Movement

Movement

A Novel

Valerie Miner

This book is dedicated to Carol Flotlin, who has been my friend for twenty-five years, since we met on the playground of Sacred Heart School in Bellevue, Washington.

Contents

Introduction by Susan Griffin

Foreword

Movement

Joan Crawford Revival

Maple Leaf or Beaver

The Common Stinkweed

In the Company of Long-Distance Peace Marchers

Dark Midnight

The Right Hand on the Day of Judgment

Newsworthy

Stray

Someone Else's Baby

Single Exposure

Cultured Green

Cooperative

Love/Love

Other Voices

Aunt Victoria

Aerogramme

One of Them

Feel No Evil

Mrs. Delaney's Dollar

Side/Stroke

Well Past the Weird Hour

Novena

The Green Loudspeaker

Afterlife

Sisterhood

Rondo

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Introduction

by

Susan Griffin

Movement
is a book about change. In these pages Valerie Miner depicts movements within movements, public and private turns of heart, the permutations of consciousness in an innovative form which shifts from story to novel, and from past to present. The hero of this book, whose name is Susan, is a political activist and a writer. Her life is deeply enmeshed in the social events shared by a generation committed to ending injustice. She is part of the movement against the Vietnam War. Because she marries a draft resister, she moves with him to Canada. There she becomes part of a socialist movement, and gradually turns toward feminism.

Movement
is also a book about consequence. Continually, Susan must live out, in her own body and soul, the implications of her political insights. And just as often, she is forced by experience to reconsider her commitments. Thus along with the same generation that questioned the causes of war and poverty, Susan moves past the traditional ways of living, and sharing lives. She looks for some center of meaning in sex and love, because along with freedom she seeks and finds a deepening knowledge of the world.

Each of the chapters of this book stands alone. Each can be read as a story, the way certain periods of one's life seem to have a definition and sense unto themselves. And in between these chapters, Valerie Miner has threaded a series of very short stories about others, strangers to Susan, not directly involved in any of the events of the narrative, peripheral. And yet, like the slight movements one captures at the edges of vision, these peripheral characters and their tales partake of the meanings which ring through Susan's life. For as much as this is a book about one fictional being, it is also a book about all our lives. We have all been touched by the social crises described here; we have all lived through the times which have inspired the questions Susan asks of life.

Like the work of Doris Lessing, or Marge Piercy,
Movement
preserves for us not only history, but more significant to the particular skill of a story teller,
sensibility.
The decades of the 1960's and 1970's were phenomenal not only for the happenings which journalists or newscasters might record, but also for the tone, the mood, the gestures, the configurations of people and remarks and styles, and above all a range of feeling. How often I have wished that someone tell these stories from our times. In one of the chapters Susan's editor, who is suffering the first symptoms of a nervous breakdown, deftly saves himself by taking credit for her work. That they both work for a radical magazine dedicated to equality and justice hardly affects his choices: she is not quite human to him. (It was this ironic juxtaposition of act and ideal that caused many women in this decade to sever themselves completely from men on the left.) In the character of Susan's husband we meet another archetype. The upper middle class young man who has the habit of calling his wife, whose mother is a waitress and father a seaman, “bourgeois.” Predictably, his holier than thou radicalism fades with time. And Miner's reflection of our generation does not blur when she depicts women, either. She gives us a portrait of the young student, idealistic, eager, ignorant, full of vitality, love and naïveté. She presents us with the perpetually radical Wina wearing a “pink ‘Frau Offensive' t-shirt … and declassé roach clip around her neck.” And she captures the atmosphere through which these characters move, through which I myself remember moving. The politically correct, downwardly mobile pile of clutter left in a hallway. Exhaustion. Cold. Meetings. Personal rivalries described as philosophical differences. The ubiquitous Volkswagon Van. Cheap wine. Mattresses on the floor. The language of hope, despair, of charade.

Yet recognizable as these landscapes and the people in them are, they are not stereotypes bent on the wheel of polemic. Rather, the book draws a sharp and poignant outline around the dilemma we have all faced by confronting us always with the feeling of reality. No one here is idealized, not even the hero, and no one is villainized.

I was especially moved by a scene between Susan and a young Moroccan man as they discuss their life choices. Susan, instilled with a twentieth century North American sense of the self as sacred, cautions the young man not to live for others, not to be bound up in the expectations of his family. But of course. This is axiomatic for a character like Susan, even though she was born in the working class, as if her parents' very struggles were aimed to make her free of parental limitation. But when Susan tells the young man she does make choices for herself, he asks her, “Is this enough for you?” And she must agree that it is not. There is no resolution to this discussion between the two. They move on to another topic, and eventually into separate lives. Throughout the book, as in this scene, Miner does not leap to solve a question which is significant to our time for its irresolution.

