We’re nearly up to 1972, the year Eve fired off that letter to Joan about Virginia Woolf. The letter so blazingly angry it was still, in 2022, hot to the touch. The letter that made me want to run out and start a riot, or at least stay in and write a book.
You first encountered the letter, Reader, in the preface, before you had enough context to really understand it. Now, though, you’re up to your eyeballs in context. So let’s take another look, shall we?
Jumping to the second paragraph:
It’s so hard to get certain things together and especially you and VW because you’re mad at her about her diaries. It’s entirely about you that you can’t stand her diaries. It goes with Sacramento. Maybe it’s better that you stay with Sacramento and hate diaries and ignore the fact that every morning when you eye the breakfast table uneasily waiting to get away, back to your typewriter, maybe it’s better that you examine your life in every way except the main one which Sacramento would brush aside but which V. Woolf kept blabbing on about. Maybe it’s about you and Sacramento that you feel it’s undignified, not crickett [sic] and bad form to let Art be one of the variables. Art, my God, Joan, I’m embarrassed to mention it in front of you, you know, but you mentioned burning babies in locked cars so I can mention Art.
I’m breaking in. Eve is criticizing Joan for what she regards as Joan’s obsessive and inexplicable machismo. For Joan, strong and hard and clear signifies masculine, while doubts and unsettled feelings are weak, dithery silliness: feminine. And Joan not reading Virginia Woolf isn’t, in Eve’s mind, Joan making an aesthetic error in judgment but a moral.
Back to the letter:
You said that the only thing you like to do was write. Just think if it were 200 years ago and the only thing you liked to do was write. I know I’m not making sense, but the thing beyond what your article on the women’s movement was about was what A Room of One’s Own is about. The whole women’s thing that is going on now is so stark and obscene most of the time that no wonder one recoils in horror. But for a long long long time women didn’t have any money and didn’t have any time and were considered unfeminine if they shone like you do, Joan.
Just think, Joan, if you were five feet eleven and wrote like you do and stuff—people’d judge you differently and your work, they’d invent reasons… Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan? Would you be allowed to if you weren’t physically so unthreatening? Would the balance of power between you and John have collapsed long ago if it weren’t that he regards you a lot of the time as a child so it’s all right that you are famous? And you yourself keep making it more all right because you are always referring to your size. And so what you do, Joan, is live in the pioneer days, a brave survivor of the Donner Pass, putting up the preserves and down the women’s movement and acting as though Art wasn’t in the house and wishing you could go write.
I’m breaking in again. The article that Eve is alluding to—“The Women’s Movement,” Joan Didion, New York Times, July 30, 1972—is written with Joan’s usual intelligence and grace. Yet there’s something insidious about it. Something dishonest. The movement had its problems, sure. Classism, for one, as she rightly observed. (She zinged the members who claimed trauma from catcalls made by construction workers: “This grievance was not atypic in that discussion of it seemed always to take on unexplored Ms. Scarlett overtones, suggestions of fragile cultivated flowers being ‘spoken to,’ and therefore violated, by uppity proles.”) The movement, though, also had a point, and she was pretending it didn’t. “That many women are victims of condescension and exploitation and sex-role stereotyping was scarcely news,” she wrote, “but neither was it news that other women are not: nobody forces women to buy the package.” Basically, she’s saying to women, “It’s all in your head,” that sexism is imaginary, which is what people who didn’t have migraines would say to her, a chronic migraine sufferer, that migraines were imaginary, only worse because the non-migraine people had never experienced a migraine and she’d certainly experienced sexism.
(It should be said, Eve was as turned off by the women’s movement as Joan. In a 1971 letter to Robert Doty, curator of the Whitney, she wrote, “My last boyfriend drove me into the arms of women’s lib which didn’t take very well, but at least I don’t mind being a ‘lady artist’ anymore. The whole idea used to make me cringe with shame. Not that I have joined or even know any of the ‘lady artists’ who have banded together to unite under the stern eye of Judy ‘Boots’ Gerowitz.” Judy Gerowitz, real name of artist Judy Chicago, was, in the early seventies, cofounding Womanhouse, a feminist art collective, at CalArts. Among the best-known works to come out of Womanhouse, Chicago’s 1972 installation Menstruation Bathroom, depicting a white-tiled, antiseptic-looking space; a toilet; a trash can filled with tampons and sanitary napkins, used. It’s impossible to imagine Eve reacting to Menstruation Bathroom with anything other than derision and disgust. Feminism offended her sense of style: it had no style. Beyond that, feminism offended her sense of efficacy: the conundrum it set out to resolve—women’s inability to get a fair shake—it didn’t. Joan, though, offended her more by refusing to admit that there was a conundrum.)
Joan, in her career, had beat men at their own game. Proof not that the game wasn’t rigged. Proof that a woman playing the game couldn’t win without also losing. For instance, so that her writing might be formidable and flashy, Joan made herself itsy-bitsy and meek—a tongue-tied wallflower. As Eve points out, Joan emphasized, almost fetishized, her frailty. Frailty was, for Joan, a kind of disguise or drag, a way of concealing her boldness, her brashness, her outrageous self-assurance—qualities that she, as a female, had no business having. (Girls weren’t supposed to be natural aggressors.) In other words, Joan was a predator who passed herself off as prey. From the closing paragraph of the preface to Slouching Towards Bethlehem: “My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.” (Italics hers.)
If Joan wanted to sell herself out to maintain her viability as a writer that was okay with Eve. Eve was practical. She understood ugly necessity, the dilemma of survival. What was not okay with Eve: that Joan, with the New York Times piece, was selling women out to get in good with men, as Joan, with Play It, had sold L.A. out to get in good with New York.
The end of the letter:
It embarrasses me that you don’t read Virginia Woolf. I feel as though you think she’s a “woman’s novelist” and that only foggy brains could like her and that you, sharp, accurate journalist, you would never join the ranks of people who sogged around in The Waves. You prefer to be with the boys snickering at the silly women and writing accurate prose about Maria who had everything but Art. Vulgar, ill bred, drooling, uninvited Art. It’s the only thing that’s real other than murder, I sometimes think—or death. Art’s the fun part, at least for me. It’s the salvation.
Eve was tracing the connection she imagined Joan made between women and art: alike in their volatility, their illogic, their wet, tangled profusion and lurid chaos. And both, Eve believed, were appalling to Joan, an affront to Joan’s orderly and austere intellect. Which means that Eve, with her double-D breasts and overlapping love affairs and big, unwieldy, slovenly talent, was also appalling to Joan. After all, Earl McGrath, Joan’s proxy, rejected Eve as “gross,” didn’t he? Only Joan, unlike Earl McGrath, was an artist, an artist almost in spite of herself, and Joan didn’t reject Eve. On the contrary, Joan, whose relationship with so many in her orbit was vampiric, nurtured Eve.
But for how long would Eve allow herself to be nurtured? As this letter shows, her deference was growing ever more bitter, her resentment ever more festering.