Herself

by Hortense Calisher

  Socially it didn’t worry me, and in our quiet house on the river I was very possibly kept from more mobile ambitions which might have been ruinous for work. What did get to me was whether a demi-bourgeois like me, and a demi-sane one, could really be an artist of the same intensity as the divinely mad, or dedicated alien? By the time I belatedly read Tonio Kruger—what a relief to find that dichotomy played upon so precisely!—I have already decided for myself. And not with Mann. Meanwhile that question so touchingly posed down all the ages of art—“What must an artist be?”—would help keep me happily unaware of another—“Could an artist be female?”

  I had honestly never thought otherwise. I could understand all the feminine rages at unequal circumstances, over-protected lives and under-subscribed opportunities, and had had some of them—smiling through my teeth at the male writers who say to me “What every writer needs is a good wife!”, worrying over what the children would make of me in a world geared as it was, and what I would make of them. But that all the philosophical rages of the universe, its hieratic dances of either body or intellect, its whole wild, sad glee of celebration and human fact, wasn’t to be equally mine—had never occurred to me. And hasn’t yet.

  To Mathias, back there at the Guggenheim, I say “Well, guess I can’t take the money then. Since I contracted to go for a year, and I can only stay eight months. So I better give it back.”

  His answer, one I trust all endowers of the arts continue to give, is substantially that I had been given the award under the assumption that I knew best what would foster my work—if I felt that buying a car and going to California with the money would do it, that was up to me. Naturally, as he must have known, the greatest freedom lay in that I was not bound to deliver any concrete work, not within a specific time, or ever. The future of my own work, in any form and pace, was mine.

  So I went. It’s easy now to pick out later stories which from their backgrounds, came to me from being abroad. But that was the least of it.

  “Tha-at’s right, get your local color!” an old boyo of a bohemian (who had been a stockbroker) says to me when I’m leaving. And who doesn’t know how that mezzotint comes crowding in? But I now have walked into another civilisation, of beings who might as well be on the moon for their foreignness, yet share my parts and my language. Sometimes it is sparks and crash-bang, a young man yelling at me “Why don’t all you Americans go home!”—and coming round to apologize the next morning; sometimes I slide con amore into the warm bath of English living and new company, into the misty days and hot conversations which have helped make a literature.

  An American chatterer, now for months on end I become a listener, at tables where talk is a living organism, to be tended for the good of all. In mobile-home America, friendship is increasingly easy, sleazy and forgettable; here friends could be treated as my parents’ had been—grappled to one with hoops of steel and kept for life. They can be trusted to brush some of the poetry off me, and I to recover it later. Walking my rounds, Regent Street to Piccadilly, or down the Strand to Reuters, head high in the air to catch the street signs, and unaware that to pass three times through Burlington Arcade is as good as a work permit, I am regularly accosted by men who ask “Do you have the time?” My male friends, whose women are still wearing their post-war “utilities,” say “It’s that black silk coatee of yours, and the poke hat” (at home the Lord and Taylor uniform of the year). “They think you’re a Belgian tart.”

  I am so happy here, going from street to street, friend to friend, experience to experience—is it possible that, intellectually, I am an American one? I tell myself that every American is either a potential Anglophile or Francophile, and I happened to hit England first. Where I have the social mobility of the foreigner who may ask to go anywhere, whom friends pass from hand to hand for whatever unusualness of hat, face, situation, profession or tongue might attract them: as an American I am a nobody who might be anybody. As for me, I am having a temporary flight from that provincial construct, by now both suburban and city-literary, to which I am confined at home. But principally, I am learning—like some new resident of a magnetic field in which all my particles are drawn toward a certain pattern—what it is to be American, to them and to me. What it is to be an intellectual woman, outside my country. And what it is to be a writer, elsewhere.

