Herself

by Hortense Calisher

  But sexual revolutionists they weren’t, as it is often said Jews seldom are. Freud himself saw the importance of Christian sexual guilt to the Judeo-Christian ethic, all the more plainly from the Judaic side. In writing of sex, the younger writers like Heller, Friedman, Roth, and the older Golds, Herbert, and Ivan, use all the freedoms and attitudes that a much prior revolution has provided, from the flower-decked pubis á la Lady Chatterley, or from the chamberpot humors of any folklore, or from psychiatry—or from whatever the virility disease which Norman Mailer, early on writing as the middle-class Harvard boy he couldn’t bear to be, first caught from Papa H.

  Mailer’s own cancer metaphor was to be far more original, when applied to America’s sense of itself—as well as closer generically to his own modern-middle Jewish fears. He had a litry interest in queers. Coupled with his avowed cult of women in her basic functions only, and his use of “writing like a woman” as a sneer against male rivals, some said that he protested too much, and took this as a sign of something latent. If so, it was not in the sex—which was monumentally old hat—but in the ego, which at its worst, but at its artistic best also, pushed against proscribed boundaries and greedily seemed to want to be what it saw. Mailer’s view of women is essentially suburban Talmudic. As a Jewish Don Juan, he always laboriously marries them.

  He empathies toward homosexuals, however, exactly as he does to blacks—and from his canny power-sense that they are going to be of new importance to literature. They are those aliens which birth hasn’t sufficiently allowed him to be. Has anyone noticed, for instance, how Why Are We In Vietnam imitated Burroughs? The gag is great—analyze American aggression via Texas sexuality and the whole Southern stereotype (to be seen any day in televised field interviews in Vietnam) of sexy war. It’s a typically sharp Mailer choice, in which he may at first appear to be as usual—imitating himself. But the use of violently linguistic sexuality as propaganda in this seriocomic, demonic way, is pure Naked Lunch. (Whose author, Mailer has said, may be a genius.)

  Yet in Naked Lunch, the note of anguished power is authentic; Mailer is energy trying to be anguish. Burrough’s ultra-high-pitched language works through confusions and exaggerations to a terrifying assemblage in whose hell we must believe. Mailer’s language is as clear as gag-style always is, the tone assumed being that of the “best” gutter lingo, peppily poeticized—does anyone really bother to refer to a woman’s asshole as her “dirt track”? (Or sometimes an oddly dainty jocundity: “elegant as an oyster with powder on its tail.”) Although Mailer too, tries to command the blind force of that every-which-way physicality which Purdy and Burroughs have—which masticates as it fornicates as it masturbates, all in a delightfully polymorphous mudslinging at the target—what emerges is only fecal pie. As a friend said of it, reading it is like eating crap. (If so, very Jewish in its alimentary concentration. Kosher crap.) What we really see is “the writer” going at his “subject” with cannibalistic empathy, and that fake-Southern talk-talk which is one of his oldest charades—most of it unreadable not because it is dirty but because it is old-man-dirty and other-generational, a gritty banjo-uke getting up the last of the poontang blues.

  Where Naked Lunch is a cry, Mailer is all elocution, the spiritual difference being that try as he may, he is not sufficiently underdog to anything; born to be linguistically on top of everything except death, all his other humiliations always sound just a little arriviste. His achievement is peculiarly elsewhere, and never where he would want it to be—in the sexual, emotional sphere. He cannot create the presence of common life, in literature. What he can do is no mean thing, but quite inverse to that. What one feels in each successive book, even this one, is the presence of literature, in common life.

  Sexually, only Malamud and Singer write out of “orthodox” Jewishness—by which I mean from feelings born of the Jewish law. On the rest, including Mailer, an appropriately funny destiny has converged. When they try to make sex their “main thing” they can’t—and for good or bad art, that’s Jewish enough. But there’s worse to come. Sexually, they write exactly like Christians.

  All of them pure white American Sex One.

  And now, what of writers Sex Two and Sex Three?

