Saturday's Child (37 page)

ELEVEN

Revolucinations

The revolution must be ongoing and permanent
.

—M
AO
T
SE
-
TUNG

Don't panic. I'm not given to quoting Mao, and haven't for more than thirty years. Even then, I usually restricted myself to the tasted-of-the-pear bit, which, though somewhat Garden of Eden for my taste, at least suggested a concrete image: socialism with a human face might leave little cadre tooth marks in a Bosc. Did you know that Mao—along with Castro, Guevara, and Quaddafi—considered himself a poet, and that they all have written perfectly awful poetry? As bad as Jimmy Carter's, which
is
impressive. It's tempting to wonder if they settled for political power because they couldn't get published; what's a state publishing house, after all, but a vanity press writ large?

Still, the visionary old tyrant or his “Quotations” of staff writers had a point in that statement I've used as an epigraph above. It's like a rule of entropy: whatever seems fresh and new will get crusted over with amazing rapidity, until the original content ossifies into something almost wholly surface. Human curiosity yearns to discover the unfamiliar, but human attention span is embarrassingly short. We bore easily. Having discovered something, we frequently dismiss it: politics become co-opted, enlightenment
dwindles to ritual, art gets banalized, creativity commercialized. But that necessitates reinvention: a new thesis, antithesis, synthesis; a fresh turn of the wheel. Or the screw.

I've just relearned the obvious again because I've been trying to write this damned chapter for weeks. The problem? We were now up to the mid-1960s, so politics had officially clambered into the memoir, excreting rhetoric in its wake like a slug trails slime—many words ending in
-ism
and
-tion
. Furthermore, as draft after draft emerged—each more awesomely dull than the next—despite all my efforts to focus on the personal, each draft sounded ominously
familiar
, like a codified set-piece, the subject matter already tackled before, many times. In fact, it
has
been—in my poems, fiction, essays, and book-length works of “feminist theory” (meaning attempts to demonstrate with the facts of our lives answers to that dumb Freudian question “What is it women really want?”).

There truly is a limit to how many times and ways you can say something, no matter how inventive you tell yourself you are. Even a summary is preferable to another repetition. This way the disinterested reader will be spared, and the interested reader can find the information elsewhere easily enough. Consequently, we now pause for a (
brief
!) aside:

“And Then I Wrote…”

My introductions to both anthologies,
Sisterhood Is Powerful
and
Sisterhood Is Global
, are studded with personal anecdotes about the impact feminist consciousness (domestic and international) made in my life.

Going Too Far
focused on my earlier activism in the so-called New Left and the beginnings of the “women's liberation movement.” There I wrote at length about the influence of that politics on my marriage, comparing “B.C.” (Before Consciousness) ways in which we had communicated with later ones—which at the time seemed fresh and hugely helpful, even if we did couch many of them in the political jargon we called “being in struggle.” I looked at how the rhetoric of the period corrupted many of us who worked with words, how in order to write for the so-called underground media that we deemed so necessary, we were pressured to sacrifice what verbal or literary skills we possessed to the Marxian gibberish of the Left and the hippie gobbledygook of the counterculture, which in turn—as
Orwell knew well—affected our thinking itself. I sniped, for instance, at what I termed Failure Vanguardism: the then trendy but unadmitted notion that if your political project fizzled, your constituency ignored you, and your personal attitude was sneeringly more-radical-than-thou, you were obviously a Revolutionary—but if you actually
succeeded
in any of those areas, you had sold out and were a Running Dog Capitalist Swine. (Not only was this patently unfair to puppies and piglets, but the purism was
literally
terminal: imprisoned was preferable to free; life sentence had more cachet than felony; corpsehood had status in the most enviable vanguard of all.) In
GTF
I also wrote about my fleeting fantasy of building feminist “basic training” guerrilla camps (an idea that luckily died before Ramba could be born and buckle on her weaponry). Last, attempting to have form follow function, I stirred all this personal-life-plus-political-analysis eclecticism together in a comic verse play at the book's end, a somewhat wild exegesis on “metaphysical feminism.”

