Saturday's Child (52 page)

Some of them paid dearly for their hubris. To paraphrase a line from Ginsberg's “Howl,” I've watched some of the best
feminist
minds of my generation go mad with impatience, despair, horizontal hostility, or—I'm afraid it has to be said—laziness. We've certainly had our casualties. Many “original” radical feminists have been lost, having themselves lost the vision, having let themselves be driven into irrelevance: bright minds squandered to alcohol, drugs, “personal solutions,” corrosive negativity, religious conversions, easy-chair feminism, single-issue obsessiveness, shallow celebrity-politics, or frozen central-committee thinking.

If this sounds overly severe, so be it. My impatience with ego games, whining, and the lack of political will stands in an honorable tradition: for
real
judgmentalism read Elizabeth Cady Stanton's writing during the last twenty years of her life. Some of these women never worked on a tangible project like storefront legal counseling or a crêche or a self-help health clinic; most never had or long ago lost touch with women outside their own local, exclusive feminist-café-society circles. Such alienation from
the world of most women's acute needs and desires makes for a solipsistic attitude inimical to becoming a political long-distance runner (which, I can testify, carries its own moral perils), one into which I might have fallen had I not been fortunate enough to be lured out of the serpents' nest by the traveling that
Sisterhood Is Powerful
's publication initiated. It was in small towns, on welfare lines, on factory floors during break time, in shelters, farmhouse kitchens, and student cafeterias—listening to women—that I learned a durable politics with multiple, interconnecting priorities, what I've come to call a multiplicity of feminisms. Little wonder (and little credit to me) that, when I simply turned that politics around and sent it back out in my speeches, the most commonly used adjectives in audience reactions were “life-changing” and “inspiring.”

Admittedly, at first it wasn't only sharing the emotional and intellectual “high” generated by these women all across the country that was so exciting. It was also the adventure of travel—which I'd done to death in my working childhood but which the intervening years had glossed over with misremembered glamour. All those airplanes! All that toy food served with toy plastic cutlery by flight attendants who were treated by most male passengers as toy women! All those podiums and phallic lavaliere microphones! All those junk-food-for-the-ego academic receptions at which one was lionized, then criticized; deified, then crucified. Except that, after years of such questionable exoticisms, getting there was no longer half the fun; the high from the women endured; the high from the travel went flat. Life had become a round of airports echoing flight announcements, of waiting for connections in deserted terminals at 3:00
A.M.,
of rarely being able to sit at my desk for more than four days at a time without having to pack again. Life became long-distance phone calls squeezed in after the guest seminar (which I would promptly rename “ovular”) and before the evening lecture, while I hunched over a sandwich and nursed a container of rapidly cooling tea for my ever-present cold. Life was trying to pack one carry-on bag for a February trip that would span Vermont and Louisiana; life was revising poems and drafting essays on seat-back tray tables in every airborne vehicle from 747's to four-seater commuter tin cans seemingly powered by squirrels on treadmills. Life was a chronic stiff neck from dozing off in trains, buses, waiting rooms, and backstage green rooms.

Life was also learning that the at first temptingly homey stay at the local feminist commune was to be tactfully avoided since, with a few memorable exceptions, it meant one or all of the following: (1) being kept awake through the night for the intimate, “exclusive” workshop—the unstated but equivalent price of room and board—after which the local sisters went to bed while their bleary guest tottered to the airport for another flight, city, and round of the same; (2) being fed gummy brown rice puddled with soy sauce topped by a bean sprout; (3) feeling compelled to insist on washing up after dinner because one did
not
wish to be a snooty New York-type star-leader honcho who let other people wait on her and consequently doing dishes for ten people after the lecture and before the “private” rap; (4) discovering that rest, at least for the ten minutes permitted, was to take place in a sleeping bag on the floor—sometimes, unsettlingly, with a would-be-groupie-young-lesbian-feminist fan hovering hopefully over it. To complain and be a rotten sport was not an option. These were women trying to treat their guest as best they knew how. (Besides, wasn't I trying for Perfect on
their
chart?) So I grinned, talked, rasped cheerfully hoarse, sucked lozenges till my tongue glistened chartreuse, diplomatically declined intimate overtures, learned to enjoy it all—and tried to nap on the plane.

