Fear of Fifty (28 page)

It blasted two years of my life that should have been fun. It wound up, as any sane person could have predicted, in a total legal rout, huge bills, and no movie. I moved back to New York, promoted
How to Save Your Own Life
around the world, and was only ever asked about “the zipless fuck” and the lawsuit. Back in New York I began a third novel, about an ancient Christian fed to the lions, but soon abandoned it and plunged back into my old security blanket from Barnard, the safely retrospective eighteenth century. I began to research a picaresque tale about an orphaned girl who becomes a poet, a witch, a highwaywoman, a prostitute, and finally the mother of a lovely daughter, thereby triumphing over all mischance—the perfect heroine to redeem my post-fame life.

During the five years I labored on this eighteenth-century tale, I was uniquely happy, and at the denouement of the plot, I also had a baby. I wrote about her through Fanny's eyes:

When I entered the hospital I wasn't sure whether my heroine or I was having that baby. Consequently, Molly's birth certificate at first read “Belinda”—the name of Fanny's daughter. I caught my mistake, then lay about in bed inventing names for my beautiful child. Glissanda, Ozma, Rosalba, Rosamund, Justina, Boadicea ... I doodled on a pad. Then Molly Miranda came into my head. And Jon agreed.

“Good thing you came to, Mom,” Molly says.

Molly's birth redeemed everything, and
Fanny
did the rest. I suppose I like
Fanny
better than any of my other novels (so far) because its unique challenges gave me deep satisfaction. The challenge of recreating eighteenth-century language and plot, of turning male picaresque upside down. It made me wholly happy in a way I have not been since I was six—and so did my marriage to Jon, till it didn't.

It's easier to write about pain than about joy. Joy is wordless. After that spasm of life in orbit, I was delighted to be obscure, hiding in the country.

We contemplated moving to Princeton for the library, to the Berkshires for the scenery, to Key West for the light, to Colorado for the mountains, but wound up in Weston, Connecticut (within driving distance of both the Beinecke Library and Manhattan), leading an almost idyllic life: writing, yoga, dogs, and cooking. The only mistake we made was letting
People
magazine photograph us for a happy couples piece. Those pieces make divorce inevitable, just as surely as
Time
cover stories lead to death, bankruptcy, and the kidnapping of beloved babies.

Fanny
made me happy because it let me live with the
Oxford English Dictionary
always open on my desk—and what can be happier than that? Jon made me happy because of his humor and his sense that nothing could be better than writing and doing yoga. And Molly made me happy because she was my ordinary miracle, produced somehow by God, while my mind was on other things—the origin of the word “fichu,” for example.

But
fame
never made me happy, though that, of course, did not mean I wanted to give it up. Fame is the great test of character. Do you lose or find yourself as a result of it? Most of us lose ourselves at least for a while. Some of us come back. Most do not. At that time, I
wanted
to get lost in the woods of Connecticut, nursing my baby, looking up words in the OED, and reading Smollett or Fielding or Swift every morning to get the cadence of the period in my head. Fame terrified and perplexed me. In three years it had picked me up and tossed me into the briar patch. I wanted to get as far away from those painful memories as I could. The reign of Queen Anne was perfect. I had died, but I was about to be reborn as a redhead in a riding habit.

I had at least survived. So would she.

 

Reading back, I notice that this chapter contains nothing about Henry Miller. Perhaps that's because I am writing here of my hunger for self-sabotage and Henry was the reverse of that: He gave me lessons in how to live.

Curiously, I met Henry Miller on the same day I met Jonathan Fast—a golden California day in October 1974.

I had taken my rented Buick down Sunset Boulevard to Pacific Palisades and spent the afternoon with an astonishing old-young Brooklyn boy of eighty-three, who had been writing me sprightly letters for six months and now appeared in his wrecked flesh with a spirit younger than mine.

Mostly wheelchair ridden, blind in one eye, dressed in pajamas and a tattered terrycloth robe, with a face like an ancient Chinese sage, Henry Miller roused himself from bed to meet me and used his walker, with great difficulty, rather than seem passive in a chair.

He was to become my clear eye in the midst of the hurricane.

American writers tend to be drunks and melancholics whose main relation to their young aspirants seems to be, “Tell me one good reason I
shouldn't commit suicide.”
If you go to meet and admire them, bring gin or an AA meeting book and prepare to do a lot of cheering up. But Henry was, as he himself put it, “always merry and bright.” His temperament was his gift and also his gift to all.

Had I met him when he was a young man, he would have been more hurricane, more chaos. But the fact of his having survived what I was going through, and having kept his center, was the whole point. Branded the “king of smut,” he went on writing what he had to write. Having been given every reason to close himself to humanity, he remained open and passed that gift along.

Whoever pushes America's sex button must be prepared for sirens and alarms. Whatever else we do in our lives will be drowned out by them.

“Why don't you take it as a joke?” Henry asked when I was troubled by fan letters requesting soiled knickers. I still ask myself this question twenty times a day. And my ability to answer it at any given moment is still the index of my mental health.

I drove back up Sunset Boulevard, laden with watercolors, books, prints. Henry was not a person who let you leave empty-handed.

All these goodies were on the bed when Jonathan and I (having just met at his parents' party) returned to it late that night or early the next morning. We had sat for an hour on Mulholland Drive, watching the lights of Los Angeles twinkle through smog, speaking of the possibility of real marriages of the minds and hearts, and realizing we were falling in love.

I was thirty-two and he was twenty-six, but in some ways, we both had just been hatched. We pledged our lives to each other that first night, and because of Molly, they will always be joined.

