Aren't we?
Taming the Beast with Two Backs
Reader, hear my confession: I have written an unchaste novel. It's a little shocking, even to me. In my previous books I mostly wrote about sex by means of the spacebreak. One reviewer claimed I'd written the shortest sex scene in the English language. I know the scene he meant; the action turns when one character notices a cellophane crackle in the other's shirt pocket and declares that if he has a condom in there, this is her lucky day. The scene then proceeds, in its entirety:
He did. It was. [Spacebreak!]
I think my readers have always relied on me for a certain reserve, judging from the college course adoptions and mothers who've said they shared my books with their daughters. They may be in for a surprise this time around. Not that the sex is gratuitous, I keep telling myself. This novel is about life, in a biological sense: the rules that connect, divide, and govern living species, including their tireless compunction to reproduce themselves. In this tale the birds do it, the mushrooms do it, and the people do it--starting on page six, already. I found myself having a good old time writing about it, too. I've always felt I was getting away with something marginally legal, inventing fantasies for a living. But now it seems an outright scandal. I send my kids off to school in the morning, scuttle to my office, close the door, and hoo boy, les bons temps roulent!
As I closed in on a finished draft, though, I began to think about the people who'd soon be sitting in their homes, libraries, and in subways with their hands on this book. Many people. My mother, for instance.
My writer friend Nancy, a practical New Englander, offered this counsel: "Barbara, you're in your forties now, and you have two children. She knows that you know."
Yes, all right, she does. But what about the man from the Ag Extension Service, whom I'd asked to vet my book's agricultural setting for accuracy? How would I hand this manuscript over to him? And what about those English lit teachers? I don't mind that they know I know, or that I think about it, in circumstances outside my own experience. Come on, who doesn't? Most people I know couldn't construct a good plot to save their souls--but all of them can and do, I suspect, imagine detailed sexual scenarios complete with dialogue (if they're female) and a sense of place.
But they don't pass them around for others to read, for heaven's sake. My dread is that people will take my book for something other than literature, and me for something other than a serious writer. In my more anxious moments I have combed my bookshelves for the comfort of finding fellow offenders. Yes, there were plenty of authors before me who put explicitly sexual scenes into literature. There's a particularly lovely one in the center of David Guterson's Snow Falling on Cedars, there are sweetly funny ones in John Irving, and of course we have John Updike, Philip Roth, and Henry Miller (notice the dearth of females on this list). Even such distinguished eighteenth-century gents as Ben Franklin and Jonathan Swift scored the occasional love scene in their prose. But I was surprised, on the humid afternoon I spent pulling down books and looking for scenes that had burned themselves into my memory, to see how often they were implied situations rather than blow-by-blow enactments. Copious use of the spacebreak, in other words. The scene in Lady Chatterley's Lover I'd remembered down the years, it turns out, was invented mostly by me, not by D. H. Lawrence (and given Lawrence's knowledge of love from the female perspective, is that any wonder?). In actual word count, if the literary novels in my bookcase accurately represent human experience, it looks like people spend roughly half their time in intelligent dialogue about the meaning of their lives, and one percent of it practicing or contemplating coition.
Excuse me, but I don't think so.
Why should literary authors shy away from something so important? Nobody else does. If we calibrated human experience on the basis of TV, magazine covers, and billboards, we'd have to conclude that humans devote more time to copulation than to sleeping, eating, and accessorizing the hot new summer look, combined. (Possibly even more than shooting one another with firearms, though that's a tough call.) Filmmakers don't risk being taken less seriously for including sexual content; in fact, they may risk it if they don't. But serious literature seems to be looking the other way, ready to take on anything else, with impunity. Myself, I've written about every awful thing from the death of a child to the morality of political assassination, and I've never felt faint-hearted before. What is it about describing acts of love that makes me go pale? There is, of course, the claim that women who make a public show of being acquainted with sexuality are expressing deviance--but that's also said about women who make a show of knowing anything, and I can't imagine being daunted by such nonsense.
