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rushthatspeaksAfter finishing this, I noticed that it had been blurbed by John Updike, and some part of the back of my head said, 'well, that explains everything'. I realize that being blurbed by John Updike is more of an effect than a cause, but I cannot help but see it as symptomatic of everything that is wrong with this book.
There is a great deal wrong with this book. Which is a shame, because there is also a great deal right with this book, but.
This is a collection of articles about woman writers, sometimes focusing more or less on one book or period, sometimes on their personal lives, and most frequently on the work laid against the personal life. The articles ran in the New Yorker between 1990 and 2000. Women discussed include Olive Schreiner, Gertrude Stein, a joint article on Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, and Margaret Mitchell, among others. The biographical information is solid, the articles and book are well-organized, and Pierpont accomplishes one of the major goals of the critic: she provokes a desire in her reader to read the work she's discussing, if only to prove to yourself that you do not wish to read the work she's discussing. She finds something to catch the attention in even the work she considers least relevant, and her angle of approach is sometimes sharply valuable by itself (there is an article here about Mae West as a writer, and of course Mae West was a writer, because she wrote all the plays and films that made her famous and created the roles for which she became iconic, but people don't seem to talk about that very much).
However, I spent a lot of this book extremely annoyed, principally for two reasons. The first and more minor is that you can tell instantly which writers Pierpont enjoys, which ones she likes personally and which ones she might, if pressed, admit to considering overrated. Unsurprisingly, the essays about authors she likes are (mostly) better essays, and the essays about authors she does not like so strongly tend to come to conclusions that are less supported. For instance, her claim that the entirety of Gertrude Stein's writing life was based on emotional repression is contradicted very strongly by the excerpts quoted in the article, which makes one wonder about Pierpont's reading protocols for modernist fiction, which makes one wonder why she is writing about Stein in the first place, except that she seems to want to set her up as some sort of existential opposition to Virginia Woolf, an idea that though the two of them disliked each other I suspect either writer would have found ridiculous. This means that I eye about half the book with the wariness of a person who suspects that the assignment has been given out by an editor.
The exception to this trend is the essay on Anaïs Nin. Pierpont basically hates Anaïs Nin, but it is an explained hatred, a hatred based on solid research, on laying out fact after fact before the reader and continuously having the response many people, myself included, continuously have the more we hear about Anaïs Nin, a response which can be summed up as: WHAT. The first time I tried to read Anaïs Nin, as a teenager, I became convinced that someone was having me on; the more biographical information I run into about her the more convinced I become that the tragedy is that nobody was.
Anyway, all this pales beside the second reason I am so annoyed about this book, which I have been thinking of as Probably The Reason John Updike Liked It.
In Dancing at the Edge of the World, Ursula Le Guin has a long essay in which among many other useful things she discusses the cultural images of women writing, of women who write, and that eternal mythical dichotomy: you can have babies and a happy marriage, or books, saith The Canon. Not both. And Le Guin talks about some writers who have fallen out of said canon, and how, funnily enough, some of them had large families, and some had adored spouses, and some wrote at the kitchen table with the kids running by in the background suggesting that maybe there ought to be aliens (which happened to Le Guin with one novel, and it was apparently a reasonable idea). But there is this myth.
And the theme of this particular book is female writer as rebel, female writer as venturing into uncharted territory, as moving out of the myths and boundaries that have been imposed on women and their literary productions: well and good.
Why, then, does this collection spend so much time minimizing the possible happiness and validity of the personal relationships engaged in by all of these writers? The marriages and affairs that were unhappy get dwelt upon, the sibling relationships that grew into feuds, the mothers who were not supportive, the fathers who were sexually threatening. The mothers who loved and supported get painted as mildly perverse for it (Mae West), the spouses who were loving and interested get the importance of their relationships either mentioned only in passing (Hannah Arendt's final marriage) or sort of sunk into the background while Pierpont talks about other things (Alice B. Toklas, and how you manage this is beyond me). The miscarriages and the children walked away from get gone over in great detail, whereas the mothering that appears to have worked out all right (Doris Lessing's youngest son, Mary McCarthy's child) gets about three sentences. Pierpont also comes down on the side that there must have been something missing from Mae West's life because she cannot possibly have been happy just being that promiscuous, &c. &c., and the combination of this sort of thing with the abovementioned attitude towards relationships is mythmaking, is distortion, because what we are being given here is a collection of women who suffer for their art.
In some ways, fair enough. It can be a hard life not conforming to social norms. It is difficult making your life and your work what you want them to be. But I cannot believe but that there were times when their work was joy for every single one of these women, and I find it difficult to believe that they were quite so bereft of people they loved and who loved them and who could be relied upon as this book seems to think, even if the good times were only for a brief period. (Well. Except Anaïs Nin. I am not sure she ever loved anyone, because I think she was a sociopath. But that is different.) And I find it hard to buy this mythmaking when it is handed me about, say, Gertrude Stein, by a critic who dismisses some of the most uninhibited erotic poetry in the English language as "nursery-school contentment". It smacks rather of that inchoate feeling that suffering is more noble, somehow, which is an inchoate feeling that has been culturally inflicted on women for a very long time now.
