Silences (30 page)

                  
That I am he

                  
On whom Thy tempests fell all night.

—George Herbert, 1593–1633

Censorship
Silences
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Immoral! Immoral!

            
Immoral! Immoral! Under this cloak hide the vices of wealth as well as the vast, unspoken blackness of poverty and ignorance and between them must walk the little novelist, choosing neither truth nor beauty, but some half-conceived phase of life that bears no honest resemblance to either the whole of nature or to man.

—Theodore Dreiser,
1902

Having to Censor Self

            
If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people. As the nineteenth century wore on, the writers knew that they were crippling themselves, diminishing their material, falsifying their object. “We are condemned,” Stevenson wrote, “to avoid half the life that passes us by.” What books Dickens could
have written had he been
permitted! Think of Thackeray as unfettered as Flaubert or Balzac! What books I might have written myself.

—Virginia Woolf

Work Withheld:
Not published in one’s lifetime (Mark Twain); or held for years waiting for a changed atmosphere (E.M. Forster:
Maurice).
Has other work by other writers been put aside, or kept from burgeoning, because of fear that its content would deny its being published?

Publishers’ Censorship:
The silencing—or being driven to the novel form—of story or novella writers because “there is no market for stories.”

Political Silences
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Involvement:
When political involvement takes priority, though the need and love for writing go on. Every freedom movement has, and has had, its roll of writers participating at the price of their writing.

The Complete
Silencing by Governments

Lives of the Poets

              
Otto-René Castillo was born

              
in Quezaltenango

                      
Guatemala

              
in 1936 and was killed there

              
in March of 1967 while fighting

              
with the Revolutionary

              
Armed Forces.

                      
The poem

              
by Javier Heraud, written

          
    
in 1963 in La Paz

                      
Bolivia,

              
was one of the last by the poet

              
before his death.

                      
Peruvian,

              
he was killed

              
at the age of 21

              
while fighting for the

                      
liberation

              
of his country.

              
Leonel Rugama, another young

                      
Latin American

              
martyr, was assassinated

              
in January 1970,

              
in Managua

                      
Nicaragua.

              
The house

              
where he and two comrades hid

              
was surrounded by 1500

              
national guardsmen and the battle

              
lasted 4 hours. Before

              
they went in

              
to finish him
off, Rugama answered

              
the demand that he surrender

              
with “
¡Que se rinde

                      
tu madre!”

              
Carlos Maria Gutierrez is

                      
Uruguayan,

              
well known

              
as a revolutionary journalist.

              
Diario del Cuartelo

              
came directly out of a

                      
prison

          
    
experience in 1969

              
and is his first

              
and only book of poems. His first

              
and only book

                      
of poems.
*

Political Silences. A woman form:
^▴

Anna Tsetsaeyva, also known as Marina Cvetaeva, the Russian poet, in exile

            
It is my notebook that keeps me above the surface of the waters.

                  
. . . It will soon be Christmas. To tell you the truth, I’ve been driven so hard by life that I feel nothing. Through these years (1917–1927) it was not my mind that grew numb, but my soul. An astonishing observation: it is precisely for feeling that one needs time, and not for thought. Thought is a flash of lightning, feeling is a ray from the most distant of stars. Feeling requires leisure; it cannot
survive under fear. A basic example: rolling 1½ kilos of small fishes in flour, I am able to think, but as for feeling—no. The smell is in the way. The smell is in the way, my sticky hands are in the way, the squirting oil in the way,
the fish
are in the way, each one individually and the entire 1½ kilos as a whole. Feeling is apparently more demanding than thought. It requires all or nothing.
There is nothing I can give to my own [feeling]: no time, no quiet, no solitude. I am always in the presence of others, from 7 in the morning till 10 at night, and by 10 at night I am so exhausted—what feeling can there be? Feeling requires
strength.
No, I simply sit down to mend and darn things: Mur’s, S.’s, Alya’s, my own. 11 o’clock. 12 o’clock. 1 o’clock. S. arrives by the last [subway] train,
a brief chat, and off to bed, which means lying in bed with a book until 2 or 2:30. The books are good, but I could have written even better ones, if only . . .

“The knife of the perfectionist attitude in art and life.”

This haunting sentence, not in the original talk, is from
What the Woman Lived
(1973), letters by the consummate poet, Louise Bogan—to me one of our most grievous “hidden silences.”
(Woman, economic, perfectionist causes—all inextricably intertwined.)

Silences of the Marginal
^▴

                  
The writer of a class, sex, color still marginal in literature, and whose coming to voice at all against complex odds is exhausting achievement.

“Only eleven [black writers] in the hundred years since 1850 have published novels more than twice.”
*

Nineteen fifty
was evidently the watershed year. Since 1960,
any single year
has seen more than nine novels by black writers that are their second, third, or fourth books.

They are reaping the (hard-won) benefits of having been born in the more favorable nineteen thirties, forties, fifties, instead of into their parents’ generations. They grew into a time of rising economic levels (still low, but for more,
above an all-conditioning economic imperative); ever higher levels of literacy and education (however painfully gotten); shorter work hours; great mass migrations seeking more humane conditions of life; visible struggle; and, with the fifties, a resurgence of black consciousness—all providing a more enabling soil and climate.

Bone did not take into account fiction privately published, nor did
he have the advantage of recent bibliographies (such as those by Rush, Myers, Arata:
Black American Writers,
1973) which disclose a wealth of writers, most of them born since 1920—and indicating eloquently what was silenced in the generations before—(and their own generation)—(“lives that never came to writing”).

These bibliographies also indicate how vulnerable nearly all (especially first-generation
writers) were to lessenings and silencings; revealing numbers of poems and stories that never came to books—and long interims between works.
Marks of all marginal writers.

They do not, except by inference, reveal “the complex odds.” No one has as yet written
A Room of One’s Own
for writers, other than women, still marginal in literature. Nor do any bibliographies exist for writers whose origins
and circumstances are marginal. Class remains the greatest unexamined factor.

“The sacrifice of talent, in pieces, to preserve its essential value”
^▴