English is at its highest and best use in comedy. Unfortunately, comedy is much harder to write than straight prose or tragedy. And fewer people understand true comedy. Everyone understands slapstick, but real comedy presupposes intelligence and the ability to discern not just different levels of language, but different levels among people. Comedy is always set in society. It’s about people as they live. Tragedy can be one man against one god. Technically, that’s much easier.
Tragedy massages the human ego even as comedy deflates it. While you’re weeping for just blinded Oedipus you’re drawn into the nobility of the tale, a human crosses the gods even if unwittingly. Tragedy pits us against large foes and the trip wire is our own character. Still, falling afoul of Zeus or Athena or Hera ennobles the human.
In comedy we fall afoul of one another. Comedy depends on social life, on our behavior in groups. In tragedy you can observe one human against the gods. In comedy it’s one human versus other humans and often one man (or woman if I’m writing it) against her own worst impulses.
The English language is one of the superb inventions of the human mind. It is and always will be the perfect language for comedy. The homonyms alone can send you into peals of laughter.
The other reason that English is made for comic vision is the temper of our people. English-speaking peoples are wary of emotion. We prize logic. Comedy depends on our hubris, on that absurd conceit that we can think our way through life.
All English speakers are set up from birth for a fall, that moment when you realize you might be smart but you’ve still fallen flat on your face. For us, this is the beginning of wisdom.
The other aspect of comedy that suits me is the sheer drive, the strong sense of self-confidence one needs to write it. It’s what has gotten me in trouble, too. We still haven’t reached the point where we are sure we like self-confidence in a woman. We’ll accept violent self-centeredness, especially in beauty queens and movie stars; the more superficial they are the more we accept it. But a truly self-confident woman, one who looks you straight in the eye and doesn’t lower her eyes in a nonverbal (and cloying) nod to your superiority, if you are male, is unnerving.
Suited though we are to comedy, since the dreary days of Cromwell and his Puritan myrmidons, tragedy has been in the ascendant. People want to see others suffer. They’re getting their wish. I suppose it makes them feel superior.
Well, whatever the reason, our society now values sorrowful tales heavily laced with violence. The French call it nostalgie de la boue, nostalgia for the mud.
I actually knew that when I started my first novel. I hadn’t studied Latin, Greek, Anglo-Saxon, Middle English and the merest hint of French for nothing. I knew our traditions. I knew my tool. I didn’t necessarily know structure, but I could learn. At least I knew a story had to have a beginning, a middle and an end. These days you can’t take even that for granted.
Virginia Woolf has a lot to answer for with that damned stream-of-consciousness technique. She could do it. Nobody else can, really.
And then there are all the Ulysses imitators. Dear God, please send them back into the pubs. Could Joyce have known what he spawned?
You find when you write a novel that once you’ve established your worldview, you have a temperament. Since I crave Shakespeare’s comedies, Aristophanes’s comedies, Molière, Sheridan, Wycherley, Pope, Goldsmith, Gibbon (it’s prose, but what prose!) and Twain, that establishes my temperament.
It doesn’t mean I hate Paradise Lost or Light in August, but those works represent a different temperament, a much more emotional one. Milton and Faulkner were wounded men, deeply feeling men. You might not think it upon first reading, but read those works again.
Times have temperament. This explains why artists go in and out of fashion like clothes. Thornton Wilder was a very good writer. Not of the first water, but damned good and worth reading. Who reads him today? Wrong temperament, but he’ll come back when the times change, and I wonder if Willa Cather and Edna Ferber will come back with him.
Temperament. Henry James’s Washington Square moves me in a way that Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano does not. Both are exceptional works.
For whatever reason, my first novel—written on a door laid across two black file cabinets with a big red stripe painted down the middle—arrived at the right time, in the right temperament.
Rubyfruit Jungle studied the struggle of an individual to be an individual. This is one of the oldest themes in Western literature: the individual versus society. Think of Antigone. It’s the same subject but in tragic form.
In order to become a useful person to the group, Molly Bolt must first defy the group mentality to find herself.
Of course you shouldn’t notice this theme. If you do, it means I’ve failed. When you read my novels the first time, if you bother to read them at all, I would hope you’ll be transported into the worlds these characters inhabit and I pray when you’re done you’ll know those people. They will now be part of your family.
Not that anyone wanted to publish Rubyfruit Jungle. Far from it. I sent it to agents in New York. A few people told me to send it to one particular agent, said to be gay. Anyway, with hope, I packed it off.
I took the train up a month later; a month seemed a reasonable time to read my novel. The agent threw the manuscript at me. You would have thought I’d tossed a canister of mustard gas into her office. She called me a pervert, telling me to get out of her office. She was so deep in the closet my novel must have given her the vapors.
I eventually gave up on agents and sent it to Simon and Schuster, Random House … really, the list is as long as your arm. I couldn’t get arrested.
Eat your hearts out. Rubyfruit Jungle is still selling and it could have been yours.