Virginia Woolf once said that across a woman's life there falls the shadow of a sword, and on one side lies convention and on the other, who knows what. This is an attempt to report from who knows what, and it is not one that entirely fails. But it is not one that is seeing clearly, either. It is one that is trying to see patterns in these lives, and the patterns it sees very subtly conform to what the people who would like to believe that who-knows-what is not necessarily a good place might expect, see above re: John Updike. Oh, a valuable thing these women did, says this book, an amazing groundbreaking set of things, and we are so glad they did it so that we are where we are now, but isn't it sad about what it did to them.
And I grit my teeth, because the 'it' that did it, when it was done, is exactly the kind of cultural idea that is informing the deep layers of this criticism, and while this is as I said a real attempt, I am no longer content with only that.
There is a great deal wrong with this book. Which is a shame, because there is also a great deal right with this book, but.
This is a collection of articles about woman writers, sometimes focusing more or less on one book or period, sometimes on their personal lives, and most frequently on the work laid against the personal life. The articles ran in the New Yorker between 1990 and 2000. Women discussed include Olive Schreiner, Gertrude Stein, a joint article on Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, and Margaret Mitchell, among others. The biographical information is solid, the articles and book are well-organized, and Pierpont accomplishes one of the major goals of the critic: she provokes a desire in her reader to read the work she's discussing, if only to prove to yourself that you do not wish to read the work she's discussing. She finds something to catch the attention in even the work she considers least relevant, and her angle of approach is sometimes sharply valuable by itself (there is an article here about Mae West as a writer, and of course Mae West was a writer, because she wrote all the plays and films that made her famous and created the roles for which she became iconic, but people don't seem to talk about that very much).
However, I spent a lot of this book extremely annoyed, principally for two reasons. The first and more minor is that you can tell instantly which writers Pierpont enjoys, which ones she likes personally and which ones she might, if pressed, admit to considering overrated. Unsurprisingly, the essays about authors she likes are (mostly) better essays, and the essays about authors she does not like so strongly tend to come to conclusions that are less supported. For instance, her claim that the entirety of Gertrude Stein's writing life was based on emotional repression is contradicted very strongly by the excerpts quoted in the article, which makes one wonder about Pierpont's reading protocols for modernist fiction, which makes one wonder why she is writing about Stein in the first place, except that she seems to want to set her up as some sort of existential opposition to Virginia Woolf, an idea that though the two of them disliked each other I suspect either writer would have found ridiculous. This means that I eye about half the book with the wariness of a person who suspects that the assignment has been given out by an editor.
The exception to this trend is the essay on Anaïs Nin. Pierpont basically hates Anaïs Nin, but it is an explained hatred, a hatred based on solid research, on laying out fact after fact before the reader and continuously having the response many people, myself included, continuously have the more we hear about Anaïs Nin, a response which can be summed up as: WHAT. The first time I tried to read Anaïs Nin, as a teenager, I became convinced that someone was having me on; the more biographical information I run into about her the more convinced I become that the tragedy is that nobody was.
Anyway, all this pales beside the second reason I am so annoyed about this book, which I have been thinking of as Probably The Reason John Updike Liked It.
In Dancing at the Edge of the World, Ursula Le Guin has a long essay in which among many other useful things she discusses the cultural images of women writing, of women who write, and that eternal mythical dichotomy: you can have babies and a happy marriage, or books, saith The Canon. Not both. And Le Guin talks about some writers who have fallen out of said canon, and how, funnily enough, some of them had large families, and some had adored spouses, and some wrote at the kitchen table with the kids running by in the background suggesting that maybe there ought to be aliens (which happened to Le Guin with one novel, and it was apparently a reasonable idea). But there is this myth.
And the theme of this particular book is female writer as rebel, female writer as venturing into uncharted territory, as moving out of the myths and boundaries that have been imposed on women and their literary productions: well and good.
Why, then, does this collection spend so much time minimizing the possible happiness and validity of the personal relationships engaged in by all of these writers? The marriages and affairs that were unhappy get dwelt upon, the sibling relationships that grew into feuds, the mothers who were not supportive, the fathers who were sexually threatening. The mothers who loved and supported get painted as mildly perverse for it (Mae West), the spouses who were loving and interested get the importance of their relationships either mentioned only in passing (Hannah Arendt's final marriage) or sort of sunk into the background while Pierpont talks about other things (Alice B. Toklas, and how you manage this is beyond me). The miscarriages and the children walked away from get gone over in great detail, whereas the mothering that appears to have worked out all right (Doris Lessing's youngest son, Mary McCarthy's child) gets about three sentences. Pierpont also comes down on the side that there must have been something missing from Mae West's life because she cannot possibly have been happy just being that promiscuous, &c. &c., and the combination of this sort of thing with the abovementioned attitude towards relationships is mythmaking, is distortion, because what we are being given here is a collection of women who suffer for their art.