For decent folk of any gender, the official and legal position of our culture is that sex takes place in private, and that's surely part of the problem. Private things--newfound love, family disagreements, and spiritual faith, to name a few--can quickly become banal or irritating when moved into the public arena. But new love, family squabbles, and spirituality are rich ground for literature when they're handled with care. We writers don't avoid them on grounds of privacy; rather, we take it as our duty to draw insights from personal matters and render them universal. Nothing could be more secret, after all, than the inside of another person's mind--and that is just where a novel takes us, usually from page one. No subject is too private for good fiction if it can be made beautiful and enlightening.
That may be the rub, right there. Making it beautiful is no small trick. The language of coition has been stolen--or really, I think, it's been divvied up like chips in a poker game among the sides of pornography, consumerism, and the medical profession. None of these players is concerned with aesthetics, so the linguistic chips have become unpretty by association. Vagina is thus fatally paired with speculum. Any word you can name for the male sex organ or its, um, movement seems to be the property of Larry Flynt. Even a perfectly serviceable word like nut, when uttered by an adult, causes paroxysms in sixth-grade boys. My word-processing program's thesaurus has washed its hands of the matter altogether, eschewing any word even remotely associated with making love. "Coitus," for example, claims to be NOT FOUND, with the software coyly suggesting as the nearest alternative: "coincide with?" It also pleads ignorant on "penis," for which it ventures "pen friend?" A writer in work-avoidance mode could amuse herself all day.
I realize that linguistic aesthetics may not be Microsoft's concern here; more likely it's the matter of college course adoptions and mothers. Roget's does much better, reinforcing my conviction that the book is mightier than the computer, or at least braver. My St. Martin's Roget's Thesaurus obligingly offers up (without even including my favorite from Shakespeare, "the beast with two backs") a whopping fifteen synonyms for copulation--I'll admit some of these are dubious, such as couplement--and an impressive twenty-eight descriptors for genitalia, though again some of these are obscure. In a scene where lingam meets yoni, I'm not even sure who I'm rooting for.
Nevertheless, the language is ours for the taking. Fiction writers have found elegant ways to describe life on other planets, or in a rabbit warren or an elephant tribe, inventing the language they needed to navigate passages previously uncharted by our tongue. We don't normally call off the game on account of linguistic handicaps. When it comes to the couplement of yoni, I think the real handicap is a cultural one. We live in a strange land where marketers can display teenage models in the receptive lordotic posture (look it up) to sell jeans or liquor, but the basics of human procreation can't be discussed in a middle school science class without risking parental ire. This is also true of evolution, incidentally, and for the same reason, I think: Our religious and cultural heritage is to deny, for all we're worth, that we're in any way connected with the rest of life on earth. We don't come from it, we're not part of it; we own it and were put down here to run the place. It's deeply threatening to our ideology, at the corporate and theological levels, to admit that we're constrained by the laws of biology. And yet there it is: sex,
the ultimate animal necessity, writhing before us like some alien invader to mission control. We can't get rid of it. The harder we try to deny it official status, the more it asserts itself in banal, embarrassing ways.
And so here we are, modern Americans, with our heads soaked in frank sexual imagery and our feet planted in our puritanical heritage, and any novelist with something to say about procreation or the lordotic posture has to navigate those straits. Great sex is rarer in art than in life because it's harder to do. To broach the subject of sex at all, writers must first face down the polite pretense that it doesn't really matter to us, and acknowledge that in the grand scheme of things, few things could matter more. In the quiet of our writing rooms we have to corral the beast with two backs and find a way to tell of its terror and beauty. We must own up to its gravity. We also must accept an uncomfortable intimacy with our readers in the admission that, yes, we've both done this. We must warn our mothers before the book comes out. We must accept the economic reality that this one won't make the core English lit curriculum.
