Herself

by Hortense Calisher

  It has become a truism, particularly with us, to note that a world of uncertainty may be good for the democratic process but hard on the novelist, who saw his way so much more clearly in the blessed time of slow trains and few termini. Nowadays he has the double job of finding some homogeneous pattern before he can sit down to describe it.

  Certainly the American novelist, who draws some of his vitality from taking things harder than anybody else, takes his uncertainty harder than anybody else. Some commentators believe that, as a younger country, we have a national flux added to the general—yet it is a long time since Oscar Wilde observed that America’s oldest tradition was her youth. Could it be, contrariwise, that for the first time we see ourselves solidifying into a national character, and that this affrights us? Our unique contributions—Mark Twain, Melville, Faulkner, for instance—have all had a bardically strong regional base, and we now see those regional differences disappearing. Where the canyons have so far escaped the leveling process, the inhabitants have not. Geographical isolation will not be of any more use to us in literature than it will be politically.

  Whether or not we like what we see solidifying is another question. Historically it has often been useful for a writer to dislike what he sees, but still more valuable for him to know what he likes, and ours is a nation where everyone is heartily pressed to be “individual” but eccentricity is not encouraged. (Not even oppressed—for Americans, despite fugues in that direction, are very tender on the subject of oppression.) Meanwhile the artist, who knows that his eccentricity—in the sense of being outside the circle the better to see it—is important to him, knows also that it cannot be cultivated on short notice, like a Barrow Street beard. The best thing that can happen to him is to be born into a tradition that respects eccentricity, sometimes before understanding it, and will give him time to develop it.

  It is no wonder that the American writer, who for so long has been carried on the energy of his great national eccentricity—that barbarian-fresh point of view on which he has leaned as on a tradition—feels lost now that he sees this heritage fading. He is losing his folklore of newness, as an endlessly rich source book or as a substitute for a personal point of view, and he knows it.

  Given time, he will go beyond newness to something as yet undreamed. He is given time, but not too much of it, and not without grumbling. If he pauses to write of his childhood, he is “retreating”; if he writes of the mad, who sometimes illuminate the sane, he is deserting art for psychiatry (everybody conceivably having forgotten that the one considerably antedates the other); if he begins to feel, with Juvenal, “difficile est non satiram scribere,” then he lacks compassion. So it happens that if he does desert “larger issues” in the hope of finding some limited world he knows well, he is sneered at for being aphilanthropic. Cornered in self-consciousness, he often finds himself half agreeing with those who predict the death of the novel, and fearing that he has lost his own faith in it as a “form.”

  When, then, in the midst of such broodings, one encounters a continuous oeuvre like C. P. Snow’s “Lewis Eliot” sequence, which he has been publishing piecemeal since 1940, one thinks suddenly of how much less often such sequences appear in American literature than in British. As against those British ones which come first to mind—The Forsyte Saga, the Tietjens novels of Ford Madox Ford, Lawrence’s Brangwens, the works of Henry Handel Richardson and Henry Williamson, the “Eustace” trilogy of L. P. Hartley, the novels of Anthony Dymoke Powell, the work of Joyce Cary and of Snow himself, we have what?—perhaps Thomas Wolfe, Farrell’s Lonigan, and Sinclair’s Lanny Budd. If we exclude Faulkner as sui generis, we cannot do so without noting that the coextensive nature of his Yoknapatawpha County, his creation of a matrix world into which he can plunge at any point, is the one path on which his imitators have not chosen to follow him. The same might be said of those who were influenced by Wolfe.

  Our novelists tend to write enormous books but discontinuous ones. Whatever may be made of this, it is certain that the American writer’s sense of acceptance is far more discontinuous than the Continental’s; his reputation rises and falls with each book to a far greater degree, and even when established he cannot hope to have each successive book taken as part of a total work until very late in the day, often when his creative activity is almost over. Although he may know in his heart that he has only one theme, he must conceal this from himself, as well as from others, in some mask of newness each time, and he does not dare any such progression as Gide’s, who unconcernedly wrote the same book again and again.

