PARTISAN REVIEW
207
not produce two lines without making five literary allusions, pun–
ning in Elizabethan English and dragging in some five-dollar word
like
chiaroscuro.
I was assimilating. Graduate school represented
the first financial security I had ever known (which may sound
weird to you, but meant a meal ticket to me). I knew I could hack
it and then I'd be safe, I thought. Actually now I see how shaky
are the positions of women in universities, Ph.D. or not, fired just
before tenure, shunted into cleanup courses. I didn't have the
savvy then to guess that security might not apply to me. But it
scared me anyhow and not entirely because I feared success. That
wasn't success to me. It was just security.
Success was telling some truth, creating some vision on paper.
I had to go back to my own roots somehow before I lost a sense of
myself. I lived in Uptown in Chicago, on Wilson Avenue in a poor
white neighborhood the JOIN project of SDS was later to work in.
I was laboring for a sense of my self, origins, prospects, antece–
dents, intentions, a renewed sense of a living language natural to
my mouth, even a mythology I could use. Some I tried to read
from the city streets, some from my grim jobs, some from the
library again. On a borrowed card I sought a mythology that cen–
tered on women. From 1958 through 1960 I read everything I
could get into my hands on the mother goddess religions, man–
dalas, matriarchy, Crete, Amazons, Isis, Ishtar, Diana, Artemis,
Cybele, Demeter. I read Margaret Murray on witches and poured
over Jung's illustrations.
It
was
all
useless. I could not assimilate it
usefully. I could not write out of what soaked dark and wet and
fecundating into my brain. I could not make connections. Now of
course the emerging women's culture draws on this stuff. But to
be interested in Demeter in 1958 wasn't to be a precursor but to
be mad, objectively irrelevant. Just as there was no community to
mediate for me between individual and mass, there was nobody to
write for, nobody to communicate with about matters of being
female, alive, thinking, trying to make sense of one's life and
times. I wrote novel after novel, poem after poem for no one: to
lack a context and to create is to be objectively mad.
Within a year after leaving school I broke out of the box of
my marriage. I remember my husband demanding to know what I
wanted in leaving him, and yelling that I was pursuing a phoenix.
