In Favor of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays (Original Harvest Book; Hb333) (2 page)

It was a disillusion, in our modern times, to discover that women courting each other did not necessarily adopt more sensuous, more subtle ways of winning desire, but proceeded with the same aggressive, direct attack as men.

Personally this is what I believe: that brutal language such as Marlon Brando uses in
Last Tango in Paris,
far from affecting woman, repulses her. It disparages, vulgarizes sensuality, it expresses only how the puritan saw it, as low, evil, and dirty. It is a reflection of puritanism. It does not arouse desire. It bestializes sexuality. I find most women object to that as a destruction of eroticism. Among ourselves, we have made the distinction between pornography and eroticism. Pornography treats sexuality grotesquely to bring it back to the animal level. Eroticism arouses sensuality without this need to animalize it. And most of the women I have discussed this with agree they want to develop erotic writing quite distinct from man’s. The stance of male writers does not appeal to women. The hunter, the rapist, the one for whom sexuality is a thrust, nothing more.

Linking eroticism to emotion, to love, to a selection of a certain person, personalizing, individualizing, that will be the work of women. There will be more and more women writers who will write out of their own feelings and experiences.

The discovery of woman’s erotic capacities and the expression of them will come as soon as women stop listing their griefs against men. If they do not like the hunt, the pursuit, it is up to them to express what they do like and to reveal to men, as they did in oriental tales, the delights of other forms of love games. For the moment their writings are negative. We only hear of what they do not like. They repudiate the role of seduction, of charm, of all the means of bringing about the atmosphere of eroticism they dream about. How can man even become aware of a woman’s all-over-the-body sensitivity when it is covered by jeans, which make her body seem like those of his cronies, seemingly with only one aperture of penetration? If it is true that woman’s eroticism is spread all over her body, then her way of dressing today is an absolute denial of this factor.

Now, there are women who are restive with the passive role allotted to them. There are women who dream of taking, invading, possessing as man does. It is the liberating force of our awareness today that we would like to start anew and give each woman her own individual pattern, not a generalized one. I wish there were a sensitive computer which could make for each woman a pattern born of her own unconscious desires. It is the exciting adventure we are engaged in. To question all the histories, statistics, confessions, autobiographies, and biographies, and to create our own individual pattern. For this we are obliged to accept what our culture has so long denied, the need of an individual introspective examination. This alone will bring out the women we are, our reflexes, likes, dislikes, and we will go forth without guilt or hesitations, towards the fulfillment of them. There is a type of man who sees lovemaking as we do; there is at least one for each woman. But first of all, we have to know who we are, what are the habits and fantasies of our bodies, the dictates of our imagination. We not only have to recognize what moves, stirs, arouses us, but how to reach it, attain it. At this point I would say woman knows very little about herself. And in the end, she has to make her own erotic pattern and fulfillment through a huge amount of half-information and half-revelations.

Puritanism hangs heavily on American literature. It is what makes the male writers write about sexuality as a low, vulgar, animalistic vice. Some women writers have imitated men, not knowing what other model to follow. All they succeeded in doing was in reversing roles: Women would behave as men have, make love and leave in the morning without a word of tenderness, or any promise of continuity. Woman became the predator, the aggressor. But nothing was ultimately changed by this. We still need to know how women feel, and they will have to express it in writing.

Young women are getting together to explore their sensuality, to dissipate inhibitions. A young instructor of literature, Tristine Rainer, invited several students at UCLA to discuss erotic writing, to examine why they were so inhibited in describing their feelings. The sense of taboo was strong. As soon as they were able to tell each other their fantasies, their wishes, their actual experiences, the writing, too, was liberated. These young women are seeking new patterns because they are aware that their imitation of men is not leading to freedom. The French were able to produce very beautiful erotic writing because there was no puritan taboo, and the best writers would turn to erotic writing without the feeling that sensuality was something to be ashamed of and treated with contempt.

What we will have to reach, the ideal, is the recognition of woman’s sensual nature, the acceptance of its needs, the knowledge of the variety of temperaments, and the joyous attitude towards it as a part of nature, as natural as the growth of a flower, the tides, the movements of planets. Sensuality as nature, with possibilities of ecstasy and joy. In Zen terms, with possibility of sartori. We are still under the oppressive puritan rule. The fact that women write about sexuality does not mean liberation. They write about it with the same vulgarization and lower-depths attitude as men. They do not write with pride and joy.

The true liberation of eroticism lies in accepting the fact that there are a million facets to it, a million forms of eroticism, a million objects of it, situations, atmospheres, and variations. We have, first of all, to dispense with guilt concerning its expansion, then remain open to its surprises, varied expressions, and (to add my personal formula for the full enjoyment of it) fuse it with individual love and passion for a particular human being, mingle it with dreams, fantasies, and emotion for it to attain its highest potency. There may have been a time of collective rituals, when sensual release attained its apogee, but we are no longer engaged in collective rituals, and the stronger the passion is for one individual, the more concentrated, intensified, and ecstatic the ritual of one to one can prove to be.

A lecture given at the Celebration of Women in the Arts, in San Francisco, April 1974; first published in
Ramparts,
June 1974.

Why one writes is a question I can answer easily, having so often asked it of myself. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me—the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art.

