Fear of Fifty (18 page)

In the autumn of 1965, I met and was ferociously moved by a Chinese-American Freudian psychoanalyst whose last name I still bear. He was handsome, sexy, nonverbal (“He communicates like a telegram,” my grandfather said, “as if the words cost money”), but he had the magic ingredient—shrinkdom. Being a priest of the unconscious, he was the antidote to Michael's craziness—or so I hoped.

“You have always lived your life by a violent alternation of extremes,” my present husband says. “Oh, yeah?” I bristle. But I know he's right. The only thing I don't know is which extreme he represents.

Allan and I met and married in two months. Marry in haste, repent at leisure, the proverb goes. My impulsiveness in marrying Dr. Jong shows me how traumatized I'd been by Michael's breakdown. I doubt that I loved him, but love didn't seem to be the point of marriage. I knew I wanted to get away from my family. I knew I hated graduate school. I knew I needed to be analyzed. I knew I needed to write. And I knew I was afraid to do these things alone.

The truth is: I was
afraid
to be without a man. Afraid because, for reasons unknown to me, I attracted men like a honeypot and had no natural netting. With a gloomy psychiatrist husband, who supposedly knew the secrets of the unconscious, I assumed I'd be safe. I turned out to be right and wrong about that. Besides, being married to Allan at that time was a lot like being in solitary confinement. And solitary confinement is great for writing.

We shipped off to Germany in February of 1966. Allan had been drafted at the age of thirty-two and had chosen Germany for three years to rule out any possibility of being sent to Vietnam. He was sure that in Vietnam he'd be killed for his Chinese face and his American uniform. In Germany, Allan went into a three-year funk about the Vietnam War (which he opposed), being drafted out of his private practice (which he was powerless over), missing his analyst (which he was powerless over). We soon discovered how essentially unsuited we were. I loved to laugh and talk. He loved not to. I had found myself a Chinese torturer. If hell is other people, as Sartre said, then I was in hell. And I was too proud to admit I'd made another mistake.

So I locked myself in a room and wrote. Perhaps that was the purpose of it all. Perhaps he was my version of Colette's Willy. I developed a convenient theory that every woman writer needed a man to lock her in a room far from her mother so she could write.

We lived just a short trolley ride from Heidelberg, in a place called Holbeinring, where our neighbors were career army officers and their “dependents.” I taught some courses at the University of Maryland's Overseas Division—where the GIs called me “Sir”—and I wrote a column on wine festivals and restaurants for a freebie magazine called Heidelberg Diese Woche. Mostly I locked myself in the second bedroom of our hideous army-issue apartment and wrote poems and stories.

I lived in a world of my own devising, which is, of course, how any writer must begin. I read the poetry quarterlies—
Sewanee
Review,
Poetry, Southern Review—which
arrived months late by sea mail. And I worshiped at the shrine of The New Yorker. I would compare my own fledgling poems to those that appeared in print. My voice was too floridly female, I decided, so I attempted to emulate the cool, neutered voice I thought of as male and therefore pleasing to editors.

But to no avail. I could not really neuter my voice and become a New Yorker poet of the sixties. Nor could I even approximate the poems I found in the
Sewanee
Review. Just as in college I had often tried to write inscrutable poetry and despaired when my poems came out clear, I tried in Heidelberg to mold myself to what I imagined was the taste of the times. I am happy to say I failed miserably. Knowing that to be female was infinitely undesirable, I wanted to find a way to become something—anything—else. But what that something else was, I did not know.

What, I wonder, would my poetry have been like if I had studied Muriel Rukeyser at Barnard as well as Wallace Stevens? “Breathe in experience, breathe out poetry,” she writes in Theory
of
Flight. I was struggling with the same female fear of growing wings, but I had no way of knowing I was not alone in this. How would my work have been different if I had known I was part of a tradition? But Rukeyser was as neglected as Ruth Stone, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Anna Wickham, H.D., Laura Riding, Marina Tsvetayevna. They might as well have written in invisible ink.

This was a pretty typical dilemma for a woman poet in the mid-sixties. Having had no women's studies courses in college, no
Norton
Anthology
of
Literature by
Women,
no professors Showalter, Stimson, Gilbert, and Gubar, we were the generation that had to name the problem and create the courses that didn't yet exist.

As I sat there in my second bedroom near the Black Forest, I had to find a way to be a woman poet in a time when “woman poet” was a term of mockery. The whole history of English poetry—which, alas, I knew so well—stressed man as creator and woman as nature. From Shakespeare to Wordsworth to Yeats and Graves, male poets plowed female Nature into androgynous fruition. The female was the muse—and muses were supposed to be mute.

“Who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?” Virginia Woolf asked, spinning her tale of Shakespeare's imaginary sister (now the name for an English rock band). And who can measure the damage done to generations of would-be women poets by such discouraging mythologies and paradigms?

One day in 1966, a friend of my sister's in New York sent me a book of poems called Ariel. The author, a woman named Sylvia Plath, was already dead, but the poems were ferociously alive. And what astonishing poems they were! They dared to claim an ordinary woman's life as subject matter. They dared an openness about anger that had been forbidden to my generation of women. They dared to write of the hiss of the kitchen, the stink of baby crap, the thrill of a cut thumb, the sacred Sunday lamb in its fat.

