholar. Nor will she be welcomed afterward in the “world.” A law firm may hire her, but it will hide her in its rear research offices, away from the eyes of clients. The lower schools will receive her, as they always have, since she is their bulwark; their bulwark, but not their principal, who is a man. We have seen her crawling like Griselda through the long ordeal of medicine: she is almost always bound to be a pediatrician, since it is in her nature to “work with children.”