by Robin Morgan
CONVERSATION
Voice too loud generally, shouts when excited. Overbearing, nervous, talks in clichés and often about subjects which expose terrific ignorance. Calls people darling, sweetie, etc. Feels one must be smiling or laughing a great deal. Plays very sexy. Feels inferior and uneasy when someone else is in control, but blind to own faults, statements, etc., when in control myself. No wit. Little spontaneous humor, except when in a bitchy mood; otherwise, borrows that of others. Jealous of chic or brilliant women, or those quietly self-possessed. Likes women who are bright, but young or naïve or in some way flawed enough for feeling superior to, or for mothering. Pretty much the same toward men. An extrovert in classically insecure manner.
6
“Jim A.” was a man with whom I tried—and failed—to have an affair, thinking, as so many women have, that such an affair would solve the difficulties in my marriage one way or the other. In my case, it was also a rebellion against any implicit (though denied) double standard in my marriage, and an attempt to “get with” the swinging morality of the sixties. God forbid I should be square, un-hip, puritanical, prudish. The “sexual revolution” which we now know never really occurred for women certainly wasn’t going to leave me behind.
“Father James” was a Catholic priest who, oddly enough, was a close friend of my rather apostate Jewish family when I was a child. He served as a powerful surrogate for the father I had not known. Years later I realized that he had his own erotic reasons for loving to be around children—especially little girls. “Your onion skin” refers to a poem of K.’s from his first book;1 the refrain is “peeling, peeling the onion skin/down to the nothingness within.” The reference to “that memorable day in Pippin’s” recalls a landmark conversation over Sunday brunch in a small neighborhood restaurant, during which I told K. that I had actually faked orgasm with him many times. I was convinced I was the only woman in the world sick enough to have done this.
27 November 1966 3:00 a.m. next morning
DEAR K.:
Well, one thing is for certain from now on—I’m never going to reread the previous letters before starting a new one. It’s too depressing, and also makes me feel I have to “fill in” what happened since. I guess I got one good poem out of that last letter’s crisis, though, “Satellite,”2 and we survived. Survived not only the deadlines, and severe money pressures, but also the Jim A. crisis. The week of almost solid talk we suffered through saved us from, I somehow know, really dangerous shoals. Yet even now, understanding each other’s positions so much better, and having tried to be honest as much as one ever can be (which is bloody little), I still sense a treacherous undercurrent. About Jim perhaps, because I’m still, despite everything, strongly attracted to him, despite my own self-disgust and fear and plain irritation at the whole mess. Maybe it would have been easier if he and I had just had a toss in the hay before all this got started—layer over layer of emotion and meaningful glances. Christ. Then the whole thing might not occupy so much of my precious thought time, which really annoys the hell out of me. Except that that’s a lie, too—I enjoy it.
Ah, K., I’m scared, I’m scared. So much that I thought I’d won out over in myself is blossoming forth again like some parasitical evergreen. I don’t mean that I thought I’d conquered forever; not quite that naïve or self-deluding. But that I’d learned to watch for, to combat, to deal with and not submit to in a delicious indulgent loosening of mind and spirit. And not because of Jim himself. Poor guy, he’s really fairly simple, and very confused by you, me, and us together. I mean by the situation: his “love” for me, my entrapment of him, your reaction to both. And suddenly, slowly, steadily, it is easier to tell a half-truth, or to exaggerate again, though I have so far stopped this side of an outright lie. And suddenly, slowly, steadily, the sado-masochistic fantasies return. And the nightmares. And the plotting: how I will sit, what I will wear, what expressions my face will speak while my words speak other, innocent meanings. And dear god, how can I even use my poems: to lure him, reassure you, and lull myself into thinking I’m really being honest in my work? Even that.