  One of the advantages of the writer as alien—of the disinherited, disenfranchised or dispossessed—is that whether or not they themselves are great, they can write from some nearness to the open-ended world to which all serious artists aspire. They write from an intellectual and emotional diaspora, from a past which transcends the nostalgias of childhood, and toward a future which apprehends something better than they have. Satire—the worm’s eye turning—comes to them naturally, as it does to those without full passport privileges, or else they have the kind of neutral perspective that attaches to small borderland nations. At the same time, they have the furious energy of the repressed.

  Women, as comparative newcomers to civil rights (some of which, like full employment in the professions and equal participation in scientifico-military researches, are still in limbo) and as artists still shrinking back against their own meager history in the arts, have easy access to minority feelings—not the least of which is their own superiority in numbers, wherever it is used to make them feel extra, rather than universal. Homosexuals, if they stick to their last, are in an even purer and sadder case; they are forever barred from reproducing themselves.

  Both they and the women have certain advantages. Freed of that birth-envy (envy of the physical capability of birth) which sends so many unfortunate American men, writers among them, into parabolas of virility-thinking and war, they can transmute their energies all the quicker into envy-for-a-cause, envy-for-a-cross, or merely envy of the square-peg in the square-hole. It may be of course that all the sexes have had their envies misnamed or misapplied. For, among the phallus-worshippers, even the inverts run second to ordinary men themselves. Organ envy is a natural fantasy of the “haves,” who conveniently can also then visualize the “have-nots” as wanting what they cannot possibly give.

  In minorities, however, envy attaches most and first to what they are not allowed to do or be—especially when they can see there is no solid reason for it; except perhaps in the case of eunuchs, or a few Lesbians, a sexual “have-not” doesn’t really want the organ, but the role. And the social privileges. Women do not suffer from penis envy, but from a lack of allowable birth-pride. Meanwhile, they and the queers can use all these advantages to make close little parochial worlds to live in and write about—as the Jews have classically done. Except that they don’t have to emigrate or be martyred first. They don’t have to move an inch. Like the blacks, they can get it all at home.

  So far, women have done less from outrage at being Sex Two, than might have been expected in the verbal arts. Unless raised to the level of great satire, outrage at what one is may be a dead end, in a woman giving rise to that henhuffing of the feathers, suffragette in the worst sense, and anticipating the worst—a desire to write “like a man.” (Vide a passage I recall from a “female” novel of some years back, in which the mind of a male character said “crud” to itself every ten paces—creating a page on which the word stood out like button-tufts on a French pouf.) Woman’s passivity may work out to be of more use to her; if the shape of human physical equipment is of as much importance as men have said it is, then it may be that those ovoid inner conformations of which a woman is always kept aware by her oval outer ones, may push her sanely centerwards—for what she has is not a “tool” or a “weapon” but a confluence much more resembling the omphalos. (In the plastic arts one sometimes sees clear variants on this consciousness; once Edward Dahlberg had called Georgia O’Keefe “the vulva-artist” it is difficult not to see that, and the sculptress Lee Bontecou seems preoccupied with frighteningly saw-toothed holes, suggestively vaginal.) The oestral tide—that grandiose attachment to the stars which civilized women have learned to deplore—may be a basic tidal sanity which men are powerless to denigrate, but keeps women where they are. Ev
en Lesbians generally menstruate. Their half of the birth-machine—which they may not want—is in a child-bearing woman considered merely unnecessary to tout. (Particularly by the male half, which must gaze at nine months of it.) Which makes for earthmother serenity in their sex, but less chance of art?

  That’s a suffragette idea, and like another idea often projected on women artists—that in a kind of compensatory barrenness they must sacrifice to the Muse any creation of their bodies—is partly male. (For male depletion, and a plaintive study of the married writer who “leaves it in the bedroom”—see Moravia.) Neither men nor women seem to think that sexual activity depletes the woman artist, (or I have never heard it propounded.) A suffragette idea is one in which a woman changes her real conception of herself in order to counterattack the male idea of it. Writers expect to deal with the world as writers. A woman who is a writer may find that the literary world expects to deal with her as a female. (After death, she may be taken into the pantheon, but in America not usually before.)

