Little Labors

Women writers

I have often in the past decade or so wanted to write something about “women writers,” whatever that means (and whatever “about” means), but the words “women writers” seemed already to carry their own derogation (sort of like the word “ronin”), and I found the words slightly nauseating, in a way that reminded me of that fancy, innocent copy of Little Women that I had received as a gift as a child but could bear neither to look at nor throw out. What was I going to say? That this or that writer was not Virginia Woolf but was similarly female? That one of my favorite contemporary novels that also happened to be by a woman was The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt, and that one of the things I liked about it was that it takes so many pages into the main section before you recognize the narrator’s gender as female, and then so many pages more before you realize that the narrator of that section is a mother, in fact a single mother, who is trying to develop herself as a scholar and who tries to solve the problem of presenting a male role model to her son by setting him up to watch Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai over and over, a ridiculous but understandable plan, and that then the major section of the book is the son trying to solve the mystery of his paternity by investigating one potential father after another? It also seemed relevant to me that this brilliantly wordy and weird book actually sold many copies only because randomly — and I feel pretty sure about this, though I’m only guessing — there was a Tom Cruise film by the same title that came out around the same time as the book. I had so many little artifacts like this that seemed to point to… I didn’t know what they pointed to. I had a strong feeling that I couldn’t see the contemporary situation, and I decided that this was because firsthand knowledge is an obstacle to insight. What of the other artifacts? There were those forgotten American noir women, like Evelyn Piper of Bunny Lake Is Missing and Dorothy Hughes of In A Lonely Place and Vera Caspary of Laura (and thirty-eight other novels) and Patricia Highsmith, less forgotten, of one terrifying betrayal after another, and these oddities, and their odd obscurity, seemed to cluster around… something. As did the fact that the Feminist Press had reissued many of these books, which were otherwise out of print, and I wouldn’t have come across them save their placement on certain remainders tables. (I also felt that Gone Girl took most of its plot from Caspary’s The Man Who Loved His Wife.) Why so much crime? Why so many mysteries? Why was my copy of The Collected Works of Jane Bowles part of the Out-of-Print Masterworks series? The same was true of my copy of Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls, a perfect novel about a neglected housewife in love with a giant escaped lizard man.

And then there was the fact that contemporary crime fiction coming out of Japan is written mostly by women, and that when I had wanted to write a profile of the Japanese writer Natsuo Kirino, the author of the bestselling Out—about four women who work in a bento factory and become involved in a series of murders of men whom they have to dispose of by cutting them apart like sushi — I was told that she was very private, didn’t give interviews, and that the publication of her next book in English had been canceled because she was just so difficult to work with. I was enamored with a story by Kono Taeko called “Toddler Hunting” about a woman who goes to great lengths to buy other people’s little boys beautiful sweaters that she then is obsessed with watching them struggle into and out of. I even had in my mind a list of male writers that I thought were somehow “female” on the page — Walser, Kafka, Kleist, for some reason all German-language — which made me realize that maybe I just meant writers that I really liked in a way that had something to do with the volume of certain kinds of quiet. I wanted to line up all the baubles and bothers and clusters and… but in the end, all the lining up of these almost-things got me to thinking of one of the more hauntingly ridiculous passages in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, where he attributes Christopher Columbus’s mistaking of manatees for mermaids to an “error in taste.” “This was before people saw things as belonging to a whole,” he clarifies. I had to let the “women writers” go. Better to just let things accrete, like the rust on the vats at the rum distilleries Lévi-Strauss visits in another chapter; rusty vats make much better rum, he says, and I find I trust him.

Near the end of Life Among the Savages by Shirley Jackson — a writer most remembered for her story about a civic group of people stoning to death their fellow citizen — the narrator is expecting her fourth child; her children and husband are asking after the not-yet-born baby daily; the narrator is trying to get a reprieve from the topic. “I took my coffee into the dining room and settled down with the morning paper. A woman in New York had had twins in a taxi. A woman in Ohio had just had her seventeenth child. A twelve-year-old girl in Mexico had given birth to a thirteen-pound boy. The lead article on the woman’s page was about how to adjust the older child to the new baby. I finally found an account of an axe murder on page seventeen, and held my coffee cup up to my face to see if the steam might revive me.”

