The Penguin Book of Women’s Lives, Phyllis Rose (ed.), Viking
Written by Herself: Autobiographies of American Women, Jill Ker Conway (ed.), Vintage
You have only to murmur the titles of these two anthologies to hear the ghostly chorus squeaking and muttering: “Why not men’s lives?” “What about us?” But we’re adding to, at this stage in history, not substituting for, or taking from. The exemplary lives of men – St. Augustine, Rousseau, Samuel Butler, A Portrait of the Artist, whatever you’re having yourself – stare at us from the shelf, as always. Only now, we see the development of women, too, as filled with drama and challenge, and as potentially instructive. That’s the tactful thing to say to pretend it’s all equal. It is not. I can’t be the only woman who has come to find most accounts of women’s lives a good deal more suggestive than most men’s, and to find myself falling on them with ravenous appetite.
The need to read them went into the writing of them. There is no thought of the public world here, applauding a dutiful life, dutifully recounted. “The buried model of the autobiographer can change from the boastful man to the confiding woman,” the Penguin editor, Phyllis Rose remarks. “Sharing her experience with friends, she may be gossipy, artful, tutorial, cool, forthcoming, evasive, maternal, childish, stoic, narcissistic, boastful or modest, depending on her nature, but at some level she always feels the autobiographer’s characteristic urge: the urge to preserve herself by giving herself away.”
These tales had to be told. What happened has to be told. The telling of it is indistinguishably a raid on expressiveness or truthfulness. The critic Cynthia Ozick, who grew up in a pharmacy in the Bronx, talks about being “buffeted into being” as a writer. “But after a while other ambushes begin: sorrows, deaths, disappointments, subtle diseases, delays, guilts, the spite of the private haters of the poetry side of life, the snubs of the glamorous, the bitterness of those for whom resentment is a daily gruel, and so on and so on and then one day you find yourself leaning here, writing at that self-same round glass table salvaged from the Park View Pharmacy, writing this, an impossibility, a summary of how you came to be where you are now, and where God knows, is that? Your hair is whitening, you are a well of tears, what you meant to do (beauty and justice) you have not done, Papa and Mama are under the earth, you live in panic and dread, the future shrinks and darkens, stories are your only vapour, your inmost craving is for nothing but an old scarred pen, and what, God knows, is that?”
There are maybe 60 extracts from memoirs or autobiographies in the Penguin book; 832 pages. No themes. “The units I wanted above all to avoid,” the editor says, “would have been on the order of ‘Work,’ ‘Family,’ ‘Love,’ ‘Power.’ I think we need to rid our minds of these false divisions in women’s experience, and this seemed to me as good a place to start as any. My Borgesian decision was to take refuge in a bibliographic reality, to organise the selections alphabetically.”
So we begin with Maya Angelou’s brave grandmother in Arkansas, facing the taunting white kids singing a hymn. Next is de Beauvoir, and the lifelong deal she came to with Sartre. Through to the Leo-centered suffering of Sophia Tolstoy (“Maybe if I am gentle with him, he will grow more fond of me too, and will not want to leave me.”). To Virginia Woolf’s diary at the end: she met Mrs. T. S. Eliot. “… this last making me almost vomit, so scented, so powdered, so egotistic, so weakly.”
Between, there are confidences from all over the world, and from many cultures. Nisa is a Khung hunter-gatherer from a remote part of the Kalahari. Her long rage and mourning at being put away from her mother’s breasts is the kind of thing Western consciousness will not allow. In an alphabetical run, Janet Frame, Anne Frank, and Natalia Ginzburg each people the prisons they find themselves in. Being trapped, and escaping, is the basic narrative of many of these women’s lives, whether the escape is from literal imprisonment, or from analogues, like Colette’s marriage to Wily or Jessica Mitford’s class background, or Mary McCarthy’s Catholicism, or Emily Hahn’s addiction to opium.
Ireland is strangely represented by an extract from Bernadette Devlin’s The Price of My Soul about teaching the Mother Superior of her grammar school the difference between bigotry and patriotism. But then, nothing here represents. Editor Phyllis Rose’s deceptively relaxed introduction could not put it more humbly: “The book is a product of a lifelong and personal interest in women’s autobiographical writing, an interest which had little material to feed on in my childhood but now is treated to a rich harvest.” She herself had been an ambitious child. She had wanted to be a cowgirl. But “what did it mean to live life to the full? How fully could a woman live? These were the questions that I wanted biography and autobiography to answer …”
You read their lives to see how it might otherwise have been, your life. As if women’s writing was a shared, not an individual act, and each writer stood for the whole class of women. Even though some are stunning and some plain. And even though this incoherent possessiveness is not a publicly acknowledged motive. “The selections,” the editor of the Vintage American anthology, Jill Ker Conway, says sniffily, “are chosen to exemplify the range of activities, occupations, and social situations which have prompted the autobiographical muse for American women … The aim of the whole is to give the reader a feel for the texture and imagery of women’s writing and a sense of the kinds of narrative problems which a woman autobiographer must resolve.” That sounds academic enough. But you take away from the book 25 long pieces, 672 pages, not the apologia for it, but the blistering personal moments it contains.
The poet Louise Bogan, for instance, writing in the 1930s about revisiting the mean Boston streets of her childhood. She goes to the local library.
No book of mine was listed in the catalogue. (A slight paranoid shudder passed over me.) I felt the consuming, destroying, deforming passage of time; and the spectacle of my family’s complete helplessness in the face of their difficulties, swept over me. With no weapons against what was already becoming an overwhelming series of disasters, no insight, no self-knowledge, no inherited wisdom, I saw my father and mother (and my brother) as helpless victims of ignorance, wilfulness, and temperamental disabilities of a near-psychotic order facing a period (after 1918) where even this small store of pathetic acquisitions would be swept away. The anguish which filled my spirit and mind may, perhaps, be said to have engendered (and reawakened) poisons long since dissipated, so that they gathered, like some noxious gas, at the centre of my being. The modern horrors of the district also became part of this miasma; certainly the people in these newly overcrowded streets were as lost as those members of generations preceding them … But those were my first years of adolescence and of the creative impulse and of hard and definitive schooling. And, as I remember, in spite of the growing sense of crisis by which I was continually surrounded, they were years of a beginning variety of interests of growth and of hope …
This kind of speaking may stop you in your tracks. In which case, these books are waiting for you.
The Irish Times, April 30, 1994