Saturday's Child (50 page)

“By any means necessary” means just that—as Galileo knew when he genuflected to the pope while muttering, “Nevertheless, it moves.” So I attempt another approach: a revision to 'scape hanging yet get the point across. Thank
god
for the rhetorical question:

How can

I accuse

Ted Hughes

of what the entire British and American

literary and critical establishment

has been at great lengths to deny,

without ever saying it in so many words, of course:

the murder of Sylvia Plath?

And god
bless
irony: I recast the entire poem in a tone hovering between that and sarcasm—which, with the addition of a stanza about Hughes's second wife's suicide, possibly makes it even more powerful:

What a coincidence.

But only paranoiacs would assume

that such a curious redundancy constitutes

a one-man gynocidal movement.

I also add in various
J'accuses
against A. Alvarez, George Steiner, and Robert Lowell, who, along with other “critical necrophiles,” have gone to some lengths to protect Hughes after her death, writing about his talent but her instability. In a sense, this poem of mine will have an effect similar to that of “Goodbye to All That” regarding the Left—but this time in terms of the literary establishment.

I seem not to worry about crossing a bridge until I get to it and am ready to burn it behind me.

Random House goes with the revised version of the poem, so the book finally is published in 1972. The
Feminist Art Journal
promptly prints both the original
and
the revised versions of “Arraignment,” plus an essay of mine exposing the entire censorship process. To everyone's shock,
Monster
takes off: it
sells
, fast and well. Thirty thousand hardcover copies in the first six months alone is unheard of for any book of poems, much less for a first book by a young poet. What no one, including me, has anticipated is the size and hunger of the new female readership.

The 1970s are a renaissance period for poetry, especially that by women poets and poets of color. These previously stifled voices are
singing, and people are coming to listen and be moved, to laugh and cry as if in ancient bardic days around campfires. Poets are accustomed to audiences of twenty loyal souls, but now readings draw hundreds of people; on three occasions I give readings for packed auditoriums that seat a thousand or more. The white, gentlemanly poetry establishment is disturbed by this new popularity of the art; Robert Lowell is actually quoted as saying, “Too many people are reading poetry these days.”

But the establishment isn't finished attacking
Monster
.

In 1973, Kenneth, Blake, and I spend three months in Sarasota, Florida, where I am to be guest professor at New College—holder of the Visiting Chair in Feminist Studies, to be precise—by invitation of the student body in a popular vote. I go down a week early to orient myself, lease a car (and relearn how to drive it), rent a bungalow, and stock up on groceries before they arrive. It will be like a vacation! It will be a quiet, bucolic, beach-walking, family-cuddle, writing-poetry time! Yeah, sure.

Blake at least turns tow-haired and bronze-skinned in the sunshine, splashing through the waves and watching for dolphins. Kenneth's fair skin and vitiligo alternately burn and tan him in patches until he must stay hatted, sleeved, and shaded. I drive them around when necessary, since Ken doesn't drive. I also wind up spending more and more time at the school, not just teaching but organizing: students, faculty women, faculty wives. Things heat up when I set different requirements for male students (practical politics: set up a childcare center) than for female students (keep a personal journal, then write one element of feminist theory based on it). The administration has a ho-hum attitude about campus rape, so petitions must be initiated. Meanwhile, Jane Alpert, an old
Rat
colleague now a fugitive from the FBI on bombing charges, visits us for a brief, secret holiday. I end my short tenure in academia supporting my students by sitting in with them in an occupation of the president's office.

Blake starts preschool. He's bored because he already knows his alphabet and has begun to read, and he can't comprehend why one little boy in particular keeps hitting him for carrying a doll. Kenneth and I embark on what will be years of visits to principals, defending him and getting school policies changed. We tell each other that we really
must
be more selective about which issues we'll take on, but life doesn't permit us this indulgence, and temperamentally we rise to the bait every time.

Showing a fascination for music early on, Blake fiddles around at the piano every chance he gets. Ken's childhood ghosts rise and wrestle with mine. He'd always longed for piano lessons but his family couldn't afford them, so he wants Blake to have every advantage he lacked, to start lessons at once. I, of course, don't want Blake to have to go to
any
lessons
whatsoever
, much less ever have to perform in recitals or be prey to
any
enforced knowledge unless and until he himself demands it. Back and forth we go. Blake solves it one day by asking for lessons.

Canadian friends phone, asking me if I know why
Monster
has disappeared from their bookstores; they've been informed the book has been withdrawn by the publisher, Random House of Canada. On investigation, I learn the Random House consortium has, without a word to me, made its separate peace with Ted Hughes, who threatened to sue even on the basis of the revised, irony-suffused poem. The publisher agreed to withdraw all copies from any markets in the entire Commonwealth, and Hughes then agreed not to lodge suit. After a flurry of activity by stalwart Emily, it's clear there's nothing I can do.

But I'm underestimating women. When I tell them what I've learned, the Canadian women are outraged. They decide to publish a “pirated” edition—but “pirated” with my permission. Within a month, Australian women and New Zealand women contact me wanting to publish their own pirated editions, which they do—with my permission. This happens all over the Commonwealth, spontaneously, furiously, wondrously. Each edition is different, some with graphics by women, some with photos of Plath, some with
both
versions of “Arraignment,” picked up from the
Feminist Art Journal
. Then, bearding Hughes in his own den, an English
women's group publishes and distributes
its
edition, an act of special courage, since UK slander laws are draconian, carrying heavy sentences for printers and distributors as well as publishers and authors.

These remarkable women all over the Commonwealth carry it further. They make it impossible for Hughes to give public poetry readings in his own country: English feminists picket the venue with signs quoting lines from “Arraignment.” His reading tours in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States are canceled because of threatened mass protests by what come to be called “Arraignment Women.” I am dumbstruck with admiration and gratitude.