For many years, Shirley Jackson was nearly the only “woman writer” I had read. Then, around age twenty-five, I had the blunt experience of looking at my bookshelves and noticing that my bookshelves were filled almost exclusively with books by men. Which was fine, I wasn’t going to get in a rage about it, I loved those books that I had read. But I was unsettled, since my bookshelves meant either there were no good books by women, or I had somehow read in such a way as to avoid them all. I had never had my Jane Austen phase, or Edith Wharton phase, or even George Eliot phase, I associated those writers with puberty, or “courting,” both things which repelled me. (I now know I was stupid to feel that way.) But, like I said, I wasn’t going to rage at myself, or at the world, I was just going to try to read some books by women. But where to start? I came across a book by someone named Denis Johnson. (I didn’t run in a bookish crowd.) Graspingly, I thought that Yes, I was pretty sure that I had heard that this Denis — I was imagining a French woman, or maybe a French-Canadian — was very good. There was no author photo on the book. The first Denis Johnson book I read was called The Name of the World, a sort of rewrite of a Bernhard novel; it centered on a man who goes to look at the same painting in a museum every day and the reader eventually learns that the man’s wife and child died in a car accident. I liked the book, though upon finishing it, I did find myself reflecting that it was surprising that this particular book was by a woman, but I dismissed that thought, because it’s always so unpleasant — so distasteful! — to think about the gender of who wrote a book — shouldn’t it ideally be anyone? Maybe it had been textbook self-defense, or self-loathing, that had kept me from reading books by women. The only “girl” book that made it through to me — also a gift, from my childhood best friend’s mother — was Anne of Green Gables, that book that is mysteriously so beloved in Japan that there are direct flights from Tokyo to Prince Edward Island, the tiny green patch the fictional redhead is from.

Still: I kept clumsily seeking out books by women. (The Pillow Book and The Tale of Genji were finds in that awkward search.) When I discovered how brilliant Muriel Spark’s novels were — they also were mostly out of print when I found them — I did feel a bit of fury — an emotion I nearly always deny myself — but that was that. (My daughter’s middle name is Spark.) And yet I had never envied men their literary place, and I still don’t, and I had never envied men much of anything, ever… until very recently. I now envy men, but for just one thing. What thing? It is true that at the moment the baby is beating a small wooden cutting board against the ground, that the cutting board had at one point had on it an apricot I had sliced into tiny bits for her, she has since sat on some, and smashed some into the ground, she has taken a lengthy interest in my wallet, she has held the supermarket-discount-points card at a distance, then put it in her mouth, then held it at a distance away again, she has not yet learned to crawl but can drag herself across the floor to the edge of a set of stairs I am hoping to keep her from exploring further, she has gathered fuzz from the shag rug here at this rental cabin that has been obtained as a luxuriously imagined Room of One’s Own, she has been interested in having her hand inside of my mouth, and has not been interested in lying down, she is now trying to pull herself up along a ledge and is now trapped in a position from which she can discover no out and so requires rescue by the large being (me) who is always with her, later she needs rescue simply from being on her stomach, and so in brief moments, between these activities, I have one-third of an associative thought, about that story “Pregnancy Diary” by Yoko Ogawa in which a woman’s sister is pregnant and very nauseous throughout the pregnancy and the narrator begins making grapefruit jam for her nauseous sister, and the sister loves it, it’s the only thing she can bear to eat, and so the narrator keeps making it even though she read a sign at the grocery store that the grapefruit was not safe, and so she believes she has ruined the baby… but really I’m insufficiently upset about not being able to think, and then the baby falls asleep. She sleeps on her back, slightly tossed to the side, with both arms in the same direction, like she’s in a boat I can’t see. Her breathing in this moment is making her glow like an amulet. I had been talking about gender envy. The one thing I envy. The first gender-envy thoughts I have had really in my entire life started maybe not immediately following the arrival of the puma in my apartment, but shortly after, when the puma spent a lot of time spinning a wooden cookie on a rod, or maybe shortly after that, when I took her for her first swim in a pool and she persisted uncomplainingly even as it began to rain. The envious thought was simply that a man can have a baby that their romantic partner doesn’t know about. This is a crazy thought, of course, but I find myself feeling it with such sincerity that I cannot see its edges. The thought seems a descendant of a thought I had while hoping to become pregnant, which was imagining a woman who was pregnant with twins but didn’t have the courage to confess this to her partner, who she believes will be devastated by the news, and so she dreams up plans to come up with some “hysterical” reason for not wanting her partner there for the birth, and then what? What will she do with the second child? Raise it in secrecy? I knew I wouldn’t be having a second baby. And while I of course felt terrible for that secret child of Arnold Schwarzenegger who — I am presuming, I refuse to research the misery of others — had grown up for years either not knowing who his real father was, or knowing that he had to keep as a secret who his real father was — still I envied Schwarzenegger. I had considered envying men before — I pretend to envy things like their higher incidence of ungrounded confidence and monomania, but I don’t really envy those things, and I’m not sure I even believe in them — but this, the covert-baby-having thing, was the first real thing.