And ye, O living poets who are dead
Though ye are living, for neglect can kill,
Tell me if in the darkest hours of ill
With drops of anguish falling fast and red
From the sharp crown of thorns upon your head
Ye were not glad your errand to fulfil?
Yes, for the gift and ministry of Song
Have something in them so divinely sweet
It can assuage the bitterness of wrong.
—the scarcely-ever-now-quoted Longfellow
Yes.
In art, as in no other form of endeavour,
there is meaning apart from success.
—Conrad
(I believe that to be true for all forms of human endeavor, but let it stand.)
The rapture; the saving comfort; the joyous energies, pride, love, audacity, reverence in wrestling with the angel, Art—
This dear old blessed healing
—James
I walk, making up phrases, sit, contriving scenes; am, in short, in the thick of the greatest rapture known to me.
—V. Woolf
One sentence follows another, is born of the other, and I feel as I see it being born and growing within me, an almost physical rapture.
—Gide
The strange mysterious perhaps dangerous perhaps saving comfort there is in writing; it is a leap out of the murderers’ row; it is a seeing of what is really taking place.
—Kafka
Yes.
The American bards shall be marked for generosity and affection and for encouraging competitors. They shall be Kosmos, without monopoly or secrecy, glad to pass anything to anyone—hungry for equals by night and by day.*
—Whitman
O yes.
The truth under the spume and corrosion. Literature is a place for generosity and affection and hunger for equals—not a prizefight ring. We are increased, confirmed in our medium, roused to do our best, by every good writer, every fine achievement. Would we want one good writer or fine book less? The sense of writers being pitted against each other is bred primarily by the workings of the commercial marketplace, and by critics lauding one writer at the expense of another while ignoring the existence of nearly all. What—in addition to all the preceding—disheartens, weakens, can poison, is the existence, and sometimes success, of the sleazy, the corrupt, the tricky.
Hungry for equals. The sustenance some writers are to each other personally, besides the help of doing their best work.
Hungry for equals. The spirit of those writers who have worked longer years, solved more, are more established; reaching out to the newer, the ones who must carry on the loved medium.
The small presses, magazines, making work accessible.
Established writers trying to get unestablished ones known or published. Or, a different form of concern; serving on committees for other writers.
Poets and Writers (CODA) building a sense of community among writers through their Newsletter, directory, services. Margins.
Even in the publishing world, those who are drawn there because of their love for literature, who still do what they can.
The exceptional publisher, anthologist, critic, bookstore.
The teacher who incites to literature.
Our caring readers—co-partners.
The sustaining existence of writers whose work and lives we can respect—and love.
A little-known writer:
Some of what I know to be my best writing will never be published . . . many of my most cherished projects will never come to fruition; many of my aspirations forever unfulfilled. I am always surprised when a stranger recognizes my name . . . but for more than half a century I had had my work published . . . at 77 I am busier with my writing than ever before and expect to continue until I die. . . . When I was young I was going to be a great poet . . . now I am happy that at long last I did get one volume [of poetry] published . . . I was also going to be a famous short story writer and novelist. How many years of disappointment and rebellion and grief to realise that I was never going to be anything of the kind; [there are only] my dozen books, my moderate recognition in two or three specialized fields.
It is what you aspire to rather than what you attain that brings into being even what you do attain. Never set your sights too low. . . .
There is no disgrace in joining us Almosters. At least a little of what we had to say has been said and a few have heard and even listened.
—Miriam Allen De Ford, 1973
And a famous one:
I spent so much of my life teaching and lecturing and reading . . . that I had not time or energy to write the things that I have really begun. I have 3 unfinished books which were the main objects of my life. I am 85 years old, I am working ferociously trying to make a deadline, being a little late of course, but this time, thank God, my deadline is my own. I rather enjoy driving myself. It brings back the old times when I was like, not an ox, but a horse on a treadmill, being urged at a dead run always. And, without seeming to grow roses on a past that was full of briars and cactus, it was not so bad; I did survive. I have enjoyed my work, it has been my only happiness. . . . It was worth living for and I still have what might seem a wild hope that I shall finish at least this book I am working on. And the other 2 are still alive and beginning to agitate for attention like very healthy children in an uncomfortable cradle.
My dear fellow artists, I suggest that you go ahead and do your work and do it as you please and refuse to allow any force, any influence (that is to say, any editor or publisher) to tamper with your life or to debase your work. You are practicing an art and they are running a business and just keep this in mind.
—Katherine Anne Porter, 1976
“We are the injured body. Let us not desert one another.”
The Literary Situation.
*Title of a fine book by Malcolm Cowley, 1954. What follows confirms his earlier findings. It’s no better.
SILENCES, P. 13
*Russell Lynes, “The Artist as Uneconomic Man,” Saturday Review, February 28, 1970.
