New York in the '50s (38 page)

Such stories abounded, true stories of physical and psychic damage, and sometimes death. A grapevine of rumors, warnings, and
advice gave out phone numbers and addresses that were sometimes reliable, sometimes not. A highly touted “clinic” in Puerto Rico might turn out to be a back room tenement in old San Juan; a retired doctor in Passaic, New Jersey, could be a twenty-five-year-old Romanian immigrant who barely spoke English; a nurse who let her patients sleep in a quiet bedroom in her Vermont cottage had left the place three days before.

The best hope was a doctor in the small town of Ashland in the drab coal region of eastern Pennsylvania, where there really was a building that served as a clinic with overnight facilities run by a kindly, efficient M.D. named Robert Douglas Spencer, who usually charged $50 and never more than $100 for the operation. Patients received an anesthetic before Spencer did a D and C (dilation and curettage), then were given 600,000 units of penicillin to protect against infection, and a day's rest in bed. The facts of Spencer's underground career were reported by
Newsweek
when he died at age seventy-nine in February 1969, a legend to the thirty thousand women who had come to him over the years.

Spencer was trusted and admired by the townspeople because he had come there after World War I as a pathologist in the miners' hospital and risked his own safety to go down shafts for them after accidents. They protected him even though he was breaking a state law in performing abortions. Still, there were times he had to temporarily shut down his clinic, and cryptic messages were sent to the hapless women who had planned to come to that safe haven, saying the doctor would not be able to see them, he would be unavailable until further notice.

In an anonymous paper describing his cases that was read by a sociologist at a conference on abortion, Spencer said most of the women he saw in the early years of his practice were married, but since World War II “fully half” his patients had been single women in their late teens and early twenties. One in ten were referred by a college guidance counselor or psychologist, most others by women who had gone to his clinic and told their friends that there was at least this one safe place, this one good doctor who would take you in when all the others shut you out.

A young woman went during one of those winters to the small town in Pennsylvania to see Dr. Spencer, and spent the night—as
many young women before and after her must have done—in a room in an old hotel, reading a Gideon Bible and talking on the phone to the man who had made her pregnant. The woman, who grew up Hettie Cohen in Brooklyn, describes in her memoir,
How I Became Hettie Jones
(wife of the poet LeRoi Jones), how she stood at the side of the road the next afternoon, “still a bit drugged,” waiting for the bus that would take her back to New York, when a car came by, slowed down, and a man shouted, “Oh, you must have been a
bad girl!
”

The Vassar graduates living in New York in the thirties whom Mary McCarthy wrote about in her landmark short story of 1954 realized that birth control, now available for use by women with diaphragms and by men with condoms, was “just one facet, of course, of a tremendous revolution in American society.” That revolution, which began after World War I with the loosening of moral strictures in the Roaring Twenties, was part of the whole women's movement for full equality that really took off in the sixties and has permanently changed the way we live.

Jane Richmond looks back on the fifties as a preliberation period of oppression and unquestioned male dominance. “My whole life then was bound up in pleasing men,” she says. “Camille Paglia said recently that women know when they're women because they get their period. Women who went to school in the fifties felt they knew they were women when men made them feel they were. Camille is writing from ten years later. I think of the fifties as a time of ‘waiting for him to call'—organizing my life around different men.

“Men I was involved with made it clear that it was more important for them to write than for me to write. I believed their lives were more important. During a time when I was seeing a man who was a writer, we were both sending in stories to magazines, and I had a story taken by
The New Yorker
. When my story came out, he made it clear it should have been his story that was published. The message was I shouldn't even continue writing.” So Jane actually lived the Zelda role in more ways than as the flamboyant and glamorous flapper at Barnard who got her nickname from the boys at Columbia.

