Herself (53 page)

The psychic history of women artists since their so-called civil or psychological emancipation should one day be a book itself—by that time hopefully to be written in terms of its significance to the society itself—and always remembering that the history of art is nothing except as it attaches first to individuals. Meanwhile, watching the recent women of American writing, recalling the work of others like Stafford and Boyle (at least one of whose short novels is Laurentian) one seems to see a whole generation of marvelously endowed women, not holding their breath—which contrarily pours forth in a unity of language and sensibility that can arrive of itself at the small masterpiece—but holding still. In one way or another.

One might think that as heirs of so recent a civil victory as the vote, they might have taken up their political responsibilities, not literally maybe, but in terms of the energy with which it was fought for. But like American women in general, they have not much done this—Hellman in the theater, Rukeyser in poetry—but in fiction little to compare with the roaming conscience of the men. Physically, they were kept from the wars, for one thing, and this had its effect on them; they accepted the image given them, and forgot that experience-of-itself is not art, or can be countered by
other
experience. Saved from the virility disease of the men writers, they abjured those excesses of the language and of the ridiculous which went with it. Prose, in its many relationships—to poetry sometimes, but to the peasantry too, or to the locutions of a blended middle society—in their hands seemed to attain its true directional force. And became their forte.

Meanwhile, publication was no problem but sometimes might be a gift horse; avoiding the slick like any artist, they would still find the high-fashion mags (then foraging the arts for art-chic) more tenderly open to them, always eager to encourage their talent for minutiae—and to print whatever they wrote “about women.” Some, like Djuna Barnes and Anais Nin, seemed to “come from abroad” even when they were here, always expatriate, not from the country but from the image it cast upon them. Others faded, still writing, in the magazines of taste, which were always in the market for any “fine” writer who could write of reality
objectively
(that is, from a
recording
sensibility but not a
judging
one) and would never get in a fight about saying “fuck.”

But it was not “style” which made them mandarin. Reading much fiction by American women of the ’40s and ’50s (and of the men who imitated them, particularly in the “little” reviews), one can’t help but be struck by the droning of the sensibility, on and on. (Most writers dispense with their own past work by dropping it out of their consciousness as a means of getting on to the next—and I am one of these—but on occasion when I have had to refer to certain stories, it is that tone against which my eye screws up, finding it unreadable.) One of the great “tones” of literature, of course—the sensibility—and perhaps common to most writing, but when pursued
en masse
like this, one wonders why. (And why it
is
a sensibility which seems to be standing still—
en masse.)
Partly it derives of course from the general nineteenth-century upswing of the individual. But a still later part of modern sensibility-writing comes out of the Zolaesque realism which was to treat even the individual as an object “found” in space. And for some women artists of the time, this has been ideal.

They are not going to be trapped into speaking for women only, or for any division of women—and in this, like any artist who avoids category, they are right. They are going to be objective, with a coolth the men can’t manage, maybe—and long after the men in many instances have given coolth up. (Negro sociologists of the era, who hid their blackness under that everyman language, are the same.) Fleeing above all from the image that the society projects upon women artists, such a writer is not going to write, even in the deeper sense, as a woman—i.e., from her own preferential experience. She knows her own capacity, for the universal, and will not have it contaminated with the particular—if the particularity is feminine.

Looking abroad, she can see what has happened, even in Europe, to women who do: de Beauvoir, tied in the inimitable French way to the coattails of a man. Lessing to the coattails of psychiatry, and the vaginal reflex. She herself has had her mental hysterectomy early, and avoided that. She is going to be a pure artist, i.e., a sexless one. (And since male writers of the time, like Hemingway and Faulkner, abjured criticism, leaving the impure or second-rate to practise it, she too will thus cut herself off from that philistine power.) In art, she will speak for anything but the literal female experience or female part in experience; she will not use any of her sexual power at all (much less in the extravagant manner of some men); she will be the angel-artist, with celestially muted lower parts.

