Saturday's Child (51 page)

Better believe it. This woman and her male lawyer, who's working for a share of the profits, will not listen to Emily, my valiant if exhausted attorney. Nor will this woman listen to other women who call her and beg her to stop. She will not sit down and try feminist arbitration. She
wants
to involve Random House—which means their Park Avenue lawyers, which means the clock ticking on skyscraper legal fees, which means the publisher has the right to indemnify itself by garnisheeing the royalties, not only from the anthology but from
Monster
and any future books of mine at Random House as well. Everyone—Kenneth, Emily, all my women friends and colleagues—urges me to settle, reminding me that it's done all the time and doesn't mean surrender. But it's so
unfair
, I moan, I'm
not
a plagiarist, and it
will
wipe out the fund. So do I stop?

I make Emily countersue, for slander. Months pass, during which I throw up a lot. The law's delay, depositions, affidavits, movement rumors, frozen royalties, frozen fund. Finally, physically and emotionally depleted, and fearing there won't be enough money in my entire future writing life to indemnify Random House sufficiently for their five-hundred-dollar-an-hour lawyers' zillions of hours, I agree to settle out of court. The plaintiff and her lawyer get a few grand, plus the excision of
our
bibliography from all future editions of our book. (By that time, feminist books are proliferating, as are feminist bibliographies, so this loss doesn't worry me that
much.) The plaintiff, sad woman, gets something else, too: virtually ostracized in the Women's Movement.

I feel compelled to write a “Report to the Movement,” with appended legal documents, explaining the entire debacle, why it has erased our fund, and why there can be no more grants. Yet this brings it all back again, and makes me literally ill to write. Friends say not to bother. But I can't stop, feeling it's owed to the community.
²⁵
The Report appears in most feminist media. Support letters in response are many and gratifying.

Yet I feel bitter for the first time, having fallen prey to that particular acridity of soul suffered by an idealist who now feels something of a failure and a fool. My responsibility tic reminds me that I brought all of this on myself and that I have no right to act martyred or sanctimonious. Yet I keep wondering if I'm the only one crazy enough to have really believed in trying to
live
this politics.

Of course it's hardly just me. Resentments, personal envies, and ideological schisms are imploding viciously all over the movement as if, in our rush to sisterhood, we forgot about sibling rivalry, or as if we'd fallen for the myth that suffering ennobles, when it actually degrades. Certain disturbed women with personal, vituperative agendas are becoming career “trashers,” spending their lives sniping at other women in the name of their own apparently patented brand of feminism. God knows I am a judgmental, snippy person, but I've devised some rules for myself regarding this and try to abide by them. Fulminating up to 20 percent of any given period, time, or space (as in an article), though probably tasteless, is grudgingly allowed as polemic or “venting”—but raving on for more than 20 percent becomes
trashing
and should not be trusted, in oneself or anyone else.

Meawhile, having done
Sisterhood Is Powerful
, I'm now beginning
Sisterhood Is Global
—but privately I joke that I should compile an anthology titled
Sisterhood Is Suicide
.

Still, in its brief life, the fund has made history, set a precedent, and given a considerable amount of money ($35,000 in its last year alone) to hundreds of women's groups across the United States. That seed money will flower into century plants.

Kenneth and I expand our miraculously cheap, spacious apartment to
three
floors, since the landlord no longer needs the other floor for pharmacy storage. More tearing down of walls, building of walls. Separate studies, with working fireplaces, for each of us. This is great, because the strain has taken a heavy toll on the marriage. This is also great because it's the first room of my very own—excepting the three-month sojourn in the 78th Street walk-up—in my entire life. I'm in my mid-thirties.

We also colonize a mostly shady rooftop off the back of the new floor, which we turn into a small garden, “making the tar bloom.” I grow herbs and a few annuals and cacti in pots; Kenny nurtures a sapling jacaranda tree. I discover a favorite time of day—dawn, sprinkling plants with my watering can and listening to birds.

