Lorde arrived at the gay bars after a difficult youth marked by the discrimination her Caribbean-born parents faced during the Depression. Throughout a Harlem childhood, her fiercely protective mother—impotent against the racism of the white nuns at her daughter’s Catholic school—regularly thrashed Audrey, the youngest of three sisters. Chubby, spirited, and legally blind, Audrey needed to be taught not to expect fair treatment, her mother believed, since it would never be forthcoming. A precocious little girl, she learned to read and write early, savored her mother’s Caribbean cooking and storytelling, and enjoyed dropping the “y” from her first name because she relished the resulting “evenness” of her two names.45
Growing up lonely, with the conviction that she was an outsider inside her family, Lorde had one resource: whenever anyone asked her “How do you feel?” she would “recite a poem, and somewhere in that poem would be the feeling, the vital piece of information.” At the children’s room of the public library, she memorized poems. They became “the first reason for my own writing, my need to say things I couldn’t say otherwise when I couldn’t find other poems to serve.” Saying her first poems aloud helped her “find a secret way to express my feelings.” 46
No one in the family spoke about “race as a reality.” At age 6, Lorde asked her two older sisters, “What does Colored mean?” Since her mother looked white enough to pass, the child decided to identify herself as “white same as Mommy,” only to be plunged into confusion by her siblings’ horrified reaction.47 At Hunter High, there were only a scattering of Black students, and according to Zami, the one Lorde befriended committed suicide after possibly being abused by her father.48
Despite the trauma of that event—recalled in “Memorial II,” the opening poem of her Collected Poems—Lorde gained a strengthened commitment to verse through a group of literary white girls whom she calls “The Branded”: “the Lunatic Fringe, proud of our outrageousness and our madness, our bizarre-colored inks and quill pens.”49 Aspiring poets and the daughters of immigrants, among them Diana di Prima, these feisty girls skipped classes and held séances, calling up the spirits of the dead poets they revered.50 Always active in Argus, the school literary magazine, Lorde also at 17 published a poem in, yes, Seventeen.
During a stint of factory work in Stamford, Connecticut, Lorde had an affair with her first significant lover, another worker, who entranced her but also instructed her on prevailing attitudes toward lesbian sex. “Snappy little dark eyes, skin the color of well-buttered caramel, and a body like the Venus of Willendorf. Ginger was gorgeously fat, with an open knowledge about her body’s movement that was delicate and precise” (italics hers). Although Ginger perceived Lorde “as a citified little baby butch,” she learned from Ginger how much she had not learned in high school: about Black history and about lovemaking, which brought her “home to a joy I was meant for, and I only wondered, silently, how I had not known that it would be so.” However, Ginger would not acknowledge “a relationship between two women as anything other than a lark,” and Ginger’s mother casually informed Lorde, “Friends are nice, but marriage is marriage.”51
Meanwhile, Lorde’s grueling work at Keystone Electronics—running a commercial X-ray machine and then processing quartz crystals used in radio and radar machinery—would take its toll: “Nobody mentioned that carbon tet [tetrachloride] destroys the liver and causes cancer of the kidneys. Nobody mentioned that the X-ray machines, when used unshielded, delivered doses of constant low radiation far in excess of what was considered safe even in those days.”52 This retrospective passage in Zami was written after Lorde’s first diagnosis of cancer.
