206
MARGE PIERCY
nated by scientists (and in graduation panic married a physicist)
because they seemed elected to have some effect. I would then
sometimes derive a heady excitement from the distance between
my intellectual labors and everything visible to me. Partly no
doubt that was due to a naive working-class based zest for "real
learning" which had to be esoteric to assure me that I was being
truly educated. But some had to do with advanced learning in the
various disciplines (that word!
It
conjured up for me then an
almost Marquis de Sade shiver: I was crazy about that word at
nineteen) representing an available exit from a crushingly repres–
sive world. A world in which the Left was dead (or comically
irrelevant: meetings of five socialists representing five factions, all
competing in anti-Communist pieties) was for me a world without
historical movement and a world without hope.
My existence in the English Department at Michigan was ex–
ceedingly perilous and bumpy. One of my teachers there who is
now at Syracuse said when some students wanted to invite me to
read a couple of years ago, over his dead body. I was a garlic
among the Anglican-convert lilies. I felt the wrong shape, size, sex,
volume level, class, and emotional coloration. I fought, always
with a sense of shame, for I could never define what I felt was
being throttled in me. And I wanted approval. I loved working in
the dim mustily fragrant stacks of the library, safe, busy. I loved
i
the old clanking conveyor belt that delivered books up to the desk
t
when requested (and chewed up a number of books as we found
out the night we snuck into the space at the bottom).
It
was
ancient, noisy, did not work well, had a certain wrought iron
charm, and impressed upon me the privilege of being in its pres-
ence at all: something of a makeshift image for my education.
In graduate school at Northwestern suddenly things came
easily. As soon as I passed my master's exam with a record score, I
got scared. I can look at my fright one way as conventional female
programming. I was married to a graduate student in physics. I
dropped out to support him, although I was a better student.
Failure brings emotional rewards to women; success brings penal–
ties. Indeed all the men in my department used to insult me when–
ever they could get through.
But I wanted to write. I knew I was writing badly. I could
