PARTISAN REVIEW
17
letter to post into the distant past: I am so sure that everything we
now take for granted is going to be utterly swept away in the next
decade.
(So why write novels? Indeed, why ! I suppose we have to go on
living
as
if. ... )
Some books are not read in the right way because they have
skipped a stage of opinion, assume a crystallization of information
in society which has not yet taken place. This book was written as if
the attitudes that have been created by the Women's Liberation
movement already existed.
It
came out first ten years ago, in 1962.
If
it
were coming out now for the first time it might be read, and not
merely reacted to: things have changed very fast. Certain hypocrisies
have gone. For instance, ten, or even five years ago - it has been a
sexually contumacious time - novels and plays were being plentifully
written by men furiously critical of women - particularly from the
States but also in this country - who portrayed women as bullies and
betrayers, but particularly as underminers and sappers. But these atti–
tudes in male writers were taken for granted, accepted as sound phil–
osophical bases, as quite normal, certainly not as woman-hating,
aggressive, or neurotic.
It
still goes on, of course - but things are
better, there is no doubt of it.
I was so immersed in writing this book, that I didn't think about
how it might
be
received. I was involved not merely because it was
hard to write - keeping the plan of it in my head I wrote it from
start to end, consecutively, and it was difficult - but because of what
I was learning as I wrote. Perhaps giving oneself a tight structure,
making limitations for oneself, squeezes out new substance where
you least expect it. All sorts of ideas and experiences I didn't recog–
nize as mine emerged when writing. The actual time of writing, then,
and not only the experiences that had gone into the writing, was
really traumatic : it changed me. Emerging from this crystallizing
process, handing the manuscript to publisher and friends, I learned
that I had written a tract about the sex war, and fast discovered
that nothing I said then could change that diagnosis.
Yet the essence of the book, the organization of it, everything
in it, says implicitly and explicitly, that we must not divide things
off,
must not compartmentalize.
"Bound. Free. Good. Bad. Yes. No. Capitalism. Socialism. Sex.
