Going Too Far (5 page)

And the face in the mirror is you.

P
ART ONE

Letters from a Marriage

PART I:

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

Women are only now discovering how many great literary treasures of our history lie buried—in diaries, journals, letters sent and unsent, folk songs and lullabies never written down, poetry scribbled on the flyleaves of old pioneer-family Bibles and recipe books, aphorisms scratched on the walls of prisons and asylums, published volumes whose authorship was attributed to husbands and fathers and brothers and lovers, meditations written around the margins of cloister prayer books, unforgettable tales woven by the grandmother who never learned to read or write. For each woman of genius who was permitted minimally to consider herself a writer, to publish, to be acknowledged (albeit patronizingly), and to pay the enormous and at times even fatal price for this privilege—for each of those desperate and intrepid few, there were literally thousands of others who went to their graves unheard and unacknowledged. “Anonymous” herself, it would appear, was most frequently a woman, forced into secret writing when she could not be silenced altogether
.

Although I have wanted consciously to be a writer from the age of four, and although I have worked seriously at my craft from the age of fourteen and published professionally from the age of seventeen, I too have written an entire body of work “in secret”—so strong is the message of female literary history. I don't mean that work which I wrote with an eye to publication but which simply has not been published. I mean, rather, other work, including the letters in this section of
Going Too Far.

“
Letters from a Marriage” were written on the dates they bear, to myself or my child, and mostly to my husband. They were almost all written before any feminist consciousness had touched my life, although in my ongoing fight for equal treatment I had fallen into the trap of thinking I must be an “exceptional woman” to be taken seriously. When my attempts to live up to such an image still didn't produce the desired result, I thought I was at fault, or perhaps (rarely) the individual man or situation was to blame—but I always saw the
problem as unique, not universal or political. And I was in continual psychic pain about this: I had grown so used to that pain, in fact, that it seemed an integral part of myself
.

These letters span a period of eleven years. I was twenty-one years old when I wrote the first one, thirty-two when I wrote the last. The first was written before I was married, the last when my child was four years old. The bulk of the letters, those to my husband, Kenneth Pitchford, herein referred to as “K.,” were written out of those thoughts and feelings I feared I could never actually speak aloud to him. I thought of them as diary leaves—written mostly for my own sake, with the remote possibility of someday perhaps being able to show them to him. Beyond that, I admit that I secretly hoped the letters would be found after my death, and then could be seen by the whole world, should it care. I confess this last because to do otherwise would be hypocritical; the driving, voracious, irrepressible, and brazen desire of a writer is, after all, to write, and yes, to be read
.

As becomes evident in the later letters, I did eventually let K. read them, and that reading opened up new channels in our relationship. Publishing them is another step altogether. They are, to say the least, embarrassing. They reveal both pleasant and unpleasant truths about myself, K., and our marriage, which inclinations toward complacency would rather leave unsaid, or at least unprinted. I know that there will be those who will be surprised that we remain together; those men who will wonder why K. never left me, and those women who, from a superficially “correct” feminist position, will have only contempt for me, for not having left
him.
Some readers will be voyeurs and some will be judges. There will even be some, perhaps, who disbelieve the validity of the letters; who will insist that I wrote them all recently, specifically for publication in this book, as some sort of gimmick
.

One cannot require that the world understand one's actions. One can only try to proceed honorably, and to explain those actions one feels it necessary to clarify. The letters
are
real, and were written at the time of their dates. I publish them now because I feel they are an important part of my life, and because I am convinced that they name truths, trace patterns, and expose attitudes which in one way or another every woman who has ever lived under patriarchy has experienced
.

The sharing of that experience is at the heart of the feminist metamorphosis—and for every reader who willfully misunderstands the letters there will be more women who will recognize this voice as their own. That would be sufficient reason for making myself vulnerable. Indeed, it is merely a measure of residual patriarchal identification in me that I still feel embarrassed about this at all. But such are the ironies inherent in the process
.

“
Love is more complex than theory,” I wrote once in a poem. The letters are ultimately about love, in its various and terrifying and life-sustaining forms—and about the griefs that accompany it, today, for a woman, although I could at the time of writing most of them give no name yet to those griefs. But I could not know what I know now, however little that is, had I not dared to begin at that point
.

Awkwardly, then, I affirm these letters, claim them for my own, and send them forth on their own. And I affirm the woman who wrote them, the man who finally read them and later courageously supported the idea of their publication, and the relationship which so far has endured and which continues to pay the costly price of growth
.

The personal is political, I know as a feminist. The personal is also the pure ore to be mined for literature, I know as an artist. There is no way, then, that I cannot dare publish these letters
.

1

The first letter in this series is both naïve and prophetic; it was written to myself one week before I married Kenneth Pitchford. He and I had met almost four years earlier, when I was seventeen; we met through a poetry anthology in which we each were represented by some poems. The relationship deepened and intensified during the following years, when we formed a poetry workshop together. There are references in this letter to various friends' and relatives' opposition to our marriage; indeed, my mother was greatly upset, as were most close family friends. Surprisingly, most of K.'s friends—a supposedly less conventionally minded circle of artists—were also opposed. Hardly anyone saw much of a future for such a couple: the man a poet and an unashamed homosexual (this, years before Gay Liberation), the woman a virginal former child actress ten years his junior who claimed she wanted to be a writer.
¹
Such a marriage, buzzed the consensus, in traditional, or Freudian, or even bohemian terms, was going too far.

