Bitch

by Elizabeth Wurtzel

  I, for one, like both parts of the equation—I like the sorrow and the fury, but only Liz Phair seems able to balance them. Meanwhile the latter drowns out the former, and it isolates us all a little more. Ultimately, that alienation always leads right back to Sylvia Plath, to the last days of the art of confession. A zillion clinical reports in the Journal of the American Medical Association that translate into articles in the “Science Times” section of the Tuesday New York Times and features in women’s magazines talking about epidemic rates of depression have nothing on the evocations of this catastrophic mental state that Plath created so clearly.

  To be fair, Sylvia Plath’s narrator in The Bell Jar is tart and detached, always aware that compared to the execution of the Rosenbergs—a death sentence with which she is obsessed—her problems are all about tempests in teapots. But she doesn’t care: the book itself is testament to her belief that this is a story worth telling, a malady worth understanding. The Bell Jar is still one of the few titles that speaks to depressives who cannot blame their mental state on any life event dramatic or traumatic or concrete enough to qualify as a topic for Sally Jessy Raphael to explore. Her prose and poetry tell of untethered unraveling and purposeless pain. That Plath later wrote poems invoking Dachau and Auschwitz in the framework of her emotional life proves she truly did not fear the censure of the Casablanca-ists, the ones who think personal problems don’t amount to a hill of beans, et al.

  And Plath was able to compose such a book in the way that someone else might have caught the last train out of Berlin before the Nazis took over: after that period of time, mental health could only be politicized if it was to be heard of at all—in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, in Phyllis Chesler’s Women and Madness, in Juliet Mitchell’s Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Her story would have been polemical, rhetorical—not nearly so good as the novel it was. It would have been read as a “text”: as the precise case history the American publishers had initially reduced it to. But the result of the diminished acceptance of the concerns of the self—except in the broadest, Me Decade movement sort of way, or in the vilest Leeza–Jenny Jones-Ricki Lake–Jerry Springer sort of way—is that serious and accessible literature has tended not to deal with nervous breakdown without incest or some other suburban catastrophe being implicated, or without taking a harsh, ironic, been-there, done-that tone. The Bell Jar—in the same sense that Bob Dylan is the last American folksinger and Allen Ginsberg is our last popular, populist poet—was the last novel that exhibited the confessional poetry impulse of the fifties, an impulse driven by the fight against the era’s repression, and later drowned out by the far louder voices of protest in the sixties.

  Ever since then, depression has mostly been agenda-ized out of literature’s aegis—although once in a while a surprising work of truth and depth will sneak into the marketplace. Smilla’s Sense of Snow, author Peter Høeg’s beautiful thriller embedded within a melancholy interior monologue, was a huge critical success and best-seller here in the United States in 1994, a rarity for any book in translation, but as an import from Denmark it is probably the first success in these parts since Hans Christian Andersen. The novel is ostensibly about a Danish Inuit woman’s attempt to solve a murder, but it is actually a meditation on sorrow and longing and exile, it is about deep-down defining depression, it is about luxuriating in loneliness, it is about lusting for the darkness of Greenland, it is about finding truth and all the world’s secrets in the coldness of snow—it is in fact a novel about a woman in love with snow. Though it was written by a man, Høeg understands the truth of this woman’s mind the way D. H. Lawrence felt for the drives of Lady Chatterley and Gustave Flaubert understood intimately the ennui of Emma Bovary. I have to assume that this study of a woman who takes a strange pride in her sorrow only managed to register on our cultural charts because the murder mystery aspect obscured its emotional content. Or maybe, as is the case with the many successful memoirs that have come along to fill a void where intense and exploratory literature once resided, there is a hunger for Høeg’s lucid rendering of an alienation that is preferable to a compromised life integrating with an indifferent, cynical world—Smilla’s Sense of Snow gave readers a bottled SOS from another coast, assuring the most deserted and isolated person that she is not alone.

  More to the point, since the death of Plath in 1963 and her fellow confessional poet Sexton in 1974, no American poet—and, to my thinking, artist or writer—has replaced these two as icons of insanity. For the life of me, I could not tell you what the typical poem published in The New Yorker or whatever other journals still contain poetry is actually about—trees, stalagmite and stalactite, and what the fall does to the landscape is all I can grasp—but I am sure that none have the dread immediacy or ache or honesty of “Elm” or “The Tulips” or “Wanting to Die.” For a refreshing moment, confessional poetry reigned supreme and then when all the practitioners made good on the promises that their work offered up—which is to say, one by one they died by their own hands—poetry went back to being a gentleman’s art, an intellectual parlor game, and all that crazy manic energy instead got packed up and sent off into rock and roll. Certainly, plenty of depressing stuff has appeared, but no one has achieved icon status for sorrow—perhaps because death is a prerequisite, but Diane West Middlebrook chronicles how even when she was alive, Anne Sexton’s followers would come see her read in order to see her go crazy. Even as rates of female depression accelerate, with men’s speeding up as well, somehow this culture cannot find a place for art that is intellectual, accessible, glamorous and depressive all at once. Finally it reemerged in grunge rock, and pop music in the early nineties achieved the elusive “relevance” it had been masturbating over ever since the death of Jim, Jimi and Janis, ever since the Beatles broke up. But, alas, Kurt Cobain died before it could take hold, before the momentum that qualifies anything as a movement could be felt.