Later, in New York, Lorde became aware of her vulnerability as a Black in the lesbian world, a lesbian in the Black world, and anathema to progressives who were fearful of government surveillance. A (closeted) English major at midtown Hunter College, downtown she frequented Village bars: Swing Rendezvous, the Pony Stable Inn, and the Bagatelle. Experimenting with communal sex, earning money at a library job, making ends meet by shoplifting, Lorde enrolled in night courses. Before and then after the breakup of a committed partnership—which filled her with the “red fury” that “used to burst into nosebleeds instead of tears” in her mother’s house—she found solace in the bars.53
Yet the lesbian bars were predominantly white. “To be Black, female, gay, and out of the closet in a white environment, even to the extent of dancing at the Bagatelle, was considered by many Black lesbians to be simply suicidal.” Social interaction was also rigidly structured. Lorde felt anomalous when categorized as one of “the ‘freaky’ bunch of lesbians who weren’t into role-play, and who the butches and femmes, Black and white, disparaged with the term Ky-Ky, or AC/DC. Ky-Ky was the same name that was used for gay-girls who slept with johns for money. Prostitutes.” In Lorde’s self-assessment, “I wasn’t cute or passive enough to be ‘femme,’ and I wasn’t mean or tough enough to be ‘butch.’ ” Then there was the added danger of plainclothes policewomen “looking for gay-girls with fewer than three pieces of female attire. That was enough to get you arrested for transvestism.”54
Depressed despite ongoing therapy, Lorde struggled with Black women who dubbed her crazy, Black men who sexually assaulted her, a white partner who thought that “gay-girls were just as oppressed as any Black person,” and white strangers who viewed her as an intruder, if they didn’t mistake her for the folksinger Odetta just because they both had natural hair.55 The conundrums of her life in the fifties are made clear in Zami: after an unsatisfactory relationship with a boyfriend, her terror at undergoing an illegal abortion; her delight in discovering a community of lesbians in Mexico, where she could not afford to settle down.
These problems help explain why in the sixties the woman whose name would become synonymous with Black lesbian activism found herself “raising two children and a husband in a three-room flat on 149th Street in Harlem.”56 Sometimes conflicted, Lorde nevertheless shared with Plath, di Prima, and Hansberry a determination to find or forge words to break the shackles that bound her.
JOAN DIDION’S VOGUE VERSUS BETTY FRIEDAN’S PROBLEM THAT HAS NO NAME
Even while rebels like di Prima, Hansberry, and Lorde stalked the cafés of the Village, Mademoiselle persisted in flattering, fluttery efforts to indoctrinate college girls in campus glamour. Nor was Sylvia Plath the only would-be literary star to grace its pages. In 1955, a mousey-looking white girl from an old Sacramento family stepped into the tepid summer air of what used to be called Idlewild Airport, already worried that her dress wasn’t fashionable enough.
A 20-year-old UC Berkeley undergraduate, Joan Didion understood right away that New York was where she needed to be. After a month in the perfumed corridors of Mademoiselle, she went back to school, fulfilled her Milton requirement, and returned to the Big Apple as the winner of Vogue’s prix de Paris, an even more prestigious award than her earlier gig. Now she was becoming a real pro, learning to “write to count.”57 In one of her first assignments, she profiled another winner of the prix de Paris, Jacqueline Bouvier, who had claimed in her prize-winning essay that she dreamed of becoming a “sort of ‘Overall Art Director of the Twentieth Century,’ watching everything from a chair hanging in space.”58
Didion never liked JFK—she was a dyed-in-the-wool Republican—but she recognized that his wife would become an icon of the new era, “leading a rebellion in beauty” so significant that, she observed, after Jackie’s appearance on the scene the “insistence on a certain nose, a special profile, is dead.”59 At the same time, Didion loathed the Beats, especially Ginsberg; disliked Lorraine Hansberry; and understood Sylvia Plath to be a rival at Mademoiselle. Yet despite her conservative politics, Didion was workaholically ambitious. Though she was never to be a feminist, she was never to become a conformist wife and mother either, and she was always to pursue her goals with a kind of cynical energy. Her New York boyfriend, Noel Parmentel, described her working twelve hours a day at the office and then twelve hours at ho
me writing her first novel.60
As 1959 slid into 1960, with Hansberry on Broadway, Lorde and di Prima at Swing Rendezvous, and Plath at Yaddo, Didion was climbing the ladder at Vogue and, soon, at Life, the Saturday Evening Post, and the National Review, as well as (eventually, in the early sixties) in Hollywood. While Mattel manufactured the Barbie doll created by Ruth Handler, and Hugh Hefner hosted a variety/talk show on TV, Didion elaborated on her feelings for Jackie, noting: “She came along, and suddenly we forgot about the American girl—that improbably golden never-never child who roved through the world’s imagination with a tennis racket . . . —and fell in love instead with the American woman, a creature possessed of thoughtful responsibility, a healthy predilection for the good and the beautiful and the expensive.”61 Given her astute journalistic instincts, Didion would seem to have predicted the next national romance.