  On the fictional work of Mary McCarthy, it was for years the critical fashion to say that it (she) “lacked compassion,” a phrase I used to think revealed a lack of knowledge of what satire was—until I caught onto the fact that it was never used on male satirists. What I saw, maybe as a woman, was that Miss McCarthy, (how hard it still is to leave out the “Miss”!) though in command of extraordinary powers of mind, and a sentence like a lance, often bent it on subjects smaller than need be. (A man would have had more “pomp”?) Later, her novels would be given the attention they deserved as satire, but very much because she had won her spurs as critic and journalist. And now had more pomp. In The Group, it was still the historical minutiae which were fascinating—an age disinterred in its artifacts of advert living and advert meditation—by a memory as careful with that dust as an archeologist.

  Whatever, no one could deny that she had a major energy, which exerted itself with a European range, always refusing that crutch of the “one image” (in the sense that galleries currently exact it from painters) which can give a minor air to any artist’s work, even while it be a source of the deepest parochial strength. F. O’Connor had the Catholic faith, Welty the South and the Southern one; Miss Porter was its self-proclaimed classic storyteller, at best with the objectivity of the diseuse, always in danger of a balladeering coyness—and of the set piece. Alone among them, McCarthy wrote of sex apart from love, as a Frenchwoman might, or as American males tried to—copying not the manner but the privilege. Porter wrote of “love” either in the Habaneras of the peons or with fairy-tale cool. It was never Welty’s subject. In O’Connor, a sexuality not really Catholic at all extruded its allegories from within the snake-dark of the Baptist basilica.

  A man might see a spinsterish limitation in all of them, nothing to do with marriage, but much as if one midwife word might shatter the glassy page. (And a woman is tempted to.) Only McCullers, more naively honest than any of them, more lyrically endowed than any, and with an asexual mobility which could seem both childish and adult, wrote of “love” as undifferentiated sex. Whether or not her vague or weak sexual orientation made her sound the more “universal,” she had the ego to write large. Where McCarthy prefigured a time, (really already well on the way) when the lines between pure fiction and pure journal, either public or private, would drop, McCullers used sexual love, “unnatural” or not, naturally—that is, in the nature of art—but bothering so little with the customary alignments of the day, that the day could do nothing but call her an original.

  The psychic history of women artists since their so-called civil or psychological emancipation should one day be a book itself—by that time hopefully to be written in terms of its significance to the society itself—and always remembering that the history of art is nothing except as it attaches first to individuals. Meanwhile, watching the recent women of American writing, recalling the work of others like Stafford and Boyle (at least one of whose short novels is Laurentian) one seems to see a whole generation of marvelously endowed women, not holding their breath—which contrarily pours forth in a unity of language and sensibility that can arrive of itself at the small masterpiece—but holding still. In one way or another.

  One might think that as heirs of so recent a civil victory as the vote, they might have taken up their political responsibilities, not literally maybe, but in terms of the energy with which it was fought for. But like American women in general, they have not much done this—Hellman in the theater, Rukeyser in poetry—but in fiction little to compare with the roaming conscience of the men. Physically, they were kept from the wars, for one thing, and this had its effect on them; they accepted the image given them, and forgot that experience-of-itself is not art, or can be countered by other experience. Saved from the virility disease of the men writers, they abjured those excesses of the language and of the ridiculous which went with it. Prose, in its many relationships—to poetry sometimes, but to the peasantry too, or to the locutions of a blended middle society—in their hands seemed to attain its true directional force. And became their forte.

  Meanwhile, publication was no problem but sometimes might be a gift horse; avoiding the slick like any artist, they would still find the high-fashion mags (then foraging the arts for art-chic) more tenderly open to them, always eager to encourage their talent for minutiae—and to print whatever they wrote “about women.” Some, like Djuna Barnes and Anais Nin, seemed to “come from abroad” even when they were here, always expatriate, not from the country but from the image it cast upon them. Others faded, still writing, in the magazines of taste, which were always in the market for any “fine” writer who could write of reality objectively (that is, from a recording sensibility but not a judging one) and would never get in a fight about saying “fuck.”