Reading back among those wondrously endowed women of roughly the second quarter of the century, one glimpsed how they had perhaps helped to eunuch themselves. Powerfully gifted in eye, ear, and hand, they had self-willedly kept themselves artistically dead from the waist down. Thinking themselves to be countering that image which the society and the male artists had projected upon them, they had in their way really accepted it. And in wherever it was complained that their work remained beautifully “minor” or “mandarin,” this may have come not from their womanhood, but from their lack of it. They had accepted their envy after all. Or had belittled their experience, or hunted it in male terms. To say this is however an understanding of their art, not a belittling. Art is a series of limitings; half of any work is the leaving-out. One of the great elements of form is the presence of the absence of something. From age to age, from writer to writer, this changes.

In Nabokov’s work, for instance, the critique of literature was once more allowed to take place in the body of the work itself, as in ancient days it sometimes had. Long since, in America, critics and journalists had reserved critique for themselves, allotting novelists et al. only either the direct dramatic effect in which meaning must remain implicit, or the tensile powers of an ambiguity in which meaning could be trapped. (In neither case must it be stated—in the ’50s, my friend Ken Stuart once said he’d heard a rumor that
The New Yorker
intended publishing all the endings of its stories in a supplementary volume.) In “pure” art of the era, formal resolutions were gauche, and “moral” observations of any kind, declassé. As editorial parlance had it, “author comment” was out. And in the curious misapplications of that policy, anything in a novel or a story which could not be made to seem the comment of the persona themselves, was “author.” Ideally also, persona should make their comments as part of the “action”—as coming from characters so unaware, or so far immersed in life, that they could never make an intellectual or meditative comment upon it. That would spoil the “pure” effect. (Vide the work of O’Hara.)

Life-in-the-raw, as these literati saw it, could not be meditative too. (In itself, what a litry conception!) The voluminous, ramshackle world-of-comment of the Russian nineteenth-century novel, was momentarily over. Subtly too the reader was downgraded, or divided, into those who read for art’s sake, and those who read for critique divorced as much as possible from an art to which it was very possibly superior—since it made the moral judgments. The literary artist, himself in flight from either church-pamphleteering or happy-ending art, found himself ruled out from direct statement. (As well as somehow politically committed to popularist readers—when a “review” intellectual asked me “Who do you write for?”, my answer, that I visualized a reader sentient and intelligent enough for anything—was taken to be arrogance.) Concurrently, pure prose artists, “imaginative” ones, did not “write” criticism (which high as it was on the litry value-scale, was too low for them), meaning they couldn’t expect to have all the art and the power too, or to be on both sides of the fence—as James and Flaubert, Tolstoi and Turgenev had been. As writers, somewhere in their mutterings, always are.

All this was to change in a world not only troubled, but media-aware, and rawly or not—meditative. With science morally discredited, God in trouble too, the artists were looked up to by a materialistic world as interpreters from the one remaining medium which had no axe to grind. (Whether it did so or not.) And some writers of course had never abjured statement. Choice of subject is indeed a form of statement. On literature.
Pale Fire
moreover took in all the antic semantic of some critique, made shifts between poetry and prose (Nigel Dennis, in
Cards of Identity
had already included a poetry sequence very similarly), and made it plain that any of its critique of literature belonged there, being in its turn a critique of life. Pure critics would praise it, not yet seeing what prerogatives had been snatched from them—and some writers would not see what rights had been returned to them.

Lolita
, wherein sex, however lepidopterously inspired, could be seen as a put-on directed at a sicklily material American gas-station civilisation, was a bonus for everybody. It was hilarious, and done in that nihil, non-person style of character, that rolling-stone rhythm of action, which was being called black comedy—nobody’s yet defined white. Above all, it was sex with intellect—which the quarterly-review porns hadn’t been able to make hilarious. Only by the way, it was a lovely work of art. In which the statement—in spite of all the scathing minutiae—was not strictly direct, the ambiguities pointing like a porcupine’s quills. Heterosex—America’s youthful version of it and denial of perversion in that, was somewhere being laughed at—or if sex with a barely nubile girl was perversion (Islam would not say so) then how natural! Alignments were being changed or crossed, both in the “subject” and the use of it. Sex was once more being used as a critique of life, both from within the core of the work and peripherally, at a point where the work of art itself was also the critical commentary (often of itself). Sex was the metaphor and the moral weapon—but the moral judgments made were never about the sex itself.

