Silences

by Shelly Fisher Fishkin

  —The peerless poet, Louise Bogan (who had none of these things—except a daughter to raise, alone).

  (From a letter to May Sarton, 1954, in What the Woman Lived)

  INTERVIEWER: Was he writing very much when you were first engaged?

  MRS. WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS: No; once in a while he would send me a poem. But he was busy building up his practice. After we were married he wrote more. I saw to it that he had time.

  John Gardner:

  . . . If I have any doubts about what a character would say or what a room would look like, I ask my wife. She has the ability to go into a room where she doesn’t know anyone and tell you the first names of several people because they seem the Raymond type or the Sheila type. My writing involves these two imaginations in a very deep way, page after page after page. My own imagination is poetic and philosophical. I’m concerned with the rhythms of sentences and paragraphs and chapters, and with ideas as they are embodied in characters and actions. Joan’s imagination is a very close psychological and sociological one. It informs everything I do. Perhaps I should have used “John and Joan Gardner” on the titles all along; I may do this in the future. But in modern times such a work is regarded as not really art. The notion that art is an individual and unique vision is a very unmedieval and unclassical view. In the Middle Ages it was very common to have several people work on one thing; the thirteenth-century Vulgate cycle of Arthurian romances had hundreds of writers. I feel comfortable with this approach, but I haven’t felt comfortable telling people it’s what I do. As I get more and more into the medieval mode, I’ll probably admit how many writers I have.

  BELLAMY: You leave it sounding as if your wife is a collaborator. Has she actually written parts of your books?

  GARDNER: . . . I use a lot of people, Joan in particular. She hasn’t actually written any lines, because Joan’s too lazy for that. But she’s willing to answer questions. The extent of her contribution doesn’t quite approach collaboration in the modern sense.*

  —from The New Fiction: Interviews with Innovative American Writers, 1974

  We Who Write Are Survivors—Only’s; One Out of Twelve . . . and must tell our chancy luck, our special circumstances

  Fortunate are those of us who are daughters born into knowledgeable, ambitious families where no sons were born; fortunate are those in economic circumstance beyond the basic imperatives, thus affording some choice; fortunate are those in whose lives is another human being “protecting and stimulating the health of highest productivity”;** fortunate are those of us to whom encouragement, approval, grants, publication, come at the foundering time before it is too late; fortunate as has been indicated here, are those born into the better climates, when a movement has created a special interest in one’s sex, or in one’s special subject; fortunate are those who live where relationships, opportunities, not everywhere available are.

  The rule is simple: whenever anyone of that sex, and/or class, and/or color, generally denied enabling circumstances, comes to recognized individual achievement, it is not by virtue of special capacity, courage, determination, will (common qualities) but because of chancy luck, combining with those qualities.

  *As any discerning reading of biographies discloses.

  **—their sense of their own potentialities, their self-confidence already so robbed: not recognizing everyday enabling differences in circumstances for males, let alone superior advantages since birth.

  ONE OUT OF TWELVE, P. 41

  *—and, I might add, perhaps discarded.

  **A sampling of famous sons, this century, includes T.S. Eliot, Jorge Luis Borges, Allen Ginsberg, John Updike. Remember also, Woolf’s “. . . whenever one reads of a remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet . . .”

  †“In the 20 years that we’ve lived here [Morocco], I have written only two short stories and nothing else. It’s good for Paul, but not for me.”

  ‡The husbands: Robert Penn Warren, Yvor Winters, Allen Tate, Paul Bowles, Robert Lowell, Richard Ellmann, Lionel Trilling, Robert Gorham Davis, Alfred Kazin, José Yglesias.

  *I have qualms in quoting Gardner; he expresses the situation forthrightly. The true “leech” writers—whom I would have preferred to quote—do not do so.

  Furthermore, I share his “medieval” view: classical, medieval, or modern, we in art have all been contributed to, have “collaborators.”