In
The Anatomy of Freedom
I explored reasons underlying what I named the New Left's “ejaculatory tactics,” unacknowledged masculinist agendas that corroded its vision and diminished its constituency to reflect finally only its own entrenched leadership: middle-class, young, straight, pale males who could afford to preach downward mobility since they had the option of re-elevating themselves with a single collect-call home. In writing about the personal lessons as well as the organizing techniques gleaned from that experience, I suggested that advanced theoretical physics could constitute a witty metaphor for sophisticated feminist politics, parsing the physics as well as the politics. But I grounded the abstractions by writing about my own body (and flesh loathing), sex (and fantasies), dreams, the politics of aging, and the possibility of “a good death.” I wrote about the marriage there, too, about the nonverbal code between a wife and husband that neither admits to but each continually transmits; “The Marriage Map” section tracks what happens when the tsunami of feminism hits and they both think No Problem! Why, We'll Be A Liberated Couple!

Dry Your Smile
was a quasi-autobiographical novel, so what do you
think
I wrote about?

In
The Demon Lover
, I revealed the period of my pre-feminist involvement with small, militant individuals and groups (predating but overlapping
with the Weather Underground period): the intoxicating drama of living on the edge as well the nausea of fear that permeated daily life, the bitter fights over making warning calls after incendiary devices had been placed in buildings (the women wanted to place calls, the men considered such concerns bleeding-heart sentimentality). That book, subtitled “On the Sexuality of Terrorism,” began as an attempt to fathom the process of what had been my personal descent into political violence and the struggle to break free of those tactics—which I was lucky enough to do, thus managing not to wind up, like many of my colleagues, underground, in prison, or dead. This personal exploration of violence—its odd seductiveness, rewards, demands, and despondencies—grew into a study of women and global terror, yet returned repeatedly to the autobiographical. That forms the premise of the entire book, so to summarize it is no more feasible than repainting a mural as a miniature.

For the essays collected as
The Word of a Woman
, I assembled the unabashedly nonobjective “participatory journalism” I'd done for mainstream as well as alternative media from the mid-1960s through the mid-1990s, with contextual commentary—from my days of Leftist-defined priorities and the “women's liberation” early years through my becoming a feminist, the mother of a son, an international activist, and the partner of another woman.

As for the six books of poems—well, the
real
story is in the poems …

All of which is to say, in other (so as to avoid the same) words:

Been there. Wrote that
.

“But I Digress…”

You see the problem. This period in the memoir has already been written and published, years ago. All that's left of the pear is the core.

Well, let's look at that, then, because it
is
fair to wonder
why
I mined my life for the ore of subject matter and drafted its details into political service.

Partly, I believed that such explorations into the impact of politics on my life (and the reverse) were required by the essence of the politics themselves, feminism in particular. It was an experiential essence, so it
invited, even demanded, a reaching out to others, mostly but not exclusively to women, not only through words on the page but through a willingness to risk exposing one's private realities (plus an equal or greater commitment to learning others' realities). I'm not sorry I took that risk. I admit to being a romantic, but frankly, I also think it's
sensible
to trust politics rooted in experience, reality, and passion more than those based on some central-committee-devised abstract theoretical blather, or those emanating from certain post-commonsense academics too busy deconstructing tropes to go on a march for reproductive rights.

But that might not be the whole story. Perhaps I was hoisted by my own petard: that phrase “the personal is political” returning to stalk what unfamiliar privacy I'd managed to achieve as an adult. Or possibly it was recurring egotism, albeit in a benign form, a gambit to remain onstage but through a volunteerism of self this time pressed into service to illumine a political point. Likely it was a bit of all of the above. Mostly, it was just what
writers
do.
¹

In any event, one thing is bracingly clear on having plowed through this chapter's earlier drafts of stale epiphanies: if I were to be bored writing it (again), then reading it would have put you in a coma.

