Fear of Fifty (16 page)

Who, after all, were our role models? Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Virginia Woolf—all of whom killed themselves before or during middle age. Who were our literary heroines? Charlotte Brontë, who died in pregnancy; Mary Wollstonecraft, who died in childbirth; Simone de Beauvoir and Emily Dickinson, who forswore children. Only George Sand and Colette among them had both love and art. And only Colette wrote about growing old with love. But she was French. French women are allowed to get older. They are even allowed to have young lovers. And write about them. (Though even Colette was kept out of the Académie Française.)

But most of our literary mentors never got to be middle-aged. We ought to be proud, not ashamed, to have made it. Yet the sexist stereotyping is so deep that a middle-aged woman reviewer calls another woman “middle-aged” and expects to have cast a blow for—what ? Feminism? No—collaboration. For the woman reviewer knows she is there on sufferance. And to keep her own job, she is expected to trash other women—particularly famous uppity other women. Thus the culture makes capos of us all.

Those of us who protest collaboration will be punished in various ways: not fairly reviewed, not given prestigious grants and awards, not elected into academies. The rules are at once subtle and blatant. If women who practice journalism still call each other “middle-aged,” how dare we blame men for the lack of greater feminist progress?

The diminution of women by women is taught everywhere—school, jobs, journalism. Women are not born knowing how to trash other women; they are carefully taught. They are taught there is only room for one token, one teacher's pet, one capo whose job it will be to show the nonexistence of discrimination. She made it against the odds. She is there to prove that anybody can.

Given my history, I should have become the capo. Wherever I went I was the token woman—Phi Beta Kappa, Woodrow Wilson Fellow, good at footnotes, research papers, good at charming elderly male professors. In short, I was good at being the good daughter. That had been my role at home. My older sister was the rebel; my younger sister the sheltered baby. My grandfather and my father adored me, and I went out into the world with long blonde hair and miniskirt, expecting to meet my grandfather and my father everywhere.

And, of course, I did. But somehow I knew that all these seductions to become the token woman were lies, betrayals of my mothers and grandmothers. I thought of my talented mother—the mad wife in the attic—and her talented sister—the mad lesbian. One went with men and the other went with women, yet both were equally discriminated against just because they were women. And I carried these two mothers in my heart. The world could not hear their cries, but I could hear little else. So when I was offered the role of token, I refused. I studied to become the voice of the madwoman in the attic. I knew her fate could just as easily have been mine.

At Barnard, I fell in love with Blake, with Byron, with Keats, with Shakespeare, with Chaucer, with Pope, with Boswell, with Fielding, with Twain, with Yeats, with Roethke, with Auden. I loved being in a place where words were valued, where poetry mattered, and I began to shape and revise my own poems. I had a poetry teacher—a poet himself—who recognized that I was a word person, not a doctor, and rescued me from pre-med and the dreaded dissection of the fetal pig.

I fell gratefully under his tutelage and followed his directives to learn to write sonnets and sestinas before I attempted “free” verse. At last there was guidance in learning the craft of poetry. At last somebody cared enough to teach me. I will always be grateful to Bob Pack for bringing rigorousness to the study of poetry.

“Learn to write a Shakespearean sonnet,” Bob (I called him Mr. Pack then) said, “and after that you can fly.”

I remember breaking my brains over my father's old rhyming dictionary (from his song-writing days), learning how hard it is to rhyme in English, and I remember bringing my efforts to Bob with trepidation. The first poem of mine he pronounced a success was this one, written about sending my boyfriend a lock of my hair:

The poem tells me who I was at seventeen—a girl in love with poetic gestures, trying to relate her life to the lives of dead white English Romantic poets, not yet even beginning to confront the issues Virginia Woolf poses in
A Room of One's Own:

In college, I did not find this to be so. Perhaps my search for identity was too retarded. I imitated Shakespeare, Keats, and Byron, wrote a novella in the style of Fielding (my preparation for writing
Fanny Hackabout-Jones),
and was extraordinarily grateful to be nurtured in a cloister where, for four blissful years, I could devote myself to verbal explorations. The subject of feminism did not re-rear its head in the years 1959 to 1963. Virginia Woolf, Emma Goldman, Gertrude Stein, Simone de Beauvoir, Colette, Muriel Rukeyser, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, H.D., Antonia White, Jean Rhys, Doris Lessing, Rebecca West were not taught at Barnard in my time—so how could one even know there was a female tradition? How could one know that one had not been born from the very foam of the wave? Virginia Woolf got it right:

The lack of a woman's tradition (or, indeed, the deliberate ignoring of a tradition that, despite all odds, existed) was an issue not dealt with at Barnard when I was so happily immersed in learning the male tradition, winning A's and poetry prizes, feeling myself lucky to be the darling of my male professors. The lack of self-consciousness about feminism seems like innocence, looking back. I did not feel cheated then by the absence of women in the curriculum. Rather, I felt that a whole world of riches was there to plunder and that I was blessed to be allowed that opportunity. My poetry teacher was young, handsome, rather too flirtatious to stay at spinsterish Barnard (especially after he married one of his students), and undoubtedly a sexist pig. But he changed my life, turning me toward words forever. He flirted madly with me, but did not fuck me. The yearning fantasies I had for him surely fueled my verse. (There is so much talk these days of banishing sexuality from academe, but the fire of learning inevitably has something sexual in it. This does not mean that it should be used as a power play against adolescent girls or expressed literally. But sexuality must be there as a mythic fire, even when it goes unfulfilled in the flesh. Or is this too subtle a flame for mortal men to tend? Can't we keep our sexuality but sublimate it into poems?)