I love birds. I love plants. I love cats. I remember I once yearned to love everyone in some way approximating what I feel for Blake. That thought provokes a crooked little smile. I am in danger of becoming one of those revolutionaries who love humanity but can't stand people.

¹
Among the poems, “The Network of the Imaginary Mother,” first published in
Lady of the Beasts
and included in
Upstairs in the Garden: Poems Selected and New
. For the politics, see, for instance, the section on children's suffrage in
The Anatomy of Freedom
and the essay “Every Mother's Son,” in
The Word of a Woman
.

²
She and I stay in touch to this day. Judith, now divorced, remarried, and working in theater-therapy, has relocated to California.

³
When last heard from, Peggy was a professor of sociology at the University of Alabama. She published a book of feminist theory,
From Kin to Class
(Signmaker Press, 1981), but complained humorously that her two sons were growing into southern “good ole boys.”

⁴
Florika Remetier will die of a drug overdose at age thirty-three in 1979. The poem “Elegy” commemorates her (in
Depth Perception
, and collected in
Upstairs in the Gar den: Poems Selected and New
), and
Death Benefits: Poems
(Copper Canyon Press, 1981) is dedicated to her memory.

⁵
Marcia Patrick will die tragically of breast cancer in the 1980s—cancer she chose to treat solely with alternative, herbal remedies until it was too late.

⁶
Alix and I also remain in touch. She will go on to write the highly successful
Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen
, as well as the historic first “Marriage Contract”; still a feminist, she is still writing.

⁷
This was the title up through advance notice in catalog copy, until it turned out to my surprise that S. J. Perelman had written a short story with that title decades earlier but now threatened to sue if we “harridans” used it. Some humorists have
no
sense of humor.

⁸
The situation, of course, is markedly different thirty years later. Now, tokenism abounds.

⁹
For a thorough depiction of the
Rat
seizure, the reaction to “Goodbye to All That,” and the essay itself, see
The Word of a Woman
.

¹⁰
On August 4, 1970, Arbitrator Thomas Knowlton ruled that Grove had illegally discharged employees “solely for union activities,” and ordered our reinstatement with back pay. I could never go back, but the money was useful—it paid the pediatrician, and it paid the printer for two issues of
Rat
. For the full story of the Grove Press union-organizing effort and subsequent firings, seizure and occupation, jailings, etc., see
Going Too Far
.

¹¹
As with pediatrics in medicine, the exceptions to male control in publishing are the juvenile-book departments. This too is not so drastically different in the year 2000.

¹²
Emily and I had become friends when, as former counsel for Grove Press, she'd worked with me as I edited
The Bust Book
(a what-to-do-till-the-lawyer-comes arrest primer for radical readers) for Grove. She will be standing by me as my attorney for many a trauma during this period. Still a friend, she now sits as a judge on the New York State Supreme Court bench.

¹³
She will turn out to be a would-be journalist smuggled in secretly by Ti-Grace—violating pledges we've all made that no press will be permitted inside the group—to cover Atkinson during the demonstration. The poor woman, Barbara Kevles, who never intended to be arrested, gets pressured by Atkinson into going the whole way. Kevles pouts through the action, trembles through the arrest, and barely talks with anyone but Ti-Grace. Later, she will write the story of her rebellion and incarceration—an interesting if embarrassingly written piece of fiction—but be unable to find a periodical to publish it.

¹⁴
Certain other Grove or
Evergreen Review
authors are deafeningly silent on the whole matter, including the attempt at unionizing—among them Abbie Hoffman, Dennis Hopper, Jack Newfield, Dotson Rader, Allen Ginsberg, and Nat Hentoff.

¹⁵
See especially
Color Photos of the Atrocities
.

¹⁶
Joanne will go on to form the first Federal Feminist Credit Union and eventually move to California, where she currently writes and produces films.