June Arnold, the Houston heiress, and Parke Bowman had started a small feminist publishing house called Daughters, Inc. They paid me a thousand dollars and printed five thousand copies of the novel. I sent half the money to Mom, but not the book, which Daughters brought out in 1973. Pretty soon Daughters couldn’t keep up with the demand. Without one ad, one review, one anything, the book, sold out of the back of cars, or by mail since big bookstores wouldn’t carry a line from such a small publisher, chalked up close to 100,000 copies.
Both women wanted to publish new fiction. They didn’t want to be servants to Rubyfruit Jungle even if it was selling. They also published my second novel, In Her Day. The demand for that overloaded their circuits.
Originally they had wanted to publish five new books each season, ambitious for such a small house. They were the first feminist publishing company that I know of, which also complicated their business life. Their mission was to let women’s fiction see the light of day.
At that time, most commercial women’s fiction offered women as men wanted to see them—Valley of the Dolls kind of stuff. Big numbers, no soul.
Ironically, my success was interfering with June and Parke’s mission. They could publish me or publish new writers.
They asked whether I minded if they sold me out, so to speak, to a company that could handle the demand. It was okay with me.
Several years after publishing Rubyfruit, they sold the rights to Bantam Books. Elly Sidel, curly-haired and wildly funny, bought the book for Bantam, which was then a reprint or paperback house. Bantam is now also a hardcover house.
Although they didn’t have to do it, June and Parke split the paycheck with me. June had inherited a great deal of wealth, and like most Texas folks, she was extremely generous. Parke, or Patty, didn’t care about money one way or another. I remember standing on the corner of Seventh Avenue near Bleecker Street, outside the Daughters office, with a check for $125,000 in my hand. It seemed like a dream: Poverty that grinds you to dust, and suddenly a mess of money.
I walked down to the main Chase Manhattan Bank in Wall Street and opened an account, even though I was still living in Washington. I didn’t take a cab. It hadn’t sunk in that I could afford one.
When Mom finally read the book she was all beshit and forty miles from water.
“Everyone will think I’m that mean mother,” she wailed.
Mother could be mean as malaria. She could also be funny, but in the novel I concentrated on the malaria.
Mother could pitch all the hissy fits she wanted. She was in Florida. I was in D.C. and damn glad of it. If I’d lived within shouting distance of her, she would have shot me.
Once I paid her outstanding bills, her attitude changed to one of sweetness and light.
When you write your first novel your family snatches it up, eagerly searching for themselves and horrified when they find what they’re looking for.
So I didn’t put any part of Mother in my second novel. She didn’t speak to me for months after that.
As for Aunt Mimi, she lost no opportunity to sob at how I was ruining the family. For her my novels were a dehydrating experience.
Jerry said I’d obliterated all chances of a political career as well as any other kind of career. No one would hire me. He’d be my friend for life, but he wasn’t taking me to any more company dinners.
Gloria Steinem liked the book.
Charlotte Bunch liked it, too.
Eugene, Kenny, Wade and Terry have never said a word to me about any of my books, which only goes to prove what I’ve always suspected: “real men” don’t read fiction.
Rubyfruit brought me notoriety, a ton of hate mail, numerous threats on my life including two bomb threats, increased outrage from the conservative wing of the feminist movement and scorn from the radical dykes.
Straight people were mad because I was gay. The dykes were mad because I wasn’t gay enough.
The only creature to take it all in stride, apart from myself, was Baby Jesus.
54
A Hop, Skip and a Jump
I wrote Rubyfruit in 1971. Daughters published it in 1973 and Bantam reprinted it in 1977. Soon after the Bantam deal I found a very young Wendy Weil to be my literary agent. She worked for a well-established agent, Julian Bach, in those days.
Belonging to a kicked-around group means enduring unpleasant events, whether it’s having an ugly word flung at you, being denied a job or housing or being cast aside even from social discourse. I experience such unpleasantries. Perhaps you have as well. Irritating, painful and sometimes dangerous as being an outsider can be, poverty is worse.
My life changed the day I finally had money.
The several years following 1972 weren’t entirely uneventful, but hustling for funds, working and trying to write often drained the days of their luster.
A few memories remain, such as studying in Princeton’s library. A friend in the archeology department got me a library card. I’d moved to a small farm in Cranbury, New Jersey, to be close to Princeton. The campus, beautiful and serene, allowed me the luxury of enjoying it without having to go to classes. I proofread novels at night for money. No one cared if a proofreader was gay.
The chapel at Princeton was my second refuge. The stained-glass windows are exceptionally fine for a small church.
In spring the wisteria with pendulous lavender blossoms drapes over the stone buildings. Aaron Burr’s father was president of what was then named the College of New Jersey. Burr himself attended, as did James Madison. Since I respect James Madison, I paid attention to Princeton. The past is never dead for me; it rides on my shoulder like a becapped and jeweled monkey.
I felt alive again being on a farm, although a farm in New Jersey is different than Hanover Shoe Farm—smaller, different crops. Folks down the road had horses. That’s what really mattered.
Baby Jesus loved it. She’d sit under the purple morning glories covering the tractor shed.
Once my research was over and I’d finished In Her Day, I had an opportunity to teach a semester at Goddard College, in Plainfield, Vermont.
Goddard was as close to an experimental college as one could get. The faculty was interesting, many of them genuine academics but willing to try new things. Rubyfruit attracted them. Probably it was the only college in America that would have taken a chance on me.
