Herself (49 page)

I saw too that such notes as these ought to be left in their original circularity. The silent jumps between sections seemed to me to make of themselves a kind of connective current, and the repetitions also. My contemporaries and I knew well enough what it is that “order” destroys.

Meanwhile, I trembled at what I had said of them. For whatever axes I had ground, in the end they ground me. And by now, I was on another book. An odd one, for me. Or odd in a new way.

But until well after its completion, I had no realisation of what the following pages, since transcribed, really are to it.

There are writers whose blessed perversion is not
extra
the universe which they “share” with “the rest of us,” but total. A writer like Firbank is not only eccentric to the marrowbone, though he may seem merely that, in the first freak delight of encounter. He takes us into the marrowbone. Where exists no “the rest of us,” but the same unity anyone feels when man can take us into his universe. Social and sexual distinctions do not weigh, except in laughter; the sociological or religious critic would be absurd here; delicacies and profundities create themselves according to the relationships in this world, astonishing and fresh as any art new to us is, but no more mixed and polyglot in the end than incontinently truthful art is anywhere.

A writer like Angus Wilson—who in political discussion with a stranger I have heard interject matter-of-factly “Well, I’m a homosexual, you see”—is as an observer and recorder so thoroughly upheld by a particular tradition—here the whole background of the British “class” novel, that his satire is impersonally directed outward, no more homosexual or less heterosexual than a mythical anybody’s; homosexuals in his gallery get the same shrift as everybody, and if the compassion, when it comes, is a bit directed also, that too is British to the core.

Is an American like Albee less lucky for not being centered in such a tradition, or more? He gives no affirmation to any sex, but has used the heterosexual clichés to bitter advantage. When it is complained that he is not only constrained but compelled to do his work in these terms, even to obscure or hide it there, what is really being asked of him? Is he being asked to declare a sexual bias—which is a personal affair, and to couch his work strictly in terms of whatever it is—which is an artistic one? Or is he being asked to affirm—which is a national affair as well? It seems to me, that like the rest of us, he suffers from his Americanism on all these scores, and where he can, also makes very good use of it.

By contrast, Tennessee Williams seems to me more simply a writer of a kind, much gifted with feeling, whose personal vision, whatever its sex, sometimes transcends into poetry and sometimes not—in which case it does become ridiculous. The absurdities do become sexually divisible along a line that one can after a while predict—the girls gone dippy or bitter over homo husbands thrust on their innocence, the bull-like uncles and butch husbands, and with increasingly baby-blue religiosity, the young men always assumpting toward heaven in gilt-gesso featherbeds. If Williams’ work, always heavy on the symbol and the Freudianism, now seems old fashioned, that is why—and really most why the adoration of boy-muscle seems outmoded too. Theater treatment of homosexuality has meanwhile become more liberal. But I never feel that Williams is writing of the homosexual world. From
Streetcar
on, I have felt that he is writing of “the world” in the heterosexual terms in which it couches itself to
him
. Sometimes he gives us poetic moments, a kind of intensity-to-the-left-of-feeling—rather like a radical poet in a roomful of Republican ones, certain of whose sensitivities he shares. But I have never-seen a play of his which I didn’t feel was akimbo emotionally, or that stayed with me after-theater, to be returned to—as the major intensities anywhere do. He has always made me feel that he has got “our” world squeegee, and is stuck with it. The worst of this being that the “our world” he brings out in me is a false one too. Oftenly too narrowly heterosexual by far.

I think that the heterosexual artist himself rarely sees the “breeding” world—which is basically as far as I care to define the difference—as narrowly as the consciously or secretly homosexual must. Basically, these must deny the breeding world all its implications of feeling or worth. All their satire will proportion itself toward that, and all their self-exaltation away from it. As for that part of life—death, war, taxes, money in general, and even birth—which is only peripherally sexual, or asexual, or a no-man’s-land mixture of the
comedie humaine—
they are forced by circumstance to deny that it exists nonsexually, or to castrate themselves from it; they must take a sexual stance on everything. By its nature often an hysteric one. For the world do breed—and is not altogether to be talked out of it.

