The Cosmopolitans (30 page)
Authors: Sarah Schulman
Honoré de Balzac's novel
Cousin Bette
(1846) is taught as a classic work of nineteenth-century French realism. Balzac was so committed to his task that he wrote ninety novels with a quill pen, worked in Paris while his girlfriend lived in the Ukraine, and died of caffeine poisoning after decades of drinking sixteen cups a day. I've always felt that the job of the novelist is to individuate other people, but it takes an irregular passion to see other people as “real.” Both the real and the abstract, ultimately, have to coexist because the will to know others for who they actually are is unfortunately an out-of-social act that transcends the norm. This is what makes artists strange: the desire to see, understand, and articulate what lies beyond the facade. But to puncture someone's facade is to puncture their heart. And the facade of a society is more protected even than its individuals', so the quest to know is accompanied by alienation from those who don't want to know.
My novel also responds to a second iconic realist
work,
Another Country
(1962) by James Baldwin. Earl and Bette occupy the same world, time, and physical space as in Baldwin's novel. Both stories unfold in postwar New York bohemia, where rejected and marginalized people of different races and places on the spectrum of sexuality confront and try to come to terms with each other, both succeeding and failing. The failure is a unique urban failure because it represents a special hope, and is only made disappointing because of the optimism at its root. But for Baldwin, the men are more real than the women, and therefore more important. I want to, with hindsight, reassert into that historic moment that women have as much nuance, desire, contradiction, and, therefore, humanity as men, in fiction as well as in life. They are not pawns in a story, but full human beings with histories, contexts, and reactions. When acted upon unjustly, they experience consequences and they express those consequences. When the women have the same dimension as the men, we have an experience that is interactive. It is dynamic. And therefore more “real.”
The Cosmopolitans
occurs in the late 1950s in New York City, a place where “kitchen-sink realism” was dominating the works of film, theater, and literature that received approval and reward. At the same time, improvisation and abstraction were biting kitchen-sink's heels. Yet, for example, in painting, the abstract expressionists were benign in the face of McCarthyism, which persecuted realists. While abstraction can have a revolutionary impulse, it can also become cultural wallpaper. Jazz in the 1950s propels as equally toward incitement as it does to Muzak.
From this conjunction of the consequences of McCarthyism on cultural production, a new kind of American realism was established that prevails to this day. It firmly reflects the values of the dominant group, but can have riffs of formal innovation for enjoyment and variation that may be clever or fun. However, these engaging impulses do not disrupt the basic foundational requirements for both characters and authors: That only certain Americans deserve to become protagonists, emblematic of an era. That only certain kinds of writers can be both stylists and have gravitas of content and perspective.
This contemporary American variation on realism is so overbearingly dominant that it now controls how we think about and describe our lives, not just what books we read. We have lost objectivity about this style, see it as neutral or “literary” or “midlist,” when, in fact, it reflects values about contemporary social order and control as cohesive, sensical experiences. I have always believed that the form of a novel should be an organic expression of the emotions at the core of the piece. I have never created, nor responded to, work that repeats a known “style” and imposes it on top of its own people and events. In an expansive social moment, the understanding that new representations of under-depicted people and unexplored experiences dictate new styles would be welcomed as a broadening of point of view. We would want to see and internalize how different kinds of people experience the world in a desire to open ourselves to the broad variety of humanity. In a restricted or oppressive period, however, repetition of already known paradigms and ways of writing are embraced
and privileged, as though the familiarity itself was a sign of quality.
Only two lines remain from the original
Cousin Bette
, and I leave them to the literary detectives to unearth.
The Cosmopolitans
, in homage to both its source material and the era in which it is set, hovers realistically between French realism, kitchen-sink realism, contemporary American realism, and abstraction. I also try to evoke the era through slight allusion to the Britishized American English that dominated commonly read translations at the time. Whether the source was Flaubert or Dostoyevsky, these novels often sounded, in English, like they were being recited by Katherine Hepburn. And so, that tone, in a way, represents the period for American readers.
The book is distinctly stylized to reflect its characters' specific emotional experience of the world. For it is the specificity of their experiences that guides their perceptions, which in turn produces their actions and thereby creates the story.
Thank you to Francoise Meltzer, whose class on nineteenth-century French realism in 1977 at the University of Chicago has stayed with me all my life. Thank you to Jack Doulin, Des McAnuff, Shirley Fishman, Carrie Ryan, Kirsten Brandt, Roberta Maxwell, and my dear Diane Venora for your contributions to the development of this piece. I am grateful to the Mac-Dowell Colony for their life-long support and to the Dora Maar House and the Brown Foundation/Houston Museum of Art for the time to finish the manuscript.
Extra special thanks to Mitchell Waters, Amy Scholder, Tayari Jones, Jennifer Baumgardner, and the amazing team at the Feminist Press.