  To friends in the Foreign Office who knew America well, I can see that we are changing from a dearly-held alliance to a disturbing quantity; we are already the civilisation which is going to have to be stood off. (In 1956, in England during the Suez incident, I was able to get some of mine back, but we both knew that their colonial monster was behind them.) Defending my nativity like a college debater, I learn how to handle chaff and return it: poco a poco, soft-sharp; be slow to draw blood, quick to stanch it; if you’re a smiler by nature, don’t stop now; if you’re not, don’t start; always keep a twinkle out somewhere to show you’re aware you’re taking part in a dry-point of language; watch how the most oystery-eyed do it somehow with posture.

  As for the literary world, one may meet it almost in toto on a weekend more or less, but rarely will have to; whenever you find it alone with itself—instead of branching out into politics, or la danse du ventre, or whatever its larger tastes are—it tends to apologize. As for reviewers, at this time, their provincial worst is in a different style from ours; their middle-average tends to be better educated than ours, but more narrowminded or without our gusty enthusiasms; often their portmanteau reviews, like those in the Times Literary Supplement, link books together with infuriating expertise, while never seeming to alight square on any one of them. With their best, like V. S. Pritchett, Angus Wilson, and a host of other writers who review steadily and seem not to have lost juice or dignity by it, we have little to compare.

  As for women, the double-job-standard is bluntly advertised in the weeklies, with higher male pay for the same post as teacher or librarian. The power jobs in the print media are as entirely male as they are at home. But once you get to the arts, and the literary ones especially, among writers and critics both there is a salving lack of that male patronizing I am beginning to discover at home. They have their “kitchenmaid” writers, women who write for household women, but no one, even the hastiest reviewer, even by implication ever lumps me with them, or my work with theirs. Or sends me books for review merely because they are by women. In their “man’s country,” I am never reviewed as a “woman writer.”

  In this the English were continental as they are in so much else; the language has obscured that to us. I found that they took the same pride in their bluestockings, present and past, as in any tradition, and gave them the equivalent amount of chaff; as a woman, nobody ever made me feel too intelligent or too intellectual for my own good or theirs, but in the arenas of literature and discussion they made it bracingly clear that I would have to take my licks like anybody else.

  That same year, just before my leaving New York, word had been passed around to writers who often met at Vance and Tina Bourjaily’s (both before and when he was editor of Discovery) that “Norman” wanted us to meet of a Sunday and get some needed café discussion started, the bar chosen being The White Horse on Hudson Street—which is how it came to be known as a place where writers went, by the time Dylan Thomas was taken there. The day we first go, in a group of about ten, of which I recall for sure only Mailer, the Bourjailys and Frederic Morton, the bar and its usual patrons, mostly the remainders of indigenous Greenwich Village Irish, are no more unhandy with us—don’t we know whether we want a glass or a stein?—than we are with ourselves. The White Horse doesn’t yet know it is going to be a literary pub. And we have the sad sense, or I do, that stuff like this is hard going in America. At one point Mailer takes out a dollar bill, and pleads for somebody to start an argument going with him, “on anything.” Nobody much takes him up on it. (I couldn’t, though I sympathized with what he was after in getting us together. He knew only one way to advance or conclude an argument with any wom
an—and a dollar was a small price for it.) Nothing memorable having been said by anybody, we leave, unsure that we have consecrated the place. When I return from Europe the following summer and drop in there one Sunday with Louis Auchincloss, we find nobody we know.

  Before returning home though, I live for a few months in Rome. There I recall an evening when Bill Styron proposes to a group of us which includes John Phillips and Peter Matthiessen, that we discuss a book, the stipulation being that it must be one we haven’t read. It is lightly said and lightly taken—a game, entered into half protectively perhaps by writers sick of litry discussion, wanting to harbor their own ideas close to the vest? Perhaps. But I have just come from a place where men who crave exchange as much as I think this company does, go about it less embarrassedly. Deeply as these men care for what they are into, they feel more at ease when acting toward it in the attitudes of Sport. We didn’t get far; the drunken record player ruled us out. We weren’t meant to. Nobody there or at The White Horse, no good male writer in America goddammit, was a dirty intellectual. A lot of them were Hemingway cripples though, in part. By virtue of sex I had escaped that, but the burden is on me inversely; literature in America is a manly Sport, in which I am not expected to compete.