  The French, of course, have long since solved the question of what art may or may not deal with by refusing to see that the question exists. But the fact that the American novelist no longer worries over the content of art in any moral sense may have obscured the truth that he does worry over what subject matter is “proper” to it in a metaphysical sense. He is still propagandizing by selection, out of a feeling that a novel will be a better work of art if it not only “settles” something artistically but does it now. He wants the life he saves to be his own.

  What this urgency does for him is by no means all bad. It may have produced that peculiar split in our fiction whereby we have hugely competent “realists” whose view of life is organized, entertaining, yet too opportunely glib, and an opposing breed of “literary” novelists working in beautifully polished bas-relief, in some savagely intense corner of adolescence, homosexuality, or racial sensibility. Yet it may also contribute to that primitive intensity of concern which does not fight shy of poetry, that basic ability to confront feeling which so often seems missing in our drier British brethren. We may learn a good deal about ourselves by studying our opposites, particularly in the work of a writer like Snow who, by very national habit, seems at times so much more at home in the novel than we are, and at others too much at home in a way that we might not care to be.

  (In this kind of writing-about-others, where the great, attemptable projections of art-emotion are missing, where only now and then I can risk a lurid language-bubble from the floral ponds below, I am really examining myself. In terms of that only, could I dare to pass judgment on others. I must try only to pass printed judgment on a writer when it more than a little concerns me. Then, on entering that drier, theoretical air, I can better keep in mind caritas, the human warmth, the human rarity. For the sake of us both.)

  I CAME BACK AWARE. Doubled. And praying to love my country best. Why should this have filled me with confidence?

  If I stood still, ideas dripped from my fingers, oozed like wax from my ears, tumbled toward my lips. I sneezed, melted, opened to the world’s presence. It was all true, and utterable. The world was not my oyster, but everybody’s. For life.

  “Back in town,” but twenty-five miles up river, I ignored the muffled telephone calls which kept coming from New York like a heartbeat from the year before. I lay on the hillside behind the house, head toward the mountain, feet toward the Hudson which ran below, and all summer re-read books I have never before finished to the very end—Proust, The Brothers Karamazov, War and Peace. Now and then I went dazedly to parties down the road, when I answered the bright, loving, intense American questioning with the secret smile of the traveler returned. I touched the children with care and some fear, they of an age now to be surely quaking with dreams beyond me, who could only labor and bake for them. My marriage was slowing down; five years later it would come to a stop. Meanwhile, the four of us were, each in our own ways too busy, terrified, or enchanted with growing, to consider this. I was growing not a baby but a book. More total than a child, at least in the making, and a birth that I only could manage, or transmit.

  I had been carrying it about for sometime now, not really knowing; I had even signed a contract for another. Turning down Tale for the Mirror, a novella, The New Yorker had said it sounded more like, or too much like, the beginning of a longer work. At times I too had thought it might be, and had outlined its further projection to an editor, in a page I st
ill have. One should never do that, or I should not. For me, that book now stopped. Or had I stopped it? Yes, I knew further projections for the people in it, but this was often my case both before and after a story—until it was forgotten in the welter of new work embarked on. Probably Tale ended where I wanted it to, having said what it was meant to say perhaps a little too soon for its length, but I had obeyed its dictates.

  Meanwhile, for several years now, I have been carrying everywhere with me a small bit of paper, on it a few sentences which have for me a sacramental import beyond their meaning. Once I show it to Marion Ives, my first agent, who wisely nods and says nothing. It reads “For the past is a doll’s house. It stands there, finished and clear, centered in the attic of the mind. We stand outside it helpless, swollen with the giant present. Inside, where everything is known, charm, joy, and terror chime with the limited pangs of clocks. Outside it I stand, I the enormous Alice, and there is no little bottle from which to drink, or bit of cake that will shrink us in. At its windows the dustless curtains billow perfectly, and below, the pavements sparkle mica-sharp, in the uneclipsable light of a small but steadfast sun.” The odd thing is, that I know it is the end of something itself not yet conceived. Then, suddenly having written thirty or forty pages, I send word to the editor, Nicholas Wreden, that I want to honor the contract but switch books on him; could this be done? He replies, no doubt tongue-in-cheek, that it has been known to happen; would I send him the pages? Shortly he writes to say that I must go on with it. When it is delivered, seven years later, that passage appears in its last pages, verbatim with one exception: “I, the enormous Alice” has been changed to “we, the enormous children.” Why? The book is written from within the mind of a man.

