Fear of Fifty (14 page)

Ah—we are back to the question of Jews and names. Can we keep our names? As long as we keep them
hot.
Otherwise, we also have to change them. We may have, as political theorist Benjamin Barber says, “an aristocracy of everyone,” but not everyone can be hot at once. Thus, the drive for class becomes as relentless and chronic in America as the diet. No matter how hot you are, you're always in danger of growing cold.

It's a lot like mortality, isn't it? No wonder Carpe Diem is our motto. This is what makes America such a restless country and its top-class celebrities so insecure.

Ah, friends, I long to be born into a membership in the Corviglia Club. But I suspect I never would have written any books.

Did you ever wonder why Jews are such relentless scribes? You may have thought it was because we are people of the book. You may have thought it was because we come from homes where reading is stressed. You may have thought it was repressed sexuality. All that is true. But I submit the
real
reason is our need constantly to define our class. By writing, we reinvent ourselves. By writing, we create pedigrees. Some of my fictional heroines are West Side New York Jewish girls like me. But the heroines I love the best—Fanny in
Fanny Hackabout-Jones,
and Jessica in
Serenissima
—are to the manor born, good little equestriennes, and you can bet they have high cheekbones.

Fanny grew up at Lymeworth, Lord Bellars's country seat. Jessica grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, in the Golden Rectangle. Her pedigree was very gin and country club. Why does a West Side kid like me invent such heroines? Am I trying to escape from my
schmearer-klezmer
⁵
class? Interestingly enough, my heroines always escape too. Fanny runs away from her aristocratic upbringing, becomes a highwaywoman, a whore in a brothel, and a pirate queen. Jessica leaves the Upper East Side for Hollywood! And both of them come to regret it, and find their final happinesses back in their own backyards.

The heroines who are
apparently
more like me—Isadora Wing and Leila Sand—change their status, or else establish it, through creative work. I guess my writing tells me something that I didn't even consciously know about myself: I write to give myself a class, to invent my name, and then to leave myself a country seat.

I suspect the process is not so different with other writers—however uninvolved with class their books may seem. Saul Bellow's heroes start out as drifters and end up professors. But his very best picaresque hero, Henderson the Rain King, is a WASP to the manor born who goes to Africa and embraces his multiculturalism, thereby finding his true identity. Philip Roth's heroes are equally concerned with both questions of class and questions of Jewishness. Though they themselves are almost always Jewish, they aspire to fuck their way into WASPdom—a familiar gambit for American Jewish (male) creators. We could call it the Annie Hall syndrome. Surely Woody Allen defined it forever when his autobiographical hero, sitting at Annie Hall's family's midwestern dinner table, amid the WASPs, suddenly sprouts
payess
⁶
and a big black hat.

The archetypical Jewish-American fear! If we eat
trayfe,
⁷
we may suddenly grow
payess
! Perhaps the reason Jews in America have adopted Thanksgiving as their own special holiday is that we hope that by claiming the Pilgrims as our fathers, we will fool the rest of America too!

My former father-in-law Howard Fast is a perfect example here. His books about the American Revolution—
April Morning, Citizen
Tom
Paine,
and
The Hessian
—testify to his nostalgia for the May-flower Society or the men's auxiliary of the Colonial Dames of America. He has written of ancient Rome
(Spartacus)
and gold rush San Francisco
(The Immigrants),
but it is the founding of America that calls to him again and again. In his heart, Howard Fast yearns for the pedigree of Gore Vidal.

A Jew may wander from Egypt to Germany to America to Israel, picking up different languages and hair and eye color, but nevertheless remains a Jew. And what is a Jew? A Jew is a person who is safe
nowhere
(i.e., always in danger of growing
payess
at inopportune times). A Jew is a person who can convert to Christianity from now to Doomsday, and still be killed by Hitler if his or her mother was Jewish. This explains why Jews are likely to be obsessed with matters of identity. Our survival depends upon it.