Still, in spite of everything, I'm determined to write about the biological exigencies of human life, and where can I start the journey if not through this mined harbor? It's a risk I'll have to take.
Reader, don't blush. I know you know.
Stealing Apples
I have never yet been able to say out loud that I am a poet.
It took me many years and several published novels to begin calling myself a novelist, but finally now I can do that, I own up to it, and will say so in capital letters on any document requiring me to identify myself with an honest living. "Novelist," I'll write gleefully, chortling to think that the business of making up stories can be called an honest living, but there you are. It's how I keep shoes on my kids and a roof above us. I sit down at my desk every day and make novels happen: I design them, construct them, revise them, I tinker and bang away with the confidence of an experienced mechanic, knowing that my patience and effort will get this troubled engine overhauled, and this baby will hum.
Poetry is a different beast. I rarely think of poetry as something I make happen; it is more accurate to say that it happens to me. Like a summer storm, a house afire, or the coincidence of both on the same day. Like a car wreck, only with more illuminating results. I've overheard poems, virtually complete, in elevators or restaurants where I was minding my own business. (A writer's occupational hazard: I think of eavesdropping as minding my business.) When a poem does arrive, I gasp as if an apple had fallen into my hand, and give thanks for the luck involved. Poems are everywhere, but easy to miss. I know I might very well stand under that tree all day, whistling, looking off to the side, waiting for a red delicious poem to fall so I could own it forever. But like as not, it wouldn't. Instead it will fall right while I'm in the middle of changing the baby, or breaking up a rodeo event involving my children and the dog, or wiping my teary eyes while I'm chopping onions and listening to the news; then that apple will land with a thud and roll under the bed with the dust bunnies and lie there forgotten and lost for all time. There are dusty, lost poems all over my house, I assure you. In yours, too, I'd be willing to bet. Years ago I got some inkling of this when I attended a reading by one of my favorite poets, Lucille Clifton. A student asked her about the brevity of her poems (thinking, I suspect, that the answer would involve terms such as "literary retrenchment" and "parsimony"). Ms. Clifton replied simply that she had six children and could hold only about twenty lines in memory until the end of the day. I felt such relief, to know that this great poet was bound by ordinary life, like me.
I've learned since then that most great poets are more like me, and more like you, than not. They raise children and chop onions, they suffer and rejoice, they feel blessed by any poem they can still remember at the end of the day. They may be more confident about tinkering with the engine, but they'll generally allow that there's magic involved, and that the main thing is to pay attention. I have several friends who are poets of great renown, to whom I've confessed that creating a poem is a process I can't really understand or control. Every one of them, on hearing this, looked off to the side and whispered, "Me either!"
We're reluctant to claim ownership of this mystery. In addition, we live in a culture that doesn't put much stock in it. Elsewhere in the world--say in Poland or Nicaragua--people elect their poets to public office, or at the very least pay them a stipend to produce poetry, regularly and well, for the public good. Here we have no such class of person. Here a poet may be prolific and magnificently skilled, but even so, it's not the poetry that's going to keep shoes on the kids and a roof overhead. I don't know of a single American poet who ever made a living solely by writing poetry. That's sad, but it's true. Identifying your livelihood as "Poet" on an official form is the kind of daring gesture that will make your bank's mortgage officer laugh very hard all the way into the manager's office and back. So poets, of necessity, tend to demur. At the most we might confess, "I write poetry sometimes."
