Herself

by Hortense Calisher

  What these binding divisions of sexual characteristic have done to American writers goes deeper than what is in their books—because it apprehends it. Deeper even than the dreary round of fictional orgasm or bedsheet romanticism, or the use of sex as the sole revelation. (Or the near ruination of pornography—ordinarily one of life’s more aristocratic or subtly private adornments—by practicing it on a dull mass-scale.) Whatever the physicality in question, or the mind, a cloud of these stipulations obscures them. Sometimes, writers have been the greater for not knowing that nothing is new under the sun—in youth, a writer might otherwise never begin at all. But none ever draws strength from keeping to concerns defined as proper to what he or she is—except the negative strength of doing the opposite. Which turns some into narrower polemicists than their talents call for, or into stunted followers of the very opposite. But by and large, American writers have kept to being men, women, or homosexuals, as the case may be, very much in terms of what the times have told them that they are. In fact, doing what one is told, in this area, seems perhaps the primary secondary sexual characteristic of all Americans.

  We already know how doing what society expects of the male, or overdoing it, works with those male writers who get sucked into the virility callisthenic. These are the writers, some still extant, who are doomed to hunt deer in Brooklyn, or fish for cunt in the Caribbean, or to make the cock itself their Chanticleer—all with the penis-envy of men infinitely grateful because they have got one. All because, we say, they early got hung up on Hemingway’s jockstrap. What we forget is that, prior to this, something in the society hung up him. Behind him at home was the conviction that artists were sissy (and drink and the shotgun were dashing), ahead of him even a Europe in which Freud was prying into the neuroses of art, and Mann was perpetrating his own guilty notion that art was neurosis—wasn’t any artist deserting life by not “living” it? Was art life? A man’s life?

  Women writers in America have acted expectedly also. In the nineteenth century, women here, when not poets either hidden like Dickinson or album like Hemans and Ingelow, were journalists, to either the philosophical passions of the hour, like Margaret Fuller, or to the political ones, like Harriet Beecher Stowe. All the rest were ladies, in a three-named tradition that was to survive well past the age of Adela Rogers St. John—and never quite die. None were novelists with the breadth of experience or daring of the European Georges, or even with the formidable pomp of Mrs. Humphrey Ward. As women passed through the period of the expansion of women’s rights, they might be expected to take the right to be an artist as one of these: many did, and have, and do. But the freedom to be an artist is not granted like a vote—it is made. And women continued to make it, most of them, in terms of the sexual image allowed. In the early 1900s, before sexual taboos were broken—by men writers always remember, but not by Americans—the gap between what either sex could say of experience was narrower. When so much of life had to be left out of art, there was naturally less surprise or threat in the idea that the powers of women artists might be up to it. For a while, the image allowed them was actually less separate, more equal, than it has ever been since.

  Cast back. To Wharton and Glasgow, and Cather. The first two, as women of means and position, were part of a society which, with its confined sexual mores, was the world of Howell and James as well. Lucky or not for all of them, the shades of sexual difference in terms of subject and language, were not as severe as for women of Twain’s day—and far less violent than in the days to come, when the major division was that women didn’t go to war, to sea, or to any of the “virile” professions. If Wharton wrote restrictedly of war, so did many of the men; in Ethan Frome she did try “the poor,” attempting a break from the social world rather than the sexual one. She wrote no Golden Bowl, but she did write a House of Mirth; though as a writer she always went for the circumstantial intensity over the psychological one, the sexual ground treated was much the same. Glasgow’s sexual boundaries were smaller and the experiential ones also—she went to the history and nostalgia of a tapestry past. But neither the experience expected of a writer, nor the language, had yet so exploded over here that Cabell couldn’t say of a book by Glasgow that it was so much like James it could have been written by Mrs. Wharton.

  Cather was saved by “the land.” It allowed her to speak from a major vision, and for that, even from a woman, to be acceptable—more acceptable than it is now. As to sexual material per se, A Lost Lady is no more delicate than much writing of the era, and My Mortal Enemy a psychological masterpiece of great power, done without any of the overt sex which would have spoiled it (Fitzgerald was to do the same). Though small in scale, these two short works were still tied to the pioneer experience, or to the provincial one. The larger novels seem to be thinned less by reticence than by a blurred or cramped knowledge of how people are—thin in proportion to wherever “the land” is no longer artistically enough. As that vision recedes, a writer of less authority begins to appear. But as woman of her time, her consciousness that she could speak for the country, and for its cosmos, gave her the confidence to write “like a man.” To the country, she would be no more unfeminine than some of their pioneer grandmothers. And her male colleagues, whether from city, town, or open boat, still were allowed a dignity sufficient to them—as “men of letters.” The society had not yet placed them in the bind where they must defend their part of life or literature as the important whole.