Americans, too, are obsessed with defining identity. In a melting pot culture, where aristocratic titles are considered laughable (witness Count Dracula, or Count Chocula, as kids are introduced to him—a breakfast cereal), we must constantly test the limits of identity. Andy Warhol's remark that in the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes delineates the quintessential American dilemma. We can become famous, but perhaps not stay famous. And once having known that fame, how will we live out the rest of our lives? More to the point, how will we ever get into the Hebrew Home for the Aged?

Many American lives seem doomed by Warhol's definition. Remember George Bush struggling to stay president against the historical tide? Or Stephen King aspiring to top all three bestseller lists at once? Or Bill Clinton wiring the White House to become its own media network? Americans can never rest. They can never join the Corviglia Club and amuse themselves skiing down into the picture-book village. The grace of their skiing is
never
in itself enough. They must always climb back on the chairlift and do it again, do it again, do it again.

I see that the Corviglia Club has become my symbol of aristocratic
sprezzatura—
a lovely Italian word that means the art of making the difficult look easy. Perhaps I select that image because it evokes a world of blessed people who do not have to
do
anything but only have to be. I long for such status as only an American Jew can. How nice to have an entrée into the world that cannot ever be revoked. How nice to be
born
into an identity.

My yearning is real even though I know dozens of people born into such identities who use them as excuses to become drug addicts and drifters. I know it is not easy to be noble and rich. Yet, like F. Scott Fitzgerald's characters, something in me insists that the very rich “are different from you and me.” Fitzgerald tested that hypothesis in
Gatsby,
showing the carelessness of the very rich to life, limb, and love. And yet the longing
remains
in American writers. Perhaps that's why this rather slight, beautifully written novel has become a classic. It embodies the American dream of identity and class.

The jumped-up bootlegger, Jay Gatz, dreams of a world where he wouldn't have to
work
to be Gatsby. And that is still the primal American dream. Even lotteries play to it, promising houses and yachts. Rootless by definition, we dream of roots.

American novelists are usually good examples of this. The first thing they do after a bestseller is buy a house and land. Alex Haley bought a farm in the South. Gore Vidal settled in a villa in Ravello fit for an Italian aristocrat. Arthur Miller bought a Connecticut farm for a Connecticut Yankee. So did Philip Roth.

I'm no different. After
Fear of Flying,
I bought a house in New England. Believing that when writers died and went to heaven, heaven was Connecticut, I bought a piece of that literary state. To a writer, used to making up the world with ink and a blank piece of paper, roots and gentrification are the same thing. And you get them both with
words.
Rootless people often gravitate to those fields of endeavor where class has to be repeatedly self-created. Perhaps that's also why creativity flowers during periods of great social turmoil and often among former underclasses. Perhaps that's what draws Jews to the word and the image. If you think of the vitality of Jewish-American writing in the fifties and sixties, the vitality of women's writing in the seventies and eighties and nineties, the vitality of African-American writing in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, you see that there is a clear connection between change of status and productivity. As a group becomes restless and angry, it produces writers.

I may dream of what I would have done with my life if I had been born on a plantation with plenty of coupons to clip, but probably my literary ambitions would never have blossomed. Perhaps I would have written inscrutable poetry, readable only by advanced graduate students. But most likely the anxiety and aggression needed to finish a whole book would have been denied me. For writing is not just a question of talent with words, but one of drive and ambition, of restlessness and rage. Writing is hard. The applause never comes at the end of the paragraph. The rotten tomatoes often come at publication time. And, given the hours put in, the money isn't all that good. Counting taxation and time spent, most writers make less than dental hygienists.

But we don't do it for the money. We do it to give ourselves a class.

When I finished college at Barnard, I went on to graduate school, simply because I couldn't think of what else to do. I knew I wanted to be a writer, but I wasn't yet sure I had the
sitzfleisch
to sit down and write a whole book. While I waited to mature a little, I studied English literature. Somehow I knew it would come in handy.

