The house seems to take up so much time. . . . I mean when I have to clean up twice over or wash up extra unnecessary things, I get frightfully impatient and want to be working [writing]. So often this week you and Gordon have been talking while I washed dishes. Well someone’s got to wash dishes and get food. Otherwise “there’s nothing in the house but eggs to eat.” And after you have gone I walk about with a mind full of ghosts of saucepans and primus stoves and “will there be enough to go around?” And you calling, whatever I am doing, writing, “Tig, isn’t there going to be tea? It’s five o’clock.”
I loathe myself today. This woman who superintends you and rushes about slamming doors and slopping water and shouts “You might at least empty the pail and wash out the tea leaves.” . . . O Jack, I wish that you would take me in your arms and kiss my hands and my face and every bit of me and say, “It’s all right, you darling thing, I understand.”
A long way from Conrad’s favorable circumstances for creation: the flow of daily life made easy and noiseless.
And, if in addition to the infinite capacity, to the daily responsibilities, there are children?
Balzac, you remember, described creation in terms of motherhood. Yes, in intelligent passionate motherhood there are similarities, and in more than the toil and patience. The calling upon total capacities; the reliving and new using of the past; the comprehensions; the fascination, absorption, intensity. All almost certain death to creation—(so far).
Not because the capacities to create no longer exist, or the need (though for a while, as in any fullness of life, the need may be obscured), but because the circumstances for sustained creation have been almost impossible. The need cannot be first. It can have at best, only part self, part time. (Unless someone else does the nurturing. Read Dorothy Fisher’s “Babushka Farnham” in Fables for Parents.) More than in any other human relationship, over-whelmingly more, motherhood means being instantly interruptable, responsive, responsible. Children need one now (and remember, in our society, the family must often try to be the center for love and health the outside world is not). The very fact that these are real needs, that one feels them as one’s own (love, not duty); that there is no one else responsible for these needs, gives them primacy. It is distraction, not meditation, that becomes habitual; interruption, not continuity; spasmodic, not constant toil. The rest has been said here. Work interrupted, deferred, relinquished, makes blockage—at best, lesser accomplishment. Unused capacities atrophy, cease to be.
When H. H. Richardson, who wrote the Australian classic Ultima Thule, was asked why she—whose children, like all her people, were so profoundly written—did not herself have children, she answered: “There are enough women to do the childbearing and childrearing. I know of none who can write my books.” I remember thinking rebelliously, yes, and I know of none who can bear and rear my children either. But literary history is on her side. Almost no mothers—as almost no part-time, part-self persons—have created enduring literature . . . so far.
If I talk now quickly of my own silences—almost presumptuous after what has been told here—it is that the individual experience may add.
In the twenty years I bore and reared my children, usually had to work on a paid job as well, the simplest circumstances for creation did not exist. Nevertheless writing, the hope of it, was “the air I breathed, so long as I shall breathe at all.” In that hope, there was conscious storing, snatched reading, beginnings of writing, and always “the secret rootlets of reconnaissance.”
When the youngest of our four was in school, the beginnings struggled toward endings. This was a time, in Kafka’s words, “like a squirrel in a cage: bliss of movement, desperation about constriction, craziness of endurance.”
Bliss of movement. A full extended family life; the world of my job (transcriber in a dairy-equipment company); and the writing, which I was somehow able to carry around within me through work, through home. Time on the bus, even when I had to stand, was enough; the stolen moments at work, enough; the deep night hours for as long as I could stay awake, after the kids were in bed, after the household tasks were done, sometimes during. It is no accident that the first work I considered publishable began: “I stand here ironing, and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron.”
In such snatches of time I wrote what I did in those years, but there came a time when this triple life was no longer possible. The fifteen hours of daily realities became too much distraction for the writing. I lost craziness of endurance. What might have been, I don’t know; but I applied for, and was given, eight months’ writing time. There was still full family life, all the household responsibilities, but I did not have to hold an eight-hour job. I had continuity, three full days, sometimes more—and it was in those months I made the mysterious turn and became a writing writer.
Then had to return to the world of work, someone else’s work, nine hours, five days a week.
This was the time of festering and congestion. For a few months I was able to shield the writing with which I was so full, against the demands of jobs on which I had to be competent, through the joys and responsibilities and trials of family. For a few months. Always roused by the writing, always denied. “I could not go to write it down. It convulsed and died in me. I will pay.”
My work died. What demanded to be written, did not. It seethed, bubbled, clamored, peopled me. At last moved into the hours meant for sleeping. I worked now full time on temporary jobs, a Kelly, a Western Agency girl (girl!), wandering from office to office, always hoping to manage two, three writing months ahead. Eventually there was time.
I had said: always roused by the writing, always denied. Now, like a woman made frigid, I had to learn response, to trust this possibility for fruition that had not been before. Any interruption dazed and silenced me. It took a long while of surrendering to what I was trying to write, of invoking Henry James’s “passion, piety, patience,” before I was able to re-establish work.
