Herself

by Hortense Calisher

  Back then, my own progress toward such ideas is slow. When the novel appears, its subject will after all obscure the fact that a woman wrote it. One writer friend will question me thoughtfully. Was it necessary for it to be written through a man? “Oh yes—” I flash back, from depths that surprise me “you see—he had to be able to go anywhere.” He sees the point.

  By the time I write a second novel (1963) I will have come full circle. It is to be, as I tell him, “about the power of the little events that creep up on you while you are waiting for the big ones. And it’ll be as female as I can make it.” (It wasn’t. I would have regretted that. But it was more so than many serious novels by women. It was, I think, as female as things sometimes are.) A year or so after, a friend who has always admired my other work very vocally, calls me out of the blue. “You know I never read that one (Textures of Life). I was afraid to. To spoil what I think of you.” I worm out of him that friends have told him not to bother—it is a woman’s book. “But now I’ve read it, I want you to know that they’re wrong. It’s going right up on my shelf with your others. Now.” Victorians segregated the books on their shelves by sexes. But I refrain from mentioning it. Let it be.

  Now, in the 1970s, I may be in danger of being segregated with women by women, by those ultra-feminists for whom, if I am not totally “with,” I will be “against.” I will wonder whether they have ever read Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas, which so long ago said so much of their litany rather better, in turn getting much of it from another writer, Dorothy Richardson, whom all feminists might explore. No, art is not standing together. It is a statement by an outsider, from within.

  When, in 1957, I wrote on Maurice Goudeket’s biography of his wife, Colette, I had this to say:

  When Sidonie Gabrielle Claudine Colette Gauthier-Villars de Jouvenel, known to all the world as Colette, died in 1954 at the age of eighty-one at the end of a life extraordinarily inseparable from her work, she had long since received from her own country that national esteem with which France rewards its writers. True, although she was the first woman member of the Académie Goncourt, she had never been a member of the Académie Française. So much the worse for them, rather than for her, to whom even the chary Gide had forced himself to write: “I myself am completely astonished that I should be writing to you, astonished at the great pleasure I have had in reading you,” and to whom the more generous Proust had already written, in 1919, “Your style and your color are so full of perpetual finds that if one noted everything one could write you a letter as long as your book.”

  In her long progression she was to have a life as multiple as one of the cat race she loved—Burgundian schoolgirl, provincial child-wife in Paris, hack writer, music-hall performer and dancer in the nude, actress as one of her own characters, theater critic, seller of beauty products, housewife as perfectionist in domestic lore as she was over a sentence, and writer—perhaps the first great French woman writer to come from the middle class.

  Of the Oeuvres Completes, published by Flammarion in 1950, only a small portion of the fifteen volumes, comprising more than fifty titles, are available here in English, although more are promised. And here, too, she has never been given the critical attention awarded either her contemporaries or the younger generation of French writers. Her world, no more feminine than Virginia Woolf’s, was less bluestocking, her style too sure to be classed as experimental. And her supposed sensationalism, garbed as it was in the decor of the demimonde, seemed to many too frivolous for dignified consideration. One might say of her that her art was almost too accessible for criticism, at least for some American critics.

  Actually she was her own best commentator, continuously reassessing her life and work, stalking its persistent themes from another angle. After reading Goudeket’s account, one understands better Colette’s extraordinary gift for the particularities of sensuous detail—a gift that was based in nature perhaps, but was to be equally sharp when turned on the tailor-made world.

  “But above all she used the exact names of objects in daily use. … She knew a recipe for everything … furniture polish, vinegar, orange-wine, quince-water, for cooking truffles or preserving linen … this country wisdom impregnates all her work. … Looked at in one light it would not have displeased her if one talked of recipes for writing.”

  This household imagery is to appear everywhere in her work, bringing a curious solidity to her demimondaine worlds, and used in contexts light or powerful, from the casual, conversational aside when she could call Bach “a sublime sewing machine” down to the details of Léa’s ménage in Cheri, where, in the language of cuisine and nursery comfort, the relationship is described without a psychological word, and no symbol of anguish is more apt than Léa’s turning out her cupboards after Chéri is gone.

  Which brings us, brooding on the particular, to the question that often rears its silly suffragette head in critiques on women writers, and not infrequently in the hearts of the women themselves: Are female writers more limited in their world than male? Should they ignore all the special data they have as women or use it, try to be men or stand upon what they are—and in so doing any one of these things do they consign themselves to narrower than male limits and to less chance of greatness?

  The answer, I think, comes better from Colette than from any other woman writer I know, and is to me a token of her stature. She is no more essentially feminine as a writer than any man is essentially masculine as a writer—certain notable attempts at the latter not withstanding. She uses the psychological and concrete dossiers in her possession as a woman, not only without embarrassment but with the most natural sense of its value, and without any confusion as to whether the sexual balance of her sensitivity need affect the virility of her expression when she wants virility there.

