Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM (34 page)

I’m grateful for the ferry ride, even if it turns out the ferryman is a scoundrel.

—Dana Densmore, interview by the author

In response to claims that Valerie had been intermittently hospitalized throughout the 1970s, Valerie’s mother, Dorothy Moran, claimed, “She was writing. She fancied herself a writer, and I think she did have some talent. . . . She had a terrific sense of humor.
”
27
By 1975, after returning to New York, Valerie showed an eagerness to write again and put herself back into the writing scene. She first sent a letter for publication in
Ms.
magazine in April 1976 that was rejected. She then submitted a poem to
Majority Report: The Women’s Liberation Newsletter
, a New York–based feminist periodical founded in May 1971 that published independently and operated with an editorial collective under the leadership of Nancy Borman. The publication intended “to dispense information, encourage participation, and provide support. We intend to arm our sisters with the consciousness and the unity to fight our oppression.
”
28
To this end,
Majority Report
published feminist groups’ newsletters and writings in exchange for printing and mailing list costs; each feminist group received “quality printing,” “a huge circulation,” “an organized staff,” and “publication every two weeks.” With the motto “Let’s beat the media by creating our own,” and a reputation as “America’s least ladylike newspaper,”
Majority Report
did not disclaim, explain, or criticize its content, but allowed it to stand on its own, even when provoking intense disagreements between readers. Importantly,
Majority Report
also assured readers that it would publish any advertisements and letters “
intact
and free from editing,” advancing a philosophy Valerie had certainly appreciated and sought out. In many ways, this publication represented an ideal outlet for Valerie; committed to feminist principles of fairness and equality while not shying away from radical ideas, Valerie found, for a time, an intellectual home with
Majority Report.

Valerie first encountered
Majority Report
when she submitted a poem for a special issue devoted to the work of “authentic street people” who had proposed to take over artistic control of
Majority Report
for a issue titled “The Lesbians Are Coming.” Nancy Borman remembered, “I gave it over, not thinking. They wanted to include poetry and photography. While I was giving them artistic control only, they neglected to deal with copyright stuff. They included pieces without getting the rights to publish them.
”
29
Valerie wrote some excellent poems for
Majority Report
, though they did not generally publish poetry; her poems caught the eye of Nancy and the other editors and they eagerly published one of them in this special issue
.
They also published a reprint of Valerie’s 1966
Cavalier
article about panhandling but did not seek her permission. When the issue came out, she complained bitterly about the misspellings and lack of copyright and that her poem was poorly punctuated. She called the editorial offices and yelled on the phone, calling herself a punctuation expert. Nancy responded by asking Valerie if she wanted a job at
Majority Report
, as they needed someone who could help beginners learn how to edit. “Lo and behold,” Nancy said, “she agreed—she volunteered at the magazine that ripped her off.”

This began a year-and-a-half-long relationship between Valerie and
Majority Report
, as she joined the editorial team and worked a couple of days every few weeks helping with a variety of editorial tasks. Throughout this time, Valerie was, according to Nancy, “uncannily pleasant.” Still obsessed with Andy and copyright issues, she and Nancy had many conversations, as Nancy recalled: “I remember a discussion we had at the Lion’s Head; she drank a black coffee and I had a beer. She seemed slightly crazy, but the rest of my staff seemed more crazy. She seemed obsessed with her past, with the rip-off of her work.” Valerie talked at length about her time at Matteawan and her anger at Robin Morgan for not securing copyright to print excerpts of
SCUM Manifesto
in
Sisterhood Is Powerful.
“She didn’t moan and complain about her living situation,” Nancy said; because Valerie had no phone, Nancy assumed she lived on welfare.