When again I had to leave the writing, I lost consciousness. A time of anesthesia. There was still an automatic noting that did not stop, but it was as if writing had never been. No fever, no congestion, no festering. I ceased being peopled, slept well and dreamlessly, took a “permanent” job. The few pieces that had been published seemed to have vanished like the not-yet-written. I wrote someone, unsent: “So long they fed each other—my life, the writing—; —the writing or hope of it, my life—; but now they begin to destroy.” I knew, but did not feel the destruction.
A Ford grant in literature, awarded me on nomination by others, came almost too late. Time granted does not necessarily coincide with time that can be most fully used, as the congested time of fullness would have been. Still, it was two years.
Drowning is not so pitiful as the attempt to rise, says Emily Dickinson. I do not agree, but I know whereof she speaks. For a long time I was that emaciated survivor trembling on the beach, unable to rise and walk. Said differently, I could manage only the feeblest, shallowest growth on that devastated soil. Weeds, to be burned like weeds, or used as compost. When the habits of creation were at last rewon, one book went to the publisher, and I dared to begin my present work. It became my center, engraved on it: “Evil is whatever distracts.” (By now had begun a cost to our family life, to my own participation in life as a human being.) I shall not tell the “rest, residue, and remainder” of what I was “leased, demised, and let unto” when once again I had to leave work at the flood to return to the Time-Master, to business-ese and legalese. This most harmful of all my silences has ended, but I am not yet recovered; may still be a one-book silence.
However that will be, we are in a time of more and more hidden and foreground silences, women and men. Denied full writing life, more may try to “nurse through night” (that part-time, part-self night) “the ethereal spark,” but it seems to me there would almost have had to be “flame on flame” first; and time as needed, afterwards; and enough of the self, the capacities, undamaged fo
r the rebeginnings on the frightful task. I would like to believe this for what has not yet been written into literature. But it cannot reconcile for what is lost by unnatural silences.
1962
*A Season in Hell.
*“Entering my eighth decade [I come] into possession of unobstructed leisure . . . just as, in the course of nature, my vigor sensibly declines. What little of it is left, I husband for certain matters as yet incomplete and which indeed may never be completed.” Billy Budd never was completed; it was edited from drafts found after Melville’s death.
*As Jean Toomer (Cane); Henry Roth (Call It Sleep); Edith Summers Kelley (Weeds).
**Robert Bone. The Negro Novel in America, 1958.
*Some other foreground silences: Elizabeth (Mrs.) Gaskell, Kate Chopin, Cora Sandel, Cyrus Colter, Hortense Calisher.
*Half of the working classes are women.
*“One Out of Twelve” has a more extensive roll of women writers of achievement.
**I would now add a fifth—Kate Chopin—also a foreground silence.
*Among them: George Eliot, Helen Hunt Jackson, Mrs. Gaskell, Kate Chopin, Lady Gregory, Isak Dinesen. Ivy Compton-Burnett finds this the grim reason for the emergence of British women novelists after World War I: “. . . The men were dead, you see, and the women didn’t marry so much because there was no one for them to marry, and so they had leisure, and, I think, in a good many cases they had money because their brothers were dead, and all that would tend to writing, wouldn’t it, being single, and having some money, and having the time—having no men, you see.”
**Already in that changed time when servants were not necessarily a part of the furnishings of almost anyone well educated enough to be making literature.
1971
ONE OUT OF TWELVE: WRITERS WHO ARE WOMEN IN OUR CENTURY
An unwritten talk, spoken from notes in 1971 at the Modern Language Association Forum on Women Writers in the Twentieth Century. In this reconstituted, edited form, it appeared in the “Women Writing, Women Teaching” issue of College English, October 1972.
Happily, some of what follows is by now, in varying degrees, familiar. It was only beginning to be so in 1971. The tone, markedly different from that of “Silences,” is distinctly of that year of cumulative discovery.
The content was conditioned somewhat by its being addressed to college teachers of literature. A few quotations from “Silences,” then unavoidable, herein repetitious, are kept intact.
It is the women’s movement, part of the other movements of our time for a fully human life, that has brought this forum into being; kindling a renewed, in most instances a first-time, interest in the writings and writers of our sex.
Linked with the old, resurrected classics on women, this movement in three years has accumulated a vast new mass of testimony, of new comprehensions as to what it is to be female. Inequities, restrictions, penalties, denials, leechings have been painstakingly and painfully documented; damaging differences in circumstances and treatment from that of males attested to; and limitations, harms, a sense of wrong, voiced.
It is in the light and dark of this testimony that I examine my subject today: the lives and work of writers, women, in our century (though I speak primarily of those writing in the English language—and in prose).*
Compared to the countless centuries of the silence of women, compared to the century preceding ours—the first in which women wrote in any noticeable numbers—ours has been a favorable one.
The road was cut many years ago, as Virginia Woolf reminds us:
by Fanny Burney, by Aphra Behn, by Harriet Martineau, by Jane Austen, by George Eliot, many famous women and many more unknown and forgotten. . . . Thus, when I came to write . . . writing was a reputable and harmless occupation.
Predecessors, ancestors, a body of literature, an acceptance of the right to write: each in themselves an advantage.
