She was written as a madwoman and then she became a madwoman. This was her shadow, her sheltering sky. Prophets and prophesies.
In Chicago, I audited a graduate seminar on Fitzgerald at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The class took place in one of those depressing utilitarian buildings designed during the days of student riots, fortresses against revolt, safe safe places. No one can get in. No one can get out.
While lecturing, the tenured male professor regularly raises his hands reverently and tics off his fingers the canon of GREAT AMERICAN WRITERS. A constant MAN-tra — let’s see, there’s DeLillo, Pynchon, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, of course, who else, Roth, Doctorow, David Foster Wallace. I sit in class and furiously watch his fingers, like little guns. The canon/cannon. Yes, there’s a violence to it, to this gesture of exclusion. Like jabbing dismissals. Like Gertrude Stein segregating the male geniuses from their wives who sat at Alice’s tea table, tracing the tradition of Great Men from Henry James to herself (I mean, Gertrude Stein was basically a patriarch, right? The patriarch is the one who gets to name).
I take the course in order to apply to English PH.D. programs, but I drop out mid-semester. It just seems there is too much to defend against. I want to write my little outlaw texts and not have to reason with the Professor X’s.
I guess I have always had a tremendous fear of being institutionalized.
(She was institutionalized, as Mad Woman, as Bad Wife, and he was institutionalized, as the Great American Author.)
I took this class while I was years-deep in the attempt to become a writer, but I had never actually published any fiction. Stuff like this just destroys my nerves. Strangely, this didn’t disappear when I got published, this sense of illegitimacy and invisibility. Maybe it even got worse, because before I allowed myself to be cocooned in my little world with my dinner party of imaginary friends, the mad wives. Some sort of sanctum.
Do you know that massive novel displayed everywhere lately in bookstores, the one that could serve as a blunt murder weapon? The author is a guy I once knew in Chicago, was friends with for a while. Before he went to a high-profile MFA program we would see each other in the mornings at the coffeeshop I lived above in Wicker Park, him tapping away at his laptop, as I was stumbling home from something, the late-night shift or a boy’s bed, wanting to have a cup of coffee and a cigarette and a bagel and write in my journal, and we encouraged each other as beginning writers. I read the story he submitted for his MFA program. A few years later, we had a falling out after a brief and stupid hook-up, I felt he fucked around with me at a particularly vulnerable time in my life, as my mother was dying of cancer while being stuck up in a mental ward, being administered anti-psychotics because she was too fucking depressed about dying of cancer.
After that I always kind of hated him, but prided myself that of the two of us I had actually become the real writer (whatever that means). Before we moved to Ohio, I saw him again at this coffee-shop we both frequented once the other one closed down. I hadn’t seen him in some time. Quite unlike myself I then found myself bragging to him that I had my first novel coming out. So do I he says. He tells me his is a ONE THOUSAND PAGE novel. Mine is a slim nervous novella, a grotesque homage to Mrs. Dalloway, and an exorcism of my toxic-girl past, published by an experimental feminist press.
He tells me his work will be the longest first-person novel EVER. We discuss the respective length of Tristram Shandy, Ulysses, Infinite Jest, War and Peace, etc. He is pulling out his cock and comparing it with those writers with whom he will be compared. (I will be compared to nobody, I think, I am sent into an existential crisis when I get home, and for weeks afterwards.)
Canon actually comes from a Greek word for “measuring rod.”
Me stewing internally, outwardly smiling, supportive. Wow I say. Wow. He chatters on about $ and rights and paper v. hardback. He tells me I shouldn’t do a reading unless I get paid. Universities are goldmines, he says.
Later when I go home I grow angrier and angrier. And I think: Of the two of us only one of us can be called an artist. He would be viewed as the artist. I, the scribbling sister. I will be called solipsistic. But a thousand-page first-person narrative is not solipsistic?
He writes, I imagine, in the tradition of neurotic men who treat women as objects but are forgiven for their insight and sensitivity, in the tradition of falling in love and into beautiful girls. The entire history of Western literature is dominated by absolute pricks, I realize, pricks that can’t get hard but yet ejaculate with such eloquent language, Beckett was a prick with Lucia Joyce (poor Lucia), Scott Fitzgerald was a prick and how does she get revenge? She is always the minor writer.
I think of the tremendous EGO required to write all of that first person, and I think this is tied to this notion of legitimacy. Fitzgerald was also such a tremendous egotist. “I really believe that no one else could have written so searchingly the story of the youth of our generation,” he writes in one of his “Crack-Up” essays.
He places himself in an ancestral line — he is placed, when he is reviewed, within this significant ancestry. She is illegitimate, kept out from that tradition. In reviews the boy with the massive book is lauded as the next David Foster Wallace, compared to all the other system novelists with their doorstopper novels. He is reviewed as such, awarded, feted — an endless campaign. As I write this he has just won a big award.
The notion of the Great American Novel seems to be almost exclusively male. It seemed for a while The New York Times was under the impression that David Foster Wallace’s posthumously published, unfinished The Pale King was the only recently published novel — it was constantly covered and reviewed, an endless documentation. A canonization — with that book he was raised to the literary heavens. In reviews David Foster Wallace was compared to Melville and other Great Men just like that boy I knew was compared to David Foster Wallace. Much has been said lately about how women are reviewed less in the big literary sections, but not about HOW they are reviewed, or HOW they are not reviewed, and who women writers are or are not compared to in the body of their occasional reviews. We are considered outside the conversation of Great Books, a male-dominated tradition. Not only the self-mythologizing of a Fitzgerald or Miller, singing the Song of Himself for pages upon pages, but an endless mythology from the outside as well, from the Harold Bloom’s and Professor X’s and James Wood’s and men at the head of the major book sections who see in these novels a mirror of their own experience.
During all of the Pale King reviews, there were zero copies of my book available online, at Amazon or Small Press Distribution, because the publisher of my first novel, a brilliant feminist writer, isn’t exactly interested in the business side of things. I Google myself regularly, checking status, reviews, any sign in the world that my slim work existed (that I, by extension, existed).