Just As I Thought (28 page)

Reading Pirozhkova’s memoir, I feel I have come to know something of the man, to see Babel and his work in some common brilliant light of the hopeful Revolution, unending love of
the
people as well as people, darkened at the edges by fate, the busy encroachment of evil. But Antonina Pirozhkova will tell you the whole story. Though she lived only seven years inside it, hardly an hour escaped her loving attention, and then her memory. He is, as she was determined, restored to us—a great writer, a good man.

—1996

About Donald Barthelme: Some Nearly Personal Notes

I have trouble writing about Don because I have refused his death. So far as the rememberer in me is determined, he’s still in Texas. I was afraid he’d get stuck there, what with the working presence of so much family and his responsibilities at the University of Houston. This is not a joke. It’s called denial and is somehow tangled up with anger. One of the results of his presumed death is the bookstore problem. If
Sixty Stories
is in, then you can’t find
Forty Stories.
This may be because of the famous crisis in shelf space, the press of time, the longing of readers to rest for a couple of years in simple sensational material, easier language. And what of
The King,
that last dreamed history of war and love and language—all that generosity and gallantry.

Still, proving him alive, there are brilliant young people laboriously imitating him. Why shouldn’t they? Young people listen, or ought to, as they begin their work, for some breathtaking voice that will help them open their own throats. At first, of course, it may sound like a lot of coughing. In any event, that imitation is really not possible. Don’s imagination had spent some time living alongside the arts of painting, architecture, philosophy, music. Then he added a journalistic interest in the day—I mean the immediate morning-to-night American day. His language, invented along a syntactical line between Texas and New York. The fact is, he could have been only clever, and he
was
clever, but his intelligence ran harder and deeper than his wit.

He was in his life and work a citizen. That means he paid attention to and argued the life of his street, his city (New York or Houston), his country. He never played a game of literary personalities. If he organized an event, a reading—as he did, for instance, at the 1986 PEN Conference, he stood back, had others present their work. He wasn’t the least bit modest, he was anxious, he was courteous.

He was always worried in the very act of hilarious opposition. There was sadness in our lightest conversations, across that literature of his. We laugh, but the poem in the prose is dark.

If you were a female person, it’s perfectly true that he’d often meet you with a sort of attentive bossiness, which is the Southern male’s ingrained behavior with women. It was really an awful pain in the neck. A regional problem and serious.

He was, according to students, an extraordinary teacher, rigorous, picky, not mean—but a teaser. Sometimes. “What did he really mean by that?” a student whispered to me once when I visited his class. “You can write anything you want but you may not mention the weather,” he told his classes at City College in New York and at the University of Houston. The weather, the very geography of platitude. Still, he knew about those easy clichés. He knew their ancient usefulness and perseverance. He grabbed them, gave them a good half turn to laugh a social truth into a sentence—he was certainly a sentence maker.

He was my neighbor and a true friend.
This
kind of friend. One day in 1973 he crossed the street to talk to me on my stoop. “Grace,” he said, “you now have enough stories for a book.” (My last book had been published in 1959.) “Are you sure? I kind of doubt it,” I said. “No, you do—go on upstairs and see what you can find in your files—I know I’m right.” I spent a week or so extracting stories from folders. He looked at my list at dinner at his house. “You’re missing at least two more,” he said. “You’ve got to find them now. I’ll wait here.”

Many others have stories about that kindness to colleagues. We had a sad political parting, which lasted about a year after the 1986 New York International PEN Conference. He considered his position long-term, overriding that year’s key speaker. He thought me disloyal and was angry. I was never angry at him, partly because political opposition is more natural to me, but mostly because I never didn’t love his fine tragic heart and brilliant work. He smoked and drank in the manner of American writers (his only untransformed cliché) and died of the cancerous sorrow of these addictions. His very breath which made those perfect sentences tormented then broken.

—1990

Thinking about Barbara Deming

At the Friends’ Meeting House a couple of weeks after Barbara Deming died, we gathered to remember her for one another, to take some comfort and establish her continuity in our bones.

Later our friend Blue gave me two little wool hats assigned to me by Barbara as she worked those last weeks at dying. That work included the distribution of the things of her life, how to be accurate and fair in the giving, how not to omit anyone of that beloved and wide-webbed community. I imagine that when she came to my name she thought, Grace needs wool hats up there in the North where the body’s warmth flies up and through the thinning hair of her head. Besides, I noticed that she likes little wool hats.

“This too,” Blue said, and gave me an envelope. In it were shards and stones gathered from the rubble of Vietnamese towns in ’67 or ’68. On the envelope, these shaky letters were written: “endless love.” Nothing personal there, not “
with
endless love.” The words were written waveringly, with a dying hand, on paper that covered bits and pieces of our common remembrance and understanding of another people’s great suffering. I thought Barbara was saying, Send those words out, out out into the airy rubbly meaty mortal fact of the world, endless love, the dangerous transforming spirit.

*   *   *

Prison Notes
is the story of two walks undertaken to help change the world without killing it. Barbara Deming was an important member of both. Twenty years of her brave life lie between them. Both walks were about connectedness, though the first began as a peace walk in 1964—from Quebec to Guantanamo, the American army base in Cuba. In Georgia, it became impossible to demonstrate for peace without addressing the right of all citizens, black and white, to walk together down any street in any city of this country. Before the events in Albany, Georgia, had ended—the jailing, the fasts, the beatings—the peace movement and the civil-rights movement had come to know themselves deeply related, although there are still people in both movements who do not understand this flesh-and-blood connection.

