Of Birth and Fiction ... I thought, since I was on my way to New York, that I would ask Gina Barreca what I meant. She is a professor of literature at UConn: she is my deconstructionalyst. Writers have them, nowadays, as other people have analysts. Gina referred me to a short biographical sketch I once wrote on the subject of Rebecca West, one of our great writers in the first half of this century. Rebecca West had a baby, out of wedlock, by H. G. Wells. Gina said that here I had permanently and properly linked the bringing to birth of fiction with the bringing to birth of a childand a very literary child at thatAnthony West. ''Compose yourself," I said, addressing this woman writer who was in the pangs of giving birth. That, said Gina, is what writers do, they compose themselves; other people just narrate themselves. Listen:
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 | | Rebecca, there is life the other side of love. If only you could hear me. Perhaps you can? Perhaps through doubt, fear and pain comes a flickering sense of exultation, of future; the intimation that fate has you marked: that its plans are already made, unalterable. For this is the sense the future must have of the past, and it is this very awareness I am trying to broadcast back to you.
It is all going to be all right
. Your lungs will stand it, you won't tear apart, the pain will pass, and be forgotten. The shame will be faced and conquered. The baby is lovely, healthy, robust, will even grow up to be a writer. As is his father. As are you.
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| | Breathe deeply. Compose yourself. You are not in as difficult a position as many of your contemporaries. You are not helpless. You can (just) earn your own living, by writing. Your lover's wife, seen by a self-deluding posterity (and indeed by her husband, once she is dead) as a saint, for putting up with his infidelities and being so accommodating, even kind and chatty, to his lady friends, has no such option. She is complaisant because she has to be, she has no alternative: she does not
earn
. And so what if her husband wrongs her? Women in your day cannot divorce men for adultery: though men can divorce women for the offense. The double standard is enshrined in law. For your information, the law is presently to change and wives will be permitted to take offense at infidelity, and start their own divorce proceedings. And then later changes will bring us up to our present, when human sexual behavior is accepted with a shrug and a sigh; and matrimonial blame, for good or bad, no longer allocated by the courts. This one guiltythat one innocent. But the lot of the divorced and dependent wife is still not happy, in my day as in yours. Socially isolated, reduced in circumstances, relying for her comfort and security on the strength of a husband's guiltexcept for the grudging assistance of an unwilling state. What has changed?
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| | And back there at the beginning of the century, you, the mistress, unmarried and young, and she, the wife, married and in her middle years, both live in a milieu particularly distressing for women. You have no moral power. The trouble is that in the artistic, literary, and intellectual circles in which you move, men have discovered Free Love, the Life Force, as the way forward to the future. Free Love for men, that is, just not for wives, daughters, and sweethearts. Men look for, and claim, Life Mates, but marry pretty housewives, as usual. What's
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