(1980)
When I was walking through the rain in Cambridge today, lugging a heavy bag of books, having been sent to the wrong place, it was hard for me to believe that almost 20 years had passed since I first walked through Cambridge in the rain, lugging a heavy bag of books, with the deep suspicion that I had been sent to the wrong place. I had ostensibly come to Radcliffe to study Victorian literature, and that part of it was all right, since one of my fellow Canadians was teaching it here. But underneath my Victorian exterior I fancied myself a poet, a fancy that—as anyone who has ever been a graduate studentess in English will know—it was death to admit. And all the modern poetry, as well as the devices for listening thereto, were locked in Lamont Library, which was restricted to students and banned to studentesses. Getting out a book of modern poetry required somewhat the same procedures as those needed to extract a book of pornography from the X section of the Widener Library, and, being of a retiring nature, I didn’t want anyone to see me doing the former under the mistaken impression that I was doing the latter. To this fact I owe my ignorance of modern American poetry, as well as my Canadian nationalism —for the Canadian poetry was not kept with the real poetry, but was down with Canadiana in the bowels of the Widener, underneath Ethnology and Folklore, and freely accessible to students and studentesses alike.
Walking around Cambridge today, trying to find out what I was supposed to be doing—a continuation of a lifelong endeavour—I was reminded of many happy afternoons spent in the bathtub on the third floor of 6 Appian Way (which is, alas, no more), reading Charles Dickens, scribbling dismal poems, and listening to the rain and the pitter-patter of sexual perverts as they scampered up and down the fire escape. I was also reminded of those many nights when I sat up until dawn, popping No-Nods and trying to get my term papers finished on time —for I have to confess that I actually wrote this speech this afternoon in the Greenhouse Restaurant, over a Frogurt and a cup of Sanka. It is to my habits of procrastination in things academic that I owe my success as a writer, for if I had done scholarship true justice, how would I ever have had time to write? (I did, however, learn an important distinction in graduate school: a speculation about who had syphilis when is gossip if it’s about your friends, a plot element if it’s about a character in a novel, and scholarship if it’s about John Keats.)
It was at Radcliffe, too, that I first heard about role models. The position of dean, or was it don, was open, and there was much discussion about who should fill it. “We need a good role model,” someone said. “What’s that?” I asked, being from Canada. It was explained to me that, for role-modelhood, even at a university, scholarship was not the only requirement. One also had to be punctual, clean behind the ears, a good mother, well dressed, and socially presentable.
I’m afraid I’m a bad role model, but then, I long ago decided that I could be either a good role model or a writer, and for better or worse I chose writing.
Which brings me to the title of my address, a title I plucked from the air when presented with the need for one, without having the least idea of what I was going to say. I did feel, however, that it was appropriate to talk of witches here in New England, for obvious reasons, but also because this is the land of my ancestors, and one of my ancestors was a witch. Her name was Mary Webster, she lived in Connecticut, and she was hanged for “causing an old man to become extremely valetudinarious.” Luckily, they had not yet invented the drop: in those days they just sort of strung you up. When they cut Mary Webster down the next day, she was, to everyone’s surprise, not dead. Because of the law of double jeopardy, under which you could not be executed twice for the same offence, Mary Webster went free. I expect that if everyone thought she had occult powers before the hanging, they were even more convinced of it afterwards. She is my favourite ancestor, more dear to my heart even than the privateers and the massacred French Protestants, and if there’s one thing I hope I’ve inherited from her, it’s her neck.
One needs a neck like that if one is determined to be a writer, especially a woman writer, and especially if you are good at it. After 10 years of the Women’s Movement we like to think that some of the old stereotypes are fading, but 10 years is not a very long time in the history of the world, and I can tell you from experience that the old familiar images, the old icons, have merely gone underground, and not far at that. We still think of a powerful woman as an anomaly, a potentially dangerous anomaly; there is something subversive about such women, even when they take care to be good role models. They cannot have come by their power naturally, it is felt. They must have got it from somewhere. Women writers are particularly subject to such projections, for writing itself is uncanny: it uses words for evocation rather than for denotation; it is spell-making. A man who is good at it is a craftsman. A woman who is good at it is a dubious proposition. A man’s work is reviewed for its style and ideas, but all too often a woman’s is reviewed for the supposed personality of the author as based on the jacket photograph. When a man is attacked in print, it’s usually for saying what he says; when a woman is attacked in print, it’s often for being who she is.
Which brings me to the next unforunate aspect of witches. Witches were consulted in private, but their only public role was to be persecuted; or, as we say, “hunted.” And here, with brief mention of the fact that in the current wave of book banning taking place in Canada, all the most prominently publicized banned writers have been women, I’d like to switch from women writers—who, after all, have it rather soft in this century, on this continent, and whose necks are strong enough to survive a little name-calling whenever they stick them out—to a larger and more alarming picture.
Witch-hunting was probably always political in nature, an attempt by the powerful to control the potentially subversive, and it still is. The difference between witch-hunting and more conventional forms of justice and punishment is that in the latter you’re supposedly being punished for what you’ve done, but in the former it’s enough to be who you are. I’m a member of Amnesty International, and I read their monthly bulletins, which I would like to give gratis, a year’s subscription, to the next literary critic who accuses my work of being unduly pessimistic. Political witch-hunting is now a worldwide epidemic. Torture for the purposes of extracting a confession, which will in turn justify the torture, is not a thing of the past. It did not end with racks, stakes, and Grand Inquisitors, or with Cotton Mather. It’s here with us now, and growing. One of the few remedies for it is free human speech, which is why writers are always among the first to be lined up against the wall by any totalitarian regime, left or right. How many poets are there in El Salvador? The answer is none. They have all been shot or exiled. The true distinction in the world today is not between the so-called left and the so-called right. It’s between governments that do such things as a matter of policy, or that wink at them when they are done, and those that do not. It would be simple stupidity to suppose that North America is by nature exempt. We’ve had witch-hunts before, and there is every indication that we’re on the verge of having them again. When times are tough, when the Black Plague strikes or the economy falters and people get restless, those in authority start looking around for someone to burn.
When you are a fiction writer, you’re confronted every day with the question that confronted, among others, George Eliot and Dostoevsky: what kind of world shall you describe for your readers? The one you can see around you, or the better one you can imagine? If only the latter, you’ll be unrealistic; if only the former, despairing. But it is by the better world we can imagine that we judge the world we have. If we cease to judge this world, we may find ourselves, very quickly, in one which is infinitely worse.