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PARTISAN REVIEW
literary limitations are. Nevertheless, the remarks on artistic women are
among the most brilliant in this book. Narcissism and feelings of infer–
iority are, according to Simone de Beauvoir, the demons of literary
women. Women want to please, "but the writer of originality, unless
dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels."
Flattered to be in the world of art at all, the woman is "on her best
behavior; she is afraid to disarrange, to investigate, to explode ..."
Women are timid and fall back on "ancient houses, sheepfolds, kitchen
gardens, picturesque old folks, roguish children . . ." and even the
best are conservative. "There are women who are mad and there are
women of sound method; none has that madness in her method that
we call genius."
If
women's writing seems somewhat limited, I don't think it is
only due to these psychological failings. Women have much less ex–
perience of life than a man, as everyone knows. But in the end are
they suited to the kind of experiences men have? I don't feel nearly
so optimistic as Simone de Beauvoir.
Ulysses
is not just a work of
genius, it is Dublin pubs, gross depravity, obscenity, brawls. Stendhal
as a soldier in Napoleon's army, Tolstoy on his Cossack campaigns,
Dostoevsky before the firing squad, Proust's obviously first-hand knowl–
edge of vice, Conrad and MelviIIe as sailors, Michelangelo's tortures on
the scaffolding in the Sistine chapel, Ben Jonson's drinking bouts, duel–
ing, his ear burnt by the authorities because of a political indiscretion in
a play-these horrors and the capacity to endure them are
experience.
Experience is something more than going to law school or having the
nerve to say honestly what you think in a drawing room filled with
men; it is the privilege as well to endure brutality, physical torture, un–
imaginable sordidness, and even the privilege
to want,
like Boswell, to
grab a miserable tart under Westminster Bridge. Syphilis and epilepsy–
even these seem to be tragic afflictions a male writer can endure more
easily than a woman. I should imagine a woman would be more de–
pleted by epilepsy than Dostoevsky seems to have been, more ravaged
by syphilis than Flaubert, more weakened by deprivation than Villon.
Women live longer, safer lives than men and a man may, if he wishes,
choose that life; it is hard to believe a woman could choose, like Rim–
baud, to sleep in the streets of Paris at seventeen.
If
you remove the physical and sexual experiences many men have
made literature out of, you have carved away a great hunk of master–
pieces. There is a lot left: James, Balzac, Dickens; the material
in
these books, perhaps not always in Balzac, is a part of women's lives
