Herself (11 page)

Now, here I stop. What am I doing in this “auto” of a book? Under the flag of a prefix that from “auto-erotic” to “automation” always seems to signify the worst side of the self. In the column of “autos” in the
Shorter Oxford
at my side, I don’t find much to salve that suspicion, rather some sinister confirmations of it that are new to me. “Autofacture,” or self-making. “Autolatry,” or self-worship. “Autonoetic,” there’s a nice one: self-perceiving! But followed by “autophagous”—self devouring. Sweetened again by “Autophoby”—a fear of referring to oneself. “Autophony” gives me pause—“observation of the resonance of the practitioner’s own voice in auscultation.” Also “Autopserin”—“a patient’s own virus administered homeopathically in cases of itch.” Is that what I’m after?

Buried among the listings, I find a familiar, a risky comfort. I am making an Autonym—“a book published under the author’s own name.” This time written against the author’s usual habit of thinking: that a writer best ignores the process of writing, that a reader best ignores the private life of these, both of them trembling only in the presence of the work, to which belongs the honor and the scrutiny.

Does a writer ever see his own
oeuvre
? I hope not; that will be the
Ave atque vale
of a shade. We don’t laboriously and cannily construct such a totality, or even envision it; we accumulate it. In America, the European concept of
oeuvre
, which compounds a time with a single history, expecting a teleological goal from the writer, and serious language-worship from everybody—is still not admitted. An
oeuvre
is a body of work which, like a true body, interacts with itself and with its own growth. We here in America are not allowed the sweet sense of growing them while in life; even after death, the obituary quickly picks over the works for “what will last.”

Yet if a writer’s work has a shape to it—and most have a repetition like a heartbeat—the
oeuvre
will begin to construct him.

In 1952, the Guggenheim Foundation gave me some money to get up and go. That’s the way I wanted it. Applying, I describe myself as still a half-time writer wanting to be full-time, eager to get out of my country for a year, in order to see it from outside. I want to sit and think, and I want to sit and think in Europe. I warn them that though I won’t be able to write during such a time, it would all come out later. Candor has kept me young and foolish beyond my years; this time it may have helped. But when the money comes, I realize that I can only get away for the eight months the children can be in boarding school. I go to New York, to the Guggenheim offices, for advice.

“What do the other women you have given writing fellowships do,” I ask “when they have children?” I don’t expect a blueprint of how to proceed under the onus of the award (for that it half is). I’m groping for the assurance that other women had done what I am going to do—have left their families for a working period, or a period important to the work, just like any man. … Already, being a writer had given me certain freedoms, which though I worked at home may have been only those of any working mother, but I was confused on this, and so were my friends. … Guilty or not, I am going of course, but it will help if I am told that in the fellowship of artists, female or not, this is ordinary. “Come to think of it,” Jim Mathias says, “I don’t know as we’ve had any women Fellows in Creative Writing who have children.” We tally the ones who come to mind. That is so.

I know too well what I think of this to discourse on it now; we all do. But in those beginning years I was often to be the only family woman among serious writers and other artists and this had its effects. At almost my first editorial lunch, I hear a famous woman fiction-editor of the day whisper to my agent “But she’s so
normal
!” and want to snarl back
Naht so normal as all that!,
maybe meanwhile hacking off an ear to drop in her shrimp. Or at least giving her a Lesbian goose under the table. It seems to me that I am mad enough for artistic purposes; conversely, as I get to know artists in all fields, they often seem—particularly the best ones—proportionately in better control of their madness than the general population.

But it could take its toll of one—not to be able to lead the artistic life, not being a bohemian—at least to the eye. One had to react to it. As a woman artist with a family and a conventional family set-up, I was being scrutinized with male values for artists—often by other women artists—and by myself. A curious position, akin to others I had found myself in, maybe as the only heterosexual in a totally homosexual drawingroom, or the only city individual in a provincial one: out of step, and honey,
are you so sure you’re right
? (Does one have to be? In step anywhere?) I am learning that bohemians, aliens, unconventionals, artist-in-groups or artists who believe in a way-of-life as part of art, will press their conventions on you as cheerfully and insistently—as the conventional. With the same failure to distinguish the outer and the inner ways of life.