Those were as absent as in any scientific account of the stages of the butterfly.

Meanwhile, coming up again from the left: Sex Three.

There is no purely homosexual literature—once it becomes literature. Any more than a novel of note is ever “about” something,
on
one subject, or in any sense an investigative circling of the fields of fact. (In the way that a helpful reviewer tabbed Cozzens’s
Guard of Honor
as “the best novel about the Air Force.”) Values, the minute spoken of, derive from others—femaleness is never paid so much literal definition as at a drag ball. And the more a work of art spreads and runs into itself, like a sphere or a double helix or a polyfaceted net, the better it is. But one may see sexual focus, or proclivity, or wavering. Or the mirror-writing which would sink all sex in a vague sea of love or hate. We can never avoid seeing the selfness of a writer—what he thinks it is, and what he uses it for. Or what he sees as the objects of his hate, and uses it against. Sex in D. H. Lawrence is a hatred against, once one sees it outside the rosy penumbra of what it is for. It has sublimated—i.e., made the turn upward or outward from self-hate—to a propounded social usefulness. Just so, the Gidean self-hatred double-turns at the world which denies it, (as heterosexual guilt did after Freud). We begin to have books in which the dominant meetings and partings of people flow toward the homosexual ideal as clearly as old-fashioned love stories once flowed toward marriage. Where the old Yin and Yang sexual oppositions are as clearly no longer dominant—or are repellent or ridiculous. (Or old hat—and non-chic.) Or where the queer is no longer a member of a thieves’ carnival, or an underworld. Or where, like everybody else nowadays, he becomes middle class, with as much right to make social criticism as anybody, and like all minorities, with a sharp tongue and eye for it.

In the Burroughs’ world of
Nova Express
, the sex that is natural is homosex, but the battles between good and bad, paranoid-real and sane-real, still take place in a romantic no-man’s-land of the spirit, countered by terrible physical honesties, always presided over by the cloud-cuckoo metaphor of the drug. The struggle is a spiritual one, in language which is mystical, or even built upon a theology which is traceable from book to book, and the end impression is of a struggle unabashedly toward some ideal which is “loved.” Sex falls back, secondary, before the daemon of the drug. Lyrism, Byronic grandiosities, stagey asides, all have a place in this grim arena—and a humor like the chuckle of a prompter from below. It is proper. This is the cops-and-robbers posturing of the soul. Whose very existence admitted, whose Utopia promised, dignifies all. Society in recognizable terms scarcely enters.

Purdy’s world and its malevolencies are altogether more concrete. They are staged in the mess men and women have made of the social world, by a writer who at first seems tough-minded in all directions. The manner is a mixture: Congreve without epigram, a Restoration esprit with a fondness for typifying, mock-naming, and high-jinks in high places, and a rodomontade which stalks (goblets!), but also has a nose for the absurdities of the lower middle, and, a special sarcastical talent for describing the city strata as seen through the shrewd, traveled eyes of once-beglamored Southern Illinois.

The game here is not grandeur, but the world
coccu
in which nobody’s redemption is urged. Specifically the “American” world—but as target of an objectivity which could go anywhere. Clearly the author’s objectivity is not the usual “ours,” but it is well defined. Is he really crying a pox on all our houses, his aim to cleanse the world of its constitutional horrors and cants? Or is his satire sprung from something far more parochial—the distaste of men who bug, for men and women who breed? Who’s getting
coccu
here? And how?

Certainly the sexual symbology “we” are used to has changed, and the social structure with it. Here are no families based even in the beginning on the breeding purpose; we are in some outland of Babitry, of which the people here are the detritus. Couples are composed not of the two “straight” sexes which have classically set themselves up as the center of things, but of all the oddments of the
comedie humaine
: men live with grandmothers who are rich, and bring their men home to mother; wives are elderly with income, with itinerant spouses from the heartland and not hip yet; or are Griseldas too farcically enslaved to give their husbands the status of sadist or pimp. Men living with wives slide off expectedly toward other men, as toward a norm. Cabot Wright sets about raping five hundred women, in a gagstyle romp aimed at American heterosex—a one-man gang-bang in reverse.