by Kathy Acker
“Stoned questions…” murmurs another Spice.
“I’d love to go back to the sixties,” Emma says in her clear voice. “I’d love that. I wouldn’t wear headbands though.”
What about some of the politics of the sixties, I ask. Malcolm X? The fight against racism?
“The other day I watched The Killing Fields.” Now Geri’s doing the talking. “That was in the sixties, Vietnam. I think it’s very healthy that there’s an element of that today. Through the media today we can see people demonstrating for human rights. In Cambodia, on the other side of the world. I think it’s brilliant when you see people standing up, when they have a voice, it kicks the system, a little bit, into touch.”
But what about in England today? I mention that in the U.S., racism is still a big issue.
Mel B and Geri start talking about racism. Geri tells me that she’s learned about racial prejudice from Mel B, who says, “The thing I find really bizarre about America and England…You say that the racism thing is worse in America, yet if you look at television here (in NYC), they’re really scrupulous about making sure, for instance, that they have a black family in an advert. On the adverts in England, you wouldn’t find that.” Suddenly all the Spices are talking among themselves. I can’t understand anything. Then we’re on the subject of Madonna, of people who have inspired us, and Geri starts speaking about Margaret Thatcher. Why she admires her. “But we won’t go down there!”
“Don’t go down there!” advise the Girls.
“We won’t go down there, but…” and Geri, who never seems to listen to reason, begins.
She says that when politicians discuss the economy, they’re just talking about shifting money from one spot to another, and someone always suffers. This is the same distrust of government that so many Americans, both on the right and left—and especially among lower- and working-class people—are feeling and articulating.
Mel C says softly, “We talked about suffragettes and getting the vote to women, and all that. But a lot of women don’t vote; a lot of our generation doesn’t vote. I don’t. I don’t feel I should because I don’t know anything about politics…”
“That was what I was going to say,” adds Emma.
They blame the lack of political education in schools. Whether they like or dislike Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair, they distrust both the political industry and the related media.
“Intellectual people chatting in bathrooms,” comments Mel B.
“We are society,” exclaims Geri, “so really…”
“We should be running it,” Mel B finishes the statement.
“I’d like to run it for a day,” says Victoria, looking directly at me.
“But Victoria, who’s going to let you do such a job?” Geri reminds her.
“The only way to go is growth,” says Mel B. “I think everyone’s turned a bit to the spiritual life.”
“You know,” interjects Victoria, “if you believe in evolution, we only use 20 percent of our brain…if that. So it’s natural that we can evolve to the next level. We’ve got to, really.”
“Nowadays, people do sit down and ask themselves ‘Why am I doing this?’” Mel B continues. “They question themselves and what they’ve got around them. I know I do it, and you find your own little mission. And you fucking go for it. A lot more people are like that now.”
Do they all feel like that? There’s a general quiet, then a “Yeah” all around me.
I ask the Spices to describe themselves. For a moment, they’re lost for words.
Victoria: “I love what I’m doing. I’m with my five best friends, and I’ve seen some great countries. I’m happy, I’m very happy. I care a lot about my family. Regarding my personality, I’m private. There are things for me to know and no one else to find out.” She hesitates. “I just accept the way I am. You have to make the most of it, make the best of yourself. I’m a bit of a fretter. If I’m going to do something, I want to do it properly. I want to do the best I can. I’m a perfectionist.”
Emma: “Me, I’m definitely a bit of a brat. I worry about what other people are feeling, that sort of thing.”
Geri: “I have quite an active mind. Quite eccentric, really. A conversationalist. I believe in fate in a big way, a very big way.”
Mel B: “I’m always asking inward questions about things. I live off the vibes, I do, that people give me. If I don’t like someone then I won’t speak to them, even though something might be coming out of their mouth that I should listen to. I like to think I’m a bit of a free spirit. I don’t run by any rule book. I live on the edge a little bit. I always think, well, at least I’ll die happy today rather than worrying about it tomorrow.”
Mel C: “I’m very regimented. I really enjoy my own company, although I love being with other people.”
I’m watching the Spice Girls perform “Wannabe” on Saturday Night Live, but not seeing them. In my mind, I’m seeing England. When I returned there in July last year, lad culture was in full swing. Loaded was running what had once been a relatively intellectual magazine culture.
Feminism, especially female intellectuals, had become extinct. “Where have all the women gone to?” I asked. Then came a twist named the Spice Girls. The Spices, though they deny it, are babes—the blonde, the redhead, the dark sultry fashion model—and they’re more. They both are and represent a voice that has too long been repressed. The voices, not really the voice, of young women and, just as important, of women not from the educated classes.
It isn’t only the lads sitting behind babe culture, bless them, who think that babes or beautiful lower- and lower-middle-class girls are dumb. It’s also educated women who look down on girls like the Spice Girls, who think that because, for instance, girls like the Spice Girls take their clothes off, there can’t be anything “up there.”
