Silences (53 page)

(And where there are children. . . . And where there are children. . . .)

Leechings, balks, encumbrances.

Harms.

AND YET THE TREE DID—DOES—BEAR FRUIT.

*
“Whenever a man [appeals to the womanhood emotion] he rouses in her, it is safe to say, a conflict of emotions of a very deep and primitive kind which it is extremely difficult for her to analyze or to reconcile.”

—Woolf,
Three
Guineas

*
—which, among all else, results in our being one out of twelve in recognized achievement—

**
Writer, as well as human, task.

PART THREE

CREATIVITY; POTENTIALITY. FIRST GENERATION

“Silences”—the original talk given in 1962 under the name “Death of the Creative Process”—began:

“Though I address myself only to silences in literature and the ways in which writing ceases to be, this dying and death of capacity encompasses more than literature, the arts, or even Wordsworth’s ‘widening of the sphere of human sensibility,’ or Thoreau’s
‘to affect the quality of the day: that is the highest art.’

“At a national conference on Creativity, yes there really was such a gathering, at the University of Michigan several years ago (1959 I believe), they considered (their words) ‘the emerging discovery of the tremendous, unsuspected potentialities in the creativity of man in the meaning of respect for the individual,’ and concluded:

            
Creativity was in each one of us as a small child. In children it is universal. Among adults it is nonexistent. The great question is: what has happened to this enormous and universal human capacity? That is the question of the age.

“Not many would accede to creativity as an enormous and
universal
human capacity (let alone recognize its extinction as the question of the age). I am
one of those who, in almost unbearable, based conviction, believe that it is so.

“To establish its truth incontrovertibly would require an ending to the age-old denial of enabling circumstances—because of one’s class, color, sex—which has stunted (not extinguished) most of
humanity’s creativity. Few of us have been permitted ‘the exercise of vital powers along lines of excellence in a life affording
them scope.’ ”
^*

“Silences” was an attempt, as later were “One Out of Twelve,” “Rebecca Harding Davis,” and now the rest of this book, to expand the too sparse evidence on the relationship between circumstances and creation. (All limited to only one area of recognized human achievement: written literature.)

There is another undeniable evidence.

We ourselves (writers, others in the arts, the
professions) who are the first in generations of our families and/or sex to become so.

Our different emergences into literature as circumstances permit. Remember women’s silence of centuries; the silences of most of the rest of humanity. Not until several centuries ago do women writers appear. Sons of working people, a little more than a century ago. Then black writers (1950 was the watershed
year). The last decades, more and more writer-mothers. Last of all, women writers, including women of color, of working class origin, perhaps one generation removed; rarest of all, the worker-mother-writer.

And all, although in increasingly significant numbers, still exceptional: statistically rare.
^**

Born a generation earlier, in the circumstances for their class, and/or race, and/or sex, no
Chekhov, Brontë sisters, Emily Dickinson, Thomas Hardy, Maxim Gorky, no D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Sean O’Casey, no Franz Kafka, Albert Camus—the list comes long now: say, for a sampling, no A. E. Coppard, Charles Olson, Richard Wright, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Joyce Carol Oates, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, etc. etc. etc. etc.

                  
What they came into by virtue of their
birth, we have had to earn at the cost of years and our youth
.

—Anton Chekhov

                  
However, it was my poverty and not my will that consented to be beaten. It takes two or three generations to do what I tried to do in one
.

—Hardy’s
Jude the Obscure

Of the first generation . . .

A phenomenon of our time, the increasingly significant number of first (or second) generation of our
people to aspire to the kinds of uses of capacity possible through the centuries only for few human beings of privilege—among these, to write.

Marginal. Against complex odds.
^▴
Exhausting (though exhilarating) achievement.

This the barest of indications as to vulnerabilities, balks, blights; reasons for lessenings and silencings:
^*

The education, most often gotten part-time,
over years and with difficulty; seldom full-time for absorption in it. Often inferiority of it. Intimidations.
^**

Anxieties, shamings. “Hidden injuries of class.” Prevailing attitudes toward our people as “lower class,” “losers,” (they just didn’t have it); contempt for their lives and the work they do (“the manure theory of social organization” is what W. E. B. Du Bois called it).

