Silences (46 page)

▴
ONE OUT OF TWELVE, P
. 41

*
—and, I might add, perhaps discarded.

**
A sampling of famous sons, this century, includes T.S. Eliot, Jorge Luis Borges, Allen Ginsberg, John Updike. Remember also, Woolf’s “. . . whenever one reads of a remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet . . .”

†
“In the 20 years that we’ve lived here [Morocco], I
have written only two short stories and nothing else. It’s good for Paul, but not for me.”

‡
The husbands: Robert Penn Warren, Yvor Winters, Allen Tate, Paul Bowles, Robert Lowell, Richard Ellmann, Lionel Trilling, Robert Gorham Davis, Alfred Kazin, José Yglesias.

*
I have qualms in quoting Gardner; he expresses the situation forthrightly. The true “leech” writers—whom I would have preferred to
quote—do not do so.

Furthermore, I share his “medieval” view: classical, medieval, or modern, we in art have all been contributed to, have “collaborators.”

And—writer-woman (temerity) question: what makes someone with capacity “too lazy,” that is a contributor, and not a doer in her own voice? Which is not to say that this question is necessarily pertinent in this instance or that everyone is
or should be a writer—but that this is an essential question always to ask. We are only beginning to understand the process of discouragings, of silencings; of the making of enabled and of enablers.

**
But no one’s development should any longer be at the cost of another’s.

▴
ONE OUT OF TWELVE, P
. 39

BLIGHT. THE HIDDEN SILENCER—BREAKDOWN

Only by inference, present in the original talks:

From youngest years, the damaging of capacity; the leeching of will, of belief in self. Distraction, division, shame. Robbing of aspiration. The Angel and having to try to kill the Angel; and hoarse encumbrances of household care. The Damnation of Women. The Fundamental Situation. Economic Imperatives. Postponing;
sustaining interruption, breaking concentration. Sporadic effort; unfinished work; unsatisfactory quality of work. Devaluation. Cruel climates. Critical Attitudes. Restriction. Constriction.

“Her mind must have been strained and her vitality lowered by the need to oppose this.”

Yes. And sometimes—break down.

Breakdown (not genuine madness, rare among women writers; nor suicide, which is rarer).
^*

Extremity. When overborne, overworn—for a period—one breaks down, gives up, goes under, cannot go on.

Reality depression. Nullity. Survival withdrawal. Ragings. Or pain, harms, felt in—moved into, working in—the
body,
when there is no other way, place, to feel it, act upon it, remove the cause.

Not neuroses or symptoms of neuroses as commonly (mis)apprehended, (mis)treated. Natural. Extremity.
Sanity. It would be unreal (insane) not to (re)act so.

They understood clearer in the last century. Termed it more accurately.

Fuller (already twice quoted):

            
If any individual live too much in relations, so that [s]he becomes a stranger to the resources of [her] own nature, [s]he falls, after a while, into a distraction, or imbecility, which can only be cured by a time of isolation
which gives the renovating fountains time to rise up.

[as happened with Fuller]

Emily Dickinson:

            
Sweet Sister. Was that what I used to call you?

                  
I hardly recollect, all seems so different—

                  
I hesitate which word to take, as I can take but few and each must be the chiefest, but recall that Earth’s most graphic transaction is placed within a syllable,
nay, even a gaze—

                  
The Physician says I have “Nervous prostration.”

                  
Possibly I have—I do not know the Names of Sickness. The crisis of the sorrow of so many years is all that tires me. . . .

                  
Please Sister to wait—. . .

—Letter to Mrs. J. G. Holland, late 1883

            
. . . Eight Saturday noons ago, I was making a loaf cake with Maggie,
when I saw a great darkness coming and knew no more until late at night. . . . I had fainted and lain unconscious for the first time in my life. Then I grew very sick and gave the others much alarm, but am now staying. The doctor calls it “revenge of the nerves”; but who but Death had wronged them? . . .

—Letter to Louise and Frances Norcross, early August 1884

Vincent Van Gogh:

            
And perhaps the disease of the heart is caused by this. One does not rebel against things, it does no good; nor is one resigned to them; one’s ill because of them and one does not get better. . . .

Olive Schreiner
(writing of those who try to live ahead of their time, when the societal changes making it possible are not-yet, or only in, the process) (“a time when nothing can be done, except by
inches”
^*
):

            
In times of modifying, of doing away with traditional ways, within the individuality itself of such persons goes on, in an intensified form, that very . . . conflict, disco-ordination which is going on in the society at large—and agonizing moments must arise when the individual, seeing the necessity for adopting new courses of action will yet be tortured by the hold [outer,
inner] of traditional ways . . . [this is] almost bound to rupture the continuity of their psychological being.

                  
Because there was no other place to flee to,

                  
I came back to the scene of the disordered senses.

                  
Everyone has left me

                  
except my muse,

                  
that good nurse.
^**

“Flee on your donkey,” Annes, Annes,
Sweet Sisters,

            
. . . In her work, as in her private problems, [Virginia Woolf] was always civilized and sane on the subject of madness. She pared the edges off this particular malady, she tied it down to being a malady, and robbed it of the evil magic it has acquired through timid or careless thinking; here is one of the gifts we have to thank her for.
^†

Yes.

In her life and in her
diaries, the incomparable record (help for us all) of her preventing, staving off, countering,
bounding
the malady (sometimes true madness, sometimes breakdown); understanding, using, it.

The above are swiftings from an as yet unedited, unpublished talk given at M.I.T. in 1973 during the worst of the madness-suicide mystique. It began with this roll of names:

*
In spite of the widely believed “savage God” theory that madness and suicide are the corollary of daring creative endeavor by women. In the few instances of madness or suicide, the hidden blights are scarcely or not at all considered as factors.

*
Adrienne Rich.

**
Anne Sexton, “Flee on Your Donkey,” from
Live or Die.

†
E.M. Forster.
Recollections of Virginia Woolf
.

*
Since then, we have lost
Anne Sexton.

—Lyndall, in Olive Schreiner’s
Story of

an African Farm,
1883

HIDDEN BLIGHT—PROFESSIONAL CIRCUMSTANCES
^▴

Treatment, circumstances for the writer-woman and her work, based not on capacities, attainment alone, but affected by her being of
her sex: female.

                  
“You will, I know, keep measuring me by some standard of what you deem becoming to my sex.”

—Charlotte Brontë, 1849

                  
“Nevertheless her mind must have been strained and her vitality lowered by her need to oppose this.”

—Virginia Woolf

Devaluation; Critical Attitudes
^▴

The perpetual dancing dog phenomena: