Who Does Your Feminist Laundry?

Who Does Your Feminist Laundry?

I was at a bookstore (City Lights, the top of the heap, if there are still enough bookstores left to form a heap) event recently, a “conversation” between Rebecca Solnit and another author I’ve conveniently forgotten. They both had new books out, adding to a large body of work both in print and online, so the room was full, and rather airless. Somehow, the subject of Thoreau and his laundry came up, specifically how silly it was to mention the fact that all the time he was writing Walden, the transcendentalist classic about solitude and self-sufficiency, Thoreau went home for hot meals and clean linen, and brought his dirty laundry with him for his mother to wash. Sure, in the book he was profoundly alone and on his own, but surely we can accept that the reality of dirty laundry is not important, and move on.

            For some reason, this is the only part of the program that stuck with me. I had no interest in the books they were shilling, and as literary personalities, neither was on my A list. But something resonated about the idea of measuring laundry independence as part of a literary reputation. Perhaps I was a little jealous of the person who did the archival work and wrote the book that exposed Thoreau’s lack of attention to the details of his own upkeep.  (This is assuming that the idea even came from a book. A few minutes of Internet research did not reveal the original source of the literary rumor, but then, it never does). His practice of laundry avoidance is hardly surprising. The point is only interesting (to me, at least) as an example of the importance of maintaining an ongoing discussion on our own literary tropes. Do we know who swept Freud’s floors, or kept food on the table while Stephen King wrote that bestseller topping the charts? It is the nearest woman, of course.  The idea of Thoreau dipping his linen in scalding water, rinsing it clean, and hanging it up in the open air is oddly thrilling, while the image of his mother doing so is merely ordinary.

            This whole issue probably would not even have registered if laundry wasn’t something I have spent a lot of my time doing, for myself and my family. And it is always griped me that we romanticize the writing life so much that we’re sure that domestic chores shouldn’t be a part of it. In fact, since this question has come up, I’ve been a little more observant about the mention of mundane chores in the books I read, and I see now that they are rarely even mentioned, except in the portrayal of drudgery or as historical reference.

I’m assuming by the snide way that this subject was referenced, that the argument that Thoreau should be re-evaluated in light of his less-than-egalitarian laundry habits was originally a feminist one. We all know now to roll our eyes at the more egregious examples of academic deconstruction or hermeneutics. But, perhaps some have forgotten the monumental contributions that feminist thought, and yes, even theory, has given to our current literary landscape. Would we even be listening to Rebecca Solnit without these contributions? The hard truth is that laundry (and preparing food, and sweeping the floor) is part of everyone’s life. We are all human. To say we produce great art and ignore the chores is to perpetuate the myth that these tasks don’t exist, rendering the people that do them invisible. I wonder what kind of book Thoreau’s mother would have written.

              

Feminists Have No Sense of Humor

Feminists Have No Sense of Humor

            On the second or third day we worked together, my new supervisor, younger than me and male, asked me to define my managerial style. Before I could answer, he had come to his own conclusion. “You’re what the company calls a lion,” he said. “You leap, and pounce on any problem.” I didn’t bother to remind him that lions actually spend most of their time sleeping. It’s the lionesses who do the pouncing, after first stalking their prey relentlessly. They attack, usually from behind, and go for the jugular. This hardly sounds like my behavior at work, where I spend most of my time dusting counters, and occasionally sell a book. Maybe he thought he should be king of this small piece of the corporate jungle, or he wanted to fight me for it, teeth and claws bared. Maybe I am like a lion after all, for I am completely indifferent, and would much rather be home in bed.

            This kind of male/female interaction always makes me think of Doris Lessing, and specifically of The Golden Notebook. The male characters in that book, all based on real people as far as I know, are so openly arrogant, so sure of their place at the top of the totem pole. They parade their superiority around, more like monkeys than lions. Instead of sleeping, and rousing themselves to roar once in a while, these males are constantly chattering and running around frantically pursuing any sexual opportunity or advantage. But the book is not about the deeds of men, but concerns the lives of women. They openly mock the seemingly all-powerful, and so reduce them to their proper place. It’s so refreshing, not to mention revolutionary. It’s also deeply funny. The two main characters, Anna and Molly, skewer their whole experience, from marriage to work to children, with intelligence and wit that is as self-deprecating as it is a type of whistling in the dark.  I can imagine Molly drawling. “Well, it was all because we just wanted to get laid properly.”