  Leaving Europe that first and fatally instructive time, I still prefer the vivid, brawling possibilities of our crude blue air. Though an enchanted visitor by every impulse I am not an expatriate. But I can see the damage and the limits on both sides. This is what happens to the traveler, and against it there is no amulet. In the white light of the American century, continental energies, which once bloomed so hardily into classicism, will often now seem to me either sere or cosy. But in testing the tone of our country, often our most energetic writers, sometimes our leading ones, will seem anti-intellectual, all too busy standing together with those who are. This will affect all of us. Sometimes our lives, sometimes our works, will go soft with the corruption of it. …

  When in 1956 I want to go to England again, The Reporter agrees to take three of a proposed list of subjects. The first, which is to be on the New Towns built after the war (which with their green belts, Festival-of-Britain plazas and geriatric housing are of interest to planners here) I never write. As the social scientist Bernard Crick and others gamely take me about, and I gather fistfuls of mock-ups and statistical notes, the article seems doomed to come out good-and-proper sociological without my being orthodoxly equipped; in it I’ll be a writer lamely walking a researcher’s stilts.

  One night before I know this, when I am about to leave for Stevenage, the largest of the towns, I am sitting talking, listening to music with two friends. Guy Wint, an editor of The Manchester Guardian, is suggesting I write for Twentieth Century, a magazine he is associated with. Patrick O’Regan, in whose flat we are, says “Don’t do it; it’s only recently changed its name from Nineteenth Century.” Chaff.

  I’m emboldened to tell Guy, who begins every sentence with “Why—” or “Do you feel—” or “Would you say that—”—that I live for the day he comes out with a declarative sentence. (Except for this one characteristic not to be confused with Blount, the journalist in False Entry and The New Yorkers.)

  Sitting on the floor, he blinks upward—I see I am learning—and begins another. “Why don’t you write about the Pakistani influx into Paddington? In fifteen years we’re going to have race problems there.”

  I marvel—then and now—at how aware they are of themselves. Later, when we are talking of my “classless” nation, he explains that though the class levels may remain fairly rigid in England, there is always a mobility upward—and down, of course—which insures new blood at the top.

  Pat, who is Anglo-Irish (and sufficiently on top) says “Don’t believe a word of it.” He and I have cut short a Sunday walk—ten miles, which is why I am stretched on the floor—so that he may soon get at his homework for milord his boss; he is private secretary to Lord Reading.

  Viewing the mass of pamphlets, documents, I say Americanly, “I suppose you have to digest them for him”—bosses at home being conventionally lacking in intelligence, and milords also.

  “Good God no, I have all I can do to keep up with him.”

  Still later, when we are talking of the position of women in the two countries, he wonders why American ones are so uncertain of themselves, and why we take things so personally—including the American girl who, when that was put to her, said “I don’t.”

  I tell them these characteristics are American generally, not feminine. “Especially when we’re around people like you. … Tell me—all those upperclass girls who don’t go up to the university even when they have the minds for it, and whose brothers always go, whether there’s money or not, or mind or not, doesn’t this bother them? And how come they’re still so confident? And when they marry brother’s chum from there”—which nine out of ten I know them to do—“how do they feel about the difference in education, don’t they feel it? How does it work out?”

  Pat says “We-ell, after they marry, he raises her to his level—” He sees me rising like a meringue, and twinkling, finishes, very much through the nose “—and hmmm—after a hmmm—while, she raises him to hers.”

  Yet when, playing the Mozart Requiem which we both find ineffable, he says “Yes, I suppose hearing it is the nearest we ever get to heaven,” I make a silent reservation. I suppose, I take it personally.