The blood
struggle for means: one’s own development so often
at the cost of others giving themselves up for us or of our own being able to help our kin. “Love, tenderness, responsibility, would only have meant pain, suffering, defeat, the repetition of my mother’s life for another generation” (Agnes Smedley).

Likelihood of part-time, part-self writing. Having to support self by means other than writing.
Problems of getting to writing at all. Problems of roots; ties, separation.

Camus’s “loving with despair.” Sense of possibilities not come to; the latent, the unfulfilled, the gargoyled, in our kin.

Coercions to “pass”; to write with the attitude of, and/or in the manner of, the dominant. Little to validate our different sense of reality, to help raise one’s own truths, voice, against the prevalent.

Problems of what Chekhov (a first generation) called “squeezing the serf out of one’s soul.”

Meagerest of indications only.

Class—problems of first generation—its relationship to works of literature: the great unexamined.

            
Literature is no one’s private ground; literature is common ground. Let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves. It is thus that English
literature will survive if commoners and outsiders like ourselves make that country our own country, if we teach ourselves how to read and how to write, how to preserve, and how to create.

—Virginia Woolf

*
From the tape transcription.

**
The “only,” the occasional, the tiny handful of exceptions writing before, do not alter these datings.

*
Some of what has been written here of the writer-woman
is parallel; clues (and many writer-women are first generation of their families, women or men, to write).

**
Little teaching of writing as process to fortify against measuring one’s earlier work against that of established writers. (No anthology of the work that admired writers were doing
their
earlier years.) Little reinforcement to the V. Woolf conception that if writing “explains much and
tells much” it is valid. Little to rouse confident sense of one’s own source material—the importance of what one has to bring into literature that is not there now, and one’s right to say it.

▴
SILENCES
—II,
P.
146

Excerpts from

LIFE IN THE IRON MILLS;

or,

THE KORL WOMAN

by Rebecca Harding Davis

                  
The Atlantic Monthly, April 1861

A cloudy day: do you know what that is in a town of iron-works? The sky sank down before dawn, muddy, flat, immovable. The air is thick, clammy with the breath of crowded human beings. It stifles me. I open the window, and, looking out, can scarcely see through
the rain the grocer’s shop opposite, where a crowd of drunken Irishmen are puffing Lynchburg tobacco in their pipes. I can detect the scent through all the foul smells ranging loose in the air.

The idiosyncrasy of this town is smoke. It rolls sullenly in slow folds from the great chimneys of the iron-foundries, and settles down in black, slimy pools on the muddy streets. Smoke on the wharves,
smoke on the dingy boats, on the yellow river,—clinging in a coating of greasy soot to the house-front, the two faded poplars, the faces of the passers-by. The long train of mules, dragging masses of pig-iron through the narrow street, have a foul vapor hanging to their reeking sides. Here, inside, is a little broken figure of an angel pointing upward from the mantel-shelf; but even its wings are
covered with smoke, clotted and black. Smoke everywhere! A dirty canary chirps desolately in a cage beside me. Its dream of green fields and sunshine is a very old dream,—almost worn out, I think.

From the back-window I can see a narrow brick-yard sloping down to the river-side, strewed with rain-butts and tubs. The river, dull and tawny-colored,
(la belle rivière!)
drags itself sluggishly along,
tired of the heavy weight of boats and coal-barges. What wonder? When I was a child, I used to fancy a look of weary, dumb appeal upon the face of the negro-like river slavishly bearing its burden day after day. Something of the same idle notion comes to me to-day, when from the street-window I look on the slow stream of human life creeping past, night and morning, to the great mills. Masses
of men, with dull, besotted faces bent to the ground, sharpened here and there by pain or cunning; skin and muscle and flesh begrimed with smoke and ashes; stooping all night over boiling caldrons of metal, laired by day in dens of drunkenness and infamy; breathing from infancy to death an air saturated with fog and grease and soot, vileness for soul and body. . . .