  But it was not “style” which made them mandarin. Reading much fiction by American women of the ’40s and ’50s (and of the men who imitated them, particularly in the “little” reviews), one can’t help but be struck by the droning of the sensibility, on and on. (Most writers dispense with their own past work by dropping it out of their consciousness as a means of getting on to the next—and I am one of these—but on occasion when I have had to refer to certain stories, it is that tone against which my eye screws up, finding it unreadable.) One of the great “tones” of literature, of course—the sensibility—and perhaps common to most writing, but when pursued en masse like this, one wonders why. (And why it is a sensibility which seems to be standing still—en masse.) Partly it derives of course from the general nineteenth-century upswing of the individual. But a still later part of modern sensibility-writing comes out of the Zolaesque realism which was to treat even the individual as an object “found” in space. And for some women artists of the time, this has been ideal.

  They are not going to be trapped into speaking for women only, or for any division of women—and in this, like any artist who avoids category, they are right. They are going to be objective, with a coolth the men can’t manage, maybe—and long after the men in many instances have given coolth up. (Negro sociologists of the era, who hid their blackness under that everyman language, are the same.) Fleeing above all from the image that the society projects upon women artists, such a writer is not going to write, even in the deeper sense, as a woman—i.e., from her own preferential experience. She knows her own capacity, for the universal, and will not have it contaminated with the particular—if the particularity is feminine.

  Looking abroad, she can see what has happened, even in Europe, to women who do: de Beauvoir, tied in the inimitable French way to the coattails of a man. Lessing to the coattails of psychiatry, and the vaginal reflex. She herself has had her mental hysterectomy early, and avoided that. She is going to be a pure artist, i.e., a sexless one. (And since male writers of the time, like Hemingway and Faulkner, abjured criticism, leaving the impure or second-rate to practise it, she too will thus cut herself off from that philistine power.) In art, she will speak for anything but the litera
l female experience or female part in experience; she will not use any of her sexual power at all (much less in the extravagant manner of some men); she will be the angel-artist, with celestially muted lower parts.

  Reading back among those wondrously endowed women of roughly the second quarter of the century, one glimpsed how they had perhaps helped to eunuch themselves. Powerfully gifted in eye, ear, and hand, they had self-willedly kept themselves artistically dead from the waist down. Thinking themselves to be countering that image which the society and the male artists had projected upon them, they had in their way really accepted it. And in wherever it was complained that their work remained beautifully “minor” or “mandarin,” this may have come not from their womanhood, but from their lack of it. They had accepted their envy after all. Or had belittled their experience, or hunted it in male terms. To say this is however an understanding of their art, not a belittling. Art is a series of limitings; half of any work is the leaving-out. One of the great elements of form is the presence of the absence of something. From age to age, from writer to writer, this changes.

  In Nabokov’s work, for instance, the critique of literature was once more allowed to take place in the body of the work itself, as in ancient days it sometimes had. Long since, in America, critics and journalists had reserved critique for themselves, allotting novelists et al. only either the direct dramatic effect in which meaning must remain implicit, or the tensile powers of an ambiguity in which meaning could be trapped. (In neither case must it be stated—in the ’50s, my friend Ken Stuart once said he’d heard a rumor that The New Yorker intended publishing all the endings of its stories in a supplementary volume.) In “pure” art of the era, formal resolutions were gauche, and “moral” observations of any kind, declassé. As editorial parlance had it, “author comment” was out. And in the curious misapplications of that policy, anything in a novel or a story which could not be made to seem the comment of the persona themselves, was “author.” Ideally also, persona should make their comments as part of the “action”—as coming from characters so unaware, or so far immersed in life, that they could never make an intellectual or meditative comment upon it. That would spoil the “pure” effect. (Vide the work of O’Hara.)