The creator of these fierce poems had died when I was halfway through my senior year at Barnard. The winter of her death, there had been a page of her poems in The New Yorker. I'd read them, but I was not yet ready to absorb them. Still imitating Keats, Pope, and Fielding, still mimicking the male poets of my Barnard and Columbia education, I did not yet realize how much I hungered for those poems.

When the poet is ready, the muse appears.

In Germany, I was ready. Plath's poems cut me open. Blood spurted onto the page.

Suddenly I realized that I could abandon my neutered poems about Italian fountains and the graves of English poets and write about the life that claimed my days—the life of a “dep. wife” (as the army styled it)—the life of the market, the kitchen, the marriage bed. I could write poems about apples and onions, poems in which the daily objects of my life became doors into my inner life as a woman.

Sylvia Plath took me to Anne Sexton. To Bedlam and Part Way Back had been published in 1960, All My Pretty Ones in 1962, and Live or Die was just out in 1966. Poems like “Menstruation at Forty” and “Her Kind” suddenly conferred validity on my struggle to find the possessed witch in myself, the singer with a bleeding womb, the chronicler of love's “red disease.”

What caused the stirring that suddenly allowed poets like Sexton or Plath to be heard? Was it the civil rights movement that marked our college years and taught us how unjust our society was? Was it the Kennedy assassination that marked our early twenties and taught us never to believe what we read in the papers? Was it the Vietnam War that marked our mid-twenties and taught us never to believe our leaders? Authority was male and it was deeply fallible.

Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique the year I graduated from Barnard. I listened to my older sister arguing about it with my mother. My sister was excited—my mother less so, having seen the feminist movement of her youth eradicated as if it had never been. Even though I was still stuck in the eighteenth century, pretending Alexander Pope was a woman poet, feminism was in the air again, and I inevitably inhaled it. It gave permission to write out of a woman's consciousness.

My whole education at Columbia was a renunciation of such stir-rings, and perhaps that was why I found Columbia increasingly intolerable. I wanted to write my own books, not the books about books about books about books that would have gotten me tenure. So I married Allan as my ticket to Europe and my escape from the sexist Columbia of my professors and the Manhattan of my parents. I needed to be far away, I knew, even to attempt to write the truth.

Poetry is the inner life of a culture, its nervous system, its deepest way of imagining the world. A culture that ignores its poets, chokes off its nervous system, and becomes mortally ill. That was the case with America then. (One could argue that the situation is worse now.) All those polite male New
Yorker
poets of the sixties (writing poems about their dogs and mistresses) were ignoring almost everything that was happening in the world. Reality was howling outside. Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti were surely closer to what was happening in the sixties. But nowhere visible was a clearing in the woods for women poets—until Plath and Sexton came along, attracting our macabre fascination with their gaudy deaths. We followed in their footsteps (in tennis shoes—as Dorothy Parker said of her own stalking of Edna St. Vincent Millay in the twenties). We had to make a place for ourselves somehow. And somehow, we did.

My poetry preceded my fiction and showed me the way into my own heart. My fiction was still following (in mirrored sneakers) the elitist male footsteps of Vladimir Nabokov, who was my favorite novelist when I was in college and graduate school. It was as an homage to him that I attempted an abortive (and aborted) novel tentatively titled The Man Who Murdered Poets. I pretended to be a Nabokovian male madman going off to murder his equally mad doppelgänger. The book was destined never to work. I struggled with it for years, only to abandon it when Fear
of
Flying bubbled up. Neither mad nor a man, I was supremely blocked. Unconsciously I assumed only a man could narrate a novel. But my first husband was the madman, not I.

In the poems, meanwhile, a woman's voice was beginning to assert itself. It described the world as a ravenous, devouring mouth. It was full of the menace of being a woman. It was full of the frustration of being a smart woman. It was full of the absurdity of being a woman who had too many pheromones for her own good.

Living in the heart of Germany and becoming aware of my Jewishness was also a critical part of this development. I was spending my days exploring the half-obliterated traces of the Third Reich, poring over blacked-out de-Nazified books in the library, and even discovering an abandoned Nazi amphitheater in the woods. Anne Frank came into me. I imagined myself the ghost of a Jewish child murdered on the day I was born. I understood that only a trick of history had let me live.

The Plath poems and my own Holocaust of the mind came together to create my new sense of identity as a Jew and a woman. My first manuscript of poems, Near the Black Forest, was full of images of Heidelberg after the Third Reich, the “Jewless world without men” that resulted from the twin disasters of the Holocaust and the war.

A woman poet is a hunted Jew, eternally the outsider. She is asked at first to disguise her sex, change her name, blend into the approved poetry of male supremacy. People who suffer discrimination make up new names, bleach their skin, bob their noses, deny who they are in order to survive. That was, I realized, what I had done in college and graduate school. Suddenly I found I could no longer. This proved to be the beginning of teaching myself to write.