  Reading her, one is reminded that art—whether managed as a small report on a wide canvas, or vice versa—is a narrow thing in more senses than one, and that the woman writer, like any other, does best to accept her part in the human condition, and go on from there. …

  But let us return to Goudeket, who, while modestly disclaiming critical authority, scatters understanding everywhere in this quiet, graceful book. “It is not enough to say that she loved animals. Before every manifestation of life, animal or vegetable, she felt a respect which resembled religious fervor. At the same time she was always aware of the unity of creation in the infinite diversity of its forms. One evening she gave me a striking example of this. We were at the cinema, watching one of those shorts which show germinations accomplished in a moment, unfolding of petals which look like a struggle, a dramatic dehiscence. Colette was beside herself. Gripping my arm, her voice hoarse and her lips trembling, she kept on saying with the intensity of a pythoness: ‘There is only one creature! D’you hear, Maurice, there is only one creature.’

  It is no wonder that she was able to treat every variation, singular or regular, of the sexual or half-sexual relationship, with never the slightest false touch of lubricity, for, seeing every creature as an aspect of one, she could never really regard the sexes as antithetical.

  And this in turn was only part of a larger attitude that never made too much of the distinction between the animate and the inanimate, that was at any moment, witty or profound, likely to describe one in terms of the other. …

  It is an attitude that accounts for much; it is for instance one reason why she translates well, for whatever nuance or idiosyncrasy may be lost, there is almost always some basic image, native to us creatures, that does not escape. It accounts in part, also, for that earlier mentioned “accessibility” which perhaps so depresses the interest of the modern critics, particularly those more interested in displaying themselves. There is nothing much to emend in Colette. She treats of the basic mysteries, but with the utmost care not to add any mystification of her own, like a midwife too busy getting the baby born to stop for the philosophical “Why?”

  As for her “daring,” it is there, but is not of a sort to compel,
for instance, those who love to brood on the eunuchoid element in James or to extrapolate a national homosexual dream from Huck Finn. It is the daring of an eye that looks on the world with the directness of total health—an eye somewhat chilling at times, possibly because, like those of the genus Bufo or Rano on whom she often drew for imagery, it occupies so very much of the head. One finds here perhaps the reason for the accusation that she did not create individual character, that she saw people to be as inchoate as those other fauna or flora-through whom life blooms, droops, and is cut down, and that she never moved from her microcosm either to the metaphysical or to the “world at large.” Certainly it would be just to say that she never seemed to have much time to consider things as they might be, so busy was she with the morality of things as they were.

  By the time I wrote on Colette, I had come to terms with being a writer. And for all my surface rages in the past and to come, with being a woman among us. I feel I can go to any war I want to. To all the wars of life, and of mind.

  In the depths of the world, of the sky, there’s a rhythm that must be listened to. Anybody can. One day—who knows under what cloud or circumstance?—that beat may seep from your wrist to your pen. Like blood—which has no ultimate sex. One must give back the stare of the universe. Anybody can.

  THE STORY OF A man aided in his pursuit of art or war by his love for a good woman, or a bad one, is an old literary occurrence. The spectacle of a woman encouraged in life, companioned in art and in certain of her own wars through love of a man—is not. Because of that, I break a self-imposed rule which was to have been—“Except for where it appertains to the work; keep your private life out of it.”

  I know that in that other work, the work, no matter how seemingly objective, I somewhere lay my own life on the line. Yet I have no desire to make my own life a public work of art. Should I—as some have? No, I am not that kind of artist. I have a need to push myself through the human extravaganza the other way. Yet this book, like those others in their way, has to be true to the happenings.

  Since 1958, I have had among my papers a certain “Journal From The Far East,” kept by me and sent in lieu of letters, in exchange for one kept and sent similarly, from Iran. I decide to include it here, abridged for length and lesser trivia. And to reveal the necessary background. I do this for a reason as personal as you want. A life looks hard, vain, empty, without its love. In my case, it would be a lie. For extreme cases, sometimes—an extreme magic. Once again.

  When you look at Iowa City, seat of the state university, from one approach at sunset, it still looks (then) like the last movie-set of a frontier town. That low, paper-cut facade still clings to the prairie at its base and to the turn of the century at its square, dribbled roofline, promising in its center the feedstore and the horse-trough. You know otherwise, even if the streaking cars aren’t advising you. Behind there is the usual university-town prospect with its seedy porches, null college buildings, and perhaps one Palladian hall. Yet it is still a western approach.

  It was the farthest west I had yet been.

  I had never heard of the Writers’ Workshop, and when I arrive there still have little idea of what such a workshop is. Each time I had turned down the offer of a year’s teaching, the price had risen. At home, my earnings had begun to be counted upon. And I had a divorce to settle, dragged out by a partner who would not assist—or leave. So, accepting the offer for only a half-year, again I left the children behind me, to schools and father. Once I had the divorce and some modest situation, I intended to devote my time to work, the work, and to them. I had found I was unfitted for casual sex, which depressed me. Or for short passions, which in my case were really the obsessional outbursts of a personality still on-the-search. For that not-impossible, born-at-the-other-side-of-the-world (I always knew that) Platonic half whom one at birth had become separated from. In whose existence I at the moment did not believe.