SARAH SCHULMAN
is a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, nonfiction writer, AIDS historian, and journalist. Her seventeen books include
Israel/Palestine and the Queer International, The Gentrification of the Mind
, and ten novels including
The Mere Future
and
Rat Bohemia
. Her awards include a Guggenheim, Fulbright, and the Kessler Prize for Sustained Contribution to LGBT Studies, among many others. She is cofounder of the ACT UP Oral History Project and MIX: NYC Queer Experimental Film Festival. Her plays and movies have been seen at Playwrights Horizons, the Berlin International Film Festival, and the Museum of Modern Art. Schulman is Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at the City University of New York, College of Staten Island; a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU; and on the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace.
SINGLE JEWISH MALE SEEKING SOULMATE
Letty Cottin Pogrebin
Single Jewish Male Seeking Soul Mate
is the story of Zach Levy, the left-leaning son of Holocaust survivors who promises his mother on her deathbed that he will marry within the tribe and raise Jewish children. When he falls for Cleo Scott, an African American activist grappling with her own inherited trauma, he must reconcile his old vow to the family he loves with the present reality of the woman who may be his soul mate. A New York love story complicated by the legacies and modern tensions of Jewish American and African American history,
Single Jewish Male Seeking Soul Mate
explores what happens when the heart runs counter to politics, history, and the compelling weight of tradition.
LETTY COTTIN POGREBIN is an author, activist, and national lecturer. She is a leading figure in Jewish and feminist activism. A founding editor and writer for
Ms
. Magazine, Pogrebin is also the author of eleven books, including the memoir
Getting Over Getting Older
(1996), the novel
Three Daughters
(2003), and the groundbreaking
How to Be a Friend to a Friend Who's Sick
(2013). She is also the editor for the anthology
Stories for Free Children
, and co-creator of
Free to Be . . . You and Me and Free to Be . . . A Family
. Her articles, op-eds, and columns have been published frequently in a wide variety of magazines and publications, including the
New York Times, Harpers Bazaar
, and the
Ladies Home Journal
.
A leader in many social justice causes, Pogrebin has served
as the President of the Authors Guild, Chair of the Board of Americans for Peace Now, and is the co-founder of various organizations focusing on topics such as women's issues and Middle Eastern politics. She currently serves on the board in numerous organizations, including Americans for Peace Now, the Ms. Foundation for Education & Communication, and Brandeis University Women's and Gender Studies Program.
The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM (and Shot Andy Warhol)
Breanne Fahs
Too drastic, too crazy, too “out there,” too early, too late, too damaged, too muchâValerie Solanas has been dismissed but never forgotten. She has become, unwittingly, a figurehead for women's unexpressed rage, and stands at the center of many worlds. She inhabited Andy Warhol's Factory scene, circulated among feminists and the countercultural underground, charged men money for conversation, despised “daddy's girls,” and outlined a vision for radical gender dystopia.
Known for shooting Andy Warhol in 1968 and for writing the polemical diatribe
SCUM Manifesto
, Solanas is one of the most famous women of her era.
SCUM Manifesto
âwhich predicted ATMs, test-tube babies, the internet, and artificial insemination long before they existedâhas sold more copies, and has been translated into more languages, than nearly all other feminist texts of its time.
Shockingly little work has interrogated Solanas's life. This book is the first biography about Solanas, including original interviews with family, friends (and enemies), and numerous living Warhol associates. It reveals surprising details about her life: the children nearly no one knew she had, her drive for control over her own writing and copyright, and her elusive personal
and professional relationships.
Valerie Solanas
addresses how this era changed the world, and depicts an iconic figure whose life is at once tragic and remarkable.
BREANNE FAHS is an associate professor of women and gender studies at Arizona State University, a practicing clinical psychologist, and the author of
Performing Sex and The Moral Panics of Sexuality
.
Laurie Weeks
In this extraordinary debut novel, Laurie Weeks captures the freedom and longing of life on the edge in New York City. Ranting letters to Judy Davis and Sylvia Plath, an unrequited fixation on a straight best friend, exalted nightclub epiphanies, devastating morning-after hangoversâ
ZIPPER MOUTH
chronicles the exuberance and mortification of a junkie, and transcends the chaos of everyday life.
LAURIE WEEKS has been a superstar in the New York downtown writing world since the 1990s. Her fiction and other writings have been published in
The Baffler, Vice, Nest, Index, LA Weekly
, and Semiotext(e)'s
The New Fuck You
. A portion of this novel appeared recently in Dave Egger's
The Best American Nonrequired Reading
, and has been shortlisted for Publishing Triangle's, Edmund White Debut fiction award. She has taught in writing programs at UC San Diego and the New School, and has toured the US with the girl-punk group Sister Spit.
The Feminist Press
is a nonprofit educational organization founded to amplify feminist voices. FP publishes classic and new writing from around the world, creates cutting-edge programs, and elevates silenced and marginalized voices in order to support personal transformation and social justice for all people.
See our complete list of books at
feministpress.org