Socially it didn’t worry me, and in our quiet house on the river I was very possibly kept from more mobile ambitions which might have been ruinous for work. What did get to me was whether a demi-bourgeois like me, and a demi-sane one, could really be an artist of the same intensity as the divinely mad, or dedicated alien? By the time I belatedly read
Tonio Kruger
—what a relief to find that dichotomy played upon so precisely!—I have already decided for myself. And not with Mann. Meanwhile that question so touchingly posed down all the ages of art—“What must an artist be?”—would help keep me happily unaware of another—“Could an artist be female?”

I had honestly never thought otherwise. I could understand all the feminine rages at unequal circumstances, over-protected lives and under-subscribed opportunities, and had had some of them—smiling through my teeth at the male writers who say to me “What
every
writer needs is a good wife!”, worrying over what the children would make of me in a world geared as it was, and what I would make of them. But that all the philosophical rages of the universe, its hieratic dances of either body or intellect, its whole wild, sad glee of celebration and human fact, wasn’t to be equally mine—had never occurred to me. And hasn’t yet.

To Mathias, back there at the Guggenheim, I say “Well, guess I can’t take the money then. Since I contracted to go for a year, and I can only stay eight months. So I better give it back.”

His answer, one I trust all endowers of the arts continue to give, is substantially that I had been given the award under the assumption that I knew best what would foster my work—if I felt that buying a car and going to California with the money would do it, that was up to me. Naturally, as he must have known, the greatest freedom lay in that I was not bound to deliver any concrete work, not within a specific time, or ever. The future of my own work, in any form and pace, was mine.

So I went. It’s easy now to pick out later stories which from their backgrounds, came to me from being abroad. But that was the least of it.

“Tha-at’s right, get your local color!” an old boyo of a bohemian (who had been a stockbroker) says to me when I’m leaving. And who doesn’t know how that mezzotint comes crowding in? But I now have walked into another civilisation, of beings who might as well be on the moon for their foreignness, yet share my parts and my language. Sometimes it is sparks and crash-bang, a young man yelling at me “Why don’t all you Americans go home!”—and coming round to apologize the next morning; sometimes I slide
con amore
into the warm bath of English living and new company, into the misty days and hot conversations which have helped make a literature.

An American chatterer, now for months on end I become a listener, at tables where talk is a living organism, to be tended for the good of all. In mobile-home America, friendship is increasingly easy, sleazy and forgettable; here friends could be treated as my parents’ had been—grappled to one with hoops of steel and kept for life. They can be trusted to brush some of the poetry off me, and I to recover it later. Walking my rounds, Regent Street to Piccadilly, or down the Strand to Reuters, head high in the air to catch the street signs, and unaware that to pass three times through Burlington Arcade is as good as a work permit, I am regularly accosted by men who ask “Do you have the time?” My male friends, whose women are still wearing their post-war “utilities,” say “It’s that black silk coatee of yours, and the poke hat” (at home the Lord and Taylor uniform of the year). “They think you’re a Belgian tart.”

I am so happy here, going from street to street, friend to friend, experience to experience—is it possible that, intellectually, I am an American one? I tell myself that every American is either a potential Anglophile or Francophile, and I happened to hit England first. Where I have the social mobility of the foreigner who may ask to go anywhere, whom friends pass from hand to hand for whatever unusualness of hat, face, situation, profession or tongue might attract them: as an American I am a nobody who might be anybody. As for me, I am having a temporary flight from that provincial construct, by now both suburban and city-literary, to which I am confined at home. But principally, I am learning—like some new resident of a magnetic field in which all my particles are drawn toward a certain pattern—what it is to be American, to them and to me. What it is to be an intellectual woman,
outside
my country. And what it is to be a writer, elsewhere.

