Rita Will_Memoir of a Literary Rabble-Rouser

by Rita Mae Brown

  Surprised at our national presence, we worked even harder. What we learned in our time together must be different for each woman.

  I learned that I can work with anyone, even people I can’t stand. But I also learned that if you don’t have to, why do it? Life is ever so much more pleasant if you like the people around you, and the bald truth is that even though I shared space with these women, I barely paid attention to them. I can’t say that I did like them. They were serious, as in achingly intent. How I sat through those meetings without cracking jokes, I don’t know. Life is too important to take seriously.

  I was pretending to be something I wasn’t, a 100-percent true-blue martyr for the cause. Maybe I could muster 50 percent, but not 100. I loved literature too much, as well as Bach and Mozart, Cézanne and Cellini. In short, I am an aesthete, and if nothing else, my experience in the Furies smacked me square in the face with what must have been obvious to everyone but me. I crave the arts the way I crave good horses.

  To make matters worse, I carry a whiff of charisma. I don’t know how I got it. Is it like the flu? Can you catch it by standing outside in the rain? All I know is if I stand up and speak, people pay attention. They may not agree with me. Hell, they hardly ever agree with me because I’m usually two or three steps ahead, which makes me far less effective than if I were right in step. It’s a quality that has cost me dear in Hollywood, too. It does little good if you can see the future yet not be able to make others see it. I’m not being smug. I can usually see ahead. Of course, the next question is, can I see what’s under my nose? Sometimes, yes. Sometimes, no.

  I called the ERA right. I called the splits in the women’s movement not just right but on the minute. I was pretty clear about what would happen to the black movement and the antiwar movement, not just because I was so almighty smart but because I studied history. I’ve never stopped studying history. Most people, not just the Furies Collective, thought this uproar was happening for the first time. It wasn’t, but it was happening in different ways. No event is a duplicate of another event.

  Naturally I was full of myself. I have never lacked self-esteem. In fact, if you need some, I’ll give you some of mine.

  Jesus, I was so sure of myself I must have driven them crazy. Except for Charlotte, most of the women didn’t have a clear or positive sense of themselves then. Their resentment festered.

  Worse, I announced that the two children in the collective ought not to be there. I had good reasons for this. I never trusted we would be physically safe, though I never directly expressed this. Not that we were violent. We didn’t espouse violence, but the violence against black leaders and New Left leaders had escalated. I feared it would affect us sooner or later. You simply do not expose children to risks like that.

  Anyone who has a rosy view of motherhood is exceptionally blind. While children give you incredible gifts of love, of seeing the world anew, they ought to be your number one priority. If you can’t give them that primacy, don’t have them. It’s cruel.

  We shared responsibility for the children, but I think now, and I said then, it’s wrong. Children can’t be raised by everyone. We weren’t an extended family, we were a political collective. Maybe those societies that Margaret Mead studied share child rearing, but we weren’t living in Samoa.

  The women with children should have left. As the demands of our many projects sapped them, they should have seen that. Eventually they did, but not until after a fair amount of shitfire and abuse.

  The first people purged from this barrel of laughs were Sharon Deevey and Joan Biren. They were already a couple when they joined the group. They spent more time with each other than with us. Small wonder. They must have been as bored and antsy as I was.

  Out they went.

  I was next. I was a leader in a leaderless group. I’d gotten ideas above my station. Out with me.

  I don’t know when I’ve been so relieved. They threw me out, which meant I didn’t have to make the decision to leave. I don’t know why I would have felt so guilty about leaving them. Hell, by this time I couldn’t stand them.

  Charlotte stayed on until the group fizzled.