The second walk, in 1983, began in the city of Seneca, New York. The walk, organized by the Seneca Women’s Peace Encampment, continued through upstate towns in order to reach the huge missile base in Romulus. Its purpose was, in fact, to connect the struggles of women against patriarchal oppression at home and at work to the patriarchal oppression which is military power—endless war.

In both cases the walks were bound by nonviolent discipline.

Both walks were interrupted by hatred and rage. The walkers in ’64 and again in ’83 had to decide whether to continue on their lawful way or accede to the demand of the police chief (or sheriff) to take a different, less visible route; to leave the screaming, cursing men and women with their minds set in a national cement of race hatred, Jew hatred, woman hatred, lesbian hatred, or to insist on the citizens’ responsibility to use democratic rights—not just talk about them.

In both cases the walkers decided: We will not attack anyone, we will be respectful, we will not destroy anything, we will walk these streets with our nonviolent, sometimes historically informative, signs and leaflets. We may be pacifists, but we are not passivists. In both cases a confrontation occurred. It was not sought by the walkers, but it was accepted by them.

On that first long journey, men and women walked and went to jail together. Women alone took the second shorter walk, and fifty-four were jailed. Barbara was among them. It was her last action, and those who were arrested with her are blessed to have lived beside her strong, informed, and loving spirit for those few days. That difference between the two walks measures a development in movement history and also tells the distance Barbara traveled in those twenty years.

The direction her life took was probably established by the fact that her first important love was another woman, a hard reality that is not discussed in
Prison Notes
(this is probably the reason she insisted that her letter to Norma Becker be included in any reissue of that book). This truth about herself took personal political years in which she wrote stories and poems and she became a fine artist who suffered because she was unable to fully use the one unchangeable fact of her life—that she was a woman who loved women.

As a writer myself, I must believe that Barbara’s attention to the “other” (who used to be called the stranger) was an organic part of her life as an artist—the writer’s natural business is a long stretch toward the unknown life. All Barbara’s “others” (the world’s “others,” too), the neighbor, the cop, the black woman or man, the Vietnamese, led her inexorably to the shadowed lives of women, and finally to the unknown humiliated lesbian, herself.

It was hard when this knowledge forced her to separate her life and work from other comrades, most of whom believed themselves eternally connected to her. “Why leave us now?” friends cried out in the pages of
WIN
magazine. “Now, just when we have great tasks.” She explained: “Because I realize that just as the black life is invisible to white America, so I see now my life is invisible to you.” Of course
she
was not the separator.
They
had been, the friends who wrote, saying, “We know it’s okay to be a woman,” but hated to hear the word “feminist” said again and again. She stubbornly insisted that they recognize Woman, and especially Lesbian, as an oppressed class from which much of the radical world had separated itself—some for ideological reasons, some with a kind of absentminded “We’ll get to that later.” (And many did.)

Of course she never separated herself from the struggles against racism and militarism. She integrated them into her thinking. As she lived her life, she made new connections which required new analyses. And with each new understanding, she acted, “clinging to the truth,” as she had learned from Gandhi, offering opposition as education and love as a way to patience.

The long letters that Barbara began to write after her terrible automobile accident in ’71 have become books. They are studious, relentless in argument; she seems sometimes in these letters to be lifting one straw at a time from a haystack of misunderstanding to get to a needle of perfect communication stuck somewhere at the bottom. At the same time she had developed a style which enabled her to appear to be listening to her correspondent while writing the letter. In our last conversations (by phone), she explained that she had decided to discontinue treatment, the agonizing, useless treatment for her ovarian cancer. She had decided, she said, to die. “I’m happy now, I’m serene and I want to die in that serenity. I don’t want to die in a chaos of numbness and nausea.”

She left the hospital and went home to Sugarloaf Key to be with her companion, Jane Gapen, and the women of that community. To be present when friends came to visit. They came long distances to say goodbye, to stay a couple of days, to be part of the ceremonies of farewell and passage.

In the end she taught us all something about dying. I thank her for that last lesson and I have written here in the present tense a few other things I learned from her before those last days.

*   *   *

Learning from Barbara Deming:

First: She’s a listener.

So you can learn something about paying attention.

Second: She’s stubborn.

So you can learn how to stand, look into the other’s face, and not run.

Third: She’s just.

So you can learn something about patience.

Fourth: She loves us—women, I mean—and speaks to the world.

So you can learn how to love women and men.

—1985

Feelings in the Presence of the Sight and Sound of the Bread and Puppet Theater

ADMIRATION

Oh! Ah! The gorgeousness     the solemn size     the humorous disparities

HAPPINESS

Sheer happiness     just plain happiness

RESTFULNESS

In some of the long slow pieces often of holy intention—rest—the spirit—also the body rests inside the event the work-with room and permission for absence. The gathering of knowledge at the “five senses’ entry to the soul”—so with rest comes thought—time—room for thinking
during
the work not only after it.

ARTISTIC INSPIRATION

Why not speak the truth directly? Just speak out! Speak to! Why not?

POLITICAL INSPIRATION

Why not speak the truth directly? Just speak out! Speak up! Speak to! Why not?

CORROBORATION

Yes! That’s just what’s happening.

ENVY

Because the work is so useful the courage of its usefulness in a long period when usefulness was mocked Envy as an artist for the beauty and usefulness of the huge puppet figures like legends out of history the gray women of suffering the ridiculous evil Uncle Fatso the lovely oxen turning round and round in the dance of silent beasts the white deer on the hill under the red ball of the sun the high birds bravely carried that have flown before and after us on our demonstrations and have waited fluttering in the wind outside the jails of New York Vermont Washington.