MELINDA CAMBER PORTER
83
OP:
I think it's part of me. Eliot was talking about his own dissoci-
ated sensibility.
Mep:
He wasn't a very passionate man.
OP:
No. He separated love, it seems, from living.
Mep:
Terrible. Yes. I think he was also very cruel to women, and
frightened of them.
OP:
Yes. I've been wondering what he was like in his private life.
Mep:
A friend of mine is writing a play about his relationship with
his wife, and apparently he's gleaned the most terrible facts about
Eliot. I won't go into them because they seem too sordid; they
show a real sense of horror at femininity.
OP:
I've been thinking about him recently. In his poetry women-
they are not women anymore.
Mep:
They're all dry, and the people are all dried out.
OP:
And when there is sex it's rather sordid.
Mep:
Because of his fear of women, he tried to make the women
mad . In his mind he projected onto them all his fears, and he tried
to lock up one of his wives. I think he succeeded, by sort of telling
her that she was mad .
OP:
Yes.
Mep:
I think you said once that North American women feel ex–
tremely uncomfortable because their femininity is not given any
place in the society .
OP:
Yes . Absolutely. In Protestant countries you have a religion
without a goddess and without saints . We have the Holy Mary.
However, New York City is separate from the United States–
and there the masculine values are not important. But feminists
have adopted masculine values . I think it is an enormous mistake
of the feminist movement not to retain the differences, but to
aspire to identify with men. They have the idea that men and
women are made different by society alone. But we are physically
different.
Mep:
I actually think there is a definite difference in sensibility, too.
It is similar to the great differences between cultures, which I
would like to see maintained .
OP:
I am for differences, differences of cultures, differences of sex.
Mep:
It seems to be a problem for a lot of people, though, to accept
the notion that difference and similarity can exist at the same
time.
OP:
Yes, we confuse equality with identity. People think that if you
are equal , you are identical. That is not true . We are equal and