  For sexually, they abash me. Either they seem to take it very much for-the-health-and-here-today—with anything from three whips to love-in-the-round and a lamb-chop supper afterwards—following which they are gone tomorrow to the steeplechase they really prefer (with horses). Or else they seem to have buried it like a dear dead bird, under a clump of marguerites at the bottom of the kitchen garden, on the other side of a stile which one is never quite sure they leap.

  This article on their “nudie” Windmill Theatre (which bombing did not close but peace did) is one The Reporter has contracted for. When I get to England, they wire second thoughts. Since the magazine is shortly to come out in Britain, they don’t want to “offend”—and besides, Alastair Buchan has told them the Windmill has been journalistically done to death; there’s nothing more to be said on it. I wire back, on the first count that one sure way to lose British respect is to kowtow to it, on the second count—that I am not a journalist.

  They take it, publishing it while I am abroad, with a zealous editor’s cuts and under a catchy title, a “mishap” which we both agree to ignore. I had called it “A Taste for Sweeties.”

  It was a piece of chaff, of course. Which means—an exchange entered into for love of argument and perhaps love of subject, which often ends in love of opponent.

  NOTTINGHAM, ENGLAND, July 1. (Reuters)—Two girls, posing in the nude in a lion’s cage at a theater here, didn’t move when the beast attacked its trainer. It’s against the law for nudes to move in a show.

  When I saw that dispatch in a New York tabloid, a day before flying back to the London I had lived in for a year and hadn’t seen for three, it seemed to me that I had already been transported, without benefit of Pan American, to that corner off Shaftesbury Avenue where the Windmill stands—the theater where the art of the nude still, the still nude, or what the British, reaching guardedly and instinctively for French, call the “tableau vivant,” has been refined to a kind of high-tea perfection.

  I grew up in the 1920s, when it first became chic to draw deadly inferences about a nation from its livelier arts, but I should be understandably wary, for instance, of any foreign attempts to analyze life in the United States on a pure basis of Disneyland and the Tootsie Roll. Nevertheless, as I held that clipping, I began to laugh as I remembered the first time I saw the Windmill’s selected pekoe blend of galvanized pony ballet, sweating comics, and stone cold nudes.

  On a pedestal in the far center of the stage, a comely nude girl reared her classic cockney form divine. Under a great silver wig whose chignon streamed to windward in the general direction of
Greece, her whole profile, powdered and Medusa-struck, stared sternly into the wings. Although she must have been there for quite a while, indeed since the beginning of the scene, I hadn’t noticed her immediately, first because downstage left a young man in dinner clothes was singing an innocuous song whose topical references were straining my newly arrived ear, second because four pretty young girls dressed in dance-team gear were doing an arduous tap routine in front of her. They bounced energetically but asymmetrically back and forth, wearing jolly soccer-team smiles varied now and then by an occasional moue. For the life of me I couldn’t decide whether their bobbing energy was there to call attention to her who could not move or to cover her up.

  Their costumes had a similar combination of allusion and artlessness. Made of the usual stage stuffs—electric satins, flimsy tulles, and sparklers—they were cut to point adroitly to a thigh, a navel, or other interesting places. But effects that might have been daring were blotted out by confusion; each getup was composed of so many colors, textures, and foci that the final impression was that of a costume going off purposefully in all directions—exactly like a dowager’s Fortnum hat. Each girl wore something in her hair too, such as a string of artificial roses or a little coronet—one wore a butterfly-shaped parure with waggling antennae, the like of which I had not seen since my short stint, at the age of eight, in the De Braganza Academy of La Danse on the top floor of the Audubon Ballroom in New York.

  Meanwhile the scene had shifted. We were at a hunt breakfast now—at least the soubrette, tenor, and chorus, all vigorously singing and prancing, were done up in smashing pinks, stocks, crops, and boots, and the tenor was spurred. But this was a hunt held, apparently, in the gardens of Versailles, or possibly in one of the Roman temples that had once underlain these streets. For, gradually, one became aware again of those pedestals in the rear, four of them this time, and it was interesting to note that while one immobile naked girl might be news, four sank to the level of scenery.