Valerie fit right in with her staff, though Nancy qualified this: “When I say that she was no more unstable than others, that is not to say that I had a stable staff. We were on the Lower East Side, where everything was down and out, and enough pressures to flip. There were pressures just to survive, and landlords, and living among thugs and bums and not much hope.” Valerie found it reassuring that nobody received payment for working at
Majority Report
, as that cleared a lot of her anger about the inadequate copyright for her poem. “She used to get upset when she thought that others were getting paid and she was not,” Nancy said, “so I said, ‘We can offer you nothing,’ and we fulfilled that promise, but she took the opportunity and many benefitted.”

Valerie worked hard and had no interest in revealing her identity as the would-be Andy Warhol assassin. “She slaved away with us, devoting lots of labor to a bi-weekly publication. People there would say, ‘Hi, my name is Julie, what is your name? And she would just introduce herself as Valerie. No one knew who she was and Valerie did not tell them,” Nancy recalled. Working with Valerie changed Nancy’s view of her dramatically. While she had once thought of her as crazy for shooting Andy, she eventually understood her motivations. Because she and Valerie had such a positive working relationship, Nancy did not fear Valerie’s retribution or anger, but rather, tried to help her achieve her goals. Ti-Grace Atkinson remarked that the women publishing
Majority Report
knew Valerie and involved themselves closely with her: “Some knew her on a more personal basis, but they were still afraid of her. She was hard to deal with.
”
30

Valerie elicited awe, sympathy, and fascination from most of the women at
Majority Report
at that time. Louise Thompson, a writer and poet from the Lower East Side who had known Valerie before the shootings, described her as “stunningly brilliant” and her play as impressive and obscene. Julia Mauldin, a poet known for her toughness, who lived in Valerie’s neighborhood, also spoke highly of Valerie, saying that Valerie encouraged her to pursue poetry and get published, to have more self-confidence in her work, and to be less shy about her talents. As someone who had punched out a liberal, white, lesbian leader, Julia had been ostracized from the feminist community, just as Valerie had. When Valerie heard about this incident, she called Julia in the middle of the night at her West Village apartment (Julia had no idea how Valerie got her number) and recounted her story about Andy. Apparently, she told Julia that Andy Warhol was the first man she thought of in a romantic way. “She loved him and he led her on,” Julia told Nancy. Nancy refuted this story, saying that Valerie never had any romantic feelings for Andy and that she had never mentioned loving Andy. “It’s possible that Julia might have evoked this story from her,” Nancy admitted, “as Julia is a straight person who was black; her poetry was brilliant and beautiful, from the heart, like Valerie’s. I died for the poetry of them both.” Nancy also noted, “If you have this notion of the romantic attachment, you have this wonderful or horrible element. He was such a dull person, and she took the play around to people in such a naïve manner. Because it was a little dirty, no one would put it on. Supposedly he said he would put it on.”

Valerie spoke frequently to Julia about the shooting and the pain she felt about his mistreatment of her leading up to her actions. She felt hurt and used and believed he “dumped her” after he got what he wanted and that this pattern had repeated itself throughout his life with women at the Factory. Valerie did not want stardom, Julia said; Andy had benefited far more from the shooting than Valerie had. Julia described Valerie as not crazy but fast-paced: “There was so much going on at once, at such speed. I thought she had a lot of talent, that she was eccentric. She was hyper; if you did not sit back and watch her in the context, you might have thought that she was crazy. But if you back up, you could put it together. She had so much energy. The things she told me about made me wonder how she had survived it. It was like cutting into a pie, taking out the ingredients, and leaving the crust.
”
31

Joanne Steele, distributor of
Majority Report
, viewed Valerie as more disturbed, saying that she represented a dangerous part of the movement and seemed unstable. Joanne was particularly alarmed by Valerie’s lack of caring interactions with others, particularly in that she often acted like an abused child who fluctuated between domination and passivity (but was never in between). When bossed around, Valerie became mouselike, withdrawn, and even needy. Still, Joanne admired how Valerie understood women’s oppression and how she could not take it anymore. For Joanne,
SCUM Manifesto
exemplified that women should not “take shit,” that they should be strong so that they could separate themselves from and lose their vulnerability to men: “The
Manifesto
had an important message for women to hear. Nothing else was as virulent. She was the first to say you can hate your oppressor.
”
32

For Valerie, working at
Majority Report
bolstered her new sense of self-reliance; she had struggled for nearly a decade with hospitalizations, publishing battles, and lack of regular employment. She began work in 1976 on a new book,
Valerie Solanas
, and showed a renewed interest in circulating
SCUM Manifesto
and its ideas.