  When the movie Quiz Show came out, dramatizing the young congressional attorney Richard Goodwin’s prosecution of the television game show riggings, I was mostly struck by a dark little corner of the movie—barely even a subplot—a small personal speck within a film that was otherwise notable mostly for its sweepingness, its big themes. I was struck by the character of Sandra Leverant, Goodwin’s Vassar girl and graduate student wife, played by Mira Sorvino, in what I thought was quite a star turn. In fact I thought that Mira, who had been a classmate of mine at Harvard, ought to have won an Oscar for her portrayal, and I rightly predicted, when she wasn’t even nominated, that it was only a matter of time before she did receive that honor (only a couple of years later, as Linda in Woody Allen’s Mighty Aphrodite).

  Anyway, Sandra as movie character was only vaguely sketched, but she wore berets and accused her husband of being the “Uncle Tom of the Jews” when he seemed reluctant to press charges against Charles Van Doren, the handsome blond blue-blood who was deemed too elegant to drag into this muck, too heroic. Of course, Sandra is right, she is probably always right, and she becomes the moral center of a movie which is mostly about Goodwin’s frustration at his paper-pushing job and his attempt to kick up some dust and make a name for himself that is better suited to being number one in his class at Harvard Law. Meanwhile, he comes home to Sandra and finds her doing the crossword puzzle when she should be writing her dissertation, finds her using her obviously considerable intelligence—more considerable than his, it seems clear—mostly to set him straight, to question and criticize the probity of his crusade.

  I mean, they are, after all, only game shows.

  Well, anyway, I really liked her. I loved the way she would be doing crossword puzzles when she should have been doing serious intellectual work because, frankly, I am an obsessive doer of the daily puzzle, get the Times only for the crossword and spend a lot of time when I should be working just filling in those little boxes. And I liked the niche she had carved for herself in her marriage because I always believed it was what I, as a wife, would be best at: as someone who
hides at home, writing what is on my mind and disengaged from the politics of business, of life or of politics themselves, I always thought I’d be good to come home to, a person to put things in perspective, to point out the stupidity of the pissing contests most men seem to find so engaging. For instance, I could say, if I married a studio executive, How stupid you are to give Jim Carrey $20 million for just one movie, and I could point out why these Faustian bargains never are worth it. Or if I were married to a Democratic pollster who was fretting over Clinton’s approval ratings I could tell him that they don’t matter because Bush had a 90 percent favorable read and was thought unbeatable a year before the ’92 elections, and things change so quickly. I could, I guess I’m saying, do what I do on the page but in real life: I could point out over and over again how very little any of this matters, how huge these things seem and how quickly they then subside.

  As someone who has mostly functioned at a strange remove from life, I am often the first one who is able to say that this or that is not worth it, that the whole point is being missed. And while this occasionally looks like prescience or good judgment, it is really disinterest, it is numbness and detachment.

  But Sandra Goodwin, protesting the stupidity of this and that, gave me an idea of how it could make one a good wife, a helpmate—yes, I suppose, the woman behind the man.

  So I loved her part in the movie, saw it more than once and told the guy I was dating at the time that it really reminded me of our relationship, and he even agreed. When I read Richard Goodwin’s memoir, Looking Back on America, the book from which Quiz Show was derived, I was annoyed to find only two passing references to his wife—in fact, I think it’s fair to say I found her absence suspiciously egregious, the telltale heart of darkness that kept pumping through the plywood of the floors, pounding to be heard.

  About a year after the film came out, I met someone who had been involved in the Quiz Show production and went on and on about Mira’s fine performance, about how her few lines and appearances suggested so much, how much I liked and related to the Sandra character.

  And this man said to me: “You know, a few years after the end of the events of that movie, sometime in the sixties, she killed herself.”

  And I thought to myself: Shit. Of course I related to her, she was a complete depressive who slept and did the puzzle instead of working on her thesis, who looked at the world and mocked it from the sidelines, never quite managing the immersion that is happiness, that is the hallmark of her husband, a man who was quite compromised, who did things for the wrong reasons—or who did them because they were part of playing the game, because after all it is only a dance.

  It is a lot easier to pay Jim Carrey $20 million and to sit behind a desk at a studio, allowing it to produce bad movies if you understand that it is only a dance.

