“I don’t know if you’re really a writer. I don’t know if you’re crazy enough.”
These were the words said to me by a mentor in graduate school. I had honestly forgotten them, until an old friend from graduate school mailed me back the long letters I had written her during a period I think of as my apprenticeship as a writer, when we wrote each other fervently, and I, especially, set down the long (and sometimes self-dramatic) struggle to become a writer.
Not surprisingly, these words came from a male mentor. I believe he looked on and at me with some affection—I have memories of him smiling, eyes twinkling, when I spoke in workshop; of driving with him around Providence, RI, where he was looking at a house he was thinking of buying, and, as he told me, “wasting his time so he avoided writing.” I remember he often singled out my work, but wanted it to take a distinctly more avant-garde and dark direction. I remember one such story that I considered finished, unto itself, and somehow, after workshop, I had persuaded myself to now tell the story from the point of view of the son, as an unborn child. Another story, which again seemed finished, but for some odd details that needed fixing, was revised over and over again after his comments, until it became a muddle. The first I published as a chapbook; the second story I let go.
The word “crazy” deserves some examining. I do not know if my mentor held in his world view an idea that women writers needed to be ‘crazy’ to be good or true writers, or if he thought all writers needed to be ‘crazy.’ I do know that is a trope often dispensed on the female writer—yes, that neurotic, ungainly woman ill-suited for the regular world. Her bleeding life is her art—the crazier she was, the more of an artist she must be. But the notion of a ‘crazy’ woman author means that ambition and debilitation are always bound together. One asserts and is made helpless at the same time—think Plath, Sexton, Zelda. I was never interested in ‘crazy,’ honestly. I was interested in hard, steady work, in finding how to steady myself as an artist, which wasn’t always easy.
When I was a child, I studied with a wonderful artist, a European who lived across the street in Parkway Village; he had a slightly haunted quality, having come through the war, and ran painting classes at the back of his framing store. He seemed to think I had some talent, and he became like an artistic father to me—I relished those hours in the turpentine-smelling room, where he would lay out books of Impressionists and Fauve painters and we would try to copy and learn with oil paint. After he and I took the long walk home, down Parsons Boulevard, pausing at the bridge over the Grand Central Parkway, the cars humming beneath us, to see a sky streaked and swollen with vibrant hues, no different than the Fauve paintings I had just been poring over.
In the early days, I painted instinctively, still a child, still unafraid, lavish in my sense of color and brush stroke. I got into an art high school, but then suddenly retreated, afraid of being pigeon holed as solely a painter.
Then there was a break—my mentor’s wife passed away, he shut the store and took a teaching job to support his family, and then remarried and went to live elsewhere—not far away, in the neighborhood next to my elementary school. I became a teenager, with a boyfriend, friends, diffuse in my likings. I picked up painting again with him, this time in a room on the second floor. But something was broken and lost—in our connection, and in me. His stepdaughter, who was quite adorable, would come wandering into the room. There were no spattered and dog eared art books splayed open to show me how to do it; no smell of turpentine. My boyfriend was idling in his car across the street. I worked on one painting—of a man in a chair—and the more I worked on it, the worse it got. The palate became muddier and muddier. I had lost my way. Shortly after I stopped our lessons. There was no point.
The same could be said of the fiction writing in graduate school—the revisions I was doing that muddled my original sight, my original sense of freedom.
I was trying to please. And maybe, in some way, he was right—that pleasing side of myself was what he saw in the hothouse atmosphere of graduate school—I was the acolyte tipped forward, showing her eager and agreeable face, wanting praise, wanting attention, wanting to get it right, like a good student. Surely not a good creed for becoming a writer. One muddies–and muddles–one’s own sense of color and purpose.
And finally, he was being an a***hole.
In the most recent New York Review of Books there is an essay and review of Vivian Gornick’s oeuvre. There is much that is striking in the piece, but most notably, how it was feminism that seemed to clarify Gornick’s point of view, her analytic powers, after years and years of debilitating self-doubt. As a thinker, Dana Tortorici notes, Gornick first had the Marxism and social analysis of her parents, the world she grew up with, then the deepening power of psychoanalysis, and finally feminism, which seemed to embolden and focus her as a writer.
In the same New York Review of Books edition, there is also a piece on war journalist Martha Gellhorn, one of my cherished heroes—I first encountered her, more deeply, in researching our book on Robert Capa and Gerda Taro. Indeed Tortorici asserts that Capa was probably Gellhorn’s only true love, because they were not attracted to one another. For Gellhorn, affection, camaraderie with men was utterly separate from sexual relations. “I only loved the world of men—not the world of men-and-women. I only loved men as they were themselves, not as they became in relation to women.”
The word “crazy” brings up another word for me, its penultimate counter: “affable.” This word came to me from a male agent who dropped me after one of my books did not do well and he was unenthusiastic about a new manuscript. He was clearly pruning his list of those he considered not promising, not potential stars. That was the word he used once to describe me—clearly a back-handed compliment. I was pleasing, pleasant to be around, but not someone to be taken seriously, nor represented. The break was almost welcome because by that time I had my own inner fury, and I didn’t want anyone who could not be fully in my corner—who saw only the surface of what I might be socially—but did not see the volcanic possibilities within.
It seems to me this strain for the woman writer—to please, to be pleasant, to take in the proclamations of men—are the pressures that are most certainly our undoing. I was raised in a home with a garrulous and overbearing mother, who at her best, gave me a vision of an outspoken woman, but at worst, could not cede the stage of intellectualism. I also had a brother who spoke in clanging certainties and judgments. My response was to retreat—to books, to journals, and to painting. There I could hear myself and imagine; there I could think without the hardened voice of judgment.
The private quest of a writer, as we push our little boats into choppy waters, means we cannot keep such utterances about our character, our destiny, on board. They must be tossed off, left behind on the dock so we might head toward our own destinations. Isn’t this what Elena in “My Brilliant Friend” again and again learns as she navigates out of her working class Sicilian world into rarified literary reaches? The slights, the cuts, the patronizing put downs, are there aplenty, and yet she ultimately plumbs her own self, her own set of memories, to write the books she was meant to write.
Finally I am reminded of Virginia Woolf describing her attempt to open the door to the library at Oxbridge when “there issued, like a guardian angel barring the way with a flutter of black gown instead of white wings, a deprecating, silvery, kindly gentleman, who regretted in a low voice as he waved me back that ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow the College or furnished with a letter of introduction.” Woolf swerves off in anger, to then contemplate the condition of women and what is necessary to come into themselves, as writers in her now famous lecture/essay, “A Room of One’s Own.”
Now, years later, so many years later—most importantly many books later–when I think about what that mentor had said to me, I am reminded of the ending of “To the Lighthouse,” which finishes with painter Lily Briscoe:
“But what did it matter? she asked herself, taking up her brush again. She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the center. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.”
If I were to speak back, yes, I would raise up my quivering brush and mark it very firmly in the middle. “No,” I would say. “One does not need to be crazy. One needs to be fierce. And to not listen—to you.”
