Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly. I was flying with Rubyfruit. I love writing fiction. Comic vision is natural for me—not necessarily comedy, but comic vision, which entails an entire worldview incorporating pain and tragedy.
Thanks to Charlotte, the Institute for Policy Studies granted me a one-year visiting fellowship at $7,000 a year. I figured once they knew me I wouldn’t be visiting long. The institute, founded by Marcus Raskin and Richard Barnet, is in essence graduate school for the New Left. Marc and Dick had both worked in government for a time. But they were interested in moving beyond the anticommunism touted by the liberals in office. So they founded IPS as a haven for New Left and radical thinkers like themselves. Since I am an old-fashioned American centrist I knew I wouldn’t dazzle the guys at IPS. I just hoped I could hang on long enough to write my novel and learn something from them. One need not agree with people in order to learn. I don’t agree with Otto von Bismarck but I’ve learned from his life and work.
IPS, nestled hard by the National Democratic Women’s Headquarters on New Hampshire Avenue, burst at the seams with people and activity. Karl Hess, a former speechwriter for Barry Goldwater, and far more of a structured anarchist (sounds like a contradiction but read Karl, you’ll see it isn’t) than a leftist, became a friend for life. He understood technology and people, a rare combination.
Arthur Waskow can only be described as a radical Talmudic scholar, although he wasn’t a rabbi. He brought a deep spirituality to political questions; he brought the best of Judaism. He taught me to wrestle with God.
James Ridgway, as young as I was among these older men, was working on coal mining problems at the time. What I adored about his lectures was that they were based on specific events.
Marcus, on the other hand, floated above us all with his philosophical approach. Given his time in the Kennedy administration, we knew he could deal in spades when he had to but his true inclination was philosophy.
Dick Barnet was just beginning his study of how the multinational corporation would change the world, which resulted in the publication of Global Reach. Dick’s writings are accessible, well organized and hit the bull’s-eye.
The black radical contingent at the institute included Frank Smith and Ivanhoe Donaldson. Ivanhoe was later to go down in ignominy. In 1986, he pleaded guilty to stealing from the District of Columbia government and served three years in prison.
Frank and Ivanhoe’s relationship with the white fellows, lined with tension and suspicion, taught me not to bite the hand that fed me. These men, each so different from the other, felt forced into an alliance against the white folks. Or at least that’s my analysis, I could be wrong. Frank was a genuine idealist underneath the steely, quiet cynicism. Why he thought we didn’t know that mystifies me. You can hide the fire but what are you going to do with the smoke?
Ivanhoe dazzled everyone. His fall from grace reverberated in our minds when it happened years later. He was so special, so magnetic. Maybe everything fell into his lap and he forgot the struggle. I don’t know. Or maybe, as we say in the horse world, he broke bad.
Charlotte, the resident feminist, both challenged and charmed the men. The challenge was that these guys, the wunderkinds from Harvard, etc., were hearing feminist thought for the first time. The charm was Charlotte herself. You had to like her. She was engaging and nonthreatening.
I’d pop in most every day for a few hours, sit in on a lecture or conference. Often a congressman would call for information on an odd subject such as the cost of setting up an oil refinery in Saudi Arabia. The various fellows over the years covered the world, literally, in their knowledge. Being at the center of the exchange was exciting.
I had a crush on Bob Borsage. I made my feelings manifest by ignoring him at every moment. His view of the people and events at IPS delighted me because he had critical distance. He must have learned it from his father, Frank, the famous film director who even directed Mary Pickford.
The swirl around me helped me write my first novel. Not one thing in that first novel suggests heightened intellectualism or political thought. IPS gave me the high contrast I needed to find my true fictional voice.
Up until that time, I’d had two books of poetry published as well as grim political essays and articles in underground newspapers, but it wasn’t my voice. The writing showed promise, but how many young people with promise break out? Precious few.
The glorious thing about the institute was I didn’t belong there anymore than I belonged in the Furies Collective. The dislocation and loss, the constant feeling that my pants were on backward, drove me to what did fit, fiction.
I owe a great debt to Alexis Smith, an actress from the forties and fifties. She appeared in movies like Night and Day, solid movies with handsome leading men. When Hal Prince staged Stephen Sondheim’s Follies, a cinematic musical that had an impact on how plays were staged ever after that, he brought back Alexis for the starring role. It was a good cast, Dorothy Collins, Yvonne DeCarlo, John McMartin and Gene Nelson.
I saw the show in 1971, on a trip to New York, and fell in love with Alexis, as did everyone who saw it. I wrote her a letter and she responded. I visited her at the Winter Garden theater, and she took me to dinner after the show. She was wise, warm and direct. She told me to forget politics. Many more people can be politicians than can be fiction writers.
Wearisome as my crush must have been for her and her husband, Craig Smith, she nudged me along. She never said anything antigay. She never commented on my obvious poverty. She delighted in my tales of Mom and Aunt Mimi and she seemed to understand how much I loved animals.
I have never felt such lust in my life as I felt for that gorgeous creature. She bore it with good humor.