  Now I would not be that consistent, or see the need for it. But during the long writing, I had begun to wonder how it would be received, this interior confession—“search for identity” as the jargon of the time tended to call any self-searching book—written entirely in the male person, by me. I even dally with publishing it under an alias. “I’ll be one of the Georges,” I half-joke to my publisher—but he shakes his head. My own name is what they are buying. I give up the idea with regret; in a way I would always rather be anonymous. (Waiting, of course, to be found out.) Why have I thought of it at all? Am I afraid of being thought a Lesbian?

  I think seriously about this, as my generation has been taught to do. Is it possible I am a submerged one? Tall, and capable of summoning a baritone voice, I was always given the male parts in the all girl high-school dramatic club, and a couple of girls fell in love with the way I looked in a tuxedo. I have a powerful body, curved though it is, and have a certain dominance, though it doesn’t always last. I have close homosexual friends but they are all male, many of them married to one other man, all of them leading full lives. I have never known a Lesbian well, though I have known couples; in love they often seem to me to tend toward the perfervid, the sub-hysterical and the sentimental, all the worser qualities of women. I have close women friends whom I love, but like me they are interested in men, or one man. I have never been bodily shy; years as a dancer did that for me. I used to be shy of kissy women, but not for sexual reasons. Since having children I’m much looser at touching people I like. But I can’t excite myself over the thought of sex with women. For one thing, there aren’t enough parts. I loved my father, though not blindly, partially hated my mother, though I admired her and wanted to be like her too; that editor who so insulted me with the norm may have been reasonably right. No form of sex seems to me innately repellent; any form of it is probably natural to somebody. Saddest for me, as an imagined Lesbian, would be not having children. Even if I managed to adopt some, as homosexuals now and then do, I cannot believe that I wouldn’t be sad at having to miss that experience in the ordinary way. From here, where I stand. But I could be having another experience that I do not have—here. We tend to exalt the framework in which we are. Perhaps I am doing that?

  There must be something wrong with a personality which seems to have everything so neatly covered. My “mind”—as far as I can disinter it from the rest of me—seems to have no particular sex. I hold no special brief for “the family.” I am greedy for experience, but more greedy for some than for others. What pulls me deepest, moves me darkly and lightly, is what I can only think of as ordinary experience. Sunt lacrimae rerum. That’s me. Et mentem mortalia tangunt. I find that line untranslatable, yet am willing to spend my life at it: Here are tears for the affairs of men. They touch mortal minds; they touch mine.

  Far as I could tell, I was not a Lesbian. If I were, I doubted I would be afraid, silent, or submerged. Then what do I apprehend?

  By then, it has been borne in upon me—in a professional way—that to some I will always be a “woman writer.” Some, critics and readers both, will not bother to read me. Others, when they do, will express to me their surprise at having done so and admired it, often much as Andre Gide had to Colette. Though I am printed generally, women’s magazines are especially accessible; I have to be careful not to confine myself to them, even though at the moment some of them are printing internationally known writers of both sexes. I will begin to notice that when a biographical dictionary (or an academy or a university) excerpts from my dossier, these are the publications likely to be left out. Now and then I leave them out. I learn that the best way is not to notice any of it, and push on. When a woman is sent a book of mine for review, I have to hope it is out of respect for what she is literarily; as more men are sent them, I welcome the tribute and learn the risk. I can never be sure of being reviewed as a writer and not as a woman. I learn to know the watchwords when that is happening to me, even when well concealed from whoever pens it. I remember the old warning, from the days of “Old Stock”: when people dislike what you say, they will say that you are a bad writer. When they dislike what you are, or cannot admit that you may be an equal, they will do the same. In other words, of course. Maybe slanging the style, or the subject matter. But often in my case, to imply that I am “a woman writer” will be enough.