  But these days, art takes more responsibility for what is said of it, and has more influence. If, once past the basic physical facts, society is what makes children “manly” or “womanly,” “black” or “white,” “Jewish” or “Christian,” artists too are molded by the times in their very expression of these, often reporting back to the society in terms of what it has made of them. Academy-culture is merely popular culture early aware of itself; these days the roads between are very quick. American society at present is provincially cowed by the artist in general and the successful one in particular—this meaning one who makes either money or news. If he blows the horn loud enough, society will now accept what it has made of him (occasionally even of her)—and looks to him to tell it what art is.

  The male hetero writer no longer has to apologize to America for being unmanly. But he still may have to overcompensate for it, to himself. New elements have long since crept into the lifestyle, and into that yearly Christmas package, the American ethos. The jokes are not on the equality of women, but of the sexes; women are getting equaller all the time. Teachers, mothers, dominant purchasing power and stockholders, overbearing even in the life-expectancy statistics—there’s no end to it. The Freudians have told them and told them that they have nothing to waggle in front of them. But they seem to have got used to it, in favor of a better ’ole. He doesn’t want to hate them for it—that would be homosexual. So he approaches the subject of women in art very cannily—on the highest plane possible. And the most objective. Let them remember that they can never make major art. Not without cocks. And cunt is a pejorative.

  Major art is about the activities of men—that’s why so much of it is about women. But not by them. For major art includes where women can’t go, or shouldn’t or never have. There are no places where men can’t go or haven’t been. Childbed is not a place or an event; it is merely what women do. Major art is never about the activities of women. Except when by men. Women are household artists; Austen’s art is a travelogue between houses. Dickinson hid in one all her life, Emily Bronte too. Colette had to be locked into one, before she would write. George Eliot had to be persona non at some of the best London ones, before she could write a study of marriage like Middlemarch—and change her name. Let’s face it, dear ladies—a house is not a cosmic home. Notice too, that the women who do write scarcely ever have guts enough for the full, real life of a woman—of all the women writers so far mentioned, plus the recent generation of Porter, Stafford, Welty, McCullers, O’Connor—only Colette had a child. And she was AC-DC—talen
ted women usually are. That extra chromosome coming out in them. In the wrong way. Art is really wrong for women. How otherwise could it be so right for the men? And Marianne Moore?—she never went to war.

  To which those critics who model themselves on the male hetero writers of the day (and perhaps once wanted to be one) add, “And look at their style!” Critics of this type always know what major art is—and wish to discuss only major artists. (That’s how they know they’re major critics.) And a major artist writes only in a “masculine” style. Which uses short words—like Faulkner. Whose sentences don’t inch forward oh little iambs, but are rough and clumsy—like Hemingway. What the masculine style of major art must never be is jeweled—beg pardon, lapidary. A jeweled fancy is always feminine. Like Shakespeare. And Melville. And Sir Thomas Browne.

  Most symptomatic of all, when I say any of this, I must joke as I have, though a riffle through the reviews of any modern female writer, major or minor, would give me all the citations needed, all of the most serious intent. The bind here is extraordinarily interesting—if only to women and anthropologists: Women who complain of injustices done to them as women are in reality not angry at the different or inequitous treatment of women, but at the difference between men and women—which of course is ineradicable. The subject of female injustice is therefore innately ridiculous. Women who act as a group on any subject are also innately so—evert to women. They are being personal. Men, men writers for instance, never allege injustice on the grounds of being men—even the homosexuals. They pick something sociological, something sensible—like being black, or Ba-hai, or poor. Men are impersonal. That’s why they can afford to act sociologically. Women can really only act sexually—that’s why they are the same everywhere. Women are not sociological creatures—that’s why they are funny in groups. That’s why men take any rise in their status or opportunities not as a sociological threat, but as a sexual one.

  For a woman, a woman writer for instance, never merely wants her work to be treated equally with her peers of any sex (with a due allowance for the sexual bias of all), allowing her then to be a writer who is a woman. She wants to be a male writer. In her body, she has the mind of a man—and she wants a you-know-what to go with it. And don’t let her tell you that they order these things differently in France. All that means is she wants a French one.

  So does the tangle, sent up by the society and implemented by the male artists themselves, gather around the woman of good mind until she half believes it—or more. Women writers in America, by the evidence, are often made to believe it totally. Partly because of the real present differences between male and female in their attitudes toward the public world. As artists, women can learn pomp, but from a long history of humility generally, they begin with less of it.

  As they still do in science to a degree, and of course very largely in politics and government. In a democratic country, where women cannot expect to be queens and have never been presidents, how could this be otherwise? England has a minister of culture, but if Americans were to create such a cabinet post, it would probably still be better for “culture” for the post to be filled by a man.

  As artists, women can also be made to feel that the honesty of their work is impugned by their effect as women—particularly if it’s a good one; dare they have beauty, style or the vanities approved as womanly, or must they bloomerize? Historically and now, both men and women have dressed to show the fashion of their convictions; after which women usually get the credit for the fashion, and men for the convictions. The ringlets of George Eliot, say, were affectation, the beard of Walt Whitman sincere. So, just as men have worried whether art in a man isn’t affectation, women wonder whether their effect as women can coincide with art.