But the period I studied—the rollicking eighteenth century engraved by Hogarth—was the one that saw the birth of America, of women's rights, and of the novel. The novel started as a low-class form, supposedly fit only to be read by serving maids, and it is the only literary form where women distinguished themselves so early and with such excellence that even the rampant misogyny of literary history cannot erase them. Ever wonder about women and the novel? Women, like any underclass, depend for their survival on self-definition. The novel permitted this—and pages could still be hidden under the embroidery hoop.

From the writer's mind to the reader's there was only the intervention of printing presses. You could stay at home, yet send your book abroad to London—the perfect situation for women.

In a world where women are still the second sex, many still dream of becoming writers so they can work at home, make their own hours, nurse the baby. Writing still seems to fit into the interstices of a woman's life. Through the medium of words, we have hopes of changing our class. Perhaps the pen will not always be equated with the penis. In a world of computers, our swift fingers may yet win us the world. One of these days we'll have class. And so we write as feverishly as only the dispossessed can. We write to come into our own, to build our houses and plant our gardens, to give ourselves names and histories, inventing ourselves as we go along.

We had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice.

—Charlotte Brontë, excerpt from a diary

But how impossible it must have been for them not to budge either to the right or to the left. What genius, what integrity it must have required in face of all that criticism, in the midst of that purely patriarchal society, to hold fast to the thing as they saw it without shrinking. Only Jane Austen did it and Emily Brontë. It is another feather, perhaps the finest in their caps. They wrote as women write, not as men write.

—Virginia Woolf, A
Room of One's Own

 

 

What makes it possible for women to achieve in a world where we are still the second sex? Tillie Olsen, that epic poet of female silences, says that we are fortunate to be born into families with no sons. But my sisters claim they never felt even the ambivalent freedom to achieve that I felt. And my mother, also a second sister, was clearly more conflicted than I.

What made the difference in my life? Surely that is one of the reasons I am writing this book. I mean to understand the things that propelled me and the things that held me back. What made my life different from my mother's? And what made it the same?

I don't remember a time when I didn't assume I would do something with my life.
What
it would be I did not know. Writing, painting, medicine, all captured my imagination for a time. I assumed that there would be leisure, there would be money enough, there would be a place for me in the world, and I used to make Nobel Prize acceptance speeches before the mirror at the age of eight or nine. What the prize was for I did not know—or care. The main thing was: I assumed I was a winner. I had survived a whole nursery of shitting babies! Such grandiosity is probably the prelude to achievement, and as long as girls are routinely discouraged from being grandiose, they will have trouble achieving. Nobody ever discouraged me at home—even though the models for women I saw were not as free as those of men (for example, my mother with her folding easel). I somehow always knew that other women would hate and envy me for that freedom.

“Everyone thinks you're so sweet because you're
blonde,”
my sister Nana used to say. “But I know what a bitch you are.”

In the fifties, the dichotomy between blonde and brunette was a yawning chasm. It was Debbie Reynolds versus Elizabeth Taylor. And the dark sultry siren was doomed everlastingly to be the bad girl. The blonde was presumed good as gold. I did not know then that the opposition between dark- and light-haired sisters had a hoary literary history. But how these ancient categories stuck! My older sister hated me both for being blonde and for being confident. Boy-girl disguised as Debbie Reynolds, feeling no limitations because both my father and my mother were inside me, loving me, I burst into the world and was amazed to discover that girls were less equal out there.

That recognition dawned in adolescence. I still remember the time a prep school boy asked me if I planned to be a secretary and I replied, “A secretary! I'm going to be a doctor
and
a famous writer—like Chekhov!” I showed
him
(whose name I do not even remember) by never even learning to
type!
To this day I make my books by hand like needlepoint or embroidery. Oh, I have half a dozen computers, but have never learned to use any of them. They become obsolete waiting for me to learn. I fiddle for a while with that alternate universe and then return to my pen—phallic symbol that it is. I have no apologies to make for penis envy. What ambitious woman
wouldn't
have penis envy in a world where that unreliable scepter confers authority?