Later, to be sure, I rediscovered the bliss of privacy at hotels and motels, although given sufficient time and recurrence they began to appear hallucinatingly identical, town after town. I shall probably never forget those iridescently orange cabbage roses with which it seemed most rooms in one motel chain were papered, the design coyly carried through in the bedspread fabric. Since the boreal air conditioner usually couldn't be turned off and an extra blanket was nowhere to be found, I'd appropriate the bedspread for additional warmth—only to find, once tucked in, that its matching pattern gave me the sensation of being absorbed into the wall, my head peeping out from a rip in the design. There was, too, the radicalizing experience of being a woman traveling alone, which would require a book in itself—another one I don't intend to write. Yet there was also an unexpectedly swift trust and friendliness between traveling women strangers, particularly where children were involved. Entire vocabularies can be wordlessly exchanged in the simple gesture of offering
to hold her baby while a mother wipes off vomit from the front of his toddler sister.

With hindsight, I confess to wishing I'd spent more of those years quietly at my desk; I would have written more books, been more solvent financially, and relished lots more sleep. Still, for me that would've required living in another era, perhaps a hundred years or more in the future. Given the historical moment in which I found myself, ethically there was no other choice. I had to fight, and not just for other women. I was fighting for myself.

There are, however, genuine dangers that come with the territory of being an itinerant political organizer. Physical attack and threats of assassination are among them, yes. But except for some near misses and bad scares, a broken rib, a graze from a knife, and a well-aimed rock that probably cost me some precious brain cells I could ill afford to lose, I've been lucky. The subtler perils are less commonly acknowledged; they're psychological, intellectual, even aesthetic. There's a real danger in seeing too many faces, shaking too many hands, facing too many audiences, answering too many of the same questions, repeating too often what was once fresh and sincere until it's inevitably reduced to a platitudinous set piece. There's a danger in watching complex issues “of necessity” simplified, then
over
simplified toward precisely the sort of nonthought you fancied you were opposing. To anyone other than a sentimentalist given to convenient self-delusion, an infection of cynicism contracted in this exercise is unavoidable, as is an elation-exhaustion seesaw, an emotional megalomania, and an accompanying self-dislike. The process slackens your spirit and tempts you toward contempt for the very people on whose behalf you're purportedly acting; they begin to appear like a faceless, manipulating, manipulable mass. And you begin to feel like a faceless, manipulating, manipulated demagogue.

Think
, then, of what happens to a campaigning
politician
.

I should have recognized these hypocrisies from my childhood as an actor. But there's a warped honor, at least, in that profession, where your
job
is to appear as something other than yourself, and everyone knows your skills are bent toward that end. That's not comparable to the politician (or political organizer) who
claims
to be her/his self but learns not to
expose authentic aspects of that self, for fear of losing the attention or affection of the constituency. In our society the political message depends to a lamentable degree on who delivers it, and how.
²
The pretense of the actor is a translucent art, therefore oddly honest. The pretense of the political figure is an opaque charade, a deliberate deception that can deceive even its deceiver into thinking no deception's taking place.

There have been times when my life seemed to curve back on itself like a Möbius strip and mockingly return me to the same progression of stages, cameras, and mikes I fought so hard to escape as an adolescent. Yet the responsibility for one's life ultimately is one's own—at least after society's various bigotries and the other cage bars of existence have set the boundaries within which that choice can be made—though sometimes it can be made courageously enough to bend those bars a bit. During this siege of disillusion, I learned that the forging of a public face, necessary to a performing artist and seemingly useful to a political creature, can be pernicious to a creative artist. How could it be otherwise, when your replies become shortened into sound bites, self-protective and superficial?
³
A Q-and-A session is neither the time nor place to be confidential or candid—though I would find myself trying, sometimes sustaining internal emotional injuries in the attempt. Yet the authentic answers—and, more important, the questions themselves—
self
-asked, are the very stuff with
which the artist should work, in a markedly different process where length, depth, and self-exposure must all be assumed.