And what a relief! The book is so witty. Spun throughout the extreme seriousness of a decade facing the devastations of the planet, the technological cruelties of modern warfare, the blistering conditions of racism, are movements of great humor in which sanity demands that those of us trying to take political responsibility for the future of the world laugh at ourselves.

What pompousness, what self-aggrandizement, what blustery romantic notions have characterized our struggles! When Susan muses about the Rock group, who pledged to lead a revolution, that they could not even hold their own band together, one feels along with the laughter, a heady breath of fresh air. Sometimes Miner's humor is gentle and tender, as in her description of a sixties costume party. And at other times, one feels this wit is close to the weeping of frustration, as for instance, when one character says of another, “She spoke English instead of rhetoric.”

Miner's cameo portrait of the woman who spoke English and not rhetoric, is in a way a model for a commitment to social change toward which Miner's hero, Susan, moves. She is a “small grey-haired Montreal nurse who had worked in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive.” (Between the lines I can almost hear the author say: she derived her rage from experience and not dogma.) “She delivered sense and feeling,” Miner writes and, “She was more interested in peace than rubric and thus performed an intricate balance before this scrupulous congregation.”

Throughout the rest of the book, Susan sorts out hollow rhetoric and performance from the daily passion of genuine caring. She asks the same questions of the Feminist movement that she asks of the anti-war and socialist movements. In a moment of tiredness, she asks, “Where was sisterhood now?” She had “given her loneliness to group consciousness, her anger to organized protest, her oppression to revolutionary retribution.” But what does this mean? Even if she were free from oppression, what does this mean if there is no “afterlife”?

A heady, abstract, holier-than-life revolution can be, after all, only another excuse to avoid life. And yet, this is not a book to argue against movement. Rather it is from her deep passion for social justice which is the same as her passion for life that the hero, and the author, poses her questions. She turns back to her work with that tenaciousness of spirit that belongs only to the mature—for one must have been tried to possess it—and with the steadfast courage that belongs to those who, from years of small failures, know that we who are born of this troubled world, and would wish to end suffering, are not perfect, but we are beautiful.

Berkeley, California

Fall, 1981

Postscript:

One last note. It is entirely fitting that The Crossing Press should publish this book. Its publishers possess the virtues of
Movement's
hero. This press has been with us for more than a decade (a long life for an alternative press) and shown all along a great courage and insight. They were very early publishers of feminist writing, before feminists became fashionable. (They were one of the first presses to publish any of my work.) Now, in these difficult times, when we have witnessed the closing down of, for instance, Diana Press, they have taken over the publication of several books we so need to have. And they continue to publish and distribute writing from those protest movements Susan might have belonged to: the antiwar movement, the prison rights movement, the movement for gay liberation. In these days when to work together seems so essential and yet so impossible, this press has quietly worked to print books from many different dissident movements and helped us all to understand perhaps, better, that in the end, we share a vision, and that none of our visions is complete without the insights of our sisters and brothers. I thank them for this.

Foreword

Movement
is about a woman named Susan. It is a novel and a collection of short stories, exploring the territory between and beyond these forms. Most “chapters” follow a chronological sequence but also stand as stories on their own. I prefer such tales to longer narrative. The traditional novel has become an endurance test in which both the writer and the reader begin at the beginning and pursue the end without pause, in form, for reflection. Our lives are more flexible in time and space than most novels express. Life, or movement, is fantasy, memory, premonition, and the descriptions of this life should be layered.

Susan's stories are interwoven with short-short stories about completely different women who are experiencing other kinds of movement. I write these stories to break through the isolation and the individualism of the
Bildungsroman,
the conventional novel of development. Susan does not know, and may never meet, any of these women. Their stories are told as shadows and illuminations of our mutual momentum.

I

Movement

Susan slid the romaine leaf around the faded parquet bowl. It was too heavy with oil to curl through her fork. Larry Blake's special salad had more garlic than she remembered and the Coke tasted oversweet. Still, everything had a certain pungency compared to the stewed tea on which she had been surviving in London for years. A jock sat down in the opposite booth. Varsity most likely. He wore a pin-striped shirt under the Vaughn maroon sweater. Fraternities were popular again, she had heard, and everybody went to football games.