The literary establishment puts in its two cents, pressuring me to “call off” these women, who are planning their own actions quite without consulting me anyway. I get phone calls from gentlemen literary critics whose voices are shaking with disgust at having to descend to lobbying the likes of me. I get notes from James Silberman and Jason Epstein, the Olympian gods at Random House. I keep
trying
to explain that this campaign is neither at my direction nor under my control, although I do admit I support what the women are doing. I keep
trying
to explain that we are not a conspiracy but a synchronicity.

The one pressure letter that reduces me to tears is from Doris Lessing. I have loved her work, and
The Golden Notebook
has been germinal for me both as a writer and as a political being. She urges me to withdraw
all
versions of the poem from publication
anywhere
, and to call off all protests because, although she makes a point of not denying these problems regarding Hughes, she insists that we literary people must not wash our dirty linen in public.
²⁴

The reactions to the poems “Monster” and “Arraignment,” make me think of Auden's line “Poetry makes nothing happen,” and beam.

Apparently not having enough to do, and feeling I'm falling behind on the home front, I initiate a series of political-literary dinners.

Subtext: Kenneth and I can't talk literature with our political colleagues, but often get into political fights with our literary friends
. We feel schizoid. Never mind.
I
—Earth Mother Redux—will ride to the rescue.
I
shall meld these worlds together.

It is not what Martha Stewart would call “a good thing.” At one dinner party guests are faint with hunger since we don't eat until almost 11:00
P.M.,
because I am so busy holding people back from each other's throats that I fall behind on the overly ambitious kitchen front. Another evening founders when Kenneth argues hotly with the poet Howard Moss, then the New
Yorker's
poetry editor; Kenny is claiming that a person has every right—indeed, a moral responsibility—to lie during jury selection, pretending to be neutral about capital punishment in order to get
on
the jury so that later, if there's a conviction, the person can argue against the barbarity of the death penalty from
inside
the jury. I kick him under the table, privately fearing that he'll never have another poem published in the
New Yorker
, and that I'll never have one published there at all. At another dinner, Ned Rorem and Kate Millett get along well enough so long as they stay on the subject of adoring Paris, but when Ned announces he's about to set a series of Sylvia Plath's poems to music,
I
take umbrage. He's my friend; I care for him, his wit, and his music; but I feel rabid that at this moment in history it's arrogant for any male artist to think he can interpret women's experience, especially one so redolent of female anger as Plath's; besides he has pressed my Plath button. Ned takes umbrage at
my
umbrage. He will set any poet he bloody well chooses, and besides, he tells me, he's as feminine as any woman, probably more so than most feminists. I get a crazed look in my eyes at such a statement. Kenneth kicks
me
under the table. Ned publishes it all in his next
Diary
, adding slyly that Kenneth is perhaps too quick to defend the cause of women rather than letting
them
speak.

Embattled again. Or is it consistently?

Valerie Solanis decides she despises feminists, especially me, since I
have committed a double sin against her. First, in
Sisterhood Is Global
I've published—with her permission and full payment of the agreed permission fee—an excerpt from her “SCUM Manifesto.” I've regarded it as a grimly funny example of extremism (SCUM was an anagram for Society for Cutting Up Men), which by comparison reveals radical feminist statements to be quite rational. My second sin apparently is having come to her support after she shot Andy Warhol, was then deemed psychotic, and sentenced to a state asylum; I'd organized a petition and raised funds for her release to a private institution where she would receive better care. Now, suddenly, she
is
released—and livid. She decides that (1) she is not now and never has been a feminist but is a “killer dyke biker,” (2) I have defamed her by printing her work in the context of feminism, and (3) I am somehow responsible for her having been sent to a mental institution in the first place. She phones repeatedly, informing me that she plans to throw acid in my face and blind me for life. I try to reason with her, finally stop answering the phone, shudder a lot. The local precinct is already shadowing a man to whom Kenneth unthinkingly gave our home address, who, it turns out, is stalking me for having “destroyed his life” by “inventing” feminism. Just getting Blake to school in the morning is becoming a challenge. But Solanis is something else. By now I'm used to getting threats from men, but being menaced by another woman corrodes the spirit.

Meanwhile, I'm attacked in a startling manner by one of the contributors to
Sisterhood Is Powerful
, who has asked me for a personal grant from the Sisterhood Is Powerful Fund. I remind her of what she and all the contributors already know and in fact supported: that the fund gives grants to groups, not individuals. We have only so much money, and much as we'd like to be able to support individual women, the collectively decided-on priority is to build alternative institutions of and for women. This particular contributor now demands to be the exception to the rule; I apologize but say I cannot oblige her. She says if
she
can't have the money, nobody else will, either—and hangs up. I dismiss it as hyperbole, but it's dismaying nonetheless. Not as much as what's to come, though.

She proceeds to sue me. For plagiarism. She claims that in
Sisterhood Is Powerful's
bibliography I have plagiarized a mimeographed handout bibliography she once compiled. She wants almost half a million dollars in
damages, plus all copies of the anthology recalled, the printing plates destroyed, and any foreign editions of the book stopped.

I think it must be a sick joke. First I go into a spin on the basic question. How in hell can a bibliography be plagiarized, since it's a list of books? I know firsthand the months of collective labor that I, with the help of Connie Brown and Jane Seitz of Random House spent creating the anthology's bibliography, surveying the various woman-centered book lists that existed but deciding to build our own from scratch despite the additional research entailed. I know that this woman, a contributor herself, received a complimentary copy of the book well before publication—and that she has not once mentioned a word to me about any problems regarding the bibliography in the intervening
four years
since the anthology was published. I know she knows that the fund is the sole recipient of the book's royalties, and that such a suit will drain it. I cannot believe this is happening.