The more I age, the more I appreciate perspective—which itself changes with, well … perspective.

In the enthusiasm of the 1970s, breaking free from the incestuous infighting of elite metro-feminism gifted me with a perspective that the movement was far more than the sum of its sororicidal leadership parts. By the end of the decade, a different perspective helped me figure out that my growing irritability with being on the road was not about the estimable women I was encountering but about my loss of writing time and family time, plus the fatigue of trying to pacify rising childhood ghosts as I found myself again the family's sole breadwinner: the old conflicting prides, guilts, resentments, and martyrdoms.

Now, two decades later, perspective offers another, different surprise: the realization of what I've left
out
from this period, not even from choice but simply from having overlooked it as just not being important, although at the time it happened it seemed absolutely crucial. There are so many examples of this in the writing of a memoir that any sample of the genre might as easily be termed a forgettoir. Perspective comes into play because certain occasions or relationships that seemed integral to one's existence reveal themselves with time to be totally irrelevant to who one really is, always was, or has become. So they fall out of the story, not from a wish on the writer's part to hide them, just from their retroactive irrelevance to the narrative and from the indifference of the narrator.

There was, for instance, some cadre-type organization in San Francisco run by Lynn somebody, who was petrifying most Bay Area women's groups by garroting them with correct lines; I remember being asked to come and confront Lynn whats-her-name in public, and agreeing (part of the responsibility of the “outside” agitator who can, after all, visit but then gets to
leave
), and I recall being anxious about my decision for two months before the trip to California. Finally, a mobile bundle of nerves, I went. We had a confrontation where she and her group were faced down publicly and successfully, and I learned later that they never wielded their mini-tyranny effectively again. The whole movement buzzed about it for the better part of a year, but the substance of the debate, along with her name, has vanished, leaving only the spoor of stale adrenaline. I'd love to
go back and warn myself not to spend such angst on something so trivial, but all I can do is try to fritter less in the present.

Perspective's lack of pity in denying do-overs
is
compensated for, however, by the merciful humor it can bestow on what once felt earth-shakingly serious. An example of this would be my relationship during the 1970s with a once vivid presence in my life: Jane Alpert,
⁴
a Leftist militant who'd been involved, together with her lover Sam Melville,
⁵
in anti-government bombings; she became a fugitive from the law, surfaced after some years underground, turned herself in, served a prison term, and was finally released into middle-class obscurity. In that single sentence (thanks to semicolons) resonates what was once an impassioned alliance: years of friendship, actions taken together and separately, journeys in various disguises to meet in various cities; years of support, risk, and financial aid, of long letters sent to and from false names, of poems written for and dedicated to her;
⁶
a conceited tutorial pride in watching her outgrow her old politics and gain a sense of self as she discovered what feminism really was (and an accompanying despair every time her feminism
and
sense of self went out the window because some cute stud came in through it, this vulnerability self-indulged even at the risk of exposing her identity or infuriating the guys' girlfriends, who were sheltering her as a favor to me). Then there were more years of finding attorneys to help her surface, doing damage control over her flirtation with an FBI agent, visiting her in prison, orchestrating her move to a minimum-security facility (then doing damage control over her affair with a male inmate
there
), mobilizing support to defend her against accusations of having informed on her colleagues. … Well, an expense of spirit in a waste of shame all
that
turned out to be. Which is a somber way of saluting the amusing power that perspective has in clarifying how what we once were sure was central was quite marginal.
You see, in writing about the Sixties and Seventies,
I forgot
to put any of this
in
. But shorthand does it justice.