Around this time—sometime in late 1976 or early 1977, Valerie checked out of the New York Public Library the 1971 Olympia Press edition of
SCUM Manifesto
and wrote all over it with various complaints. On the front cover, she wrote, “Read all about fleas in my next book to be titled
Valerie Solanas
”; circling Vivian Gornick’s name, she penned, “One of the many fleas riding on my back. Valerie Solanas.” “This is not the title,” she declared, in reference to Maurice’s use of the abbreviation form
S.C.U.M.
(she preferred
SCUM
to
S.C.U.M.
, later calling Maurice’s decision to use the latter “extraordinarily tasteless”). On the back cover she wrote, “lie” and on the jacket she called Maurice and Vivian “fleas.” She accused the volume of being “full of sabotaging typos” and wrote, “
lies! fraud!
” on the copyright page.
33
Clearly, her interest in the absolute integrity of her work and words played a major role in her action of defacing a library book and in her obsession with having a correct
edition of
SCUM Manifesto
released to the public. From this point on, Valerie refers to her version of
SCUM
as “CORRECT,” in all capitals, as a way to emphasize this important distinction from the Olmpia Press edition.

In 1976, after eighteen months working for
Majority Report
, Valerie decided to leave the editorial team and pursue writing her new book full time
.
As an editor, Valerie could not publish anything in
Majority Report
because of the newsletter’s policy discouraging dual roles, but if she left, she would be able to use the publication as a springboard to advertise
SCUM Manifesto
and debate with others about feminist ideas.
Majority Report
became an ideal site for Valerie to publish her latest musings and squabbles with feminists who had misrepresented her and to engage, however unwittingly, with the women’s liberation movement.

Following her departure from
Majority Report
, Valerie began a series of letters and commentaries that continued for a full year. Her “wars” staged on the pages of
Majority Report
started in 1976 when the radical group C.L.I.T. (Collective Lesbian International Terrorists)—which included Susan Cavin, Marsha Segerberg, and Maricla Moyano—wrote two collections called “the C.L.I.T. papers.” These texts drew from
SCUM Manifesto
to detail a philosophy that advocated female separatism and the revolutionary overthrow of patriarchy. In November 27, 1976, a group of men claiming to be from the men’s auxiliary of SCUM wrote a response to excerpts from the C.L.I.T. papers that had been published in
Majority Report
(and later in
Dyke, a Quarterly
); they found it shameful for the C.L.I.T. papers to have a “mindless association of SCUM ideas with separatism from men, an idea which was
not
in the
SCUM Manifesto
.” These men—Lee Hazlitt and Stan Rudolf—stated that Valerie had had a response to the “incongruous and shameless mingling of SCUM ideas with a mishmash of asininities”: “It’s brilliant and original—brilliant ideas from SCUM Manifesto and an original stream of errors.
”
34

In a later response to the C.L.I.T. papers, Al Reinheimer argued that its members did not advocate violence of any kind and were “possibly nervous about the many unattributed paraphrased (and some not paraphrased) lines from
SCUM Manifesto
, which lines where interspersed throughout their sea of gibberish and contradictions, adopted as part of their philosophy that the belief that ideas can be stolen is wrong, male, a convenient philosophy for those on the receiving end.” He later added, “‘How,’ they asked, ‘can you steal an
idea
?’ I will tell them how—by representing someone else’s ideas as your own, by signing your name (whether real or a pseudonym) to someone else’s work” (vol. 6 [January 8–21, 1977]).