And so we do. Whether anyone pays us or respects us or calls us a poet or not, just about any person alive will feel a tickle behind the left ear when we catch ourselves saying, "It was a little big and pretty ugly, but it's coming along shortly...." We stop in our tracks when a child pointing to the sunset cries that the day is bleeding and is going to die. Poetry approaches, pauses, then skirts around us like a cat. I sense its presence in my house when I am chopping onions and crying but not really crying while I listen to the lilting radio newsman promise, "Up next: The city's oldest homeless shelter shut down by neighborhood protest, and, Thousands offer to adopt baby Jasmine abandoned in Disneyland!" There is some secret grief here I need to declare, and my fingers itch for a pencil. But then the advertisement blares that I should expect the unexpected, while my elder child announces that a shelter can't be homeless, and onions make her eyes run away with her nose, and my toddler marches in a circle shouting "Apple-Dapple! Come-Thumb-Drum!" and poems roll under the furniture, left and right. I've lost so many I can't count them. I do understand that they fall when I'm least able to pay attention because poems fall not from a tree, really, but from the richly pollinated boughs of an ordinary life, buzzing, as lives do, with clamor and glory. They are easy to miss but everywhere: poetry just is, whether we revere it or try to put it in prison. It is elementary grace, communicated from one soul to another. It reassures us of what we know and socks us in the gut with what we don't, it sings us awake, it's irresistible, it's congenital.
Over the years I've forgotten enough poems to fill several books and remembered enough to fill just one. By the grace of a small, devoted press and a small, devoted contingent of North Americans who read poetry, it remains in print. I began writing poems when I was very young; the most noticeable virtue of my early works was that they rhymed. Then, in high school, I abandoned rhyme scheme in favor of free verse and produced rafts of poems whose most noticeable characteristics were that they were earnest and frequently whiny. I returned again to rhyme scheme and more rigorous structure when I was in college, after seeking my first writing advice from an English professor who advised, "Write sonnets. It will teach you discipline." I dutifully wrote a hundred dreadful sonnets and just one that seemed successful, insofar as its subject suited the extremely confining sonnet form.
Although I had been working at poems and stories all my life, I didn't really begin to understand what it meant to be a writer until my adulthood commenced in Tucson, Arizona, following my arrival here at the very end of the 1970s. I had come to the Southwest expecting cactus, wide-open spaces, and adventure. I found, instead, another whole America. This other America didn't appear on picture postcards, nor did it resemble anything I had previously supposed to be American culture. Arizona was cactus, all right, and purple mountain majesties, but this desert that burned with raw beauty had a great fence built across it, attempting to divide north from south. I'd stumbled upon a borderland where people perished of heat by day and of cold hostility by night.
> This is where poetry and adulthood commenced for me, as I understand both those things, because of remarkable events that fell into my quite ordinary way. Oh, I suffered the extremes of love and loss, poverty and menial jobs and exhilarating recuperations, obsessive explorations of a new landscape--all common preoccupations for a young adult in the America I knew. But I also met people, some of them very uncommon. In particular, some of them were organizing the Sanctuary movement, an undertaking I could not previously have imagined in the America I knew. This was an underground railroad run by a few North Americans who placed conscience above law. Their risk was to provide safety for Latin American refugees--many hundreds of them--who faced death in their own countries but could not, though innocent of any crime or ill will, gain legal entry into ours.
I learned, slowly, with horror, that the persecution these refugees were fleeing was partly my responsibility. The dictators of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Chile received hearty support from my government; their brutish armies were supplied and trained by my government. Some of the police who tortured protesters in those countries had been trained in that skill at a camp in Fort Benning, Georgia. My taxes had helped pay for that, and also the barbed wire and bullets that prevented war-weary families from finding refuge here. I wasn't prepared for the knowledge of what one nation might do to another. But that knowledge arrived regardless. I saw that every American proverb had two sides, could be told in two languages, and that injustice did not disappear when I looked away, but instead seeped in at the back of my neck to poison my heart's desires. I saw that unspeakable things could be survived, and that sometimes there was even joy on the other side. I learned all this, one story at a time, from people who had lived enough to know it. Some of them became my friends. Others vanished again, into places I can't know. This great apple that had fallen into my lap became my first novel, The Bean Trees. I doubted whether my compatriot readers would really want to hear all that much about what one country would do to another, particularly when one of the countries was ours. I have been wrong about that: once, twice, always.