170
PARTISAN REVIEW
kill the reading public's evenings, the next best thing to Nembutol. I
go home, read it, fall asleep eight million times, come back weary and
yawning and tell him I learned a lot lot more than I ever did from
Vogue.
I bought books, dozens of paperback books. I discovered pref–
aces. You find out everything in the preface from someone whose life
is devoted to understanding. You get that gift, you save time, and
you understand what the fuck is going on. I became a preface fiend.
I discovered cemeteries, those quiet places without a person any–
where, just birds chirping, and I drove out there and read.
If
any–
body saw me in a cemetery reading I would be suspect, but you have
to do it only once to understand. Parks now are noisy and ugly, traf–
fic is everywhere, people reach up your skirt, but in a cemetery one
has the quiet of a golfer, and soon you forget the implication. It's just
a pretty, extremely dignified place to be away and read. In the ceme–
tery I finished
Crime and Punishment.
A fine rage book. I began
The
Brothers Karamazov,
hoping for more fury. Fury must be the hardest
thing to write. It's the hardest thing to sustain. It's the hardest thing
to face. Everybody goes around with grudges and immense fury, but
all they do is shit on each other as a result. Shit on their friends, their
kids, lover. But to separate it out and churn it up into
Crime and
Punishment-
bravo. Beyond description. I know what makes writers
great . The human dirty subtlety they know all about. The sensitivity
storming out of them. The blot-out concentration on their thing.
They're like fathers are supposed to be: big, bossy, gluttonous, dom–
ineering, positive, emphatic. Reading Dostoyevsky was medicine for
me. His grip on me was terrific. The fantasies Dostoyevsky is custo–
dian of are mine. He encompasses everything I learned at my mother's
knee. Feet. Throat. Through a madman's book the awful truth. Vio–
lence and humiliation, humiliation and violence, and clinging to
hatred for dear life. You have to. Noone can leave anything without
hating it first. Oh, let me be reincarnated as my mother and return
to axe the D.A. to death. Carve him up good early one morning and
make it to Canada before they open the drawer to his cuff links and
find his nuts. Let me come back very self-assured, a very self-assured
woman given this by a mother who was the mainstay of her life,
which is where courage comes from. No longer abject. Courage in
me like a beam of steel. My life has been an attempt to get away
from my mother. Enraged with her since babyhood. She implanted
guilt in me which is a loathsome trick. I howled in the cab, the guy
pulled over, lit a cigarette, listened to my whole life. "Simply unfath–
omable to me," he said, "why she treated you like that." "She had no
choice," I explained, "she is one of those people who never do."