At present. As food and good rivers grow scarcer, maybe sexual difference, already on its way to optional, may sink the whole frame of reference we now know, in a puree of pills. (Even now, what is a “heterosexual” writer—a man who copulates with women strictly non-anally, if not in the missionary position? Is a woman writer, after a certain mild point of subject and aura, dubiously heterosexual altogether?) Meanwhile, if the English-speaking world, and American literature in particular, has undergone a sexual revolution in the last fifty years, then it is the homosexuals who are its latest suffragettes.

Like all writers, their position toward society—intellectually, emotionally, influentially—starts from their place in it as people. And is altogether different from the suffragettes who preceded them. Women, however kept to the back stairs in the pantheons of art, are admissible to society as people, if only so far. The homosexual, as a person forced into underground alienations or flashily outsize compensating reactions, can feel closer to the categorized—to the black and the Jew. Art, however, has always accepted him as a fully participating member of at least the world of art. Where the women writers, still somewhat relegated to their end of art’s living room, must earn their way across it much as in that kind of segregated American provincial society (and with the same mixed results), the male homosexual writer’s place in the pantheon—and in the host of earthly connections which arise from that privilege—is still with the gentlemen. He may or may not also have additional “homintern” access to spheres of sympathy and influence. The female homo writer, even if a type bold enough to assert its place with the men, also instinctively tends to align herself with that “homintern,” thereby acquiring a coterie to face the world with, much as Southern women writers, linking themselves to the Southern Agrarians, or linked by the critics to that renaissance, were enabled both to escape the stigma of female, and to achieve the connections.

One pays for any connection, of course—is the usual moral tone taken. One pays in a narrowing of sympathies, in exchange for sympathy, and in a loss of autonomies important to artists—in exchange for not being literarily alone. So be it—if it is also admitted that all writers in America, and the heterosexuals as much as any, suffer from their connection with a society which in the most rigidly gross way arrogates what shall be considered male or female in people, taking no note that the antipathies which it has manufactured for itself: soft-hard, virile-weak, delicate-strong, sheltered-experienced, etc., etc., are elsewhere much more loosely defined—as in Europe even of the nineteenth century, or are partially blended or altogether reversed—as historically in Asiatic and Muslim countries everywhere. (What would be said of a flower-arranging American who spent his days in exclusively male cafés, or walking hand in hand with a male friend, meanwhile expecting his wife and her female relatives to run the family business and practical relationships? Or of a country where the practice of medicine and dentistry is more for the female, and a poet can therefore tell me “I am free to write of course, and have this beautiful house, since my wife is one of the best dentists in Manila”?) That so-allotted sex characteristics vary wildly with geography is still a matter of merely anthropological or travel interest even to the educated here—rarely entering their thoughts about themselves. And the democratic fear of acknowledging that money makes us different
really,
shuts off even the artist from freely admitting in his work that where you dig your ditch or your dough has more to do with some so-called feminine-masculine divisions of personality than human nature does—or than personality does. American society, certain portions of it, can take up sexual “looseness” for fun or freedom’s sake. Or it can learn to let fathers change diapers, for dear psychology’s sake. Or it can admit that there’s a little feminine in the best of us, and a little heterosexual in the worst of us. What it fights to the death, even on the highest intellectual levels—literary critics, say, or really male novelists—is any admission that those ingrainedly fem.-masc. activities or movements of the reason, which our lifestyle apportions as such and takes for granted—are actually “so-called.”

What these binding divisions of sexual characteristic have done to American writers goes deeper than what is in their books—because it apprehends it. Deeper even than the dreary round of fictional orgasm or bedsheet romanticism, or the use of sex as the sole revelation. (Or the near ruination of pornography—ordinarily one of life’s more aristocratic or subtly private adornments—by practicing it on a dull mass-scale.) Whatever the physicality in question, or the mind, a cloud of these stipulations obscures them. Sometimes, writers have been the greater for not knowing that nothing is new under the sun—in youth, a writer might otherwise never begin at all. But none ever draws strength from keeping to concerns defined as proper to what he or she is—except the negative strength of doing the opposite. Which turns some into narrower polemicists than their talents call for, or into stunted followers of the very opposite. But by and large, American writers have kept to being men, women, or homosexuals, as the case may be, very much in terms of what the times have told them that they are. In fact, doing what one is told, in this area, seems perhaps the primary
secondary
sexual characteristic of all Americans.