  For all our silliness, we accomplished some important things. We stayed true to our vision of nonviolent protest. Gandhi created this. He gets all the credit. But it’s hard for Americans. In a perverse way we worship violence. From the days of our first landing, from the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, we absolutely worship violence. It isn’t a dark tangent of American life, it’s central to our concept of who we are. This nation was born in blood. We can’t get away from it. First we killed the Indians. Then we killed the French in the French and Indian War. We whacked the British twice (they started it). Then we managed to endear ourselves to the Mexicans. Not long after that we slaughtered one another in the worst war of our history. Recovered, sort of, from that grotesque episode, we displayed adventurism in the Spanish-American War. And in rapid succession we’ve engaged in World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam and the Gulf War. The Gulf War was covered by the media like a football game.

  We cheered smart bombs.

  Far better had we cheered smart people.

  If nothing else, the Furies stayed true to a nonviolent concept of cleansing and confrontation.

  And the collective also alerted other gay women to the shattering knowledge that they weren’t alone. Today it’s almost impossible to feel the resonance of that connection.

  With the delightful exception of Charlotte, who never stops thinking, the only other Fury I have seen since then is Sharon Deevey, a nurse who lives in Cleveland and whom I still count as a friend.

  There are few people who will stay by you for your entire life. To expect that I would make lifelong friends from a superficial connection is a mistake. Politics is not compelling enough to bind you to people for life. The Furies taught me that, and it has continued to help my perspective about people in politics. I know, nine times out of ten, that when the political project is finished, so is the relationship.

  I moved back into 217 Twelfth Street, SE. Baby Jesus preened with my undivided attention.

  I decided to write a novel. Everyone said how hard it was to write one, journalists especially. I figured, what the hell. If I fell on my face, I’d pick myself up and do something else. What was the big deal?

  With Baby Jesus lurking behind my typewriter, batting the paper, I fired off Rubyfruit Jungle. It made me laugh. I needed one.

  Maybe one of the reasons I needed to laugh was that I had come to the dolorous conclusion that American women are not serious about power.

  Harsh as this judgment sounds, let me explain. Politics is war without killing. You want your program to succeed. It’s a battle and often that battle is filled with bravery, cowardice, greed and heapings of dishonesty. It’s a bare-knuckle fight for power. You want the power to enact your program. If you’re a lightweight, you want the power for self-aggrandizement or money. The real warriors fight for their program just as military warriors fight for territory.

  While a few women in history were able to battle, such as Elizabeth I of England or Catherine the Great of Russia, the political experience of women has been no experience. They haven’t learned how to fight. The process is repellant to most women. Of course, it’s so cheap now I think it’s repellant to most men.

  Women are not accustomed to an arena in which people would willingly destroy another person’s reputation just for two years in Congress. The vengeful nature needed to succeed, the constant dissembling, eludes most women. And you absolutely must hurt the people who hurt you, or you look weak. If you look weak, you accomplish nothing.

  My experience is, once an opponent or outright enemy gets hurt they treat you with respect. All animals understand pain.

  It really doesn’t take brains to be a politician as much as it takes stomach. Both would be nice, but in America we have accepted diminishing returns in this arena. I’m not sure why. Many reasons, I guess.

  For women to be
serious about political power they must demolish their political enemies as the liberals demolished Judge Robert Bork during his confirmation hearings to fill a vacant Supreme Court seat. That was a lesson in naked revenge exacted by the Democrats on the Republicans.

  I’m not commenting here on Judge Bork’s viewpoints. I’m commenting on the campaign against him.

  The theater of the Bork hearings seemed to be about a Supreme Court nominee. That was the text. The subtext was about power. The Democrats served notice on the Republicans: If Republicans wanted to get any person confirmed or any program accomplished, they were going to have to find a middle ground on which to meet the Democrats. The way things were going, neither party was likely to get anything out of the famous pork barrel.

  The Democrats’ success, limited, was success nonetheless.

  That’s politics. I could cite Republican retaliations but you expect me to do that. Each side has to inflict enough damage on the other side to create pain. Once enough pain has been absorbed, the “reasonable” minds in the party will call for bipartisan cooperation.