            The Golden Notebook was not my introduction to the devastating nature (devastating to men, that is) of what could be called women’s humor. My best friend is and was a master at it, able to spot pretension miles away. Of course, I was one of the few people who found her funny, hilariously so at times. She was not afraid to say what she truly thought in any situation. This is a hard thing for some to live with, and her life has sometimes been difficult because of her need to tell the truth as she sees it.    

            I remember reading The Golden Notebook one summer when I was far from home. I was young and awkwardly trying to find my place in the world, seeing if it was possible to define myself with the aid of family, friends, or familiar landscape. I could relate to Anna’s feeling of smallness and her extreme isolation. Reading that book was comforting in the way that a nice fat book that will take you weeks to read is always comforting. You live in the book as in a second reality. It never ceases to amaze how the two realities, real and literary, permeate and inform each other.

            I re-read The Golden Notebook recently, and this time I related to how Anna and Molly were judged by everyone around them, especially the men. The talk between these two intimate friends is their only defense against the constant pressure of the needs of others. They both believe strongly that they deserve the freedom to live their own, self-defined lives, and yet they both doubt their strength in the face of so much outside meddling and criticism. They are knowledgeable of their perceived roles as single/divorced women, and are rueful in the face of the world’s random misogyny. Even the female psychiatrist that Anna sees feels free to tell her not only what to do, but also how to be.

            This is the hardest concept to express. We take for granted now the freedoms that the personal liberation movements of the 70’s gave voice to, at least in the abstract. Yet the statistics about women’s’ lives are just as dismal as they’ve always been. In fact, you don’t even need statistics. All you have to do is strike up a conversation—on the bus, in the grocery store, at work—and it is not difficult to figure out that women are constrained by all kinds of barriers, at once economic, political, and personal. Most of the women I talk to in just this casual way are taking care of someone, elder parent, grandchild, or their own children, even if they are adults themselves. Even as I write this, on my work commute, I see a young woman walking on the opposite train platform. She is wheeling a huge suitcase, easily her own weight, even without the extra burden of a small child who is draped over the suitcase, clutching the handles so as not to fall off onto the third rail.

Maybe this is poignant to now because my own daughter, at college now, is studying a combination of literature, art history, and women’s studies. She hasn‘t read The Golden Notebook yet. I’ve told her about it, but I don’t like to push books on her (or anybody), preferring to nod my head sagely as she tells me her own revelations along the literary path. It’s strange, but I almost hope she doesn’t like it when she reads it. I hope it sounds old-fashioned and dated to her. That will be some kind of progress. She’s already funny enough on her own.

But Did You Really Read Him, Alexandra?

But Did You Really Read Him, Alexandra?

                Alexandra Styron’s memoir Reading My Father, which I am just now finishing, represents for me many of the things that I find troubling about the book business these days. The growth of the confessional memoir, in which the author has little to bring to the table except something horrific that happened to them, or a particularly gruesome childhood, has strained the boundaries of what makes a story worth publishing. It obscures the question of voice, and the believability of all narration. We now expect “the truth” and the style with which a story is told is of secondary importance. Obviously, to sell a lot of books, the object of every publisher, a story must appeal to a lot of people. As a bookseller, I’ve watched the bestseller list, and, believe me, without Oprah it has been pretty slim pickings’ (thank you, Oprah, for taking Toni Morrison out of the back-list doldrums. You are almost forgiven for The Secret). When working for the big-box stores, there was nothing more depressing in than coming in on Sunday to “change” the bestseller wall. I would spend the morning moving books from one slot to another and wondering if any of that dreck would be read in ten years’ time.

So imagine living when literature with a capital “L” and the bestseller list converged, and the so-called “big-ego” authors—Mailer, Bellow, Roth--made their livings writing novels,--big novels. This is the world that our present author grew up in, the world of serious writing, the kind that takes a lot of hours in a room alone, while family life goes on without one very important member. Then there is the serious drinking at night, while the family watches and worries.  Most of the author’s childhood took place while her father was busy writing Sophie’s Choice, one of my favorite books, and, in my opinion, one of the most important novels of the mid-20^th century. She describes his writing method--by hand on legal pads. The edition I have, that I picked up for free outside of a used bookstore that was going out of business (yet another curmudgeonly bookseller whose ability to arrange and talk about books far outweighed his business acumen) runs to 515 pages. Yet each word, phrase, sentence, chapter, was crafted by hand. How many crumpled sheets of yellow paper filled the wastebasket at the end of the day? For the whole last half of Reading My Father, I wanted to add to every one of Ms. Styron’s sentences “this is the man who wrote Sophie’s Choice.” Not that artistic achievement is an acceptable excuse for being a S.O.B., but cut the guy some slack. Every day he worked in a fictional world where reason and the will to live were a thin facade over the desperate reality of unbelievable cruelty, madness, and suicide. When, exactly, could he have been called crazy?