12
September
1962

S
O I AM
, after all, going to marry K. And for my own benefit, I want to put into words below what that—and the very living of my life entirely, which only really begins now—will entail:

I will learn to love him even as he loves me, from knowledge and not abstraction. I will use him to find more of myself, and be at his hand for the same purpose. I will not lie to him, or deceive him, no matter what the cost. I will insist on mutual honesty between us, whatever it discloses. I will not be subject to his life or work, be beset upon by him or any other; neither will I ask that of him. I will assert my selfness, my work, my desires and hours, not at the cost of his but to bring about between us a separate wholeness, threatening neither, reinforcing both. I will not play the girl-child to his father, nor will I
patronize him, emphasizing his impracticalities or awkwardness in technicalities of this world. I will work toward becoming a woman rather than a wife, knowing that the latter need not include the former, but rather the former can with ease and a whole graciousness bring about the latter. I will remain me. I will fight all images that sprout between us of unconscious making. I will find the strength to be with him, or without him, as the case may be. I will try never to hurt him, within the bonds of loving or awareness. I will try to make him love me more each day, surprising his own limitations. I will not be overly dependent upon him, his potential as an artist, or his opinions—nor allow him to be tricked into leaning overly much on me. I will respect his actions all, his motives all, his ideas all, reserving that individual right of persons to differ.

I will survive my mother's hurt and horror, until such time as she can know me—and him—again. I will never stop a barrage of love toward her that must someday break her hatred and despair, and bring her to me. I will watch her always and be there when she needs me. I will find the strength and humor to cope with friends and acquaintances and their shock or disapproval. I will not let them touch me deeply, where I dwell, but will retain a compassion, with action, toward those I care for. I will not be ashamed of what I am doing, but will compel acceptance on my own terms. I will not justify, excuse, explain, or plead. I am what I am, in pride and excitement.

I will follow him into any paths he chooses, however alien or dark, or blinding, and at the same time seek my own paths. I will respect myself and my work, alone and to his face. I will strive to enjoy his bed truthfully, his work critically, and our life, with all the endurance, passion, and honesty I, as a separate me, can bring to them.

And I will love him enough, and more. And that will make everything possible.

R.M.

¹
I had been working, primarily in theater and television, since the age of two, managing to extricate myself from this busy precocity when I was sixteen.

2

At the time of this letter's writing I had given up hope of reconciling my mother to my marriage, and had not spoken to her for over a year (it would be two more years before we resumed knowing one another). During the middle sixties, K. was working at a publishing house as a lexicographer, and I was doing free-lance editing and proof-reading, as referred to in this letter. The reference to my father stems from my not having met him until I was eighteen years old—and then infrequently, and disappointingly; my parents had been divorced when I was born. My maternal aunt, who had lived with my mother and me until I was twelve years old, was dying of cancer in Florida when this letter was written.

13
July
1965,
Midnight

D
EAR
K.:

This will be the first in a series of letters I've been wanting to write you for a long time. I shrink somehow from keeping a diary; it seems solipsistic or self-conscious, at least the way I would go about it, I know. And so many times I want to say things to you that I don't. Not because I can't—I really think we have an extremely rare ability and will to communicate with one another—but because the time isn't right, or the mood, or simply because the thought doesn't actually form itself until flowing out on paper. It's absurd to begin a one-sided correspondence to the person with whom one is living, I know, seeing every day, lying beside every night. Especially absurd since we so often sit and talk, long and animatedly, about everything important or unimportant, talking just as we did before we lived together, with the same earnest desperation as if one of us had to leave in a few hours. But whatever the real reason, which may only become clear to me later on, I write to you instead of to a diary or journal. Perhaps it's just the pompous thought that this medium will be more interesting to posterity. I wouldn't put it past me.

Tonight, you are sleeping, and since we're on slightly different
schedules, I'm wide awake, not quite alert or detached enough to really write or read; not lazy enough to watch television or goof off. But my mind is teeming with ghosts and realizations and ideas, unbidden and not quite welcome. That's why I write this, instead of the first draft of a poem.

I've finished proof-reading the Jo Mielziner memoir for Atheneum, which was filled with recollections of his having done the set for
Death of a Salesman
. This sent me back to the play, of course, which I've just now reread for about the fifth time, weeping again like a fool. The terrible love between Biff and Willy makes me realize how desperately I want to work with that subject matter I so fear and so desire: the awful love and struggle and noncommunication, and that same hopeless
belief
in one another—despite all the awareness of the heavy embroidery of lies that makes it possible—between my mother and myself. I think, too, of my Aunt Sally, dying slowly in Florida between her pitiable letters to me, trying to love me in some compromise between the way she knows how to love (possessiveness, gifts, guilt, harangues) and the way she somehow glimpses I want to be loved and to love (honestly, communicatively, with respect and some honor—oh, impossibly, I guess, with everyone in my life until you). I love and pity her in her little dying, and can do nothing. Nothing but go down and live with her and wait on her and love on her terms, be possessed and give up all that I have fought to learn and be. And even that would be nothing, because I couldn't give it up or hide it successfully, so that she would soon be disillusioned about the person she thinks she loves but could never understand.

Why is there still this interminable ache in me, in all of us, cut the bonds as we may, to try to love and know those of our own blood? I mourn my living mother tonight, for the more than a year we have lost of each other. I mourn my living father for the twenty years we never had of each other. I mourn myself as a torn child and adolescent, still trying feverishly to act upon that love and understanding and forgiveness that I am now wise enough to put only in a letter which may never be seen, or a poem which will. How many years do we go on using against ourselves the same knives our parents have bequeathed to us, still red with our own blood that they drew early in our lives?