I HAVE never felt free. I do not speak of the constraints of society but of the peculiar developments of my own nature. All my life I have carried about with me the chains of an exaggerated anxiety and tendency to worry, and an overexcited imagination for disasters ahead, problems foreboding, errors whose consequences could stretch to the end of time. I feel some measure of admiration for women who are carefree, even for the careless; but we work with what we are given, and what I know I have learned from books and from worry.
When I was young, living in Kentucky and later in New York unmarried, I was emancipated in my ideas, even radical; and yet I worried a great deal about “disgrace”: about pregnancy, promiscuity, gossip, mistakes. And here I am remembering the fears of a girl in her middle twenties, not those of a teenager. Suppose, I would think with a shudder, Mama and Papa knew! Looking back, I believe my watchfulness, in the midst of what the conventional would have called daring, had to do with the fear of losing the greater freedom, something beyond the moment. There did seem to be a happiness and usefulness over the horizon that one wanted to be ready for, worthy of. Life was a minefield, strewn with traps—the wrong man, the wrong marriage, and, because of them, not being able to live where you wanted, to have the friends, the life you wanted.
When my daughter was born, her smiles were, in Sylvia Plath’s phrase, “found money.” But what an enslavement my feelings were. Not necessity but grave intensity of feeling made me wish to be spared pleasant possibilities for travel, too many opportunities to “lead my own life.” It was a joy to sit around with even the most commonplace women, “talking about nothing but their children.” The truth was that for a few years my pleasure in my child was greater than any fatigue or restlessness, and it was a misery to be away for any length of time. This fury, fortunately, abated after a while, but not entirely. I well understand the nearly deranged passion that led Madame de Sevigne to write volumes and volumes of letters to her daughter, a girl who, alas, turned out to be greedy and ill-natured.
I have always worked, but I never felt I was working hard enough. Fitfulness of ambition seemed to accompany the general anxiety, and yet to do something was an almost puritanical pressure, bearing down like the pain of a boil. This sounds agreeable enough, even with the image of the “boil,” but it was not pleasant and soothing in the least. Creative and intellectual work is difficult, hard, and disturbing in the deepest way. You are up against the limits of yourself, your mind, your knowledge, your talent, your courage, your fineness, your energy.
Perhaps a woman needs to have worked not to hold herself above the splendors and miseries of the daily, the domestic. The cloth of memory is made of all those sofas and back stairs, the Sundays in the kitchen, the alleys and avenues. Your parents give you, in your youth, their unique dailiness and this becomes a part of your “I.” There is a sovereignty in housekeeping, and housework itself is a matter of honor. Old housewives, left aside, forgotten, eking out their last days on Social Security, are not more to be pitied than retired secretaries and schoolteachers.
The German writer Gottfried Benn tells of a bitter proverb he saw on the face of a sundial, commenting upon the hours: “All of them wound, the last one kills.” Loneliness, a hard end, will come to most of us if we live long enough. We must not ask too much of our work. It is not in the nature of work to be always gratifying. Humanity is desperate. A good person need not be ashamed to make the bed or even to turn it down at night if that makes someone else happier. What difference does it make?
We are as good and as useful as men—everyone knows that. Equality is self-evident. We do not want to be slaves or married to slaves—but this is the condition of so much of the suffering world. When that happens, human beings can only cling together, huddling under the blanket. In his beautiful book Tristes Tropiques, the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss tells of a miserable, angry tribe, the Nambikwara, going to sleep by the fireside at night:
Always they are haunted by the thought of other groups, as fearful and hostile as they are themselves, and when they lie entwined together, couple by couple, each looks to his mate for support and comfort and finds in the other a bulwark, the only one he knows, against the difficulties of every day and the meditative melancholia which from time to time overwhelms the Nambikwara.
The self always matters, no matter how great the crisis and disruption of the world. If you are allowed to live, your singular, solitary self will be gnawing at you all the time; you never wish to surrender the whole of yourself to the general. We do not want to be engulfed in the universal; but interferences are everywhere, in the nature of things, in the recalcitrance of others, in the world of accident, necessity, circumstance. Our desires war with those of our fellow men.
Dispersion, loneliness, rootlessness—these are carried on the wind like a pestilence. Everywhere one goes there are young or middle-aged women raising their children alone. “You will be aware of an absence, presently, growing beside you, like a tree,” the same Sylvia Plath poem said. It is called “For a Fatherless Son,” and it does not refer to the downtrodden and orphaned but to the children left by the educated, sophisticated man when he has changed his mind.
Some of these lone mothers are sad, some are managing, but none seems to grow used to the missing person. It was not Women’s Liberation that left these women ironically sunk in self-reliance but a slow and steady corrosion of the sense of responsibility to the past, to consequence. We will never get that back; it is one of those things that will not be reversed. The right of the self for renewal, change, another chance is more sacred to us than gratitude or accountability. The brevity of love must be acknowledged. I look at little girls with wonder and with anxiety. I do not know whether they will be free—the only certainty is that many will be adrift.
1971