Silences (41 page)

                     
Him, snake swaying like a man, in the tree

                     
Drawing her away from her true god.
^*

Looking back at poems I wrote before
I was twenty-one, I’m startled because beneath the conscious craft are glimpses of the split I even then experienced between the girl who wrote poems, who defined herself in writing poems, and the girl who defined herself by her relationships with men . . .

—Adrienne Rich

. . . Oh, the jealous and anxious passion I had for solitude, O solitude of my young days! You were my refuge, my panacea,
the citadel of my youthful pride. With what might and main did I cling to you—and how afraid I was even then of losing you! I trembled at the mere thought of the more ruthless and less rare ecstasy of love! At the thought of losing you I felt already demeaned. And yet . . . who can resist the pull of love? To become only a woman—how paltry! Yet I hastened eagerly toward that common goal.

   
               
Did I hesitate a minute, one solitary minute, standing between your beloved specter, O solitude, and the menacing apparition of love? . . . I don’t know.

—Colette

            
As lonely in her trouble as if she had been the only girl in the civilised world of that day who had come out of her school life with a soul untrained for inevitable struggles; with no other part of her inherited
share in the hard won treasures of thought which generations of painful toil have laid for the race of men, than shreds and patches of feeble literature and false history.

—George Eliot

And in all the usual college teaching . . . little to help that young woman understand the source or nature of this inexplicable draining self-doubt, loss of aspiration, of confidence.

It is in these years that
another significant turn to silencing takes place. What was needed to confirm and vivify has been meager—and occasional, accidental. The compound of what actively denies, divides, vitiates, has been powerful—and continuous, institutionalized. The young unhelped “sexless, bound in sex” being is now in

                      
. . . the glade

              
Wherein Fate sprung Love’s ambuscade, .
. .

              
To flush me in this sensuous strife. . . .

              
Of that which makes the sexual feud

              
And clogs the aspirant life.
^*

There was that . . . conception, which I’d been brought up to and wanted to believe, that I should find the
solution
to my life, not just companionship, in a single, other person. . . .

At Iowa . . . a classmate told me he believed that
to be a woman poet was “a contradiction in terms.” . . .

Princeton . . . intensified my own sense of dichotomy between “woman” and “poet.” I knew a number of men who wrote, but no women. Work by women was still sparsely represented in contemporary poetry anthologies. . . . Men’s praise of poetry didn’t seem to go much beyond Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, whose work I admired but couldn’t
then
use,
in the deep sense that writers use the discoveries of other writers as steps toward their own growth.

. . . From the age of twenty-two to the age of twenty-six, I worked strenuously and perfectly seriously on a book of poems (a
book,
not just poems), then “gave up poetry” and never tried to publish but one of them.

“Didn’t anyone ever tell you it was all right to write?” asked the
psychiatrist who came along much later: “Yes, but not to be a writer.” Behind me lay the sort of middle-class education that encourages writing, painting, music, theater, so long as they aren’t taken too seriously, so long as they can be set aside once the real business of life begins. . . .
^*

            
Now she is still not beautiful but more

            
Moving than before, for time has come

            
When she shall be delivered; some-

            
one must have, move her, or the doors

            
Be shuttered over, the doorlids shut, her

            
Eyes’ lies shattered. In the spume

            
Of a triple wave she lives: sperm,

            
Man and life’s mate break like flags upon her shore.

            
Marriage must take her now, or the sly

            
Inquirer, inviting
her to ship for his sake,

            
Will share all islands inland with her, her sky

            
No one else shares, will slake

            
Conquerlust. Seas wash away her ties

            
While through her thigh-trees water strikes like a snake.
^*

Everything has happened!

*
“The Babysitters,” Sylvia Plath.

**
From
Yonnondio
, by the young (twenty-year-old) mother-writer who was myself.

▴
ONE OUT OF TWELVE
, PP. 27–30

*
From “Adam and Eve and the Child” in
Ladder of the World’s Joy
, Sarah Appleton.

*
From Melville’s “After the Pleasure Party.”

How many making up the eleven in the possible twelve founder here?

(With more than is recognized, it has not been a leaving of literature, but an attempt at solution, a keeping and using of it within precedented woman
ways. So is born the enabler, the encourager, the wife, the helper; where there is economic imperative—that mammoth silencer only indicated in this book—the teacher, librarian, editor. And still the want to write does not die; it waits, unsleeping, sleeping, unsleeping.)

*
Jane Cooper.
Maps and Windows
.

*
“Eve,” written in 1947 when Jane Cooper was twenty-three, was put away with other poems,
and not published until
Maps and Windows
, in 1974.

THE DAMNATION OF WOMEN
^▴

I. Within the Injunction

Perfection is terrible.
     

It cannot have children.

It tamps the womb.
        

Was it so that “most women writers of distinction never questioned, or at least accepted [a few sanctified] the patriarchal injunction;
^*
this different condition for achievement not imposed on men”?

A few sanctified, yes. Willa Cather:

  
          
Art of every kind is an exacting master, more so than Jehovah. He says only “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” Art, Science, Letters cry: “Thou shalt have no other gods at all.” They accept only human sacrifices.

For Ellen Glasgow there was not even a question. She answered the literary man who told her,

            
The best advice I can give you is to stop writing and go back
to the South and have some babies. The greatest woman is not the woman
who has written the finest book, but the woman who has had the finest babies

that “all I ever wanted was to write books. And not ever had I felt the faintest wish to have babies.”

Henry Handel Richardson (quoted in “Silences”) and Katherine Anne Porter acquiesced; it was one or the other:

            
There are enough women
to do the childbearing and the childrearing. I know of none who can write my books,

wrote Richardson. Porter told an interviewer:

            
Now I am all for human life, and I am all for marriage and children and all that sort of thing, but quite often you can’t have that and do what you were supposed to do, too. Art is a vocation, as much as anything in the world, not as necessary as air and
water, perhaps, but as food and water. . . . We really do lead almost a monastic life, you know.

In that long roll of childless women writers who paid the cost of being able to do their best work, was there not one who felt it as damnation? Not one? Silence, reticence, until with Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, in our century, an anguish, a longing to have children, breaks into expression.
In private diaries and letters only.

Virginia Woolf, writing of the causes of her descent into madness as a young woman:

            
. . . and all the devils came out—heavy black ones—to be 29 & unmarried—to be a failure—childless—insane too, no writer . . .

At thirty-eight:

            
Why is life so tragic; so like a little strip of pavement over an abyss?

            
. . . It’s having
no children, living away from friends, failing to write well. . . .

At forty-four:

            
Woke up perhaps at 3. Oh it’s beginning, it’s coming—the horror—physically like a painful wave swelling about the heart—tossing
me up. I’m unhappy, unhappy! Down—God, I wish I were dead. Pause. But why am I feeling this? Let me watch the wave rise. I watch. Vanessa.
^*
Children. Failure. Yes. Failure.
Failure. The wave rises.

She was one month to forty-six before she could write

            
. . . And yet oddly enough I scarcely want children of my own now. This insatiable desire to write something before I die, this ravaging sense of the shortness and feverishness of life, make me cling, like a man on a rock, to my own anchor. I don’t like the physicalness of having children of one’s own.
This occurred to me at Rodmell, but I never wrote it down. I can dramatise myself as a parent, it is true. And perhaps I have killed the feeling instinctively; or perhaps nature does.

Or perhaps nature does. Only at forty-eight, on

            
a day of intoxication . . . when I sat surveying the whole book [
The Waves
] complete . . . felt the pressure of the form—the splendour, the greatness—as
perhaps I have never felt them

could she write, unqualifiedly:

            
Children are nothing to this.