  And—writer-woman (temerity) question: what makes someone with capacity “too lazy,” that is a contributor, and not a doer in her own voice? Which is not to say that this question is necessarily pertinent in this instance or that everyone is or should be a writer—but that this is an essential question always to ask. We are only beginning to understand the process of discouragings, of silencings; of the making of enabled and of enablers.

  **But no one’s development should any longer be at the cost of another’s.

  ONE OUT OF TWELVE, P. 39

  BLIGHT. THE HIDDEN SILENCER—BREAKDOWN

  Only by inference, present in the original talks:

  From youngest years, the damaging of capacity; the leeching of will, of belief in self. Distraction, division, shame. Robbing of aspiration. The Angel and having to try to kill the Angel; and hoarse encumbrances of household care. The Damnation of Women. The Fundamental Situation. Economic Imperatives. Postponing; sustaining interruption, breaking concentration. Sporadic effort; unfinished work; unsatisfactory quality of work. Devaluation. Cruel climates. Critical Attitudes. Restriction. Constriction.

  “Her mind must have been strained and her vitality lowered by the need to oppose this.”

  Yes. And sometimes—break down.

  Breakdown (not genuine madness, rare among women writers; nor suicide, which is rarer).*

  Extremity. When overborne, overworn—for a period—one breaks down, gives up, goes under, cannot go on.

  Reality depression. Nullity. Survival withdrawal. Ragings. Or pain, harms, felt in—moved into, working in—the body, when there is no other way, place, to feel it, act upon it, remove the cause.

  Not neuroses or symptoms of neuroses as commonly (mis)apprehended, (mis)treated. Natural. Extremity. Sanity. It would be unreal (insane) not to (re)act so.

  They understood clearer in the last century. Termed it more accurately.

  Fuller (already twice quoted):

  If any individual live too much in relations, so that [s]he becomes a stranger to the resources of [her] own nature, [s]he falls, after a while, into a distraction, or imbecility, which can only be cured by a time of isolation which gives the renovating fountains time to rise up.

  [as happened with Fuller]

  Emily Dickinson:

  Sweet Sister. Was that what I used to call you?

  I hardly recollect, all seems so different—

  I hesitate which word to take, as I can take but few and each must be the chiefest, but recall that Earth’s most graphic transaction is placed within a syllable, nay, even a gaze—

  The Physician says I have “Nervous prostration.”

  Possibly I have—I do not know the Names of Sickness. The crisis of the sorrow of so many years is all that tires me. . . .

  Please Sister to wait—. . .

  —Letter to Mrs. J. G. Holland, late 1883

  . . . Eight Saturday noons ago, I was making a loaf cake with Maggie, when I saw a great darkness coming and knew no more until late at night. . . . I had fainted and lain unconscious for the first time in my life. Then I grew very sick and gave the others much alarm, but am now staying. The doctor calls it “revenge of the nerves”; but who but Death had wronged them? . . .

  —Letter to Louise and Frances Norcross, early August 1884

  Vincent Van Gogh:

  And perhaps the disease of the heart is caused by this. One does not rebel against things, it does no good; nor is one resigned to them; one’s ill because of them and one does not get better. . . .

  Olive Schreiner (writing
of those who try to live ahead of their time, when the societal changes making it possible are not-yet, or only in, the process) (“a time when nothing can be done, except by inches”*):

  In times of modifying, of doing away with traditional ways, within the individuality itself of such persons goes on, in an intensified form, that very . . . conflict, disco-ordination which is going on in the society at large—and agonizing moments must arise when the individual, seeing the necessity for adopting new courses of action will yet be tortured by the hold [outer, inner] of traditional ways . . . [this is] almost bound to rupture the continuity of their psychological being.

  Because there was no other place to flee to,

  I came back to the scene of the disordered senses.

  Everyone has left me

  except my muse,

  that good nurse.**

  “Flee on your donkey,” Annes, Annes, Sweet Sisters,

  . . . In her work, as in her private problems, [Virginia Woolf] was always civilized and sane on the subject of madness. She pared the edges off this particular malady, she tied it down to being a malady, and robbed it of the evil magic it has acquired through timid or careless thinking; here is one of the gifts we have to thank her for.†

  Yes.