  At the depot, I am met on the one hand by the couple who are my landlords-to-be—he with a long, Grant Wood neck, she with what must be a hundred spit-curls, set in rows like Papuan teeth. On the other hand are my friends the Bourjailys with their Anna, Tina calling out in her amused voice, “I recognized the coat!” (Worn since London, a long, hooded, pocketed jewel of a reversible, in which it is possible to live like a tent, it will serve me as a chadur in Persia, though I can’t know that yet.)

  And in the middle, a tall man, with a face. I see it yet, with its strange look of recognition, that it doesn’t want to make. It is seeing the same look on mine. He has come out of courtesy to meet a traveler, not a woman. I have not come to meet a lover—the lover. Because the face is handsome, I even wisecrack to myself like a smart chorine—“Uh-uh, Hortense. No.” The last time I say it.

  We become an accepted couple, the beaming faculty displaying a restraint softer than New York’s would be, and effortfully more cosmopolitan. As for the rest of the place, the Workshop especially, it is a blend of a rural Athens with a Greenwich Village when it too was doe-eyed with its own dreams, set down in a campus autumn ringed round with football and “homecoming” queens, where we play handball with an all-poet team. It is the perfect place for an idyll we don’t know is going to last.

  The Workshop is a shock. They really mean to make artists. Much of the student work is mediocre, sometimes rising to good, though with that fell tone to it which tells one it is doomed to remain what it is; an alarming proportion of manuscripts is bad—and a few students, maybe one or two, are first class. They are already made, by God or the Devil, California or Brooklyn, and are there for time out and money—in order to make. I tell the head, Paul Engle, “When they’re no good, I want to say to them ‘What are you doing here?’ When they’re good, I want to say to them ‘What are you doing here?’” He says brightly “That’s what we pay you for. Your personality.”

  So I am for this lovely moment absolved. To be for the first time in my life with a man whose intelligence leaps with mine and is capable of outrunning it, whose sexuality does the same. From differing lives, we find constant points of similarity. We listen alike—to the rest of the world. And we know too much to think this merely the entente of love.

  A Lutheran boy with six siblings, from a working farm where country skills were taken for granted, and a Jewish girl with the streets in her blood, an only child until she was seven—we both felt that we had become writers, or humanists, from having sat young in the outer shoals of large, anecdotal families. We both wrote mornings, after which we craved physical activity and then perhaps, company, although we had a capacity for silent, inner living—which unnerved other people. His wife had felt shut out when he closed his study door; my husband, though compliant, had been at a fatal distance from what I did there.

  I have since known many artists who live with non-artists; there is always a separateness. The non-artist is forced to admire, or to stand off, or to serve. And there is always a rub between the two routines. I cannot now imagine living with someone who doesn’t share that other unspoken rhythm. Days when one or the other was not working and was feeling it, were likely to be our worst; then we were like anybody else. To people who find one artist’s life queer enough, two together are a riot; the prospect of two writers getting on seems to pique most of all. Or perhaps it is the old concept that every artist is doomed by his demon never to get on in that way, to be alone, emotionally. We were to be, in a way, but knew that. We were never to “share” the work, until it was done. But we belonged to the same cell.

  Meanwhile, we had no thought of marriage, on this rebound, absorbing though it was. Too much was unsettled, in any case, and not only divorces. His so recent wife, though now with the man of her choice, wrote often of returning after the child she was bearing was born. I had my children, and my resolve. During the next year we separated several times, I to Stamford, in the spring of 1958, to teach, where he visited me, he to Iowa for the summer, where I visited him. (Once, when I was flying to Mexico for divorce papers, we arranged
to meet in Chicago on my way back. On the flight down, the president of a Texas Methodist university gave me his card, no doubt tabbing me as one of those divorcées—he laughed when I said I was a professor—and tried to persuade me to stay overnight in El Paso—presumably with him. I refused, and from the plane watched him being met by a woman no doubt his wife. Saved his card though; it was such a classy one. We left it stuck prominently on the mirror of the Chicago motel.)

  By now absences were a travail. We solved the problem with visits ever wilder. In the fall, he was to go abroad as a Fulbright lecturer, and had opted for Tabriz, in Azerbaijan. That past winter, the International Educational Exchange Service, which during those years specialized in exporting our culture (and to whom I had once applied, on the suggestion, both of us full of drink, from Richard Blackmur, who was going to Japan for them) had asked me to join a summer symposium in Japan. I had turned it down—the novel was going too well—and I cannot take seriously either summer programs or symposiums. (Once, I heard a woman say proudly that her son had gone “to a supposium”—which seems to be apt.) As a writer, my application to the I.E.S. had languished, except for a reply, ominous during this McCarthy-probe era “Yes, Miss Calisher, we know who you are and what you are doing.”