*. . . and to whom denial of circumstances is irremediable lessening of literature.
*Re-affirmed newly in the 1974 National Book Awards, when prizewinner in Poetry Adrienne Rich “refused the terms of patriarchal competition,” rejecting the award as an individual, but accepting it in the name of all women (in a statement written with Audre Lord and Alice Walker, two other nominees): “We . . . together accept this award in the name of all the women whose voices have gone and still go unheard in a patriarchal world, and in the name of those who, like us, have been tolerated as token women in this culture, often at great cost and in great pain. . . . We symbolically join here in refusing the terms of patriarchal competition and declaring that we will share this prize among us, to be used as best we can for women. . . . We dedicate this occasion to the struggle for self-determination of all women, of every color, identification or deprived class . . . the women who will understand what we are doing here and those who will not understand yet: the silent women whose voices have been denied us, the articulate women who have given us strength to do our work.”
Blight never does good to a tree . . . but if it still bear fruit, let none say that the fruit was in consequence of the blight.
—William Blake
THE WRITER-WOMAN: ONE OUT OF TWELVE—II
Acerbs, Asides, Amulets, Exhumations, Sources,
Deepenings, Roundings, Expansions
. . . And yet the tree did bear fruit.
BLIGHT: ITS EARLIEST EXPRESSION
(Early 1600s)
I never rested on the Muses bed,
Nor dipt my quill in the Thessalian fountaine,
My rustick Muse was rudely fostered
And flies too low to reach the double mountaine.
Then do not sparkes with your bright Suns compare,
Perfection in a Woman’s work is rare.
From an untroubled mind should verses flow
,
My discontents make mine too muddy show.
And hoarse encumbrances of householde care,
Where these remain, the Muses ne’er repaire.
—Mary Oxlie of Morpet to William Drummond of Hawthornden
ONE OUT OF TWELVE, P. 38
A SENSE OF WRONG VOICED
Background
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.
The three years had also shaped a swelling indictment of literature, in its beginning around Images of Women in Literature. Virginia Woolf had once called it “Women in Fiction—and in Fact.” Sexual Politics is how Kate Millett defined the difference in 1969. Tentatively phrased, exploratory questions in the beginning:
Is women’s character in fiction a function of cultural values? of male subjectivity? and not an accurate portrayal of woman’s real situation and reactions?
Are women portrayed only in terms of relationships to men; men in a variety of situations?
became arraignment:
There is a wide discrepancy in American culture between the life of women as conceived by men and the life of women as lived by women.*
Literature has unwittingly aided the conspiracy of silence, neglect, as to the nature of women’s lives and services.
Throughout much of our literature, fanciful constructs of the female, her character and psychology, have obscured the limitations suffered by actual women. Worse, they have encouraged expectations and behavior that only strengthen the real oppression.*
A search began for different (truer) Images of Women in Literature.** Women writers, previously scarcely included in the literary curriculum, began to be hungrily read and studied in increasing number; “Women in Literature” classes, teaching now mostly writing by women, proliferated,† became (often interdisciplinary) Women’s Studies courses. They had to be argued and fought for.
There are practical and intellectual reasons for establishing some separate courses dealing with women writers. We cannot change literary history or reinterpret a tradition overnight. We cannot create women writers where they do not exist, and few existed before the Nineteenth Century. . . . Women writers should not be studied as a distinct group on the assumption that they write alike, or even display stylistic resemblances distinctively feminine. But women do have a special literary history, susceptible to analysis, which includes such complex considerations as the effects of social and political changes in women’s status upon individuals, and the implications of stereotypes on the woman writer and restrictions on her artistic autonomy.‡
The contribution of women writers has been ignored too long—the addition of a few women to reading lists is not sufficient. An entire course makes more sense, because when studied in succession, their writing and experience reveal patterns which are almost impossible to perceive if they are studied only in relation to male writers.§
“By what standards should literature (itself) be judged?” came into question. “Should viciousness or falseness of portrayal affect the evaluation of literature?” asked one course description. An older touchstone for literature—truth—re-entered the classroom to reside along with critical analysis. Classes themselves became profound experiences, charged with intellectual-emotional discovery. (“For a tear is an intellectual thing.”*)
Feminist literary criticism came into practice.
The woman writer herself became a special field of exploration (one to which an increasing number of women writers contributed, some in fictional form).
Realization of the “staggering exclusions from the male-stream of literature,”** roused and emboldened diverse expression: poetry, fiction, biography, personal accounts, criticism, anthologies.
