Silences (14 page)
Authors: Shelly Fisher Fishkin
*
Among those with children: Harriette Arnow, Mary Lavin, Mary McCarthy, Tess Slesinger, Eleanor Clark, Nancy Hale, Storm Jameson, Janet
Lewis, Jean Rhys, Kay Boyle, Ann Petry, Dawn Powell, Meridel LeSueur, Evelyn Eaton, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Pearl Buck, Josephine Johnson, Caroline Gordon, Shirley Jackson; and a sampling in the unparalleled last two decades: Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer, Margaret Laurence, Grace Paley, Hortense Calisher, Edna O’Brien, Sylvia Ashton-Warner, Pauli Murray, Françoise Mallet-Joris, Cynthia Ozick,
Joanne Greenberg, Joan Didion, Penelope Mortimer, Alison Lurie, Hope Hale Davis, Doris Betts, Muriel Spark, Adele Wiseman, Lael Wertenbaker, Shirley Ann Grau, Maxine Kumin, Margaret Walker, Gina Barriault, Mary Gray Hughes, Maureen Howard, Norma Rosen, Lore Segal, Alice Walker, Nancy Willard, Charlotte Painter, Sallie Bingham. (I would now add Clarice Lispector, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, June Arnold,
Ursula Le Guin, Diane Johnson, Alice Munro, Helen Yglesias, Susan Cahill, Rosellen Brown, Alta, and Susan Griffin.) Some wrote before children, some only in the middle or later years. Not many have directly used the material open to them out of motherhood as central source for their work.
*
Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil.
**
This does not mean that these full-time writers were hermetic
or denied themselves social or personal life (think of James, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Balzac, Joyce, Gide, Colette, Yeats, Woolf, etc. etc.); nor did they, except perhaps at the flood, put in as many hours daily as those doing more usual kinds of work. Three to six hours daily have been the norm (“the quiet, patient, generous mornings will bring it”). Zola and Trollope are famous last-century examples
of the four hours; the
Paris Review
interviews disclose many contemporary ones.
Full-timeness consists not in the actual number of hours at one’s desk, but in that writing is one’s major profession, practiced habitually, in freed, protected, undistracted time as needed, when it is needed.
*
Professions for Women.
**
As must many women writers.
*
Among them: Harriette Arnow, Willa Cather, Dorothy
Canfield Fisher, H.H. Richardson (of
Ultima Thule
), Ruth Suckow, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Sarah Wright, Agnes Smedley; Emily Dickinson, pre-eminently; Sylvia Plath, sometimes Christina Stead, Doris Lessing. (I would now add Edith Summers Kelley
(Weeds
and
The Devil’s Hand),
the Marge Piercy of
Small Changes,
and my own fiction.)
*
In the long tradition of early rising, an hour here and there,
or late-night mother-writers from Mrs. Trollope to Harriette Arnow to this very twenty-four hours—necessarily fitting in writing time in accordance with maintenance of life, and children’s, needs.
**
Phrases, lines, throughout from Plath’s
Ariel,
letters, BBC broadcasts.
*
Richard Howard, in
The Art of Sylvia Plath,
edited by Charles Newman.
*
Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett,
edited by Annie Fields.
**
Compared to men writers of like distinction and years of life, few women writers have had lives of unbroken productivity, or leave behind a “body of work.” Early beginnings, then silence; or clogged late ones (foreground silences); long periods between books (hidden silences); characterize most of us. A Colette, Wharton, Glasgow, Millay, Lessing, Oates, are the exceptions.
*
For myself, “survivor”
contains its other meaning: one who must bear witness for those who foundered; try to tell how and why it was that they, also worthy of life, did
not
survive. And pass on ways of surviving; and tell our chancy luck, our special circumstances.
