PARTISAN REVIEW
203
an adult involves a bonding with a community, and therefore of
history and progeny, a meshing with time, a sense of struggling
and yielding, shaping and being shaped in that river.
In
the fifties I found myself a perennial adolescent, isolated,
stuck in the alienated pose of an individual in a hostile environ–
ment. History had ended in the American apotheosis; it was only a
matter of time (and struggle with the forces of evil) before the rest
of the world became just like Our Town with cigarette commer–
cials. I remember my best friend's brother-in-law yelling at her,
"You aren't satisfied with anything. What do you want, to go live
with savages in a cave in Italy?" Changing this country felt incon–
ceivable. Politics was voting. The long ice age of General Motors,
General Foods, General Eisenhower, and general miasma: the only
choices were conformity or exile. I could not imagine a future.
Only sci-fi freaks were into that, and mostly their future looked
like the old frontier with shinier gadgets. My own actions of pro–
test against the distribution of wealth, rights, power were doomed
to be symbolic and abortive.
Survival was hard enough. It was harder to be poor then than
now, I think, although of course that is a snotty judgment eased
by the fact that I am no longer poor. There was no support for
choosing anything other than a narrowly defined norm. There was
no subculture to drop into especially, especially for women. (To
an independent woman the enclaves of beat and hep were more
piggish than the straight world.) Still, beyond survival or a clubby
grouping of nervous politics played by Robert's Rules, the only
actions I could see were gesture, bordering on prank. My anger was
enormous, when I was in touch with it at all, but the isolated
gestures available trivialized it: soapsuds in a fountain, a faked
news story, refusing to use footnotes or keep hours, taking off my
clothes. Either you got away with it because you didn't get caught
so it might as well not have happened, or you did it publicly and
were promptly punished.
The end of ideology produced a world in stasis. Actually the
fifties represented the last gasp of WASP history as history: the
history of the affluent white male Western European and latterly
American presence in the world given to us as the history of
humankind; Western European culture of the better off sold us as