So. We'll try an entirely different approach. I'd
really
like to pull this off as a sonnet sequence or a farcical playlet, but they'd never let me get away with it. However, I promise you that whatever follows will
not
be:

(1) A chronicle—personal or otherwise—of the New Left, civil-rights movement, anti-war movement, counterculture, or Summer of Love.

(2) A history—political or otherwise—of “women's liberation,” contemporary feminism, the Women's Movement, or “gender theory.”
²

(3) A sensationalistic confession, personal or political, listing details of the illegal political actions (“armed propaganda,” we called it) I did—or revealing when, where, and with whom.

These last are delineated at some length, only mildly disguised, in
The Demon Lover
. I could write—carefully—about them there, because by the time I was working on that book (published in 1989), the period fixed by the statute of limitations for incrimination regarding certain acts had lapsed; regarding some other acts, it's still not up. Moreover, unlike some militants of the Sixties and Seventies who in their zealous recantations veered so far Rightward they chose to volunteer colleagues' identities in an orgy of confessional writing, I won't name names. There were actions I took that not even Kenneth knew about, but I don't intend to endanger those who did know, either—even persons I no longer respect or trust, people with whom I wouldn't now stoop to wire a woofer or tweeter, let alone anything incendiary.

In general, from here on in we encounter another challenge, which a traditional memoirist would probably not admit: How can I tell the truth without ruining my credibility? Unlike the majority of souls who populated the first part of this memoir, most of the persons in this part are
alive
. What's more, they have lawyers. Many are friends—the people, not the
lawyers (well, even a few of the lawyers). Unlike the late poet Robert Lowell or the arguably living pugilist Norman Mailer, I've always tried to respect what I feel is a fine-line border between my right to explore my own life as subject matter and other people's right not to be subject matter. If, however, the other person has already given her/his “side of the story” publicly—why then, all's fair. Nor do I intend to hide the
fact
of someone's being part of my life. But I might employ that handy proscenium device, the scrim, letting it descend over certain scenes so their details can be viewed with softened edges, as if on a London street corner through fog or across the blue spaces of a smoky bar. So we enter a new terrain, where, in order to
be
honest, truth-telling must sometimes put aside its homespun cottons and array itself in more artfully draped silks that whisper subtlety. While this might be a loss in terms of gossip-quotient buzz and prepublication excerpts appearing in periodicals (another blow to my patient publisher and long-suffering literary agent), it could be a gain for literary style. Rather an agreeable trade-off, that.

Anyway, I never promised you a Tell All. Only a Tell Some.

If you're the sort of reader I suspect you are—you've traveled this far, after all—then such an announcement will actually come as a relief. If it strikes you as a disappointment, though, go read something else. I'll be hurt but I'll act understanding. Meanwhile, I'll just tell some stories, preferably some I've never revealed before.

Politics becomes a part of your life once you realize it has been all along. Kenneth and I had been “political” before we knew each other, albeit in the mild-mannered fashion of, respectively, literary people and show-business folk. The son of a working-class man proud of having once ridden the rails with the Wobblies, Ken grew up in a more consciously Leftist household than mine. While teaching at NYU, he'd tangled with his department head over the attempted imposition of faculty loyalty oaths, and had refused to trot out his students for air-raid drills, noting that nuclear holocaust would hardly be survived by ambling to the basement. Later, when Funk & Wagnalls—where he worked as an in-house writer and editor—was purchased by the conservative Reader's Digest Association, he would
get into principled hot water for daring to put up anti-Vietnam War posters in the privacy of his office cubicle; he was finally fired because he refused to take down a famous poster showing the bloody My Lai massacre, its caption quoting testimony by the GIs who'd torched the village, killing all its inhabitants: “Q:
And children? A: And children
.” He would in time become a founder of the Gay Liberation Front, as well as one of the first men to respond to this feminist wave in ethical, supportive ways, both on the page and in daily life. But that's getting ahead of the story.