  Of course, this is a grotesque waste of time, energy and money. As a people, at this moment in our history, we seem willing to watch this sorry spectacle and to feel superior to it. I expect we will change the process when we are ready.

  The point is, until we can change the process we must participate in it if we are to accomplish anything politically. If you want paid paternity leave, then you have to fight.

  Bad as this process is, wounded as you will become, it is still better than not fighting at all. Not fighting doesn’t make you morally superior. It makes you a victim. You get chewed up like dog meat.

  Until women realize that some pain is better than more pain, we aren’t going to get but so far politically. I should amend that to many women. Clearly individual women understand the process and will fight for power. Elizabeth Dole certainly understands the process. Madeleine Albright understands the process.

  Until millions fight back, I can only conclude that American women, as a group, are not serious about political power.

  53

  Assholes Anonymous

  Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly. I was flying with Rubyfruit. I love writing fiction. Comic vision is natural for me—not necessarily comedy, but comic vision, which entails an entire worldview incorporating pain and tragedy.

  Thanks to Charlotte, the Institute for Policy Studies granted me a one-year visiting fellowship at $7,000 a year. I figured once they knew me I wouldn’t be visiting long. The institute, founded by Marcus Raskin and Richard Barnet, is in essence graduate school for the New Left. Marc and Dick had both worked in government for a time. But they were interested in moving beyond the anticommunism touted by the liberals in office. So they founded IPS as a haven for New Left and radical thinkers like themselves. Since I am an old-fashioned American centrist I knew I wouldn’t dazzle the guys at IPS. I just hoped I could hang on long enough to write my novel and learn something from them. One need not agree with people in order to learn. I don’t agree with Otto von Bismarck but I’ve learned from his life and work.

  IPS, nestled hard by the National Democratic Women’s Headquarters on New Hampshire Avenue, burst at the seams with people and activity. Karl Hess, a former speechwriter for Barry Goldwater, and far more of a structured anarchist (sounds like a contradiction but read Karl, you’ll see it isn’t) than a leftist, became a friend for life. He understood technology and people, a rare combination.

  Arthur Waskow can only be described as a radical Talmudic scholar, although he wasn’t a rabbi. He brought a deep spirituality to political questions; he brought the best of Judaism. He taught me to wrestle with God.

  James Ridgway, as young as I was among these older men, was working on coal mining problems at the time. What I adored about his lectures was that they were based on specific events.

  Marcus, on the other hand, floated above us all with his philosophical approach. Given his time in the Kennedy administration, we knew he could deal in spades when he had to but his true inclination was philosophy.

  Dick Barnet was just beginning his study of how the multinational corporation would change the world, which resulted in the publication of Global Reach. Dick’s writings are accessible, well organized and hit the bull’s-eye.

  The black radical contingent at the institute included Frank Smith and Ivanhoe Donaldson. Ivanhoe was later to go down in ignominy. In 1986, he pleaded guilty to stealing from the District of Columbia government and served three years in prison.

  Frank and Ivanhoe’s relationship with the white fellows, lined with tension and suspicion, taught me not to bite the hand that fed me. These men, each so different from the other, felt forced into an alliance against the white folks. Or at least that’s my analysis, I could be wrong. Frank was a genuine idealist underneath the steely, quiet cynicism. Why he thought we didn’t know that mystifies me. You can hide the fire but what are you going to do with the smoke?

  Ivanhoe dazzled everyone. His fall from grace reverberated in our minds when it happened years later. He was so special, so magnetic. Maybe everything fell into his lap and he forgot the struggle. I don’t know. Or maybe, as we say in the horse world, he broke bad.

  Charlotte, the resident feminist, both challenged and charmed the men. The challenge was that these guys, the wunderkinds from Harvard, etc., were hearing feminist thought for the first time. The charm was Charlotte herself. You had to like her. She was engaging and nonthreatening.