I dreamt a little while ago that Jim who, as you know, once wanted to be a priest, was Father James as a young man, except that he took the path away from where poor Father Jim wound up. And in my dream, I tore open Jim/James’ flesh with my nails and lifted out his heart, still trailing veins and arteries, and gave it to my mother, who neatly clipped off the dangling lines and hung it on a chain around her neck with other charms. She thanked me for it, and said he (both J.’s, I assume) was grateful, too. I tried to believe her, but I didn’t, I didn’t. I can’t remember the rest. Mercifully blocked.
Obvious enough, I suppose. And I had made a conscious connection between the two J.’s earlier. Sort of getting my own back at the nympholeptic Franciscan who was such a surrogate father in my non-Catholic girlhood. But what I hadn’t connected was the role my mother played in the whole Father James thing, and my own actions in the present situation. So she rises, again and again, with her flirtation and her lies and her hoarded guilt and her martyr’s revenge. And I play her out to the full of my ability. Except that even that’s a lie—nobody rising like some hidden personality in me—no hereditary or even environmental traits working in me that I’m powerless to control. Lie upon lie. Like your onion skin.
K., I’ve been more honest with you than with any other person in my life, including, at times, myself. Yet I’ve lied to you, as you know (that memorable day in Pippin’s), and I’m prevaricating now, in some way. I don’t even know how. I do know this: that though I’ve finally begun to believe you’re a human being, not a god, that you’re a hypocrite and you’re intolerant, lazy, weak, and vulnerable as the rest of us, you somehow do try and do trust and do commit yourself on some level I’ve yet to reach, and I never will without you.
We’ve both said that if we were to break up tomorrow we’d each walk away having gained something. The only thing I’d have gained would have been a glimpse of what I’d lost. I used to think that what I’d learned living with you had cleansed me of many, if not all, of the old crawly cunning patterns that clothed me like tattoos. These last weeks, and my behavior over Jim, have taught me differently. Even knowing this, I am not able to say firmly to myself how I will proceed now. Perhaps even deeper back into the old ways. Perhaps into fresh, more cunning, slimier ones. Perhaps to some kind of freedom from all of them.
But whatever happens, and despite our having settled all such questions in our long talks—having vowed to stick to each other no matter what, now, now, in the middle of the night with you asleep and my nightmare still flashing on and off in my brain; now, when I sit here wanting to wake you up to hold me and at the same instant am thinking about when I’ll next see Jim—some corner of my mind plotting, never dormant, planning, exulting; now, when everything clean and healthful seems impossible for me to even approximate; now, in the mocking quiet of our study where I’m crying without noise as I type, afraid that any sobs will echo back to me as the staged hypocrisies even they somehow are; now, I have one prayer to pray to no one: that you will not leave me, that I will not lose you. Because my only hope for even an attempt at truth lies with you, living with you. Because your love and trust blesses my twisted life like the hands of a healer on a sick body. Because I have been able to love you as I want to love. And because I feel, too, that it is a hopeless prayer, one that is doomed somehow not to come true.
Or is that hypocrisy, too? The easy way out? Because the prayer is answerable and is, in fact, even addressed to someone. No god, anthropomorphic or mystical, and not to you, either. But to the only person who can possibly grant it. Myself.
I guess I’m finally very tired, and I won’t reread this letter on the suspicion that despite all its pretense at searing honesty it’s just another onion-skin layer. Maybe I can get to sleep now. There’re errands tomorrow. Sometimes I think that “telegrams and anger” and bank deposits and grocery shopping are what really keep us alive, despite all ou
r bitching at them. At any rate, I can understand those people who choose to live wholly within that world in complacent comfort, without attempting the difficulties we choose to face—even to lie about—in our lives. Forgive me, my darling, for this letter—and what I never did say in it.
R.
1 The Blizzard Ape: Poems by Kenneth Pitchford in the Poets of Today Series (Scribner’s, New York, 1958), p. 83.
2Monster (Random House and Vintage Books, New York, 1972), p. 7.