  Yet all this is, as I well know, merely the professional hazard, like the money, and the personality pouncing and the party cauldrons—like the whole worldly loss of innocence. To heed it unduly is to be one of those shriveled devotees who live by the calendar of saints but have forgotten the godhead. None of this must enter the work.

  Is there a fear that has?

  Not a fear, but a knowledge. Which has entered the writer. Who is a woman.

  All around me, women of the richest sensibility were writing. Sometimes they lyricized the world, sometimes they classicised it. Sometimes they grotesqued it. And sometimes, without a tone altered or an honesty shifted, it was possible to feel—in the way one senses a closed window—that they had daintified it. Often they wrote from the interiors of women and children, or of the old. Men they wrote of as lovers, fathers or brothers. Seldom did they write from the interior of a man, or in the male persona altogether, as women had long since been written of by men.

  I had done several stories that way, even before the novel. Now and then I idly wondered about this. How far could the adaptive imagination go? I wanted to think it could go anywhere. One enormous shadow then loomed over the American male writer, and through him, over me. War. With all its attendant virilities of sport and sex. Only one—Faulkner, after writing of it in its natural frame, and its current one (Soldier’s Pay) had gone on to a wider human comedy, hunting the past in the present. Fitzgerald, who had done the same in more immediate terms, was dead, and then largely unappreciated. The rest, senior and young, hunted the war novel, that great bear. And women were civilians, their only connection with war being the bed or the bedpan, the Red Cross doughnut or the office typewriter, or the entertainment circuit, which included those few female correspondents who flirted equally with generals and with death. For the mass of women, the war-connection was as wives, lovers and mothers, all Gold Star. All women were joined to this “larger” worl
d by the same single thread—men. So deep was the human race sunk in war and all the effects of war, that this seemed to us entirely natural. As women, we could be Lysistratas, or Florence Nightingales. As writers, we could ape the men by seeing the world as militarily as possible, or we could popularize ourselves in the image always ready for us—as sweet sprinklers of sachet in the sickroom experience. Or we could stand back or aside, the better to see the whole range, and the whole other range, of human experience. Including our own.

  Although my male confreres who in one way or other imitated Hemingway could still make me feel small punkins in front of a bar or behind a gun, secretly I thought them and him provincial in some way, though I couldn’t yet have told why. Their cult seemed to me both narrow and exaggerated. Hunting the blood dramas of war and ambulance as if out for game, tied to the physicality of events, they were becoming the male journalists of literature. Hindsight, not too much later, would tell me why. Men, and women too, who make a sentiment out of physical prowess, need a neo-primitive culture to sustain them; in ours, bloody as it is, physicality pursued to the end keeps one an eternal juvenile. When the prowess dies, the importance of such event dies, and the sentiment, even of combat, dies with them—as Hemingway’s suicide gun perhaps signaled. The price paid by some male American writers of the period would be that of an intellectuality refused. But this would be nothing to the price paid by all Americans, whether they know it or not, for fighting wars at the peculiar modern distance. While they sent their sons, the middle-aged stayed at home, to rot in silk, under safe skies. To tranquilize themselves for lesser tragedies. To psychoanalyse themselves for fears of cancer and death. To beat their breasts over the disappointments of educational and social meliorism—and social change. To yearn secretly for the cleansing violence that a nation has, when it defends itself and its ideals at home. All the falsities of that America could be laid to it. We were not bombed at home. We were the first nation really to live by the electric button, in our souls. Or in our balls? Men writers of the times were telling us that, sorrily not by their prophetic tongues but by their barometric actions. These samurai were having to cross the water, the air, to find gests emotionally worthy of them. Europe, in the bloodiest way, was still attracting Americans. Over there. Too late. In the bloodbath, women are more and more equal. War, no longer a gest, is civilian now. No one, not even a child, need be envious.