In some ways, fair enough. It can be a hard life not conforming to social norms. It is difficult making your life and your work what you want them to be. But I cannot believe but that there were times when their work was joy for every single one of these women, and I find it difficult to believe that they were quite so bereft of people they loved and who loved them and who could be relied upon as this book seems to think, even if the good times were only for a brief period. (Well. Except Anaïs Nin. I am not sure she ever loved anyone, because I think she was a sociopath. But that is different.) And I find it hard to buy this mythmaking when it is handed me about, say, Gertrude Stein, by a critic who dismisses some of the most uninhibited erotic poetry in the English language as "nursery-school contentment". It smacks rather of that inchoate feeling that suffering is more noble, somehow, which is an inchoate feeling that has been culturally inflicted on women for a very long time now.
Virginia Woolf once said that across a woman's life there falls the shadow of a sword, and on one side lies convention and on the other, who knows what. This is an attempt to report from who knows what, and it is not one that entirely fails. But it is not one that is seeing clearly, either. It is one that is trying to see patterns in these lives, and the patterns it sees very subtly conform to what the people who would like to believe that who-knows-what is not necessarily a good place might expect, see above re: John Updike. Oh, a valuable thing these women did, says this book, an amazing groundbreaking set of things, and we are so glad they did it so that we are where we are now, but isn't it sad about what it did to them.
And I grit my teeth, because the 'it' that did it, when it was done, is exactly the kind of cultural idea that is informing the deep layers of this criticism, and while this is as I said a real attempt, I am no longer content with only that.
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no subject
Date: 2011-06-10 11:33 am (UTC)This reviewing you are doing is tremendous. It is astonishing to me, how much you are reading, how quickly, how thoroughly, and how brilliant are your responses. I want you to get paid for it! Is reviewing for somewhere like Strange Horizons something you have any interest in doing? Your reviews -- and Deborah Brannon's, and J. C. Runolfson's -- are reviews I want to be reading in magazines. Yours are the reviews that read a work and take apart the hows and whys of its successes and failures, and I want so many more people to read them and EXPECT MORE from reviews than plot summary and dis/like.
Rar. This has been your helplessly admiring rant of the day.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-10 11:57 am (UTC)I'm wondering how much of the book was shaped by the idea that it's more romantic, more artisty, if artists screw up their lives. This used to be believed about male writers, and while I've read somewhat about how you can be just as good an artist if you have sensible habits, and meds don't damage creativity and give you more time when you're functional enough to write (http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CBYQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FPoets-Prozac-Illness-Treatment-Creative%2Fdp%2F0801888395&rct=j&q=poets%20on%20prozac&ei=ZQbyTdGiIJCs0AHerZXRCw&usg=AFQjCNEPg3Zg3v5ICWtIdAgocfLPEp4o7w&cad=rja), I'm not sure how much the romantic myth hangs on for men as well as women.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-11 07:52 am (UTC)Also, thank you. Very much.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-12 12:24 am (UTC)And this book sounds extremely annoying. I HATE the romanticizing of the Suffering Artist, as if those of us with good relationships and happy lives weren't authentic, were just playing at what we do, or otherwise Not Serious. Art made out of joy can be good art, whichever gender commits it.
Hmph.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-10 11:48 am (UTC)The first time I tried to read Anaïs Nin, as a teenager, I became convinced that someone was having me on;
Aa-yup. I was reading her as the diaries first came out and she was being canonized as An Amazing Woman. My first reaction was, when did she get time to do anything when she spent all her time writing her diary? The second was WHAT. The third was, I bet it's because of the Henry Miller connection feh.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-11 07:57 am (UTC)Also, it was indeed published because of the Henry Miller thing. She initially became known to literary types because she wrote the preface to Tropic of Cancer and he spent about twenty years trying to get her to write a novel and then on getting the diary into print.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-11 12:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-10 01:44 pm (UTC)Nine
no subject
Date: 2011-06-10 04:10 pm (UTC)Urk -- the Romantic mythology, it burns.
Which is not to say that the suffering someone does for their art is to be dismissed, but that is essential to artistry, or the art (or person) is better for it ... argh. To the point, sometimes, of incoherence.
---L.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-10 04:34 pm (UTC). . . example, please? I don't have enough stress in my day yet.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-11 07:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-10 09:50 pm (UTC)