7
The schizophrenic quality of internal emptiness expressed in this letter seems endemic to a woman in a not-yet-struggle relationship with a man. The strong sense of identification with the work and life of Sylvia Plath interests me, particularly since I was so resistant to admitting it. Interesting, too, the tenacity of love in the marriage, and my refusal to give up on what seemed to be an all-but-hopeless situation. Within a few months I was to attend my first consciousness-raising meeting which, in time, would explain the identification with Plath, the tenacity of love, and the refusal to give up—among other things.
2 December 1966 8:10 p.m.
DEAR K.:
This will be the final letter in this “series”—by which I mean the group of letters I wrote you thinking they would not be read for some years, if at all. This very letter, in fact, is not a proper companion to the previous ones, as I already know that you will read it, soon, tonight perhaps, because on finishing it I will place the entire folder on your desk, for you to read when you wish. So a new element enters into the writing of it, inescapably.
Since I first told you about these letters and you wanted immediately to see them, feeling saddened and hurt by their secrecy and wanting a chance to reply—not years later, but closer to the time of their having been written—I’ve feared that my knowing they’d be read, truly knowing it as a certainty, would inhibit the writing of them. I’ve really used them so far as a diary, or journal, or what-have-you, except that they have always, in a very real way, been meant for you. From here on in, I don’t know what form they’ll take: will I be able to write them at all? will I write them hypocritically? use them as ploys? be able to be honest in them? perhaps be able to be more honest than before in them? I really can’t say. I do know that this, the first of the new batch, is very difficult for me, and feels like gobbledegook even as it’s coming out on the page.
Rereading the other letters in this folder touches me, not only letter by letter, but as a progression—toward nowhere, I could feel, if I let myself. Each letter brings back its intense mood so vividly, but enhances my present kind of schizophrenic state of mind by doing that very thing. It would appear from the progression that it sure as hell has been a struggle to love you, one that has rewarded me well more often than not—and more, a struggle to love myself, with lesser, or false, self-deluding rewards.
Interesting, that The Leech Dream is in here, and that the reason I’ll be showing you these letters tonight is partly brought about by our still not having learned that dream’s lesson. Interesting that the letter just before this one is like the wail of a child for help; a pathological liar-child, in fact, with fantasies and mother-problems and all the old boring shit. Interesting that I’m writing almost a poem a day and fantasizing about suicide, only to be infuriated by the cliché of self-pity of that Plath-y role, unable to enjoy even the fantasies or take them seriously, mocking my own depression, my own secret filthy boring self. Mocking even that last bit of melodrama in the previous sentence.
I’m sure it all is really very funny. In fact, I think I’ll dig up and place at the beginning of this folder the letter I wrote myself before we were married. Might as well include the whole grandstand gesture, and round it out. I won’t reread that one, though, because I know from the last time I did that I almost hate it, and its writer, for such smugness, such naïve I-can-lick-the-worldness, such humility, such simple-minded unawareness of what I felt even then: resentments, hurts, hostilities, all “unimportant” and unexpressed, buried under that rosy glow of positive thinking. God knows I admire the courage, though, and am touched by the rather trusting innocence, icky as that sounds and ironic as it is, because I thought, at that time, that of course I wasn’t innocent but on the contrary very aware: of you, me, the way the relationship worked. More complex than that, dears. I’ll include it anyway.
So what else do I say before I turn these over for your perusal? Worse—or better—for your replies. Will those replies make it easier, or harder, for me to write more letters? I wonder. We’ll soon find out, I guess, and I’ll be interested to see—although at this moment my curiosity, spontaneity, and general “negative capability” seem at a record low ebb.
But since I don’t know, I must make this letter an end, to this series at least, hoping it will be followed by others more, not less, sincere. Notice I say sincere and not honest, as I don’t know that I possess one fiber of the latter quality, but I will allow myself at least the former. A farewell letter of sorts, then, from that secret letter-writer to her unknowing, unreading reader. There were more things I wanted to say in these letters than I ever got around to saying. I don’t know if the new writer will be able to write such things to her new reader.