In a way I wrote Rubyfruit Jungle for her. I hoped I would prove her confidence in me not unfounded. And I finally had sense enough to realize I couldn’t keep up with her. She was at the top of her game and I was just starting mine.
She would never love me but she saw a flash of talent. That was better than carnal love.
Writing fiction brought me to my great love: the English language.
The English language has created a vast body of literature in our native tongue. That may sound odd but if you think about it, Medieval French is a kind of lax Latin. English literature as we know it starts with The Canterbury Tales. Most scholars will tell you no, it started with Beowulf. I dispute that. Beowulf, redolent with Teutonic attitude, written in Anglo-Saxon, is important, but The Canterbury Tales is English to the core. Between the time when Beowulf was composed, sometime around 1000, and the late fourteenth century, when Chaucer roistered forth with his energy, insight into character and use of sophisticated structure (it’s a pilgrimage, remember), something revolutionary had happened in England. The people became English and the language soared to the heavens, the dialect of London gaining ascendance over the other dialects.
That’s what I found. My home was the English language and my particular path was the same as Chaucer’s: comic vision. Comedy, in the grand sense, is the richest vein of English. The language breathes, expands, turns golden with comedy, for an English sentence is capable of conveying irony, pathos, wit and humor simultaneously. Think of some of Shakespeare’s comedies. Hell, think of the tragedies too. When Hamlet is about to stab Polonius to death behind the curtain, he says, “How now? A rat? Dead for a ducat, dead!”
This prince, so often portrayed as a sensitive, suffering young man in an existential crisis (please, Louise), is really a brute.
What about Noel Coward’s Private Lives? It’s easy to hop from Shakespeare to Coward because Coward wrote the second most famous balcony scene in the English language. I’m assuming most of you have read or seen the play Private Lives. If you haven’t, you’re in for an exhilarating experience.
The line “Strange how potent cheap music can be” is mean, hysterically funny given the circumstances, poignant and above all true. One simple line.
English is at its highest and best use in comedy. Unfortunately, comedy is much harder to write than straight prose or tragedy. And fewer people understand true comedy. Everyone understands slapstick, but real comedy presupposes intelligence and the ability to discern not just different levels of language, but different levels among people. Comedy is always set in society. It’s about people as they live. Tragedy can be one man against one god. Technically, that’s much easier.
Tragedy massages the human ego even as comedy deflates it. While you’re weeping for just blinded Oedipus you’re drawn into the nobility of the tale, a human crosses the gods even if unwittingly. Tragedy pits us against large foes and the trip wire is our own character. Still, falling afoul of Zeus or Athena or Hera ennobles the human.
In comedy we fall afoul of one another. Comedy depends on social life, on our behavior in groups. In tragedy you can observe one human against the gods. In comedy it’s one human versus other humans and often one man (or woman if I’m writing it) against her own worst impulses.
The English language is one of the superb inventions of the human mind. It is and always will be the perfect language for comedy. The homonyms alone can send you into peals of laughter.
The other reason that English is made for comic vision is the temper of our people. English-speaking peoples are wary of emotion. We prize logic. Comedy depends on our hubris, on that absurd conceit that we can think our way through life.
All English speakers are set up from birth for a fall, that moment when you realize you might be smart but you’ve still fallen flat on your face. For us, this is the beginning of wisdom.
The other aspect of comedy that suits me is the sheer drive, the strong sense of self-confidence one needs to write it. It’s what has gotten me in trouble, too. We still haven’t reached the point where we are sure we like self-confidence in a woman. We’ll accept violent self-centeredness, especially in beauty queens and movie stars; the more superficial they are the more we accept it. But a truly self-confident woman, one who looks you straight in the eye and doesn’t lower her eyes in a nonverbal (and cloying) nod to your superiority, if you are male, is unnerving.
Suited though we are to comedy, since the dreary days of Cromwell and his Puritan myrmidons, tragedy has been in the ascendant. People want to see others suffer. They’re getting their wish. I suppose it makes them feel superior.
Well, whatever the reason, our society now values sorrowful tales heavily laced with violence. The French call it nostalgie de la boue, nostalgia for the mud.
I actually knew that when I started my first novel. I hadn’t studied Latin, Greek, Anglo-Saxon, Middle English and the merest hint of French for nothing. I knew our traditions. I knew my tool. I didn’t necessarily know structure, but I could learn. At least I knew a story had to have a beginning, a middle and an end. These days you can’t take even that for granted.
Virginia Woolf has a lot to answer for with that damned stream-of-consciousness technique. She could do it. Nobody else can, really.
And then there are all the Ulysses imitators. Dear God, please send them back into the pubs. Could Joyce have known what he spawned?
You find when you write a novel that once you’ve established your worldview, you have a temperament. Since I crave Shakespeare’s comedies, Aristophanes’s comedies, Molière, Sheridan, Wycherley, Pope, Goldsmith, Gibbon (it’s prose, but what prose!) and Twain, that establishes my temperament.
It doesn’t mean I hate Paradise Lost or Light in August, but those works represent a different temperament, a much more emotional one. Milton and Faulkner were wounded men, deeply feeling men. You might not think it upon first reading, but read those works again.