The Spice Girls are having their cake and eating it. They have the popularity and the popular ear that an intellectual, certainly a female intellectual, almost never has in this society, and, what’s more, they have found themselves, perhaps by fluke, in the position of social and political articulation. It little matters now how the Spice Girls started—if they were a “manufactured band.”
What does this have to do with feminism? When I lived in England in the eighties, a multitude of women, diverse and all intellectual, were continually heard from—people such as Michèle Roberts, Jeanette Winterson, Sara Maitland, Jacqueline Rose, Melissa Benn. Is it also possible that the English feminism of the eighties might have shared certain problems with the American feminism of the seventies? English feminism, as I remember it back then, was anti-sex. And like their American counterparts, the English feminists were intellectuals, from the educated classes. There lurked the problem of elitism, and thus class. I am speculating, but, perhaps due to Margaret Thatcher—though it is hard to attribute anything decent to her—a populist change has taken place in England. The Spice Girls, and girls like them, and the girls who like them, resemble their American counterparts in two ways: they are sexually curious, certainly pro-sex, and they do not feel that they are stupid or that they should not be heard because they did not attend the right universities.
If any of this speculation is valid, then it is up to feminism to grow, to take on what the Spice Girls, and women like them, are saying, and to do what feminism has always done in England, to keep on transforming society as society is best transformed, with lightness and in joy.
THE LAST INTERVIEW
BY KASIA BODDY
PRETEXT 5
1997 (PUBLISHED MAY 2002)
I interviewed Acker at her basement flat at 14 Duncan Terrace in Islington, near the Regent’s Canal. She was very welcoming and hospitable, keen to talk despite being very weak. She told me she was ill because she had been poisoned with parasites from the canal; her Evian bottle had fallen in, and her lover Charles Shaar Murray had retrieved it. Our conversation took place in September shortly before she returned to the States. She died in November.
BODDY: In an interview published after you lived in London in the 1980s, you said that you felt both the lack of a literary underground in Britain and misunderstood by British press. Can you say more about that, especially now that you’re living here again? Is this still true?
ACKER: I don’t think you have an underground here. By underground I don’t mean young writers who aren’t known yet. What I mean is a recognizable alternative to what we call commercial literature, that is really as public as anything else. And no, I don’t think you have that.
BODDY: You missed it?
ACKER: It’s changed here, so now I’m talking about how I felt back then. I felt that it was easier for a writer to get published here, especially for a writer who was slightly, or more than slightly, unconventional. But you couldn’t go too far because there was no underground. William Burroughs would have never survived here, and certainly wasn’t published here until he was famous enough. In the States there is a true underground, in which people like Burroughs, of course, are published. It was both good and bad. In one way, it was easier for writers here, and in another way it was harder, because you had to stay somewhat within the norm.
BODDY: So you stood out.
ACKER: Well, I was American. It’s very different. And I was brought over with a big bang. Sonny Mehta, who was head of Picador at the time, did a number, and for whatever reason things caught on. They had never seen—“they,” the English—had never seen anything like it, but I don’t think that there was ever any sense of where I came from. I was seen as a loner. There was more of a cult around my image, around my personality, than there was interest in my writing. And certainly there was no interest in where the writing fitted in in any history of writing. The sectors of the American underground that I come from are fairly well known in most countries—most people know who the Black Mountain poets are, or the art scene. Process writing would mean something. They just don’t mean very much here.
BODDY: Why do you think that is?
ACKER: I don’t know. This is just a guess: there is a position that literature has in English society that really has to do with properness, with class. One speaks properly: whatever the subject matter, the elegance and the proper use of irony shows that one fits properly, one upholds the class structure. There is something different with the Irvine Welsh thing…but then I wonder. The Scottish writers are closer to American writers—like James Kelman and Alasdair Gray. So there are ties. There is a certain network. There are very few writers here [in England]—Ballard, but that’s very peculiar, Iain Sinclair—who’re very well known to the American scene—and some poets.
BODDY: So how did you fit in?
ACKER: I don’t think I did. I was seen as the oddball wild woman. So I was fitted in to places that said, “We like wild women.” To my mind I was in a little cage in the zoo that instead of “monkey,” said “female American radical.” So whenever they wanted the female American radical to comment on anything, to make a token appearance, they’d pull me out of the cage and give me some money. It was quite lucrative, I must say.
BODDY: How have things changed now?
ACKER: England on the whole has got very American, and I think the publishing industry has changed a great deal. When they consider now if they’ll take a book, trendiness is the name of the game. I’m not sure it’s better to tell you the truth. On the one hand, I like the way Irvine Welsh and friends have gone against proper language. On the other hand, there’s a kind of interest in surface spark, surface lightning, and little interest in anything else. It’s very conservative in a way. I think literature is deeply about lineage, and there is nothing to do with lineage here. Basically it’s realist writing. Okay, so it’s grungy realist writing and it talks about toilets or dope.
BODDY: In the Nelson Algren tradition?
ACKER: Well, I take Algren to be not just a realist. I love Algren. Next to Faulkner, he’s my favorite.
BODDY: In In Memoriam you speak of Faulkner as “the American writer.” What is it about Faulkner that makes him “the American”?