  But what if you believe that life is the real thing, that it is serious, that it is huge? As Sylvia Plath wrote in a letter to a boyfriend in 1955, “Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing”—which is not so different from saying that you are given to caring so much because you fear how perilously close you come to not caring at all. Depression, the disease of not feeling, starts to manifest itself as-tantrums, hysteria, excess—the disease of feeling too much. And after a while, I defy anyone to define the difference.

  Depressed women, alternately distant and overwrought, are the most difficult women of all. And behavior that is mistaken for any number of things—lasciviousness, insanity and bitchiness above all—is rarely mistaken for what it actually is, for one of the oft-forgotten sins against society, the illness at the center of so many ills: despair.

  PART FOUR

  The Blonde in the Bleachers

  There are women and there’s pussy

  SAM PECKINPAH

  interview in Playboy

  August 1972

  There is an apocryphal story, which, like most bits of folklore, ought to be true even if it isn’t. According to this myth, Bill and Hillary Clinton were driving along one day, when they pulled into a gas station and had their car serviced by a man who turned out to be an old high school beau of Hillary’s. So Bill said to her, “If you had married him, you’d be the wife of a gas station attendant.”

  To which she replied, “No, I wouldn’t.” Pause for effect. “I’d be married to the President of the United States.”

  I probably don’t need to explain that the assonance of this anecdote is in that it confirms our notion of Hillary Clinton as kingmaker and string-puller, as back-door and back-room woman who’s so good at what she does that if Bill Clinton had not existed, she would have invented him.

  But then there is another story, one that ought to be true because it is true. This one is recounted by Gloria Steinem in her essay “College Reunion,” published in Ms. in 1981, on the eve of the twenty-fifth anniversary of her graduation from Smith College. As Steinem recalls, a reporter approached her for an article about why so many women of accomplishment had attended Smith. Steinem asked, “Like who?” Well, the reporter replied—completely glossing over the obvious ones, the Sylvia Plaths and Betty Friedans—like Jean Harris, the school headmistress who killed the Scarsdale Diet doctor. Like Nancy Reagan and Barbara Bush (who dropped out after a year to marry George Bush and become a full-time undergraduate war bride in New Haven). “Don’t you think it’s remarkable,” the reporter asked, referring to the First and Second Ladies, “that the two top women in the country went to the same college?”

  “Look,” Steinem replied, “do you think a reporter is interviewing Mr. Thatcher’s schoolmates to find out how they were trained to marry a chief of state? Is Mr. Thatcher one of the top men in England?”

  Some years later, during George Bush’s presidency, when Barbara was the “top” woman in the country, she was scheduled to deliver the commencement address at Wellesley College. While Mrs. Bush did ultimately give the graduation speech as planned, there was much protest beforehand from students who could not see why an institution devoted to the advancement of women’s education and opportunity should bestow the honor of this platform upon a woman whose primary accomplishment was getting married.

  Which is fair enough. (Mrs. Bush, ever the good sport—the woman who gets twenty-five pairs of Keds from her husband as a birthday present, and insists that George would never commit adultery because it would cut into his golf game—gamely remarked to the Wellesley grads: “Who knows? Somewhere out there in this audience may even be someone who will one day follow in my footsteps and preside over the White House as the President’s spouse. I wish him well!”)

  Hillary Clinton, of course, is an alumna of Wellesley, where she herself addressed her graduating class as president of the student government in 1969. She was the first undergraduate ever to speak at Wellesley’s commencement exercises, and her remarks fairly exude the typically overexuberant twenty-two-year-old’s mix of idealism and idiocy. Sixties cant seems sweetly sincere: “We’re not interested in social reconstruction; it’s human reconstruction.” And psychobabble is as psychobabble does: “We can talk about reality, and I would like to talk about reality sometime, authentic reality, inauthentic reality … the potentiality for imaginatively responding to men’s needs.” But Hillary Rodham was at her Creative Writing 101/Rhetoric 11 best when veering into foxy, frisky, juicy thoughts about “searching for more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating modes of living.”

  It is no wonder that after this podium delirium, Ms. Rodham was photographed for Life magazine as part of a roundup on the rising youth culture leadership. Even looking so serious and dowdy in big, decidedly non-Steinemesque, nonstylish aviator glasses, bottomed off with sensible shoes and horrible stretchy striped trousers—you know the kind, the ones that don’t even flatter people who look good in everything, and are inevitably worn only by those who look good in nothing—even in all this frump adornment, the picture suggests the possibility of wildfire.

  In fact, in a less
frequently published photograph from the same era, Hillary makes her best play for this year’s model, captured by the lens in a clingy ensemble of an itty-bitty miniskirt and knit T-shirt with a necklace of bangle links suggesting some style sense, after all; but most of all, Hillary, looking lost in reverie, reveals a huge beatific smile and mischievous mien—the picture is clearly posed but the expression is all candor, all fun. Stuck up as she seems these days, she looks like she might have once had awesome sexy potential—or, shall I say, potentiality? She looks like she might have actually inhaled. (Could there be any other explanation for that speech?)