A Season in Hell (22 page)

Our Father
was published in early January, and I had been scheduled to make a publicity tour. The tour was canceled because of my hospitalization, and nothing else was done—no ads, no promotion. This harmed sales of the book. And given that I had gone without working for almost two years and had over half a million dollars’ worth of medical bills (not all covered by insurance), I needed the book to do well. Beyond that, the reviews upset me. They described the book as a “good read,” a “page turner.” But I had planted myself deeply in this book; it was on one level a response to the most important book I had ever read (Dostoevsky’s
The Brothers Karamazov
). But then, reviewers, female or male, rarely treat fiction by women seriously; with a few exceptions, who, it is decided early on, are “serious,” women are reviewed as if they write with their uteruses. Women’s fiction is assumed to be autobiographical, based on the writer’s sexual and emotional life. Although incest is important in
Our Father
, its major theme is not incest, as everyone wrote, but four sisters’ hatred for one another, based partly in their profound disagreement about the nature of life. Not only did no reviewer ask how incest fits within this larger theme of female disharmony, but none even noticed the theme.

Writing is a lonely occupation to begin with, but the sense of aloneness is hugely compounded when a book receives absolutely no comprehension. The cause of this obtuseness is sometimes stupidity but most often is blindness caused by the sex of the writer. That most women’s writing is not serious is a prejudice shared by female and male reviewers; they approach the work of the two sexes with different expectations. I knew that after such a dumb response, I was not easily again going to be able to muster the passion and intellectual fervor with which I wrote
Our Father
.

Two weeks after my release from St. Luke’s–Roosevelt, I had to enter Sloan-Kettering for another endoscopy. Although this was not a painful procedure and Dr. Gerdes was always pleasant, it was nevertheless another day in the hospital, a day of waiting, undressing once more in a cold metal locker room, getting into chilly paper hospital garb, waiting, waiting, waiting, having needles stuck in my arm, lying on a cold metal table in an operating room, being asked to sign a form stating that I have been told that I could possibly be damaged or killed by the procedure about to take place, then recovering slowly in a huge warehouse of a room. It was another day in the elephant dung. I was deathly tired of it.

I seemed to need much medical attention in the weeks after my release, and between the many doctors’ appointments and my depression, I saw few friends. My sister helped me out of this. She knew I normally spent the winter in Florida, and understanding that I was not yet physically able to take care of myself, she offered to go with me, to help me manage. Hating the cold, I happily accepted, and at the end of January we flew down together.

Florida was hard for me. The building I live in is relatively new, and its doors, all up to modern codes, are so heavy I can barely open them. When the wind was high (as it almost always is, winters) the doors to outside were impossible for me. Even now, I can open the door to my apartment only by leaning my entire weight against it and slowly pushing forward. My sister’s help was invaluable. She drove the car I rented; she opened the damned doors. She carried bags of heavy vegetables from the market, and the half-bushels of the Honeybell oranges I love. Together we prepared meals and cleaned up.

It was my first post-cancer experience of trying to manage virtually on my own, and I found it very hard. Not being able to do things, or trying and failing, made me irritable when I was in pain or when things went wrong. I did not like this and, looking for excuses, told myself it was caused by my constant pain. I did not know that the irritability was a symptom of trauma.

Still, Isabel and I had fun together, and as I grew stronger, I once more became convinced that I would fully recover. And, too, my depression passed. The year before, I had agreed to extravagant plans for the spring, believing despite my weakness that I could realize them. I had agreed to go to Holland to promote
Our Father
; to attend the Adelaide Book Fair in Australia; and, a bit later, to go to England for a week of promotion. Bad weather in the Northeast stymied Isabel’s and my return from Florida, but we finally got back to New York. A few days later, I was on a plane to Amsterdam.

It was horribly cold there, and the streets were icy; with my weak body, broken back, and sawdust spine, I did not dare to walk around the city. Still, I was overjoyed to be in Amsterdam again, recalling my melancholy intimations of mortality on my last visit. I had dinner with Annaville and Nettie, and with my lovable Dutch publisher, Maarten Asscher. But mostly I sat in the wonderful Hotel de l’Europe, being interviewed.