  In her life and in her diaries, the incomparable record (help for us all) of her preventing, staving off, countering, bounding the malady (sometimes true madness, sometimes breakdown); understanding, using, it.

  The above are swiftings from an as yet unedited, unpublished talk given at M.I.T. in 1973 during the worst of the madness-suicide mystique. It began with this roll of names:

  *In spite of the widely believed “savage God” theory that madness and suicide are the corollary of daring creative endeavor by women. In the few instances of madness or suicide, the hidden blights are scarcely or not at all considered as factors.

  *Adrienne Rich.

  **Anne Sexton, “Flee on Your Donkey,” from Live or Die.

  †E.M. Forster. Recollections of Virginia Woolf.

  * Since then, we have lost Anne Sexton.

  If I might but be one of those born in the future; then, perhaps to be born a woman will not be to be born branded.

  —Lyndall, in Olive Schreiner’s Story of

  an African Farm, 1883

  HIDDEN BLIGHT—PROFESSIONAL CIRCUMSTANCES

  Treatment, circumstances for the writer-woman and her work, based not on capacities, attainment alone, but affected by her being of her sex: female.

  “You will, I know, keep measuring me by some standard of what you deem becoming to my sex.”

  —Charlotte Brontë, 1849

  “Nevertheless her mind must have been strained and her vitality lowered by her need to oppose this.”

  —Virginia Woolf

  Devaluation; Critical Attitudes

  The perpetual dancing dog phenomena:

  Ozick’s instance was 1969. A 1928 version is quoted in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, as is Dr. Johnson’s of two hundred years before, the (in)famous

  Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all

  and the four hundred years ago (Shakespeare’s time) original, Nick Greene’s: “a woman acting puts me in mind of a dog dancing.” Its current descendant is: breadth—or strength—or knowledge—or power—(or whatever) “surprising in a woman.”

  Reviewers

  A man who reviewed my Procedures for Underground . . . talked about the “domestic” imagery of the poems, entirely ignoring the fact that seven-eighths of the poems take place outdoors. . . . In his case, the theories of what women ought to be writing about, had intruded very solidly between reader and poems, rendering the poems themselves invisible to him.

  —Margaret Atwood

  “Sexual Bias in Reviewing” (condensed from a study by Margaret Atwood’s students, 1973):

  . . . by which we meant not unfavorable reviews, but points being added or subtracted by the reviewer on the basis of the author’s sex and supposedly associated characteristics, rather than on the basis of the work itself. . . . Writers, half of them male, half female [were asked] had they ever experienced sexual bias . . . in a review? A large number of reviews from a wide range of periodicals and newspapers [were surveyed].

  Of the men, none answered Yes, a quarter answered Maybe, and three-quarters: No. Of women, half were Yeses, a quarter Maybes, and a quarter No’s. The women replying Yes often wrote long detailed letters, giving instances and discussing their own attitudes. All the men’s letters were short. . . .

  When we got round to the reviews, we discovered they [the women] were justified.

  Areas of bias found included:

  Assignment of reviews:

  “Masculine” adjectives still most likely to be applied to the work of male writers; to female writers, . . . some version of “the feminine style” or “feminine sensibility” whether their work merits it or not. (Called the Quiller-Couch Syndrome after a turn-of-the-century essay defining masculine and feminine styles in writing.)

  She Writes Like a Man:—a pattern in which good equals male, bad equals female. Meant as a compliment. . . . If a woman writer happens to be a good writer, she should be deprived of her identity as a female and provided with higher (male) status.*

  The (usually male) habit of concentrating on domestic themes in the work of a female writer, ignoring any other topic she might have dealt with, then patronizing her for “interest in domestic themes.” Critical space taken up with discussion of appearance.** Points for attractiveness. (Called the Sexual Compliment/Put-down Syndrome)

  —Atwood’s Paradoxes and Dilemmas, The Woman as Writer, 1973

  Critical Attitudes: Major Art Is . . .