I loved teaching. I know writers are supposed to hate it, but watching another person handle the language delights me. They all come to writing classes in college worried about character development and plot; some are already thinking about an agent. The cart’s before the horse. They know nothing about their tool, English. You’ve got to crawl before you can walk, so I took them right back to nouns and verbs, active voice versus passive—as a writer sees language, not a grammarian. A writer doesn’t need to know the subject of an elliptical clause. It’s nice but not necessary. What is necessary is to hear it. Language is music, and few languages are capable of such wide cadence as our own.
As I knocked around from pillar to post, from Plainfield, Vermont, to New York City, to Cazenovia, New York, I learned to rise at five or five-thirty in the morning, write until I had to go to work and then come home and write until I fell asleep.
People make demands on you. Not being a social person helped me write. Over the years I’ve disappointed many people by not attending parties or dinners. I hate those affairs. If an event doesn’t involve work, theater, horses or hounds, I don’t want to go. Because I wasn’t social I made few friends. It’s no different today. I’d sooner bleed from the throat than go to most cocktail parties, and fund-raisers are a descent into hell.
I’ll do it if I have to or if I’m the point person raising the funds.
What I do love is having tea with a friend. Because I want to know what people think and feel, I like intimate gatherings. Teatime is my favorite time of day, the best time to see people. Also, since I don’t drink, having tea spares me the ordeal of dinner, where you run the risk of your dinner partner or partners bending their elbow and becoming increasingly less witty. A few people become more witty with alcohol—precious few.
What strikes me most about those floating years between the first publication of Rubyfruit and the release by Bantam is that they had little emotional effect on me.
Even a year’s stint in Boston, an exquisite architectural jewel, left hardly a mark. The one thing I most remember from my time in Boston was the corruption of Elaine Noble, the first openly gay elected person. She did business with crooked folks and turned state’s witness to escape any charges that might be brought against her. What sorrow she brought on herself, and what sorrow she brought on all those who elected her.
Boston brought me Santa Ferari, Ann Lewis, and Ann’s brother, Representative Barney Frank, each of whom I see intermittently, usually at one of those fund-raisers I don’t much like. While Ann, then deputy director of Clinton’s re-election campaign, and Barney are acquaintances whose political acumen is never to be underestimated, Santa had become a friend. She raises funds for a house where women with AIDS can live.
Our friendship had an unlikely beginning; we both dated the same woman, the above-mentioned Elaine Noble, called by us and others “Ignoble.”
Before Elaine took her waltz with the sleazy boys, she worked hard. Full of energy and that bombast so peculiar to professional politicians, she helped me buy two buildings on Marlborough Street near Massachusetts Avenue. In the early seventies they were cheap. Broke as I was, Linda Damico—a saint, really—lent me five thousand dollars for a down payment. I met Linda at a summer school for feminists called Sagaris. I’d helped found it but didn’t administer it. She was one of the students, a quiet, thoughtful person, a true thinking person.
These two buildings brought me $225,000 worth of debt. Finally I was in business. You’re nothing in America if you don’t have debt. All those years that I paid cash, had no credit cards, was clean as a whistle, were utterly worthless in our perverted economy. Now I had a shitload of debt, and all of a sudden the banks loved me.
Elaine Noble helped me find the buildings, she put me in touch with John and Linda Lecoq, the owners, and she took a share of the properties. Years later I sold those two buildings as t
he co-op boom was starting. I did okay.
While my romance with Elaine was short-lived, I wasn’t upset. I rarely was, because I neither understood romantic love nor wished to understand it. It looked like neurosis shared by two. So when the bloom was off the rose I was fine. This relaxed attitude was not always shared by the other party.
Elaine, however, could not have cared less. She was wrapped up in what appeared to be the beginning of a good career and was meeting lots of women who were falling all over her. My southern worldview, with its emphasis on honor in capital letters and underlined three times, wearied her.
Santa, with her green eyes, rapier wit and good looks, caught her eye. Well, to tell the truth, Santa caught everyone’s eye. Elaine was happy that I didn’t throw roadblocks up as she drove in the direction of the appealing, alluring and available Santa.
Poor Santa. She was the one who bore the brunt when Elaine’s dealings became public. All the more painful since Santa had given her ample warning that if she continued doing business with the wrong people her career would flame out.
Elaine’s apartment was on the ground floor of 401 Marlborough Street, and mine was on the floor above it, in the rear. We had keys to each other’s apartments, but this turned out to be more useful for her than for me. Since she was out all the time, I endlessly walked her Welsh Terrier, a dog with an inexhaustible voice.
One evening I came downstairs and she was sitting with a state senator who had a reputation for financially advantageous deals allied to political favors. When he left I said, “Elaine, you’d better be careful. You’re running with the wrong people.”
Flushed, she replied, “You’ll never get anywhere in politics. You need a little shit to fertilize the rose.”
I told her if she cut a deal with this particular politician she’d better move out of the building. She moved next door, and soon after moved in with Santa.
But the damage was done. It took a year for the fertilizer to become public knowledge.
Rita Will Page 34