  In reaction, some literary women become scholars, or Xantippes of the quarterlies, or salonnistes. Or males. Or use their profession to fend off the female experience. “Hortense, did you want yo chi’drun?” Carson McCullers once said to me. “Ah didden. Ah always felt they would innafere with my woik.” Honest to the nth, we are. We lack the pomp to be sure that when we spread our breast to the world as ourselves, a major eagle will come and peck at it. We have been taught to lack it: that a man’s role is to hunt experience, a woman’s to let it come upon her—and that this makes all female experience less exciting document.

  Women are constitutionally immersed in and interested in the minutiae of daily living; so are artists and writers; a great deal of Dickens, Balzac, and Tolstoi takes place in the Dutch interiors of life. But in women artists this is called domesticity—of subject—and women artists themselves fail to see scope there, or give it. They fear the lady-writer in themselves. For what society says to the American male writer, via his sex, is Watch Out—maybe you shouldn’t. What he says in turn to the woman writer is Hump It—you can’t.

  Not anything important. You are the little jewelers. Of little experiences. Once, when a renowned poet and a writer who had just written her first book were guests at the same house, the poet one morning reported to their host that he had stayed up all night reading it—he was an old man, and slept little. “Very fine,” he repeated several times over. “Very feminine of course! But still—very fine.”

  For a long time, this puzzled her. Some of her stories were autobiographical, as with any young writer, but some were about men, some were about “the society,” one was indeed the very essence of the woman’s side of an affair and as feminine as she could make it—in just the way that a male writer, on love, might be male. None of the stories were more miniature than most short ones are, nor had even the reviewers called them lady-work; the title story, as it happened, was political. Whereas the body of the poet’s work was very autobiographical and very delicate—and included some famous miniatures. Perhaps all this worked differently for poetry. Later, she thought not. Even at eighty, a male American artist daren’t be a miniaturist. He has his cock to think of. Which is always very large.

  So, very naturally, we come back to the queers, who are now in the process of telling us, in their own way, what all this has to do with America. Or showing us. Not the writers themselves (who for all we know may be as hetero American as a Legion commander after church, in bed with his wife—and a floozie). Their books. I say “queer” because the word at least says what it means, where the homo-hetero language, once straight biological, now belongs to the psychologists—and all psychological language implies redemption to a norm. Queer literature, in its own way is now preaching redemption for the American norm. Not only for sex. For all American life.

  So is everyone else of course. But not sexually. Why, the sexual revolution was won some forty-fifty years ago, wasn’t it?—with Freud and Joyce and Gide and Proust and Havelock Ellis and de Montherlaht, and D. H. Lawrence and Bertrand Russell and all those freelove people—and Freud. And lots of Americans?

  I myself have certainly never scanned back over the so-called “pantheon of American writers” in terms of their sexuality before—first off because I am an enemy of any who look at literature topically, second because anything monosexual to me is a bore. But one glance, and one realizes that whoever made the revolution, American writers didn’t. And at one glance, the whole “hoorah for bed and basic language”—which has been mainly American—becomes clear. We came in late. And on the hoorah score, mostly with secondary or second-rate writers. Among our good ones—it was quite possible to read both The Sun Also Rises and Sanctuary (and especially if reading it before the deluge had made expectations clearer) with at first some wonder over the guy’s lack in the former, and over who was doing precisely what with the corncob, in the latter. (Nor is it certain that on the part of Hemingway and Faulkner this was all merely artistic restraint.) Meanwhile, only gradually did Americans readers learn to lean over the bed, unpartisanly cheering. Over what the 1950s would tell them at once. And the ’60s? With pictures. We develop slow.

  Take a further look. Only the. heterosexual revolution was “won” by whomever, in those days. Gide
made his living out of his neatly Calvinist self-torture, straddling the bisexual see-saw. And Proust made his Albertine a girl. Colette did as she pleased, but revolutions are not won by those not interested in them. Except for Cheri, her work was narrowly known here (mainly through the fashion magazines and a later movie made on the least of her works, Gigi), and was altogether out of line for critics like Wilson in his Marxist period, or for the later historicity of Kazin and Howe. (Plus all those subemendators who were out for “American Studies” buffalo—and picked their comparative literature along related lines.) Trilling might have done her, in his Forster period—if of course we could be sure that he “knew about” Forster. (When I lived in England, in the ’50s, I was regularly taken aside by writers or dons, and hilariously asked, with covert or plain reference to the novels Forster was rumored to keep locked up at Kings—“Does Mr. Trilling know?”) Certainly the New-Critic commentary which took Howards End to its heart in the forties paid no mind to the diaphanous sexual qualities in The Longest Journey or A Room with a View, in their ardor at discovering a book in which sex too was treated entirely as a matter of social class. Meanwhile Wilson kept any trenchant sexual comment of his own to his fiction: I Thought of Daisy and Hecate County. It looks better there generally, I agree.