Her story reminded me of my surprise at receiving in the seventies a book written by a woman who had been an important girlfriend
of mine in the fifties. She had done me the enormous favor of voluntarily typing up the entire manuscript of my first book. I had no idea she wanted to be a writer herself, though she worked for a publisher. I wrote back a letter of thanks and appreciation of her book, and said, “Why is it the boys of the fifties didn't know the girls wanted to write their own books, instead of just typing the boys' manuscripts?” The only answer I offered in defense of my own obtuseness was another question: “Why didn't the girls
tell
the boys?”

Some of them did, of course, and some of them wrote and published and were duly honored, as their female predecessors had been—Edith Wharton, Millay, Dorothy Parker, Mary McCarthy, and Carson McCullers, to name a few. Women friends of mine were writing articles, fiction, poetry, and criticism I admired as much as any being done, including Meg Greenfield, Marion Magid, Joan Didion, May Swenson, and Jane Mayhall. From the twenties generation we so admired there were talented and accomplished women who served as mentors and friends to many of us coming up in the fifties, especially Josephine Herbst and Kay Boyle.

I honestly didn't know any men who professed, as Norman Mailer did in
Advertisements for Myself
when evaluating his competition, that he couldn't read the talented women who were writing then. He found their work “fey, old-hat, Quaintsy-Goysy, tiny, too dykily psychotic, crippled, creepish, fashionable, frigid, outer-Baroque,
maquille
in mannequin's whimsy, or else bright and stillborn” (in a footnote he admitted “with a sorry reluctance” that the early work of Mary McCarthy, Jean Stafford, and Carson McCullers gave him pleasure). He doubted there would be “a really exciting woman writer until the first whore becomes a call girl and tells her tale.” In true Hemingway tradition, he concluded that a good novelist can do without everything “but the remnant of his balls,” and to top things off, said what little he had read of Herbert Gold “reminds me of nothing so much as a woman writer,” which was obviously his worst damnation.

As unaware of women's issues as most men were in those days, such blatant gender hostility was rare and shocking. Us guys were trapped in the same system as the girls, and the social rituals we followed were part of an inherited order we took for granted and
even imagined was chivalrous. Remembering some of those unspoken rules of the fifties, Jane Richmond says, “If a girl ordered veal parmigiana at a restaurant, it didn't become a fact till the man said, ‘The young lady will have the veal parmigiana.' It was mythic until the man said it—the waiter became deaf when the woman talked, and the woman thought she was invisible. Later, in the sixties, a man I was having lunch with said, ‘If you don't order when you're with me, you'll starve,' so I started giving my own order.”

Other women friends from that era regard it differently. As Marion Magid puts it, “When I read pieces by women my age, I don't recognize the experience of oppression they describe. I had a career, marriage, a child. I think the fifties had a very bad rap. I was supposedly growing up in a conformist world, but I didn't get married until my thirties. My parents were immigrant Russian Jews, but they didn't tell me to marry a doctor. In fact, I was never told that anywhere, at Barnard or anywhere else.”

Marion doesn't envy the more liberated generations that came of age after us, saying, “I think a sense of sin is a very erotic thing. Now young people start by going to bed with each other and then trying to see if they get along or even like each other. We had more discovery, more a sense of being special. Everything now is in quotes—‘He wouldn't commit,' or ‘He hasn't explored his own sexuality yet.' The options have been numbered and tagged.”

What now seem like indications of changes in the balance of sexual power, or breakthroughs in communication between the sexes, seemed at the time completely personal discoveries between me and a particular girlfriend. I think the kind of education I was getting from women I met in New York was different from what was going on in Indiana.

I found that a woman with a diaphragm not only had control over her sexual fate, but this control gave her, in a natural way, the freedom to have a say in the proceedings. By tradition, the man ran the show in bed; he was the director of the movie, and the woman was to play her role and act as if everything was just fine, the way he liked it. That scenario changed the first time I went to bed with a woman who had a diaphragm.

