Words of a Woman

Writing about writing is often a most painful exercise. For one, you can only write about other people’s writing which is either so much better than your own, that you despair of ever evolving to that level of greatness: so you begin to gush or else sound surly and resentful; or you write about people who are in evolutionary terms on a much lower plane, so you end up sounding horribly patronising and stuck up.

Or, if you are critiquing a fellow writer, it somehow makes you very tender towards his/her feelings. You know just how sensitive a creature s/he must be, yearning for one word or phrase, of praise. So you soften the force of your blows, dull the edge of the axe, as it were, try and find exculpatory reasons for the mess you know the work to be: did he have a nervous breakdown, was he separated from his wife, children, mother? Was there a revolution in his country, did a meteorite hit his city/his house? Anything to soften the blow of telling the poor sod that he can’t write and that he ought to go off and become an accountant or something.

One can never write about one’s own work. I have for years yearned to rest my head on some shrink’s bosom and weep copious tears for not progressing beyond the stasis that afflicted my novel; meanwhile great armies of writers, now younger and younger are galloping ahead being published all over the place. Then I decided to go off and read other writers on writing. There are plenty of those. The art and the craft of it. To see if I could find fellow-sufferers, idiots who have chosen to live this strange, twilight, solitary life, instead of roistering at the nearest tavern, painting this town and that a flaming scarlet.

Saul Bellow once said, “You anoint yourself as a writer.” Robert Browning memorised Johnson’s dictionary, both volumes, cover to cover as preparation for becoming a writer. Freud said, we, meaning men, write for three basic reasons, desire for fame, money and the love of women. He didn’t say why women write. Shelby Foote who spent twenty years writing a monumental trilogy about the American Civil war, said the fourth reason is “the joy of writing. To write well is a huge pleasure and you feel awfully good doing it.”

In his wonderful book ‘Cold Mountain’, Charles Frazier who has created two absolutely marvellous women characters, talks about a different way of seeing. Ada one of the protagonists, (you notice, one just doesn’t say ‘heroine’ any more!) is alone after her father’s death, in charge of a farmhouse and is absolutely ignorant about the land, the seasons, planting, animals, tools, how to kill a chicken, so she starves, until the girl Ruby comes along to take charge. I must quote a passage from the book.

“Ada stood still and let her eyes go unfocussed and as she did, she became aware of the busy movements of myriad tiny creatures vibrating all through the massed flowers, down the stems and clear to the ground. Insects flying, crawling, climbing, eating. Their accumulation of energy was a kind of luminous quiver of life that filled Ada’s undirected vision right to the edges…”

That, precisely that luminous quiver and one’s awareness of it is what the writer must constantly reach out for. To look at the world and see directly and peripherally and with all one’s other senses at full mast.

And so we come to the question of why women write. I think it is all tied up with the question of their awareness of themselves, their bodies, the physical and emotional world around them, relationships with mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers, lovers, husbands and children, friends, companions in the work place, ---everything becomes a source of analysis and self-discovery.

Women who write are constantly examining their innermost feelings, thoughts, the consciousness of themselves in a unique way, through words, through language. Many women have spoken about the compulsions that formed and shaped them as writers, the certainty, often from childhood that they were meant to write.

In “The Writer On Her Work,” Janet Sternberg, who edited this book of essays by other women writers, says in her introduction, that she remembers clearly a feeling of strangeness and isolation as a child, when she closed the door of a room behind her, the room where there was a typewriter. She regrets that she had to retreat behind closed doors, but space and privacy were important. To retain control over that door, to struggle for self-definition were also important. Adulthood and acceptance of herself as a writer brought her to try and find out how other women came to write, and how they saw their lives and their work.

What emerges from this wonderful book is the range of voices, women’s voices, calling out, reaching out in wonder, in pain, in disbelief and faith: poets, essayists, novelists. None of them takes her gift for granted. All of them have struggled against great odds, bitter predicaments, discouragement, even the fear of madness, and then arrived at an expanded vision.

Ann Tyler speaks of the insidious demands of daily routines, how ideas and characters from her stories that appeared fleetingly during her domestic chores, would vanish when children, husband, parents had to be attended to and the lessons of patience and grace one learns by separating the inner world and the outer one.

Joan Didion speaks of writing as the hard-won prize after many false starts. Her inability to think in the abstract led her inexorably back to the specific, the tangible, to what everyone else, (read men), considered to be peripheral. She says, “I would try to contemplate the Hegelian dialectic and would find myself concentrating instead on a flowering pear tree outside my window and the particular way the petals fell on my floor.”

Erica Jong says that women undergo systematic discouragement even to become writers. “Often discouraged at home, at school, often by families and spouses, the rare woman who does not lose her determination along the way is already a survivor. That one should next have to face the systematic discouragement of a male-oriented literary establishment is absurd and sad but nonetheless a real fact of life for many women writers.”

Saul Bellow’s disdain when Toni Morrison won the Nobel has been documented widely. Norman Mailer has called women writers “fey, old hat, dykily psychotic, crippled…” In Britain men jeer at women writers as “feminazis”.

Another woman featured in the anthology was Margaret Walker who fought illness, poverty, discrimination as a black woman writer in universities says, “Creativity cannot exist without the feminine principle, and I am sure God is not merely male or female, but He-She, our Father-Mother God. All nature reflects this rhythmic and creative principle of femininity and feminism: the sea, the earth, the air, fire, and all life, whether plant or animal.”

In the beginning was the word. Logos. The word is imperishable, the first-born of the cosmic order, and the center of the deathless condition.