Preface
I have been asked, politely and not so politely, why I am
myself. This is an accounting any woman will be called on to
give if she asserts her will. In the home the question will be
couched in a million cruelties, some subtle, some so egregious
they rival the injuries of organized war.
A woman writer makes herself conspicuous by publishing,
not by writing. Although one could argue - and I would -
that publishing is essential to the development of the writing
itself, there will be exceptions. After al , suppose Max Brod had
burned Kafka’s work as Kafka had wanted? The private writer,
which Kafka was, must be more common among women than
men: few men have Kafka’s stunning self-loathing, but many
women do; then again, there is the obvious - that the public
domain in which the published work lives has been considered
the male domain. In our day, more women publish but many
more do not, and despite the glut of mediocre and worthless
books published each year just in the United States, there
must be a she-Kafka, or more than one, in hiding somewhere,
just as there must be a she-Proust, whose vanity turned robust
when it came to working over so many years on essentially
one great book. If the she-Proust were lucky enough to live
long enough and could afford the rewards of a purely aesthetic life, aggressive self-publication and promotion would not necessarily fol ow: her secret masterpiece would be just that -
secret, yet no les a masterpiece. The tree fel ; no one heard it
or ever wil ; it exists.
In our day, a published woman’s reputation, if she is alive,
wil depend on many small conformities - in her writing but
especial y in her life. Does she practice the expression of gender in a good way, which is to say, does she convince, in her person, that she is female down to the very mar ow of her
bones? Her supplications may be modest, but most often they
are not. Her lips wil blaze red even if she is old and gnarled.
It’s a declaration: I won’t hurt you; I am deferential; al those
unpleasant things I said, I didn’t mean one of them. In our
benumbed era, which tries for a semblance of civilized, voluntary order after the morbid, systematic chaos of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao - after Pol Pot and the unspeakable starving of Africa
- it is up to women, as it always has been, to embody the
meaning of civilized life on the scale of one to one, each of
those matchings containing within and underneath rivers running with a historical blood. Women in Western societies now take the following loyalty oath: my veil was made by Revlon,
and I wil not show my face; I believe in free speech, which
includes the buying and selling of my sisters in pornography
and prostitution, but if we cal it ‘trafficking, ” Pm agin it -
Preface