In this second century we have access to areas of work and of life experience previously denied; higher education; longer, stronger lives; for the first time in human history, freedom from compulsory childbearing; freer bodies and attitudes toward sexuality; a beginning of technological easing of household tasks; and—of the greatest importance to those like myself who come from generations of illiterate women—increasing literacy, and higher degrees of it. Each one of these a vast gain.*
And the results?
Productivity: books of all manner and kind. My own crude sampling, having to be made without benefit of research assistants, secretary, studies (nobody’s made them), or computer (to feed the entire Books in Print and Contemporary Authors into, for instance) indicates that at present four to five books are published by men to every one by a woman.**
Comparative earnings: no authoritative figures available.
Achievement: as gauged by what supposedly designates it: appearance in twentieth-century literature courses, required reading lists, textbooks, quality anthologies, the year’s best, the decade’s best, the fifty years’ best, consideration by critics or in current reviews—one woman writer for every twelve men (8 percent women, 92 percent men). For a week or two, make your own survey whenever you pick up an anthology, course bibliography, quality magazine or quarterly, book review section, book of criticism.
What weights my figures so heavily toward the one-out-of-twelve ratio are twentieth-century literature course offerings, and writers decreed worthy of critical attention in books and articles. Otherwise my percentage figures would have come closer to one out of seven.
But it would not matter if the ratio had been one out of six or five. Any figure but one to one would insist on query: Why? What, not true for men but only for women, makes this enormous difference? (Thus, class—economic circumstance—and color, those other traditional silencers of humanity, can be relevant only in the special ways that they affect the half of their numbers who are women.)
Why are so many more women silenced than men? Why, when women do write (one out of four or five works published) is so little of their writing known, taught, accorded recognition? What is the nature of the critical judgments made throughout that (along with the factors different in women’s lives) steadily reduce the ratio from one out of three in anthologies of student work, to one out of seventeen in course offerings.
This talk, originally intended to center on the writing, the achievement of women writers in our century, became instead these queryings. Yet—in a way sadder, angrier, prouder—it still centers on the writing, the achievement.*
One woman writer of achievement for every twelve men writers so ranked. Is this proof again—and in this so much more favorable century—of women’s innately inferior capacity for creative achievement?
Only a few months ago (June 1971), during a Radcliffe sponsored panel on “Women’s Liberation, Myth or Reality,” Diana Trilling, asking why it is that women
have not made even a fraction of the intellectual, scientific or artistic-cultural contributions which men have made
came again to the traditional conclusion that
it is not enough to blame women’s place in culture or culture itself, because that leaves certain fundamental questions unanswered . . . necessarily raises the question of the biological aspects of the problem.
Biology: that difference.** Evidently unknown to or dismissed by her and the others who share her conclusion, are the centuries of prehistory during which biology did not deny equal contribution; and the other determining difference—not biology—between male and female in the centuries after; the differing past of women—that should be part of every human consciousness, certainly every woman’s consciousness (in the way that the 400 years of bondage, colonialism, the slave passage, are to black humans).
Work first:
Within our bodies we bore the race. Through us it was shaped, fed and clothed. . . . Labour more toilsome and unending than that of man was ours. . . . No work was too hard, no labour too strenuous to exclude us.*
True for most women in most of
the world still.
Unclean; taboo. The Devil’s Gateway. The three steps behind; the girl babies drowned in the river; the baby strapped to the back. Buried alive with the lord, burned alive on the funeral pyre, burned as witch at the stake. Stoned to death for adultery. Beaten, raped. Bartered. Bought and sold. Concubinage, prostitution, white slavery. The hunt, the sexual prey, “I am a lost creature, O the poor Clarissa.” Purdah, the veil of Islam, domestic confinement. Illiterate. Denied vision. Excluded, excluded, excluded from council, ritual, activity, learning, language, when there was neither biological nor economic reason to be excluded.
Religion, when all believed. In sorrow shalt thou bring forth children. May thy wife’s womb never cease from bearing. Neither was the man created for the woman but the woman for the man. Let the woman learn in silence and in all subjection. Contrary to biological birth fact: Adam’s rib. The Jewish male morning prayer: thank God I was not born a woman. Silence in holy places, seated apart, or not permitted entrance at all; castration of boys because women too profane to sing in church.
And for the comparative handful of women born into the privileged class; being, not doing; man does, woman is; to you the world says work, to us it says seem. God is thy law, thou mine. Isolated. Cabin’d, cribb’d, confin’d; the private sphere. Bound feet: corseted, cosseted, bedecked; denied one’s body. Powerlessness. Fear of rape, male strength. Fear of aging. Subject to Fear of expressing capacities. Soft attractive graces; the mirror to magnify man. Marriage as property arrangement. The vices of slaves:* dissembling, flattering, manipulating, appeasing.
Bolstering. Vicarious living, infantilization, trivialization. Parasitism, individualism, madness. Shut up, you’re only a girl. O Elizabeth, why couldn’t you have been born a boy? For twentieth-century woman: roles, discontinuities, part-self, part-time; conflict; imposed “guilt”; “a man can give full energy to his profession, a woman cannot.”
How is it that women have not made a fraction of the intellectual, scientific, or artistic-cultural contributions that men have made?
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