Andrea Dworkin - The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

76

Discipline

I learned how to write on Crete. I learned to write every day

I learned to work on a typewriter that I had rented in

Heraklion. I had thin, light blue paper. I’d carve out hours for

myself, the same every day, and no mat er what was going on

in the rest of my writer’s life I used those hours for writing.

I learned to throw away what was no good. One asks, How

does a writer write? And one asks, How does a writer live?

At first one imitates. I imitated in those years Lorca, Genet,

Baldwin, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller. I read both Miller

and Lawrence Durrel on being a writer in Greece. It seemed

from them as if words could stream down with the light. I did

not find that to be the case, and so I thought that perhaps I

was not a writer. Then one wants to know about the one great

book: can someone young write only one book and have it be

great - or was there only one Rimbaud for al eternity and the

gift is al used up? Then one needs to know if what one wrote

yesterday and the day before has the aura of greatness so that

the whole thing, eventually, would be the one great book even

though that might have to be fol owed by a second great

book. Then one wants to know if the greatness shows in one’s

77

Heartbreak

face or manner or being so that people would draw back a little on confronting the bearer of the greatness. Then one wants to know if being a writer is like being Sisyphus or perhaps

Prometheus. One wants to know if writers are a little band of

gods created in each generation, cursed or blessed with the

task of finding themselves - finding that they are writers. One

wants to know if one wil write something important enough

to die for; or if fascists wil kil one for what one writes; or if

one can write prose or poetry so strong that nothing can break

its back. One wonders if one will be able to stand up to or

against dictators or police power. One wonders if one has the

illusion of a vocation or if one has the vocation. One wonders

about how to be what one wants to be - that genius of a

writer who takes literature to a new level or that genius of a

writer who brings humanity forward or that genius of a writer

who tel s a simple, gorgeous story or that genius of a writer

who holds hands with Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy or that genius

of a writer who lets the mute speak, especially the last, letting

the mute speak. Can one make a sound that the deaf can hear?

Can one write a narrative visually accessible to the blind? Can

one write for the dispossessed, the marginalized, the tortured?

Is there a kind of genius that can make a story as real as a tree

or an idea as inevitable as taking the next breath? Is there a

genius who can create morning out of words and can one be

that genius? The questions are hubristic, but they go to the

core of the writing project: how to be a god who can create a

78

Discipline

world in which people actually live - some of the people being

characters, some of the people being readers.

79

The Freighter

I learned how to listen from my father and from being on the

freighter. My father could listen to anyone: sit quietly, follow

what they had to say even if he abhorred it - for instance, the

racism in some of my family members - and later use it for

teaching, for pedagogy. Through watching him - his calm, his

stillness, the sometimes deep disapproval buried under the

weight of his cheeks, his mouth in a slight but barely perceptible frown - I saw the posture of one strong enough to hear without being overcome with anger or desperation or fear.

I saw a vital man with a conscience pick his fights, and they

were always policy fights, in his school as a teacher, as a guidance counselor, in the post of ice where he worked unloading trucks. For instance, in the post of ice where he was relatively

powerless, he’d work on Christian holidays so that his fellow

laborers could have those days with their families. I saw

someone with principles who had no need to cal at ention to

himself.

The ocean isn’t real y very different, though it can be more

flamboyant. It simply is; it doesn’t require one’s at ention;

there is no arrogance however fierce it can become. I took a

80

The Freighter

freighter from Heraklion to Savannah to New York City. In

the two and a half weeks on the ocean, I mainly listened: to

the narrative of Tolstoy’s War and Peace , which I read some of

every day; to the earth buried miles under the ocean; to the

astonishing stil ness of the water, potentially so wild and deadly,

on most nights blanketed by an impenetrable darkness; to the

things living under and around me; to the crew and captain of

the ship; to the one family also making the trek, the sullenness

of the teen, the creativity of a younger child, the brightness of

the adults’ optimism.

It seems a false analogy - my father and the ocean - because

my father was a humble man and the ocean is overwhelming

until one sees that it simply is what it is. From my father and

from the ocean, I learned to listen with concentration and poise

to the women who would talk to me years later: the women

who had been raped and prostituted; the women who had

been bat ered; the women who had been incested as children.

I think that sometimes they spoke to me because they had an

intuition that the difficulty in saying the words would not be

in vain; and in this sense my father and the ocean gave me the

one great tool of my life - an ability to listen so closely that

I could find meaning in the sounds of suf ering and pain,

anger and hate, sorrow and grief. I could listen to a barely