  I’d pop in most every day for a few hours, sit in on a lecture or conference. Often a congressman would call for information on an odd subject such as the cost of setting up an oil refinery in Saudi Arabia. The various fellows over the years covered the world, literally, in their knowledge. Being at the center of the exchange was exciting.

  I had a crush on Bob Borsage. I made my feelings manifest by ignoring him at every moment. His view of the people and events at IPS delighted me because he had critical distance. He must have learned it from his father, Frank, the famous film director who even directed Mary Pickford.

  The swirl around me helped me write my first novel. Not one thing in that first novel suggests heightened intellectualism or political thought. IPS gave me the high contrast I needed to find my true fictional voice.

  Up until that time, I’d had two books of poetry published as well as grim political essays and articles in underground newspapers, but it wasn’t my voice. The writing showed promise, but how many young people with promise break out? Precious few.

  The glorious thing about the institute was I didn’t belong there anymore than I belonged in the Furies Collective. The dislocation and loss, the constant feeling that my pants were on backward, drove me to what did fit, fiction.

  I owe a great debt to Alexis Smith, an actress from the forties and fifties. She appeared in movies like Night and Day, solid movies with handsome leading men. When Hal Prince staged Stephen Sondheim’s Follies, a cinematic musical that had an impact on how plays were staged ever after that, he brought back Alexis for the starring role. It was a good cast, Dorothy Collins, Yvonne DeCarlo, John McMartin and Gene Nelson.

  I saw the show in 1971, on a trip to New York, and fell in love with Alexis, as did everyone who saw it. I wrote her a letter and she responded. I visited her at the Winter Garden theater, and she took me to dinner after the show. She was wise, warm and direct. She told me to forget politics. Many more people can be politicians than can be fiction writers.

  Wearisome as my crush must have been for her and her husband, Craig Smith, she nudged me along. She never said anything antigay. She never commented on my obvious poverty. She delighted in my tales of Mom and Aunt Mimi and she seemed to understand how much I loved animals.

  I have never felt such lust in my life as I felt for that gorgeous creature. She bore it with good humor.

  In a way I wrote Rubyfruit Jungle for her. I hoped I would prove her confidence in me not unfounded. And I final
ly had sense enough to realize I couldn’t keep up with her. She was at the top of her game and I was just starting mine.

  She would never love me but she saw a flash of talent. That was better than carnal love.

  Writing fiction brought me to my great love: the English language.

  The English language has created a vast body of literature in our native tongue. That may sound odd but if you think about it, Medieval French is a kind of lax Latin. English literature as we know it starts with The Canterbury Tales. Most scholars will tell you no, it started with Beowulf. I dispute that. Beowulf, redolent with Teutonic attitude, written in Anglo-Saxon, is important, but The Canterbury Tales is English to the core. Between the time when Beowulf was composed, sometime around 1000, and the late fourteenth century, when Chaucer roistered forth with his energy, insight into character and use of sophisticated structure (it’s a pilgrimage, remember), something revolutionary had happened in England. The people became English and the language soared to the heavens, the dialect of London gaining ascendance over the other dialects.

  That’s what I found. My home was the English language and my particular path was the same as Chaucer’s: comic vision. Comedy, in the grand sense, is the richest vein of English. The language breathes, expands, turns golden with comedy, for an English sentence is capable of conveying irony, pathos, wit and humor simultaneously. Think of some of Shakespeare’s comedies. Hell, think of the tragedies too. When Hamlet is about to stab Polonius to death behind the curtain, he says, “How now? A rat? Dead for a ducat, dead!”

  This prince, so often portrayed as a sensitive, suffering young man in an existential crisis (please, Louise), is really a brute.

  What about Noel Coward’s Private Lives? It’s easy to hop from Shakespeare to Coward because Coward wrote the second most famous balcony scene in the English language. I’m assuming most of you have read or seen the play Private Lives. If you haven’t, you’re in for an exhilarating experience.