Times have temperament. This explains why artists go in and out of fashion like clothes. Thornton Wilder was a very good writer. Not of the first water, but damned good and worth reading. Who reads him today? Wrong temperament, but he’ll come back when the times change, and I wonder if Willa Cather and Edna Ferber will come back with him.
Temperament. Henry James’s Washington Square moves me in a way that Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano does not. Both are exceptional works.
For whatever reason, my first novel—written on a door laid across two black file cabinets with a big red stripe painted down the middle—arrived at the right time, in the right temperament.
Rubyfruit Jungle studied the struggle of an individual to be an individual. This is one of the oldest themes in Western literature: the individual versus society. Think of Antigone. It’s the same subject but in tragic form.
In order to become a useful person to the group, Molly Bolt must first defy the group mentality to find herself.
Of course you shouldn’t notice this theme. If you do, it means I’ve failed. When you read my novels the first time, if you bother to read them at all, I would hope you’ll be transported into the worlds these characters inhabit and I pray when you’re done you’ll know those people. They will now be part of your family.
Not that anyone wanted to publish Rubyfruit Jungle. Far from it. I sent it to agents in New York. A few people told me to send it to one particular agent, said to be gay. Anyway, with hope, I packed it off.
I took the train up a month later; a month seemed a reasonable time to read my novel. The agent threw the manuscript at me. You would have thought I’d tossed a canister of mustard gas into her office. She called me a pervert, telling me to get out of her office. She was so deep in the closet my novel must have given her the vapors.
I eventually gave up on agents and sent it to Simon and Schuster, Random House … really, the list is as long as your arm. I couldn’t get arrested.
Eat your hearts out. Rubyfruit Jungle is still selling and it could have been yours.
June Arnold, the Houston heiress, and Parke Bowman had started a small feminist publishing house called Daughters, Inc. They paid me a thousand dollars and printed five thousand copies of the novel. I sent half the money to Mom, but not the book, which Daughters brought out in 1973. Pretty soon Daughters couldn’t keep up with the demand. Without one ad, one review, one anything, the book, sold out of the back of cars, or by mail since big bookstores wouldn’t carry a line from such a small publisher, chalked up close to 100,000 copies.
Both women wanted to publish new fiction. They didn’t want to be servants to Rubyfruit Jungle even if it was selling. They also published my second novel, In Her Day. The demand for that overloaded their circuits.
Originally they had wanted to publish five new books each season, ambitious for such a small house. They were the first feminist publishing company that I know of, which also complicated their business life. Their mission was to let women’s fiction see the light of day.
At that time, most commercial women’s fiction offered women as men wanted to see them—Valley of the Dolls kind of stuff. Big numbers, no soul.
Ironically, my success was interfering with June and Parke’s mission. They could publish me or publish new writers.
They asked whether I minded if they sold me out, so to speak, to a company that could handle the demand. It was okay with me.
Several years after publishing Rubyfruit, they sold the rights to Bantam Books. Elly Sidel, curly-haired and wildly funny, bought the book for Bantam, which was then a reprint or paperback house. Bantam is now also a hardcover house.
Although they didn’t have to do it, June and Parke split the paycheck with me. June had inherited a great deal of wealth, and like most Texas folks, she was extremely generous. Parke, or Patty, didn’t care about money one way or another. I remember standing on the corner of Seventh Avenue near Bleecker Street, outside the Daughters office, with a check for $125,000 in my hand. It seemed like a dream: Poverty that grinds you to dust, and suddenly a mess of money.
I walked down to the main Chase Manhattan Bank in Wall Street and opened an account, even though I was still living in Washington. I didn’t take a cab. It hadn’t sunk in that I could afford one.
When Mom finally read the book she was all beshit and forty miles from water.
“Everyone will think I’m that mean mother,” she wailed.
Mother could be mean as malaria. She could also be funny, but in the novel I concentrated on the malaria.
Mother could pitch all the hissy fits she wanted. She was in Florida. I was in D.C. and damn glad of it. If I’d lived within shouting distance of her, she would have shot me.
Once I paid her outstanding bills, her attitude changed to one of sweetness and light.
When you write your first novel your family snatches it up, eagerly searching for themselves and horrified when they find what they’re looking for.
So I didn’t put any part of Mother in my second novel. She didn’t speak to me for months after that.
As for Aunt Mimi, she lost no opportunity to sob at how I was ruining the family. For her my novels were a dehydrating experience.
Jerry said I’d obliterated all chances of a political career as well as any other kind of career. No one would hire me. He’d be my friend for life, but he wasn’t taking me to any more company dinners.
Gloria Steinem liked the book.
Charlotte Bunch liked it, too.
Eugene, Kenny, Wade and Terry have never said a word to me about any of my books, which only goes to prove what I’ve always suspected: “real men” don’t read fiction.
Rubyfruit brought me notoriety, a ton of hate mail, numerous threats on my life including two bomb threats, increased outrage from the conservative wing of the feminist movement and scorn from the radical dykes.
Straight people were mad because I was gay. The dykes were mad because I wasn’t gay enough.
The only creature to take it all in stride, apart from myself, was Baby Jesus.