Five years later (1976), it is unmistakable that out of the sense of wrong has come substantial yields for literature: its enlargement and vivification through reclamation of obscured writers and intensified rereading of classic ones; new insights and perspectives; an enhancement and deepening of literary scholarship, criticism, theory; an opening up and freeing for already existing writers; the coming into being and encouragement of new ones;—and an outpouring of writing in every field and form of literature.
All while “still in the egg life, chafing the shell.”
Women in Fiction and in Fact: 1815–1975
1815: Jane Austen: “I will not allow books to prove anything”
“Yes, we certainly do not forget you as soon as you forget us. It is perhaps our fate rather than our merit. We cannot help ourselves. We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us. You are forced on exertion. You have always business of some sort or other to take you back to the world immediately, and continual occupation and change soon weaken impressions. . . .”
“But let me observe that all histories are against you—all stories, prose and verse.”
“Please, if you please, no reference to books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.”
—The exchange between Anne and Captain Harville in Jane Austen’s, Persuasion
1871: Walt Whitman early on noted the discrepancy between “Women in Fiction—and in Fact.” In Democratic Vistas (“Literature has never recognized the common people”) he counterposes against
the stock feminine characters of the current novelists (Ophelias, Enids, princesses, ladies of one kind or another) [presented] as supreme ideals of feminine excellence to be sought after
four “typical” American women:
A young American woman, one of a large family of daughters, who, some years since, migrated from her meagre country home to one of the northern cities to gain her own support . . . an expert seamstress . . . cook . . . her presence itself healthy and bracing . . . preserves her independence. . . .
. . . another woman who, from taste and necessity conjoin’d, has gone into practical affairs, carries on a mechanical business, partly works at it herself, dashes out more and more into real hardy life, is not abash’d by the coarseness of contact, knows how to be firm and silent at the same time, holds her own with unvarying coolness and decorum, and will compare, any day, with superior carpenters, farmers, and even boatmen and drivers. . . .
The wife of a mechanic, mother of two children, a woman of merely passable English education, but of fine wit. . . . Never abnegating her own proper independence, but always genially preserving it, and what belongs to it. . . .
. . . a resplendent person, . . . known by the name of the Peacemaker . . . well toward eighty years old, had always lived on a farm . . . an invariable and welcom’d favorite, especially with young married women . . . numerous children and grandchildren . . . uneducated, but possess’d of a native dignity. She had come to be a tacitly agreed upon domestic regulator, judge, settler of difficulties, shepherdess, and reconciler in the land.
“The foregoing portraits,” adds Whitman, “are frightfully out of line from [the] imported models of womanly personality.”
1975
Shortly after the publication of Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, Charlotte [Baum] attended a meeting of a Jewish women’s “reading club” to participate in a discussion of the book. Although Charlotte’s experience in no way paralleled Alexander Portnoy’s, she intended to defend Roth’s point of view, and to support his right to demythicize the legendary Jewish family.
Most of the women in the group were in their sixties. They were the daughters of Eastern European Jews, either born here, or having immigrated as children. They were now upper-middle class women whose husbands, none of whom had attended college, were ma
nufacturers or owners of medium-sized businesses. Their sons were university-educated professionals, or associated with the family businesses. Their daughters were themselves all active in Jewish philanthropic organizations like Hadassah, ORT, B’nai B’rith, and synagogue sisterhoods.
The women began to defend themselves against Roth’s highly critical view of Jewish women, as embodied in his character Sophie Portnoy. They described their sacrifices, struggles, and hardships, and Charlotte knew she was hearing the truth. She remembered stories from her own past, about her aunts’ involvement in the labor movement, her mother’s friends who had taken in boarders to supplement the family’s income and her own mother who worked in the grocery store eighteen hours a day. She found herself agreeing with these Jewish women that if anyone had complaints to make, it was they! . . .
Why were there no Jewish women novelists recording their experiences and hers? Had the daughters of these women been so psychologically damaged that they were incapable of generating a voice of their own?
—from the preface to The Jewish Woman in America, Michel, Hyman, Baum-Sheedy, 1975
*Lilian Schissel.
ONE OUT OF TWELVE, P. 23
*Lillian Robinson.
**Title of a pioneering anthology textbook; Mary Ann Ferguson, editor.
†Some 110 in 1970–71. (By 1973 there were 600 courses in literature alone.)
‡Elaine Showalter.
§I cannot identify the author of this quotation or all previous quotations, but they were copied (in 1971) out of course descriptions or Female Studies (K.N.O.W. and Feminist Press).
*William Blake.
**Adrienne Rich in her preface to Susan Griffin’s Voices, 1976.
LITERACY
Two-thirds of the illiterate in the world today are women.
Frederick Douglass was able to leave for us the legacy of his life and thoughts as he chose to write it; Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth (Truth one of the most eloquent users of spoken words in her time)* come to us filtered through the words of others: words they were not able to read to correct or change.
Silences Page 23