The artist is the only one who knows that the world is a subjective creation, that there is a choice to be made, a selection of elements. It is a materialization, an incarnation of his inner world. Then he hopes to attract others into it. He hopes to impose his particular vision and share it with others. And when the second stage is not reached, the brave artist continues nevertheless. The few moments of communion with the world are worth the pain, for it is a world for others, an inheritance for others, a gift to others in the end.

We also write to heighten our own awareness of life. We write to lure and enchant and console others. We write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth. We write to expand our world when we feel strangled, or constricted, or lonely. We write as the birds sing, as the primitives dance their rituals. If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it. When I don’t write, I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in a prison. I feel I lose my fire and my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it breathing.

For too many centuries women have been busy being muses to the artists. And I know you have followed me in the diary when I wanted to be a muse, and I wanted to be the wife of the artist, but I was really trying to avoid the final issue—that I had to do the job myself. In letters I’ve received from women, I’ve found what Rank had described as a guilt for creating. It’s a very strange illness, and it doesn’t strike men—because the culture has demanded of man that he give his maximum talents. He is encouraged by the culture, to become the great doctor, the great philosopher, the great professor, the great writer. Everything is really planned to push him in that direction. Now, this was not asked of women. And in my family, just as in your family probably, I was expected simply to marry, to be a wife, and to raise children. But not all women are gifted for that, and sometimes, as D. H. Lawrence properly said, “We don’t need more children in the world, we need hope.”

So this is what I set out to do, to adopt all of you. Because Baudelaire told me a long time ago that in each one of us there is a man, a woman, and a child—and the child is always in trouble. The psychologists are always confirming what the poets have said so long ago. You know, even poor, maligned Freud said once, “Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me.” So the poet said we have three personalities, and one was the child fantasy which remained in the adult and which, in a way, makes the artist.

When I talk so much of the artist, I don’t mean only the one who gives us music, who gives us color, who gives us architecture, who gives us philosophy, who gives us so much and enriches our life. I mean the creative spirit in all its manifestations. For me even as a child, when my father and mother were quarreling—my father was a pianist and my mother was a singer—when music time came, everything became peaceful and beautiful. And as children we shared the feeling that music was a magical thing which restored harmony in the family and made life bearable for us.

Now, there was a woman in France—and I give her story because it shows how we can turn and metamorphose and use everything to become creative. This was the mother of Utrillo. Because she was very poor, the mother of Utrillo was condemned to be a laundress and a houseworker. But she lived in Montmartre at the time of almost the greatest group of painters that was ever put together, and she became a model for them. As she watched the painters paint, she learned to paint. And she became, herself, a noted painter, Suzanne Valadon. It was the same thing that happened to me when I was modelling at the age of sixteen, because I didn’t have any profession and I didn’t know how else to earn a living. I learned from the painters the sense of color, which was to train me in observation my whole life.

I learned many things from the artist which I would call creating out of nothing. Varda, for example, taught me that collage is made out of little bits of cloth. He even had me cut a piece of the lining of my coat because he took a liking to the color of it and wanted to incorporate it into a collage. He was making very beautiful celestial gardens and fantasies of every possible dream with just little bits of cloth and glue. Varda is also the one who taught me that if you leave a chair long enough on the beach, it becomes bleached into the most beautiful color imaginable which you could never find with paint.

I learned from Tinguely that he went to junkyards, and he picked out all kinds of bits and pieces of machines and built some machines which turned out to be caricatures of technology. He even built a machine which committed suicide, which I described in a book called
Collages.
I am trying to say that the artist is a magician—that he taught me that no matter where you are put, you can always somehow come out of that place.

Now, I was placed somewhere you might imagine would be terribly interesting, a suburb of Paris. But a suburb of Paris can be just as lonely as a suburb of New York or Los Angeles or San Francisco. I was in my twenties and I didn’t know anyone at the time, so I turned to my love of writers. I wrote a book, and suddenly I found myself in a Bohemian, artistic, literary writer’s world. And that was my bridge. But sometimes, when people say to me, that’s fine, but you were gifted for writing, my answer is that there is not always that kind of visible skill.

I know a woman who started with nothing, whom I consider a great heroine. She had not been able to go to high school because her family was very poor and had so many children. The family lived on a farm in Saratoga, but she decided to go to New York City. She began working at Brentano’s and after a little while told them that she wanted to have a bookshop of her own. They laughed at her and said that she was absolutely mad and would never survive the summer. She had $150 saved and she rented a little place that went downstairs in the theater section of New York, and everybody came in the evening after the theater. And today her bookshop is not only the most famous bookshop in New York, the Gotham Book Mart, but it is a place where everybody wants to have bookshop parties. She has visitors from all over the world—Edith Sitwell came to see her when she came to New York, Jean Cocteau, and many more. And no other bookshop in New York has that fascination, which comes from her, her humanity and friendliness, and the fact that people can stand there and read a book and she won’t even notice them. Frances Steloff is her name, and I mention her whenever anyone claims that it takes a particular skill to get out of a restricted, limited, or impoverished life. Frances is now eighty-six, a beautiful old lady with white hair and perfect skin who has defied age.

It was the principle of creative will that I admired and learned from musicians like Eric Satie, who defied starvation and used his compositions to protect his piano from the dampness of his little room in a suburb of Paris. Even Einstein, who disbelieved Newton’s unified field theory, died believing what is being proved now. I give that as an instance of faith, and faith is what I want to talk about. What kept me writing, when for twenty years I was received by complete silence, is that faith in the necessity to be the artist—and no matter what happens even if there is no one listening.