In later times, we hurt each other horribly, did angry things, were irresponsible lovers and parents, blinded by pride, jealousy, and rage. It is not my business to be his scourge—though I was just that in a few books, showing only that I still thought blaming others would make me free.

I need to make this amend to him and Molly: I wish I had known myself better and hurt you less. I wish I had known then what I know now: that it is useless to blame husbands or children for your own deficiencies, that it only delays facing them yourself. And it only delays change. Until you accept responsibility for that, there is no peace.

Fame turns out to be a powerful instrument of grace because it humbles its chosen victims in a hurry. You sail into it, your canvas swelled with grandiosity, and when your fifteen minutes are over and you are becalmed, you realize that grandiosity cannot take you where you need to go.

Only then do you learn to row like hell, asking God for the strength to stay afloat.

Writing, which had begun for me as a seduction of the muse and of the public's love, now came to have a very different function in my life. It went back to being the solace it was in my childhood—a means of self-pleasuring, of self-knowledge. Several wise writers, Robert Penn Warren among them, have said that it is only when you abandon ambition that you really begin to write.

I returned again and again to poetry after each novel because poetry was guaranteed to be obscure, thus ambition-proof, so it was possible to write it with little thought for the outside world.

A society is impoverished, I think, by its scarcity of outlets for ambitionless activity. Meditation, athletics, poetry, watercolor painting, journal writing, prayer, are only as enriching as they are
without
hope of outer adulation. When the ambition imp creeps into the activity, it is tainted. But it's hard for the ambition imp to creep into poetry, because nobody
wants
poetry for money, for fame, for bestsellers, so poetry must be done for yourself if it is to be done at all.

Fame, on the other hand, is a prisoner of marketing and demands that you do the same thing over and over again—at least if you want to feed the baby.
Fanny
had reminded people of my literary roots, had collected serious notices, and worldwide bestsellerdom, but somehow my most enduring fame was still as Ms. Lonely Cunts, the spokesperson for American womanhood's darkest urges.

However deep I might go into my poetry, and however many poetry books I produced, the fame imp wanted me back in center stage as the coiner of “the zipless fuck”—a symbol of my generation's hunger for female freedom through sexual pleasure.

You don't get to choose what you get famous for and you don't get to control which of your life's many struggles gets to stand for you. The best you can do is work at not caring too much about the outer symbols and continuing to do whatever it is that centers you and makes you remember your true self.

Poetry has remained that for me.

If the goal of our brief existence is to make us accept ourselves, turn the future over to our children, and make peace—however grudging—with our mortality, poetry remains the perfect means.

Mortality is poetry's main obsession—seconded by love, mortality's handmaiden. She strews the roses; he gathers them back to his bony bosom.

It is neither wise nor good to start a child with too much thought.

—Colette,
The Evening Star: Recollections

 

 

Motherhood is supposed to be a part of Nature—timeless, immutable, a kind of female Rock of Ages. In truth, nothing is more mutable than motherhood—ringed round with the conventions and pretensions of the society in which it appears. Everything about motherhood changes with our ideologies: breast-feeding and swaddling, wet-nursing and baby farming, anesthesia or the eschewal of anesthesia, mother-infant bonding or mother-infant separation, birthing standing or sitting or lying down, birthing alone or with kin, midwife, or obstetrician. There's probably not one thing about giving birth that cannot be changed by culture except for the fact that it can only be done by a woman! Even the feelings the mother supposes she is supposed to have can be changed.

How we mothers hate to hear that. We would probably prefer to believe that childbirth and its paraphernalia are made by the Mother Goddess herself and mutate not at all from historic moment to historic moment. The hormonal ritual may be the same, the ontogeny of the fetus the same (as it recapitulates phylogeny—according to our high school biology teachers), but how we respond to labor, childbirth, the gushing of milk at the baby's cry, is infinitely mutable.

We whiplashers were as jerked around by theories of motherhood as we were about sex, about femininity, about success, about money, about idealism, about men, and about everything else in our chronically bipolar lives.

We grew up amid images of Betty Crocker mothers proving their womanliness by
baking.
(A Ceres myth recycled for the fifties?) The magazines we read in doctors' waiting rooms assured us that leaving the kids and going to work would stunt their psychological growth and blast our peace of mind. Male doctors dictated to us and we seldom suspected (nor in fact did they) that there was a political agenda behind their words.

In graduate school, married for the first time, I was warned by my parents' internist that at twenty-two, I was well into my chief childbearing years.

“Better not wait too long,” he cautioned. “At thirty, you'll be an elderly prima gravida.”

Elderly prima gravida.
What a terrifying term. Elderly at thirty? (Two hundred years ago, childbearing women were mostly dead at thirty!) Reproduction hardly requires that we live till fifty—much less the thirty or forty
extra
years we all expect as our due.

I had absolutely no intention of listening to that internist (my older sister was the earth mother; I was the artist), but the fear seed he planted bore fruit every month. Whenever the blood sheeted down, I saw a miniature dead baby in the flow. It might be my last. I mourned every egg, wrote poems to them, feeling both abject and relieved.

My whole struggle to learn to write and go to graduate school was carried out as if under a looming threat. Perhaps, by using my diaphragm so faithfully, I was committing my life to emptiness and despair. My physical revulsion against babies was so great then that seeing another Barnard classmate pushing a white antique wicker pram down West End Avenue, I felt
nauseous.
Either I yearned for pregnancy so much that I had become allergic to my own yearnings, or I was determined never to lose control. I hated and pitied the classmate who had succumbed to female weakness and was cooing and making funny faces at the blob in the pram.
She would never do anything with her life,
I thought contemptuously.