  “Major Art is about the activities of men.” That’s why so much of it is about women. But not by them. “Major Art includes where women can’t go, or shouldn’t, or never have.” Childbed is not a place or an event; it is merely what women do. “Major Art is never about the activities of women.” Except when it’s by men. “Women are household artists.” . . . Let’s face it, dear ladies—a house is not a cosmic home. . . .

  . . .“And look at women writer’s style!” Critics of this type always know what major art is—and wish to discuss only major artists. That’s how they know they’re major critics. A Major Artist writes only in a “masculine” style. “Which uses short words.” Like Faulkner. “Whose sentences don’t inch forward on little iambs but are rough and clumsy.” Like Hemingway’s. “What a masculine and major art must never be is jeweled—beg pardon, lapidary. A jeweled fancy is always feminine.” Like Shakespeare’s. And Melville’s. And Sir Thomas Browne’s.

  Most symptomatic of all, when I, or any woman, complains of male injustices—we must joke.

  —Hortense Calisher, “No Important Woman Writer”

  . . . Literature has never been so sexually polarized as it is today, and women, as subjects, images, and artists, have never been so inconsequential in the realms of high literary culture. There is not even a Dark Lady, a token, a high priestess to satisfy affirmative action requirements in the new lineup of Pynchon, Barth, Heller, Barthelme, Hawkes, Coover, Vonnegut, Elkin. In symposia like the one on “Ongoing American Fiction” in Triquarterly (Spring 1975), one searches in vain for female names. And the problem is not simply that women are not writing in the abstract, discontinuous, parodistic manner of postmodernist fiction; female fabulists and experimentalists like Susan Sontag,* Rosellen Brown, Rosalyn Drexler, and Carol Emshwiller seem not to be noticed. While we have been out looking for androgyny, a new regional literature, whose region is the library, has quietly taken over, and its subjects and themes—apocalypse, war, entropy, cybernetics, baseball, computers, and rockets—are not androgynous at all. As this new virtuoso fiction becomes the yardstick of what is serious and important in contemporary writing, women writers are being crowded once more into that snugly isolated inner space of
art which they have often described as “the living centre,” a space which always looks disturbingly like the kitchen.

  —Elaine Showalter, Signs, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1976

  Remember that “eclipsing, devaluation, are the result of critical judgments, a predominantly male domain. The most damaging, and still prevalent, critical attitude remains ‘that women’s experience, and literature written by women are, by definition, minor.’ Indeed, for a sizable percentage of male writers, critics, academics, writer-women are eliminated from consideration, consciousness, altogether.”

  Climate

  Writers know the importance of respect for one’s vision and integrity; of comradeship with other writers; of being taken seriously; of being dealt with on the basis of one’s work and not for other reasons. . . . Nearly all writers who are women are at a disadvantage here.

  Appearance

  Yes, it has a place here in the hidden blight.

  Scarcely at all a factor for the man writer.

  But for nearly all writers who are women, its harmful importance (enforced since infancy through unspoken penalties, or meretricious approvals—also a penalty). Admitted, unadmitted; acceded to—or fought to proportion—its toll in time, concentration, wholeness.

  Its weaponry against un-self consciousness, naturalness; against based sense of self-worth.

  Its use to demean or lessen achievement.

  Appearance and Singleness

  Patriarchal attitudes last century, with application to this.

  The poor little woman of genius! The fiery little eager brave tremulous homely-faced creature! I can read a great deal of her life as I fancy her in her book [Villette] and see that rather than have fame, rather than any other earthly good or mayhap heavenly one, she wants some Tomkins or another to love her and be in love with. But you see she is a little bit of a creature without a pennyworth of good looks, thirty years old I should think, buried in the country, and eating up her own heart there and no Tomkins will come. You girls with pretty faces will get dozens of young fellows fluttering about you—whereas here is one genius, a noble heart longing to mate itself and destined to wither away into old maidenhood with no chance to fulfil the burning desire.