I returned to New York on a Friday night, did some telephone and television interviews with Australian media people (some of whom had interviewed me before I left for Holland), and on Monday evening flew to L.A. I stayed there for a night, and the next day took a cab up the coast to visit the Getty Museum. That this gorgeous building with its wonderful art could be created purely by money, not time, I found amazing. That night, I flew to Australia.

I had not been there in fifteen years and was expecting to encounter the same culture I saw in 1977 and 1979. At that time, Australians were xenophobic in the extreme, especially about blacks and Asians. Australian men were the current ugly Americans of the South Pacific; and many of the women journalists who interviewed me ended up weeping in my hotel room, an experience I never had elsewhere. In a fine restaurant in Melbourne, dining with a party of publishers, I listened in shock as a waiter told the table a long-drawn-out anti-Semitic joke.

But I had never been to Adelaide, a southern province famed for its art festival, held every two years. Getting to Adelaide took some time, and I was tired when I arrived, but I was whisked away by Mary Beasley, then CEO of the Department of Industrial Affairs of South Australia and chair of the suffrage centenary (South Australians were the first women in the world to win the vote, in 1894), and Susie Mitchell, chair of Adelaide Writers’ Week in the Adelaide Festival of the Arts. They had the imaginative and humane idea of protecting the authors from the media for a weekend, to give them a chance to get to know each other, to recover from the long journey, and to see a little of Adelaide. This is not done at other festivals I have attended, and I found it a wonderful tonic. Instead of interviews, we were offered tours of the area’s natural features, swims, and great boozy dinners. This weekend gave me a chance to get to know Deirdre Bair, whose fascinating, intelligent, and unswerving biography of Simone de Beauvoir had had the unfortunate effect of making me dislike intensely the woman who was my mentor; Sara Paretsky, whose mysteries I enjoy for their strong social conscience; and Rosie Scott, an Australian novelist whose work had impressed me with its breadth and humanity.

Back in the city, I was amazed at the Australia I saw. There were Asians everywhere, and the restaurants (which on my last visit had been much like provincial British restaurants serving food that hovered on the edge of inedibility) now offered an inventive indigenous cuisine influenced by Asian cooking—what in New York is called “Asian fusion.” Everywhere the food was wonderful, and everywhere I saw signs of respect for or at least tolerance of aboriginal culture, Asian culture, and varied sexual adaptations.

The place was utterly different from the Australia of 1979. It is rare that a culture moves from narrow meanness to openness and harmony; the reverse is far more common. I was moved and impressed by the courage and decency of the white people of this continent, who had somehow dared to overcome their terror at being distant from their English and Irish roots, their fear of engulfment by peoples so apparently different, and their prejudices, enough to embrace at least the idea of openness and tolerance. The consequence, for those who have done so, is harmony and happiness: the Australia of 1994 was immeasurably happier than that of 1979.

With Rosie Scott, I wandered through the back streets of Adelaide and took a boat ride down its river. Her work is sensuously alive like that of few other writers—I can think only of Colette and Edna O’Brien—but also highly political. Reviewers tend not to see women’s politics; those of us who address sexual politics are consigned to the “feminist” ghetto, and male reviewers discount female writers, like the Argentinian Luisa Valenzuela, who concern themselves with national or global problems. Rosie turned out to be as delectable a person as she is a writer, and although we got together only a few times, we still correspond fondly. Elmore Leonard was at the conference, but distant; as was a group of English novelists including David Lodge, whom I had met in the seventies—at a Joyce conference, I think. He looked so young then, I thought he was a student, when in fact he was already an accomplished novelist and teacher.

Susie and Mary took over my social life, escorting me to many festival events—a brilliant Mark Morris performance of Purcell’s
Dido and Aeneas
, and a play by Patrick White, Australia’s Nobelist. Judging by the play, which I walked out of, White had a cramped, narrow, mean mind, to which no bias was foreign. He represented the Australia I had encountered in the seventies. There were dinners with publishers and with Mary and Susie and Deirdre and Rosie in one or another of Adelaide’s good restaurants, and of course interviews and panels and speeches. I flew from Adelaide to Sydney for more interviews and visited Peter Solomon, who had been a colleague of mine on the Harvard Graduate Council, and his wife and children. The highlight of my Sydney stay was what is called the Mardi Gras parade, although Mardi Gras had already passed. This huge parade, lasting hours, may be the highlight of the Sydney social season. Fortunately, friends of a friend, who met me in the city and generously took me about, had reserved a spot for us in a glass-walled room overlooking the parade route. Since I could not have stood for so many hours, I was grateful.