But even while Didion was celebrating the glamour of the “good and the beautiful and the expensive,” a left-wing Jewish labor journalist and mother of three was researching the quotidian lives of American women, including not just supposedly happy housewives but many who felt themselves to be captives of suburbia and, in a larger sense, of the American dream. A summa cum laude graduate of Smith College, Bettye Goldstein Friedan began circulating a questionnaire among her classmates in 1957, asking them to comment on their home and work situations.
With a commission from McCall’s, Friedan had set out to use the Smith alumnae questionnaire “to write a major magazine article refuting Modern Woman: The Lost Sex and proving education didn’t make American women frustrated in their role as women.” 62 Surely Farnham and Lundberg were wrong. “Surely, education made us better wives and mothers,” she thought.63 But what she learned was startling. One respondent after another testified to boredom, even despair, complaining of an entrapment in domesticity. Drawing on such evidence of widespread discontent, Friedan—who had been a psychology major in college—attacked not just Farnham and Lundberg and Deutsch but also the Freudian theories in which their ideas were rooted, declaring that Freud was a “prisoner of his own culture” about gender issues and cataloguing a range of dissatisfactions while prescribing a kind of GI Bill for American mothers and housewives.64
Though she herself was a left-wing outsider, Friedan targeted white middle-class readers, hoping to publish in just the same women’s “slicks” where Plath sought to place stories. Anxious about the tail end of McCarthyism, she kept her politics under wraps. But she did, in a confessional era, explain her personal connection to her subject matter: “I suffered for a time, the reactions of terror—no future—feelings I had no personality that I have heard described by so many other women.”65 And her writing was infused with the anger that would later make her famously difficult to get along with in the feminist activist circles where she would become a founder of key women’s organizations.
Perhaps because her writing was so passionate, McCall’s rejected it, as did the Ladies’ Home Journal, Mademoiselle, and Redbook. Then, refusing to be silenced, she reworked an article into a book proposal and sold it to W. W. Norton. When The Feminine Mystique was published in 1963, with an initial print run of 3,000 copies, it touched a chord and flew, amazingly, off the shelves of bookstores. However, Betty Friedan didn’t invent the discontent she chronicled, nor was she the first to explore it. As she herself observed, “the trapped American housewife” had become a recurring theme in magazines and newspapers from Life to Newsweek and the New York Times. Declared one commentator, “The road from Freud to Frigidaire, from Sophocles to Spock, has turned out to be a bumpy one.”66
Indeed it had. As Friedan proclaimed, “In 1960, the problem that has no name burst like a boil through the image of the happy American housewife.” 67
SECTION II
ERUPTIONS IN THE SIXTIES
3
Three Angry Voices
THE FIFTIES KEPT ON being “the fifties” well into the sixties, though there was one dramatic public change. The youthful John F. Kennedy and his elegant wife replaced the fatherly Eisenhower and his rather frumpy wife, Mamie, in the White House. But as representatives of the new decade, JFK and Jackie would seem to have been icons of all that the fifties had desired: a wealthy, intelligent husband and a glamorous “society” wife. The Eisenhowers, after all, were holdovers from the forties.
At state dinners Mamie presided over meals featuring American standards straight out of Good Housekeeping. A feast for the king and queen of Greece included “Shrimp Cocktail, Saltine Crackers, Celery Hearts, White Fish in Cheese Sauce, Coleslaw, Boston Brown Bread Sandwiches, White Wine, Crown Roast of Lamb Stuffed with Spanish Rice” and “Lemon Iced Diamond Shaped Cookies,” among other down-home specialties. By contrast, Jackie hosted a luncheon for Princess Grace and Prince Rainer that was as chic as a Chanel sheath: “Soft-Shell Crab Amandine, Puligny-Montrachet 1958,” followed by “Spring Lamb à la Broche aux Primeurs, Château Croton Grancey 1955, Salade Mimosa, Dom Pérignon 1952,” and topped off by “Strawberries Romanoff, Petits Fours Secs, Demi-tasses.” (Note, too, that in Jackie’s menu, plain old “white wine” has been replaced by Puligny-Montrachet 1958.) 1
For all her glamour, though, Jackie was dutifully domestic and, with her two children, photogenically maternal, enacting the feminine mystique for a national audience and declaring in her breathy voice that the job of the president’s wife is “to take care of the president.”2 That this president was a ferocious Lothario—and that his discreet wife knew as much—was not then grasped by most of the couple’s fans. The mission she assigned herself in her first years as First Lady was also properly domestic, though more ambitious than the job ordinary housewives would face: no less than the redecoration of the entire First Interior.