“Only’s”
is an expression out of the 1950s Civil Rights time: the young Ralph Abernathy reporting to his Birmingham Church congregation on his trip up north
for support:
I go to Seattle and they tell me, “Brother, you got to meet so and so, why he’s the only Negro Federal Circuit Judge in the Northwest”; I go to Chicago and they tell me, “Brother, you’ve got to meet so and so, why he’s the only full black professor of Sociology there is”; I go to Albany and they tell me, “Brother, you
got
to meet so and so, why he’s the only black senator
in the state legislature . . .” [long dramatic pause] . . .
WE DON
’
T WANT NO ONLY
’
S
.
Only’s are used to rebuke (“to be models”); to imply the unrealistic, “see, it can be done, all you need is capacity and will.” Accepting a situation of “only’s” means: “let inequality of circumstance continue to prevail.”
*
1976: At least some of these writers are now coming out of eclipse. But Glaspell, Mary
Austin, Roberts, and H.H. Richardson are still out of print. So is most of Christina Stead.
**
Eclipsing, devaluation, neglect, are the result of critical judgments, a predominantly male domain. The most damaging, and still prevalent, critical attitude remains “that women’s experience, and literature written by women are, by definition, minor.” Indeed, for a sizable percentage of male writers,
critics, academics, writer-women are eliminated from consideration (consciousness) altogether. (See the one-out-of-twelve compilations beginning on
page 186
.)
†
“Women and Creativity,”
Motive,
April 1969.
‡
Savor Mary Ellmann’s inimitable
Thinking About Women.
*
“The Art of Katherine Mansfield,”
The Collected Essays of Katherine Anne Porter.
**
See Carolyn Kizer’s “Pro Femina” in her
Knock Upon
Silence.
†
Letter to her publisher, W. S. Williams, 1849.
*
“No Important Woman Writer . . . ,”
Mademoiselle,
February 1970. These excerpts and my exceptions to them are not wholly fair to this superb essay, which I read originally and quoted from in a copy with an important page (unnoticed) missing. My abashed apologies to Calisher.
*
Among them: ways in which innate human drives and capacities
(intellect; art; organization; invention; sense of justice; love of beauty, life; courage; resilience, resistance; need for community) denied development and scope, nevertheless struggle to express themselves and function; what goes on in jobs; penalties for aging; the profound experience of children—and the agonizing having to raise them in a world not yet fit for human life; what it is to live
as a single woman; having to raise children alone; going on; causes besides the accepted psychiatric ones, of breakdown in women. The list goes on and on.
*
Compounding the difficulty is that experiences and comprehensions not previously admitted into literature—especially when at variance with the canon—are exceedingly hard to come to, validate, establish as legitimate material for literature—let
alone, shape into art.
**
In 1976 these books are all back in print.
*
Lessing’s description of the novel (in her afterword to Schreiner’s
Story of an African Farm)
pertains to this writing which “explains much and tells much”: “com[ing] out of a part of the human consciousness which is trying to understand itself, to come into the light. Not on the level where poetry works, or music, or mathematics,
the high arts; no, but on the rawest and most workaday level, like earthworms making new soil where things can grow.” But there are other forms of expression which can do this, and more: the journal, letters, memoirs, personal utterances—for they come more natural for most, closer to possibility of use, of shaping—and,
in one’s own words,
become source, add to the authentic store of human life,
human experience. The inestimable value of this, its emergence as a form of literature, is only beginning to be acknowledged. As yet, there is no place in literature analogous to the honored one accorded “folk” and “primitive” expression in art and in music.
*
And for every twelve enabled to come to recognized achievement, remember: there would still remain countless others still lessened or silenced—as
long as the other age-old silencers of humanity, class and/or color, prevail.
Her Life and Times
Written as an afterword for the 1972 reprint of the 1861
Life in the Iron Mills; or, The Korl Woman
by Rebecca Harding Davis (
Atlantic Monthly,
April 1861).
A few notes have been added to the original ones.
You are about to give the life of your reading to a forgotten American classic, Rebecca Harding’s
Life in the Iron Mills,
reprinted here after 111 years from the April 1861
Atlantic Monthly.
Without precedent or predecessor, it recorded what no one else had recorded; alone in its epoch and for decades to come, saw the significance, the presage, in scorned or unseen native materials—and wrought them into art.