What was most astonishing, though, to a person who recalled the old Australia was that this is a gay parade. It opened with a group calling themselves Dykes on Bikes, young women in black who roared through triumphantly on their motorcycles, waving to the crowd, which cheered loudly. The overwhelming majority of the marchers were men, though, most in high blond beehive hairdos, six-inch heels, and sequined skintight dresses. How they could march for hours in that gear, I have no idea. Some mimed famous women—the favorites were Mary Tyler Moore, Doris Day, Jackie Kennedy, Margaret Thatcher, and Bronwyn Bishop, a shadow minister in the Liberal party, whose sin seems to have been being ambitious and female and having a blond beehive hairdo. Each time she appeared—and there were tens of her—a great roar went up from the crowd. My Australian friends tell me there was talk of Bishop becoming the next Prime Minister if the Liberals won the election, and that to avert this possibility, the press had been setting her up, preparing to cut her down. They succeeded. She is at present merely a deputy minister of the armed forces in the Liberal cabinet.

In the end, I found the parade a little upsetting, really insulting to women, as if protruding cone-shaped breasts, huge asses, exaggerated hairdos, high heels, and clinging dresses constituted the essence of womanhood, which these men were claiming for their own. But in fact, these guys worship the penis, and where were the penises? There was only one that I saw, a missile mounted by a dozen men, ready to shoot off into space; the rest of the parade was devoted to exaggerated female sexual characteristics.

I do not believe in essential differences between the sexes and am happy when males claim the qualities usually ascribed to women—qualities like compassion, nurturance, cooperation, and tolerance. I think a greater emphasis on these attitudes is the only thing that can save the world. But it was not these qualities that were being celebrated. They celebrated the qualities possessed by a character in
Woman on the Edge of Time
, perhaps Marge Piercy’s greatest book, whose hourglass-shaped body was created for male desire. The men in this parade were her clones.

On March 7, I left Sydney for Melbourne, to do promotion; then on March 9, I flew to the Great Barrier Reef. I have never been in a more idyllic spot. On Hayman Island, I stayed in a cottage right on the beach. The water was warm, and calm enough that weak as I was, with my damaged body, I could swim in it. I sat, reading, on a comfortable chaise, gazing out at the sea. I took a helicopter/boat trip to the reef itself, a rich, brilliant environment of colorful fish and underwater plants that extends for miles in the middle of the ocean. My brief visit fulfilled a longtime wish.

I truly enjoyed my stay in Australia, partly because I was feeling good there—stronger and more able than I’d felt since my first spinal fracture, and maybe stronger than at any time since I’d fallen ill. I began to weave illusions again, to imagine that I would be able to recover fully, be my “old self.” It took forever to get home again—the day I had gained going to Australia was lost on the return trip. I arrived at JFK on Sunday, March 13, and was in Florida on the fifteenth. Rob and Barbara joined me there; they were to help me buy a new car. Much as I loved my Porsche, I had to find a car that held my back comfortably and was easy to drive, not requiring the many arm motions of a sports car. We went about this task efficiently, and in a few days I had bought a Lexus, which I drive to this day with great satisfaction. Rob and Barbara flew back home, and I settled in to live by myself for the first time since I’d been sick.

Living alone was still difficult, if not as hard as the year before, but I soon developed a new problem—frequent painful urination, often with blood. Though I had had this problem earlier, it suddenly became much more severe. I decided to find medical help locally. I had visited an internist when I first came to Florida, in the seventies. He knew my reputation, and my first published novel, and made some fuss over me. But his attitude during a gynecological exam he insisted on doing was such that I never went back to him. Since then, I had depended on my New York doctors—which was okay during the years when I had no medical problems. I investigated urologists and finally got a name from someone I trusted, but Edie had not heard of the man and, wary, suggested I return to New York and Dr. Lowe.