I love the smell of Mailer in the morning.
I have a terrible confession to make—I have nothing to say about any of the talented women who write today. Out of what is no doubt a fault in me, I do not seem able to read them. Indeed I doubt if there will be a really exciting woman writer until the first whore becomes a call girl and tells her tale. At the risk of making a dozen devoted enemies for life, I can only say that the sniffs I get from the ink of the women are always fey, old-hat, Quaintsy Goysy, tiny, too dykily psychotic, crippled, creepish, fashionable, frigid, outer-Baroque, maquillé in mannequin’s whimsy, or else bright and stillborn. Since I’ve never been able to read Virginia Woolf, and am sometimes willing to believe that it can conceivably be my fault, this verdict may be taken fairly as the twisted tongue of a soured taste, at least by those readers who do not share with me the ground of departure—that a good novelist can do without everything but the remnant of his balls. — “Advertisements for Myself”
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A few more thoughts about Season 2 of My Brilliant Friend. I found much of it unsatisfying because the women were swept into worlds dominated by men and separated from each other. Being subordinate all the time, they couldn’t get to each other easily. Female friendship, itself, was a kind of samizdat activity, the way illicit love between sex partners is represented but really it’s passionate female friendship that’s effectively banned.
This morning I was thinking about Lila’s betrayal of Lenu absorbing most of the season. Lila takes the man Lenu wants because she can, because she is looking for an exit from her disastrous marriage, and because betrayal is how she moves through the world–having been betrayed since her early childhood, when among other things her father tossed her out of a window for wanting to continue school past grade 6 or 7.
Lenu goes her separate way into a university in the north, where she is always reminded of her southern, working class origins and where she never feels quite stable. At the end, the girl/women reunite outside the slaughterhouse where Lila has taken a job, having been left by the boyfriend she “stole” and needing a way to support the baby she had with him. Lenu seeks out Lila, and they look at each other, so happy to be in each other’s arms, no matter what, and I believed there could be joy in Lenu’s heart, and I believed it would not have been imagined had the story been written by a man.
I thought Lenu believes she owes her life–the life of the mind and of relative mobility–to Lila, and because she knows this, her gratitude is larger than her resentment. She doesn’t need to forgive Lila for taking the man. All she needs to do is remember who made her. As a little child, she consciously hitches her fate to Lila’s because she needs someone smarter and bolder to bump her out of her passivity. Had she not met Lila, so daring and angry and thwarted, she would have duplicated her mother’s unhappy, limping life with a nearly doused fire inside sometimes sparking up.
Without women writing about the lives lived by women, the world would know women only through the imaginations of men. The way it did for most of human civilization. Men could know about the lives women live, but generally they aren’t interested in them. They are interested in women as instruments of their understanding of what a man is and what a male life is.
Laurie Stone’s new book Everything Is Personal is available here.