Where from here? Tonight, coming home on the bus together, we saw a beautiful mother and baby, wonderful, free with each other, obviously healthy and rare and commonplace, utterly lovely. I want to have your child. Unsure again, afraid again, now it seems a fantastic dream. Still, still, I want that, want us together, raising it and writing and talking for twelve-hour stretches and making love.
This moment, when I am numb and tired and want only to sleep and know you are lying in bed a few feet from my desk, one thin wall between us, waiting for me to finish this—have you an idea that I’m writing the final letter of this group?—waiting for me to lie down beside you, hating, desiring, fearing, and loving me at this moment when I’ve no heart for it, for anything but to finish this, bring it to a close, place it on your desk and sleep, this moment when to feel even hopelessness is impossible, let alone hope—this is like being at the center of some simple emptiness that has lain in wait for me longer than you have lain in wait in that bed. There’s nothing grandiose about it, or dark-night-of-the-soul; on the contrary, it’s a rather light-headed and silly, obvious feeling. A quarter of a century it took me to reach this! I should’ve stopped when I was four and first had inklings!
Ah, well, my dear, nothing matters, after all, so how dare we care or pretend that it is otherwise? Except that, before this letter dwindles off and ends, and before I learn that that is only a new beginning, perhaps I should tell you one thing that I meant once to write a whole letter about: the most beautiful moment of my life, when I lay naked on the earth under your naked body, and saw only redwood-filtered sunlight, heard only the buzz of insects and your breathing, watched only cypresses bend to a breeze that swept over, not on, us, and felt only you. Something beneficent in the universe, after all—you and I, that moment? Perhaps only that, nothing else, only that worth holding on to somehow, somehow.
The letter, the series, is ended now. Goodbye, my darling. I’ll try to write again.
I love you very much.
R.
8
The following is not a letter but a short entry from my journal, which I kept at that time unevenly but which I knew enough to thrust into my shoulderbag the bitter cold December night when I left K.
Talks, tears, argument, thick silences—the pain had been constant between us for weeks, broken only long enough to give us each a faint, desperate, renewed energy sufficient to prolong the agony still further. The sour residue we both felt over my abortive affair; his anguish over a publisher’s cowardly and devious rejection of his already-contracted-for novel (an early version of what was to become The Beholding); blame of the self, blame of the other; my despair at his ever hearing what I could not manage to say—these were some of the reasons. But the underlying theme, of course, was our love for each other, spo
ken in two enforcedly different languages, a woman’s and a man’s. There was yet no technique of translation available to us.
Still, we hung on somehow. Our proposed four-month separation turned out to be one night long. When I came back home later the following day, to formally collect a few clothes and books (I had stormed out of the house with nothing but my purse), I was grateful for the excuse of seeing him again. He, meanwhile, had done a huge grocery shopping, and filled the house with homey temptations—food, wine, candles, flowers. None of which, even so, would have tempted me. His face, his loud tears and quiet voice, the words he said, however, met my own longing at least halfway—and I stayed.
That night, both of us utterly spent with emotion, we went to a small New Year’s Eve gathering at a friend’s house. I remember that the genial level of moronic conversation there served to unite us, reminding each of us of the value of the other. But what I remember most is our standing together on the front stoop of that New York brownstone before we rang the bell to our friend’s apartment. The bells of the city were announcing midnight, the breaking of the new year, and the wind cut so punishingly that neither of us could have said whether we were crying because of the cold or because of the moment. Both, naturally. The clouds of our warm breath formed a misty screen between our faces, as if we were swimming toward each other through fog. We stood there a long time, like figures on a stele, looking into each other’s eyes. I remember thinking with a sense of outrage what a pathetic waste it would be if we were to lose one another, what a failure of nerve. I think we kissed, then; I think we told each other that we loved; I think we said “Happy New Year” to each other. Then we went on in to the other people.
There were days of talking after, of sorting things out, still without the aid of translation (which would not be available for three more years), but with renewed will. There would be more bitterness as well, more pain, more sign language. Yet I never again left K., nor he me.