With the TV personality Charles Collingwood, Jackie toured the rooms to show off the result. Explaining that the White House had fallen into such neglect that it almost looked “like a hotel decorated by a wholesale furniture store,” she noted that she had even had to replace the glassware in the State Dining Room. The elaborately produced program—pitched primarily to women—drew 46 million viewers.3 When Marilyn Monroe, in a clinging gown, went onstage at Madison Square Garden to sing “Happy Birthday Mr. President” in a breathy voice not unlike Jackie’s, it seemed only right that the era’s sex idol should pay such a tribute. John F. Kennedy was, all things considered, one half of the perfect couple. Jackie herself would call the brief three years that they occupied the White House the era of Camelot.
Nonetheless, as in the fifties, transgressive forces still simmered under an apparently calm surface. In 1960, the first birth control pill, Enovid, went on the market. It would make possible an unprecedented sexual revolution. Then, in August 1962, three months after Marilyn Monroe crooned “Happy Birthday” to JFK, she died of an overdose of barbiturates. Almost immediately Andy Warhol, as emblematic of sixties pop art as Monroe was of midcentury eroticism, turned her into the objet d’art she had always really been.4
On February 11, 1963, Sylvia Plath—in the midst of a rancorous separation from her husband—set mugs of milk and slices of bread next to her children’s cribs, opened their windows and sealed their door against fumes, then went downstairs to her kitchen and turned on the gas. On the desk in her bedroom, she left a manuscript that was like a bomb. Before her suicide, in an angry letter to her mother, she burst out, “Don’t talk to me about the world needing cheerful stuff! . . . It is much more help for me . . . to know that people are divorced and go through hell, than to hear about happy marriages. Let the Ladies’ Home Journal blither about those.”5
Eight days later, on February 19, 1963, W. W. Norton published Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. Though initial reviews were mixed, the book would sell three million copies by the year 2000. In 1963, too, Norton published Adrienne Rich’s third book, Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, which the poet Marilyn Hacker was later to call “The Young Insurgent’s Commonplace Book”—and so it was.6
On August 28,
1963, 250,000 people from all over the country marched on Washington, DC, where, standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial, Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his resounding “I Have a Dream” speech. A few months earlier, Lorraine Hansberry had stormed out of a meeting with Robert Kennedy after exclaiming, “I am very worried . . . about the state of the civilization which produced that photograph of the white cop standing on that Negro woman’s neck in Birmingham.”7 Two months later, the President’s Commission on the Status of Women, which had been established by JFK and chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt until her death in 1962, issued its report titled American Women, noting the many inequalities faced by women in a supposedly liberated society.
On November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy was assassinated as his motorcade passed through downtown Dallas. Almost immediately, as he had with Marilyn Monroe, Andy Warhol turned Jackie into an objet d’art. In Twenty Jackies (1964), he captured her downcast face as she stood in front of a uniformed guard at her husband’s funeral.8
The fifties, with their decorous dreams of romance, were over, as dead as Monroe, JFK—and Sylvia Plath Hughes. Embedded in her personal history, the proto-feminist poems Plath left as her legacy prefigure the complaints against patriarchy expressed by her contemporary Adrienne Rich and the protests sung by Nina Simone, who channeled the energies of the civil rights movement into women’s issues.
PLATH DESPAIRS WHILE ARIEL TAKES WING
If Sylvia Plath Hughes was dead, Sylvia Plath was certainly still alive. Ariel saw to that, as Ted Hughes may have sensed it would, once he saw the manuscript lying on his dead wife’s desk.
Still Mad Page 7