To friends in the Foreign Office who knew America well, I can see that we are changing from a dearly-held alliance to a disturbing quantity; we are already the civilisation which is going to have to be stood off. (In 1956, in England during the Suez incident, I was able to get some of mine back, but we both knew that their colonial monster was behind them.) Defending my nativity like a college debater, I learn how to handle chaff and return it: poco a poco, soft-sharp; be slow to draw blood, quick to stanch it; if you’re a smiler by nature, don’t stop now; if you’re not, don’t start; always keep a twinkle out somewhere to show you’re aware you’re taking part in a dry-point of language; watch how the most oystery-eyed do it somehow with posture.

As for the literary world, one may meet it almost in toto on a weekend more or less, but rarely will have to; whenever you find it alone with itself—instead of branching out into politics, or
la danse du ventre
, or whatever its larger tastes are—it tends to apologize. As for reviewers, at this time, their provincial worst is in a different style from ours; their middle-average tends to be better educated than ours, but more narrowminded or without our gusty enthusiasms; often their portmanteau reviews, like those in the
Times Literary Supplement
, link books together with infuriating expertise, while never seeming to alight square on any one of them. With their best, like V. S. Pritchett, Angus Wilson, and a host of other writers who review steadily and seem not to have lost juice or dignity by it, we have little to compare.

As for women, the double-job-standard is bluntly advertised in the weeklies, with higher male pay for the same post as teacher or librarian. The power jobs in the print media are as entirely male as they are at home. But once you get to the arts, and the literary ones especially, among writers and critics both there is a salving lack of that male patronizing I am beginning to discover at home. They have their “kitchenmaid” writers, women who write for household women, but no one, even the hastiest reviewer, even by implication ever lumps me with them, or my work with theirs. Or sends me books for review merely because they are by women. In their “man’s country,” I am never reviewed as a “woman writer.”

In this the English were continental as they are in so much else; the language has obscured that to us. I found that they took the same pride in their bluestockings, present and past, as in any tradition, and gave them the equivalent amount of chaff; as a woman, nobody ever made me feel too intelligent or too intellectual for my own good or theirs, but in the arenas of literature and discussion they made it bracingly clear that I would have to take my licks like anybody else.

That same year, just before my leaving New York, word had been passed around to writers who often met at Vance and Tina Bourjaily’s (both before and when he was editor of
Discovery
) that “Norman” wanted us to meet of a Sunday and get some needed café discussion started, the bar chosen being The White Horse on Hudson Street—which is how it came to be known as a place where writers went, by the time Dylan Thomas was taken there. The day we first go, in a group of about ten, of which I recall for sure only Mailer, the Bourjailys and Frederic Morton, the bar and its usual patrons, mostly the remainders of indigenous Greenwich Village Irish, are no more unhandy with us—don’t we
know
whether we want a glass or a stein?—than we are with ourselves. The White Horse doesn’t yet know it is going to be a literary pub. And we have the sad sense, or I do, that stuff like this is hard going in America. At one point Mailer takes out a dollar bill, and pleads for somebody to start an argument going with him, “on anything.” Nobody much takes him up on it. (I couldn’t, though I sympathized with what he was after in getting us together. He knew only one way to advance or conclude an argument with any woman—and a dollar was a small price for it.) Nothing memorable having been said by anybody, we leave, unsure that we have consecrated the place. When I return from Europe the following summer and drop in there one Sunday with Louis Auchincloss, we find nobody we know.

Before returning home though, I live for a few months in Rome. There I recall an evening when Bill Styron proposes to a group of us which includes John Phillips and Peter Matthiessen, that we discuss a book, the stipulation being that it must be one we haven’t read. It is lightly said and lightly taken—a game, entered into half protectively perhaps by writers sick of litry discussion, wanting to harbor their own ideas close to the vest? Perhaps. But I have just come from a place where men who crave exchange as much as I think this company does, go about it less embarrassedly. Deeply as these men care for what they are into, they feel more at ease when acting toward it in the attitudes of Sport. We didn’t get far; the drunken record player ruled us out. We weren’t meant to. Nobody there or at The White Horse, no good male writer in America goddammit, was a dirty intellectual. A lot of them were Hemingway cripples though, in part. By virtue of sex I had escaped that, but the burden is on me inversely; literature in America is a manly Sport, in which I am not expected to compete.