Written in secret and in isolation by a thirty-year-old unmarried woman who lived
far from literary circles of any kind, it won instant fame—to sleep in ever deepening neglect to our time.
Remember, as you begin to read of the sullen, clinging industrial smoke, the air thick, clammy with the breath of crowded human beings: this was written when almost everywhere the air was pure; and these lives, hitherto unknown, invisible (though already the lives of millions), are brought
here for the first time into literature.
*
(So was
Life in the Iron Mills
prefaced in its 1972 republication.)
Until
Life in the Iron Mills
appeared in that April 1861
Atlantic,
there had been no Blakean dark Satanic mills in American literature; outside of slavery, no working people whose lives were “tragedy . . . a reality of soul starvation . . . living death.” There had been no Hugh Wolfes,
consumptive puddler in a steel mill, or Debs, hunchbacked cotton mill girl, deformed by work since early childhood at the looms; no slums, kennel-like dwellings, incessant labor, alcoholism; no “is that all of their lives? nothing beneath? all?”; no implicit:
“Wrong, all wrong.”
Nowhere in fiction was industrialization, the significant development that would transform the nation, a concern—nor
its consuming of the lives of numberless human beings. No one in literature had opposed the prevalent “American right to rise . . . A man may make himself anything he chooses” with Rebecca Harding’s living question: “What are rights without means?”
No one had delineated a Kirby, twelve hundred “hands” in his mill, who would say:
If I had the making of men, these men who do the lowest
part of the world’s work should be machines,—nothing more,—hands. It would be kindness. . . . What are taste, reason, to creatures who must live such lives?
—nor had any writers concerned themselves with the shape that taste, reason, might have to take “in such lives.”
In the creature, Hugh Wolfe, is “a fierce thirst for beauty,—to know it, to create it; to
be
—something . . . other than he is.”
Off hours he sculptures crude, powerful shapes out of the pig-iron waste; (dissatisfied, hacks them to pieces afterward). One is a giant korl woman. “She be hungry,” he tries to explain to Kirby and his party of sightseers who are “of the mysterious class . . . of another order of being.” “Not hungry for meat . . . [For] summat to make her live . . . like you. . . . Whiskey ull do it, in a way.”
“Boy, you have it in you to be a great sculptor,” Wolfe is told. “Make yourself what you will. It is your right.” When the question of means arises, the admirer shortly explains that exercise of rights depends upon money. And adds: “Why should one be raised, when myriads are left?”
Wolfe, the sense of his capacities kindled, sees his life as it
“might—but never can, be,” (What are rights without
means?) “never.”
Deborah steals to free him from the mill. “Free. To work, to live, to love. His right.” He is caught; judged “by man’s law that seizes on one isolated act, not . . . God’s justice that weigh[s] the entire life”; sentenced to nineteen years. “Half a lifetime! . . . A hard sentence—all the law allows; but it was for ’xample’s sake. These mill hands are gettin’ onbearable.”
“It
was only right,” Wolfe thinks, “he had done wrong. But was there right or wrong for such as he? What was right?”
Rather than suffer the lingering death of the penitentiary (he knew “how it went with men there”), with “a dull old bit of tin, not fit to cut korl with,” sharpened on the prison bars, he takes his life.
Near the beginning of
Life in the Iron Mills,
the narrator had said:
There is a secret down here . . . in this nightmare fog. . . . From the very extremity of its darkness, . . . the most solemn prophecy which the world has known of the Hope to come.
The secret is the great capacities hidden in humanity, latent, denied—yet struggling for expression.
The book ends with one of the oldest of human symbols, the promise of dawn.
*
Life in the Iron Mills
was not
written out of compassion or condescending pity. Rebecca Harding wrote it in absolute identification with “thwarted, wasted lives . . . mighty hungers . . . unawakened power”; circumstances that denied use of capacities; imperfect, self-tutored art that could have only odd moments for its doing—as if these were her own. And they were—however differently embodied in the life of a daughter of the
privileged class.