After my breakup with Emily Lamson, my first great love in New
York, I met at a party a gorgeous, self-assured Brazilian woman who worked for a literary agency. You might think her Latin American background was responsible for her forthright attitude, but I found the same approach in American women from Nebraska as well if they, too, had diaphragms. At the advanced age of twenty-nine, Carlotta was an Older Woman to me, and I think one of my appeals for her was my youth, not only in age but in innocence.

Innocence in bed was no plus, however, and after the first time we made love—I came in about a minute—Carlotta sat up in bed, brushed back her long black hair, and complained. “You're supposed to stay longer,” she said, “to make the woman happy. Don't you know about that?”

I learned. I learned many other ways to satisfy a woman, even when I was not able to stay inside her as long as she would like. I discovered my tongue had a function as well as my penis. In Indiana, I had only heard about oral sex as administered by a woman to a man. I learned in New York that it works both ways. Years later, a man I had gone to high school with told me of his lovemaking with his wife, which was limited to his quick release in the missionary position. “I'm one of those in-and-out kind of guys,” he explained.

You should have met Carlotta, I thought. You should have lived in New York in the fifties.

We talked frankly about intimate sexual practices and reactions that would have been unmentionable to Evan Connell's characters Mr. and Mrs. Bridge in Kansas City (prototypes of our own parents), or probably my own generation of young men and women outside New York.

The Great Orgasm Debate was carried on not only in the pages of
Dissent
but in beds all over New York. “We talked about women and orgasm problems,” Donald Cook says. “There was a belief in Freud's theory, the shifting of true orgasm from clitoris to vagina. If you were helping your girlfriend have clitoral orgasm, were you really doing her a disservice, holding her back from the greater fulfillment? It was something you and she discussed together.”

Just as I had forgotten about strontium 90, one of the hot issues of atomic testing in the Stevenson-Eisenhower campaign of 1956, I
had forgotten, until Donald brought it up, the great debate over whether clitoral orgasms were “immature” and only vaginal orgasms were “the real kind.”

A man worried that if a woman didn't have an orgasm while they were having intercourse, he had failed to please her, while a woman worried that if she failed to have an orgasm, she had failed to please the man. Sometimes we reassured each other that not having any kind of orgasm was all right. After I went to bed with Helen the first time, she confessed that up to that point in her life, she had never had an orgasm. (That was before her great analyst, I learned later.) She tells me now she still remembers my response to her confession because it was such a relief to her: “You laughed and said, ‘Don't worry, nobody has
those
.'”

Helen taught me the excitement of sharing my sexual fantasies and discovering the woman's fantasies too. And even, oh God, acting them out, “making your dreams come true.” She had a rich imagination, filled with humor as well as eroticism. After hearing Helen's dreams, I wasn't so embarrassed about revealing mine. With Helen I learned the intimacy of speaking to a girlfriend more frankly than I had ever spoken to any man.

One summer morning, we sat at her kitchen table without any clothes on and wrote down all the possible ways people could give pleasure to each other, all the openings and all the things that were possible to put in the openings that made you feel good, excited, aroused, satisfied. This was before
The Joy of Sex
, when the only sex manuals seemed to have been written for squares in Topeka and Dubuque. The
Kama Sutra
was the only instructional manual people I knew referred to, and Helen and I found its innumerable descriptions of positions dry and pedantic, like a series of yoga lessons. So we made up our own sex manual, a do-it-yourself project.

Helen was my own age but seemed a lifetime older in terms of knowledge, experience, and overall understanding of the world. I bought groceries and she cooked. She introduced me to the joys of chicken livers for dinner and bagels for breakfast with hot black freshly ground coffee. I spent most of my time at her apartment, writing there during the day and sleeping with her there at night, but we never completely moved in together.

Like most such couples, Helen and I were both in analysis and
thus not “ready” for such a commitment, so from the start we had only a temporary relationship. We didn't even use the word “relationship” then. We called our arrangement an affair, like an event that had a beginning and an end, which is how we approached it, and how we ended it when it seemed to have run its course.