¹⁷
Author of
Susan B. Anthony: A Biography of a Singular Feminist
(NYU Press, 1988),
Female Sexual Slavery
(Prentice Hall and NYU Press, 1979), and
The Prostitution of Sexuality
(NYU Press, 1995), editor of
Vietnam's Women in Transition
(St. Martin's Press, 1996), and founder of the International Coalition against Trafficking in Women.

¹⁸
An unanticipated benefit, which I will discover later, is in being remotely related by this marriage to his niece Judith Thurman—referred to by
her
family as Judith-who-lives-in-the-Village-with-a-loft-bed. She will eventually write acclaimed biographies of Isak Dinesen and Colette.

¹⁹
First published in
Monster: Poems
(Random House, 1972), collected in
Upstairs in the Garden
.

²⁰
In 1991 The Feminist Press at CUNY published
The Mer Child: A Legend for Children and Other Adults
, which I wrote for Blake when he was about seven.

²¹
See “Every Mother's Son: On a Feminist Raising a Son,” in
The Word of a Woman
.

²²
“Arraignment” also appears in
Upstairs in the Garden
.

²³
Larry Flynt had not yet surfaced as a porn king, but he would eventually take such attacks to new depths.

²⁴
This seeming anomaly became chronic a few years later, when Lessing—herself so insightfully feminist on the page—took it upon herself to denounce the Women's Movement and individual feminists publicly and repeatedly. It is one of the saddest persona splits—where the brilliance and bravery of the writer desert her when she rises from her desk—that I've ever witnessed.

²⁵
Years later, I will counsel Gloria Steinem similarly: not to spend precious time writing an open letter defending herself against Kathie Amatniek/Sarachild's spiteful and bizarre charges that Gloria is a CIA agent—but Gloria will do precisely what I did: throw up a lot and spend weeks writing what “sisters have a right to know.” Double moral: (1) it's easy enough to advise others, and (2) you're more often punished for the rights you've done than for the wrongs.

FOURTEEN

Mount St. Helens

To write is to sit in judgment over oneself
.

—H
ENRIK
I
BSEN

If suffering doesn't teach us anything, then it's ever so distasteful. I know good women who are achingly nostalgic for the early “women's liberation” years. Partly their nostalgia is plain human longing for one's romanticized youth, this being the female version of war-story reminiscences by old New Left men; there's even one group calling itself VFW—Veterans of Feminist Wars—which I've respectfully declined to join, finding myself still on active duty. In some melancholic cases, the nostalgia appears to be the longing of persons who feel their lives have slid downhill in terms of relevance and excitement ever since “the good old days.” Others apparently believe political engagement fitting for younger folks, as if it were a phase—idealistic and much missed—to be outgrown by any sensible realist. Then there's my grizzled old warrior-colleague Susan Brownmiller, by temperament a feisty scrapper who relishes a good political brawl, who thus managed to enjoy even the spite of the period, and who believes, grieving needlessly, that radical feminism perished along with “women's liberation.” (Anyone has the right to stop being an
activist, but I think it
is
a bit silly to rationalize that with the sullen claim that nothing is any longer worthy of one's activism.)

Not me. I cherished the insights gained during those early years, tried to weather the blows, and delighted in the organizing—so much so that I decided to persist in it, employing, I would hope, an expanding tactical repertoire. I've loved watching the intersecting dynamics of consciousness shift and movement growth, loved having the opportunity to feed that shift, foster that growth, help that energy spread, catch, and recognize itself
already
indigenous in countries all over the planet.
¹
In other words, what's become the vast transformative force that is the national and especially the international Women's Movement—
that's
what quickens my political heartbeat,
that's
what I call the Politics of the New Millennium, and I mean none of it as hyperbole. Which leaves me no time or inclination to mourn a season when a few young, urban, educated, largely straight, mostly white, U.S. women, however plucky or clever, actually believed they had created and could control this explosive consciousness.