                William Styron didn’t know that Sophie’s Choice would be his last novel. It must have been sad to see such power wane. Boozing is often involved in a writers’ downward spin, such a perfect foil for having spent the day wrestling with the demons in your head. Now that something, anything is on paper, it’s a great relief to relax and spend some time socializing with like-minded people, who are also hard-drinking writers. A few hours’ sleep, some coffee, and then start all over again. Watching this process as a kid couldn’t have been particularly healthy, and maybe this is her main complaint, that she had to be responsible for adult problems before her time. This is probably true, but why whine about it now?

I picked up this book (on remainder) because of the title. I don’t usually read contemporary memoirs (as you may have guessed) but the combination of the double entendre and a chance to add to my literary understanding of Mr. Styron’s work drew me in. But the thing is she admits to not even read Sophie’s Choice until well past it’s release. It sounds as if she was more excited about the movie, with its attendant fame and fortune. This is really not her fault (although you think she would have made the effort sooner). When I revealed to a group of what I thought were literary compatriots that the book was written by hand, they started reminiscing about their favorite scenes from the movie, as if the two were synonymous. That’s what a good movie does—Meryl Streep is  Sophie for many people—but strip away the beautiful, period costumes, the perfect locations, and one of the greatest cast ensembles in history and the story still remains in all of its raw power. How long did it take to write the scene in which Sophie makes her choice—two days, ten? Maybe two months or maybe it was revised over and over again during those long afternoons all alone with pen and paper (pencil, actually). We’ll never know. I don’t think it really matters. We have the story whole and perfect, as it was written. We writers now, with our contests and out MFA programs and our Twitter accounts, can only hope we get that shot.

What Do We Mean When We Ask What a Story Is About?

What Do We Mean When We Ask What a Story Is About?

Reading a story called “False Spring” by Ben Lerner in Paris Review #205, I came across this sentence:

Bundled debt, trace amounts of antidepressants in the municipal water, the vast arterial network of traffic, changing weather of increasing severity—whenever I looked at Lower Manhattan from Whitman’s side of the river I resolved to be one of the artists who momentarily transformed bad forms of collectivity into negative figures of its possibility, a proprioceptive flicker in advance of the communal body.

 I was floored. At that moment I realized I had no idea what his story was about.

This revelation sent me into a hallucinatory moment. I could see myself in front of a college classroom, “Contemporary Literature” perhaps, even though teaching is one job I have studiously avoided all these years. “Today we are discussing ‘False Spring.’ Does anyone want to start by telling us what this story is about?” Some smart-alecky kid (myself, in college) would have an answer.

                Up until that stupendous sentence, this particular story had been a fairly straightforward tale, told in the first person, apparently about a guy in New York post 9/11 (in the same paragraph, there is a reference to “the present absence of the towers.”) who is wrestling with the concept of fatherhood brought on by being asked to be a sperm donor.  He takes some swipes at hipster Brooklyn. There is a story within a story about a woman who finds out that the man she thought was her father wasn’t, negating her cultural and personal identification. These details of plot are what a story is about in some sense. They might make up the first paragraph of the publisher’s blurb or a review in a popular magazine. It wouldn’t do for my mythical English class though. We would be more interested in the sudden appearance of Whitman, and that wonder word “proprioceptive.” It gets harder and harder to know what a story is truly about the more you think about it.

                In most non-imaginary English classes, the topic of what a story is actually about is not open to discussion. Or maybe that opinion is the product of one bad experience I had in college. I got an “F” on a paper about Margaret Atwood’s first novel Surfacing. It was the only thing on our reading list that hadn’t been discussed in class, so I had no idea of the professor’s interpretation. Apparently, we did not agree. I never took another lit class. I gave up on the idea of talking about books in public at all.  It seemed such a challenge to try and say what any book was truly about much less what it meant to me.

                And yet literature still had its formative grip on me. I read everywhere, everything. My worldview was formed by the authors I’ve talked about in this blog and elsewhere—Anais Nin, Gertrude Stein, Lawrence Durrell, and then there are the classics like Pride and Prejudice and the contemporary scene, where I am guided by my daughter. Yet I never gained the confidence to be outspoken about my devotion, in fact, I avoid it. What’s going on? Working in bookstores has taught me that everyone has their opinions, and it’s a good thing, too, or the last few bookstores would be gone. The bookseller‘s skill is not necessarily knowing what someone should have read in the past, but to know what they should read next. It is our constant search for surprising sentences.