We already know how doing what society expects of the male, or overdoing it, works with those male writers who get sucked into the virility callisthenic. These are the writers, some still extant, who are doomed to hunt deer in Brooklyn, or fish for cunt in the Caribbean, or to make the cock itself their Chanticleer—all with the penis-envy of men infinitely grateful because they have got one. All because, we say, they early got hung up on Hemingway’s jockstrap. What we forget is that, prior to this, something in the society hung up him. Behind him at home was the conviction that artists were sissy (and drink and the shotgun were dashing), ahead of him even a Europe in which Freud was prying into the neuroses of art, and Mann was perpetrating his own guilty notion that art was neurosis—wasn’t any artist deserting life by not “living” it? Was art life? A
man’s
life?

Women writers in America have acted expectedly also. In the nineteenth century, women here, when not poets either hidden like Dickinson or album like Hemans and Ingelow, were journalists, to either the philosophical passions of the hour, like Margaret Fuller, or to the political ones, like Harriet Beecher Stowe. All the rest were ladies, in a three-named tradition that was to survive well past the age of Adela Rogers St. John—and never quite die. None were novelists with the breadth of experience or daring of the European Georges, or even with the formidable pomp of Mrs. Humphrey Ward. As women passed through the period of the expansion of women’s rights, they might be expected to take the right to be an artist as one of these: many did, and have, and do. But the freedom to be an artist is not granted like a vote—it is made. And women continued to make it, most of them, in terms of the sexual image allowed. In the early 1900s, before sexual taboos were broken—by men writers always remember, but
not by Americans
—the gap between what either sex could say of experience was narrower. When so much of life had to be left out of art, there was naturally less surprise or threat in the idea that the powers of women artists might be up to it. For a while, the image allowed them was actually less separate, more equal, than it has ever been since.

Cast back. To Wharton and Glasgow, and Cather. The first two, as women of means and position, were part of a society which, with its confined sexual mores, was the world of Howell and James as well. Lucky or not for all of them, the shades of sexual difference in terms of subject and language, were not as severe as for women of Twain’s day—and far less violent than in the days to come, when the major division was that women didn’t go to war, to sea, or to any of the “virile” professions. If Wharton wrote restrictedly of war, so did many of the men; in
Ethan Frome
she did try “the poor,” attempting a break from the social world rather than the sexual one. She wrote no
Golden Bowl
, but she did write a
House of Mirth
; though as a writer she always went for the circumstantial intensity over the psychological one, the sexual ground treated was much the same. Glasgow’s sexual boundaries were smaller and the experiential ones also—she went to the history and nostalgia of a tapestry past. But neither the experience expected of a writer, nor the language, had yet so exploded over here that Cabell couldn’t say of a book by Glasgow that it was so much like James it could have been written by Mrs. Wharton.

Cather was saved by “the land.” It allowed her to speak from a major vision, and for that, even from a woman, to be acceptable—more acceptable than it is now. As to sexual material per se,
A Lost Lady
is no more delicate than much writing of the era, and
My Mortal Enemy
a psychological masterpiece of great power, done without any of the overt sex which would have spoiled it (Fitzgerald was to do the same). Though small in scale, these two short works were still tied to the pioneer experience, or to the provincial one. The larger novels seem to be thinned less by reticence than by a blurred or cramped knowledge of how people are—thin in proportion to wherever “the land” is no longer artistically enough. As that vision recedes, a writer of less authority begins to appear. But as woman of her time, her consciousness that she could speak for the country, and for its cosmos, gave her the confidence to write “like a man.” To the country, she would be no more unfeminine than some of their pioneer grandmothers. And her male colleagues, whether from city, town, or open boat, still were allowed a dignity sufficient to them—as “men of letters.” The society had not yet placed them in the bind where they must defend their part of life or literature as the important whole.