ACKER: First of all, there weren’t any novelists around then who weren’t just realists. The way I see it is that it starts off with Hawthorne and Melville—you have Cooper on one side, the realist telling fairy tales (realism has always looked like fairy tales, even Dickens). For me, the American novel starts off with Hawthorne, Melville, Poe—and it’s not a novel, it’s a reaction to the novel, it’s a romance. The novel, as Roland Barthes would say, is deeply about bourgeois life. Hawthorne and Melville and Poe are revolutionaries in lots of ways. So you have the novel in America starting off being radical, not being real. Just in literary terms, the fight is against realism. Moby Dick is not a realist novel, and Pierre just makes fun of the whole idea—it’s the first genre-fuck novel. But then you don’t really have the tradition continuing. You go through a lot of radical writing that is mainly poetry. And nobody is that interesting until Faulkner, who just shines. He does something interesting—he does a novel that is both realist and radical. He keeps narrative, and yet it’s absolutely radical. What I take to be radical is that interest in America in something called guts—a heart. What does Poe say? That if you wrote the truth of the heart you’d set the whole world on fire. It’s like fuck you, the rules, that’s what you do. That’s what Faulkner did. Algren’s like that for me, but I can’t think of anyone else.
BODDY: What about Stein?
ACKER: I don’t think of her as a novelist.
BODDY: What about The Making of Americans?
ACKER: Well, you definitely get the experimental novel. And you have Djuna Barnes—Nightwood is totally radical.
BODDY: Lots of people have acknowledged your own radical influence.
ACKER: Oh yes, and the academic industry on me is getting fairly large.
BODDY: What do think you’ve given other writers? Do you notice that influence?
ACKER: I think I’ve freed other writers. I think it’s different with men and women. But I broke rules. I said you’ve just got to write however you want to write. What’s said to me most often is that people felt freed by my writing to do what they want to do rather than what they were told to do. Here I’m guessing, but I think for women, there’s this real empowerment. Coming out of sixties and seventies feminism, women so felt that they had to write in certain ways, that they couldn’t talk about certain things, have certain attitudes. I think I gave a lot of women the freedom to say I can still be strong and yet I can talk about this. I can see the influence most strongly with women. Dennis Cooper is another. We are about the only writers of our generations who crossed over—who didn’t compromise at all, but crossed over to some extent.
BODDY: Your recent work seems more interested in the idea of its audience than perhaps you used to be. Is that fair?
ACKER: I’m more interested in narrative—that’s for sure. Being ill, having the cancer, has changed a great deal for me. So I’m rethinking everything yet again. In some ways, it’s just a continuation of my work. The cancer wasn’t devastating; it was more like a fabulous school which I went to, where I learned a lot. I don’t know how all that is going to churn out.
BODDY: You’ve always rejected the idea of writing as self-expression.
ACKER: I’ve certainly said that. On the other hand, I’ve always felt that you have to write what you have to write. I don’t have an idea of a reader out there, in my best moments. That’s certainly true of what I’m writing right now. I write what I have to write. And then there are the moments—because you can’t do that every day—when you’re doing your technique stuff, theory. But you just have to do what’s coming through you. In that way, I’m close to Robert Duncan, who talked a lot about inspiration and the muse. I do a lot of drafts, and I certainly think of the reader towards the final drafts. I make my money still by performing, and I can’t afford to lose audiences. So I can’t afford to have too many chapters in a book that I can’t read aloud.
BODDY: What do you d
o in that revision?
ACKER: I first of all make it clear, whatever the intent is. They may or may not be interested but at least they can get it. This will be about this problem and you will all get it. There is a certain clarity that is necessary, even in the most experimental of texts. I didn’t think this when I was younger, but now I think there is a kind of pacing. You can’t go too fast for a reader. You can’t have too many characters, or people won’t be sure who the characters are. Technical stuff.
BODDY: What do you mean by pacing? You’ve spoken before of breath.
ACKER: I read all my texts out loud as a final draft. In terms of breath, I mean the same thing that poets mean. I was trained by poets, not by novelists.
BODDY: The idea of the line seems central to poetry.
ACKER: With me too.
BODDY: How does that work in prose?
ACKER: Let me get a copy of Pussy and I’ll show you. [She reads the beginning of the abortion sequence on page 79.] You see how the rhythm works. I hear the very simple rhythm. It goes for the jokes. It’s a very straightward, limpid rhythm that will close up at the moment you want to close the meaning. But it won’t do so obtrusively. I can see the rhythm is almost transparent. Whereas something like “Antigone’s Diary”…[She reads the beginning of that section on page 163.] So it’s that long sentence which just gets the anger out. That to me is a very oral rhythm, where you get the emotion of who the person is—as opposed to the transparent rhythm, where there is no emotion, no character. And there are times when there is something like a poetic rhythm. This is from the second chapter; this is what Louise Vanaen writes to the whores. [She reads from pages 30–31.] So there it gets to depending on each word and sentence. It’s more poetical.