Another teacher I adored was Jim Clifford, the Johnsonian, an editor of the Boswell papers, who had the gift—rare in academe—of teaching literature as if it were part of life. A tall midwesterner who began as an opera singer, he was an instinctive feminist who encouraged us to read Fanny Burney, Mary Astell, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and to think hard about the conditions of women's lives in the eighteenth century: their lack of financial independence, their lack of the vote, their lack of birth control. It was his belief that you could not understand people and how they thought unless you understood their plumbing fixtures (or lack thereof) and their patent medicines. Surely this is true for women above all. How can we appreciate their art if we do not understand their underclothes—whalebone, crinolines—their birth control or its absence, their menstrual bandages, washbowls, and privies? The extraordinary woman depends on the ordinary woman, Virginia Woolf famously wrote. By stressing the physicality of London life in the eighteenth century, Jim Clifford made us consider the conditions of being a woman in that era. It was a great gift.

Inspired by Jim Clifford's teaching, I wrote a mock epic in the style of Alexander Pope and then a novella in the style of Henry Fielding. I learned more about the eighteenth century by inhabiting its end-stopped couplets and its Latinate sentences than I ever learned from the books about books about books I was later required to read in graduate school. For the tenor of any age lingers in its verbal cadences. By inhabiting its style, you inhabit the age—almost as though you were trying on eighteenth-century petticoats and panniers.

Maristella de Panizza Lorch—a tiny Italian mother of three who had her last baby, Donatella (now a reporter for the New York Times), while I was her Italian literature student—was the third of this trio of Barnard mentors and undoubtedly the most important. A Greek and Latin scholar and an expert on Italian Renaissance literature, Maristella was to become my lifelong role model and friend. She changed my life simply by being herself: a passionate scholar who was simultaneously a passionate mother.

In those days most of the women professors at Barnard harked back to another tradition of female excellence. They were unmarried (to our eyes anyway) and had deep voices and shingled hair. Of course there was sexuality in their lives, but their students were the last to know it. They wore mannish suits—like Miss Birch and Miss Wathen—or else Greek togas and suede dancing sandals. They seemed to me as distant as the moon.

But Maristella was someone I could become. Reciting Dante and nursing Donatella, by her very existence at Barnard she struck a blow for freedom.

Looking back, I thinks it's pathetic that I was so grateful to have one teacher like Maristella. There should have been dozens! But the truth is, mother scholars were very few. I'm grateful that my daughter will be going to college in a time when there are many. So many as to be almost unremarkable.

Adolescence is such a tumultuous time. Suddenly vulnerable, suddenly sexual, we look at the world to tell us what on earth to do with our bodies and minds, and the world seems to be saying:
You
have to choose.

The current passion for political correctness has not made this better. Far from receiving more choices, women are still being dictated orthodoxies. Certain women writers are kosher—Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich, Toni Morrison—and others are not. As if to correct centuries of neglect, writers of color and lesbian writers are being touted whether they are good or not. This hardly creates diversity and pride in the female heritage. In the long run, nobody will be fooled, uplifted, or inspired if a bad writer is celebrated because of her sexual orientation or the color of her skin. But in academe today, good and bad do not apply. “Great” is a forbidden word. Only social and political relativism are acceptable in discussing works of literature. Our misplaced American populism has at last summoned the temerity to undermine “great literature” by asserting that the very term is a bigoted construct. I hope this will change. Feminism cannot become an excuse for know-nothingism. Ethnic cleansing in the curriculum to get rid of “dead white males” is a purely retaliatory move that has no place in combating sexism and racism. The worthy goal of creating a more diverse curriculum will backfire if it ends up depriving women, people of color, and poor people of the joys of what used to be called “a classical education.” Yes—we were “oppressed” at Barnard, but at least we learned the tradition so we could parody it. And enter it. That has to be better than being left out altogether.

At Barnard, I reinvented myself and became a preppy fashion plate—perhaps in rebellion against the school's grungy image—or perhaps in rebellion against my Music and Art black-stockinged days. I wore three-inch heels that stuck in Columbia's red brick paths (and often lost their lifts), tight straight skirts, cashmere twin sets with pearls. I changed my nail polish every day. I never went out without a full mask of makeup—and a new pair of stockings and a bottle of Chanel No. 5 in my bag.

Were Barnard girls supposed to be grinds and drudges? I'd show them. I'd be a secret drudge who looked like the cover of Seventeen.

I met my boyfriend the first month of school, deliberately planned to lose my virginity three months later, and was grateful to get rid of it. Michael and I “went steady” for four years. I found it convenient. Monogamy kept me pure for my work—monogamy with someone who typed my poems.