Andrea Dworkin - The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

secret, yet no les a masterpiece. The tree fel ; no one heard it

or ever wil ; it exists.

In our day, a published woman’s reputation, if she is alive,

wil depend on many small conformities - in her writing but

especial y in her life. Does she practice the expression of gender in a good way, which is to say, does she convince, in her person, that she is female down to the very mar ow of her

bones? Her supplications may be modest, but most often they

are not. Her lips wil blaze red even if she is old and gnarled.

It’s a declaration: I won’t hurt you; I am deferential; al those

unpleasant things I said, I didn’t mean one of them. In our

benumbed era, which tries for a semblance of civilized, voluntary order after the morbid, systematic chaos of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao - after Pol Pot and the unspeakable starving of Africa

- it is up to women, as it always has been, to embody the

meaning of civilized life on the scale of one to one, each of

those matchings containing within and underneath rivers running with a historical blood. Women in Western societies now take the following loyalty oath: my veil was made by Revlon,

and I wil not show my face; I believe in free speech, which

includes the buying and selling of my sisters in pornography

and prostitution, but if we cal it ‘trafficking, ” Pm agin it -

xi

Preface

how dare one exploit Third World or foreign or exotic women;

my body is mostly skeleton and if anyone wants to write on

it, they must use the finest brush and write the simplest of

haiku; I have sex, I like sex, I am sex, and while being used

may of end me on principle or concretely, I will fight back by

manipulation and lies but deny it from kindergarten to the

grave; I have no sense of honor and, girls, if there’s one thing

you can count on, you can count on that. If this were not the

common, current practice - if triviality and deceit were not

the coin of the female realm - there would be nothing remarkable in who I am or how I got the way that I am.

It must be admit ed that those who want me to account for

myself are intrigued in hostile, voyeuristic ways, and their

projections of me are not the usual run-of-the-mill rudeness or

arrogance to which writers, especially women writers, become

accustomed. The work would be enough, even for the unfortunate sad sacks mentioned above. So here’s the deal as I see it: I am ambitious - God knows, not for money; in most

respects but not al I am honorable; and I wear overalls: kil

the bitch. But the bitch is not yet ready to die. Brava, she says,

alone in a small room.

xi i

Music 1

I studied music when I was a child, the piano as taught by

Mrs. Smith. She was old with white hair. She represented

culture with every gesture while I was just a plebe kid. But I

learned: discipline and patience from Czerny, the way ideas

can move through sound from Bach, how to say “Fuck you”

from Mozart. Mrs. Smith might have thought herself the

reigning sensibility, and she did get between the student and

the music with a stunning regularity, but if you could hear you

could learn and if you learned it in your body you knew it

forever. The fingers were the wells of musical memory, and

they provided a map for the cognitive faculties. I can remember writing out the notes and eventually grasping the nature of the piano, percussive and string, the richness and range of

the sound. I wanted music in writing but not the way Verlaine

did, not in the syllables themselves; anything pronounced

would have sound and most sound is musical; no, in a different

way. I recognized early on how the great classical composers,

but especially and always Bach, could convey ideas without

using any words at al . Repetition, variation, risk, originality,

and commitment created the piece and conveyed the ideas. I

1

Heartbreak

wanted to do that with writing. I’d walk around with poems

by Rimbaud or Baudelaire in my pocket - bilingual, paperback books with the English translations reading like prose poems - and I'd recognize that the power of the poems was

not unlike the power of music. For a while, I hoped to be a

pianist, and my mother took me into Philadelphia, the big

city, to study with someone a great deal more pretentious and

more expensive than Mrs. Smith. But then I tried to master

Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, for which I had developed a somewhat warped passion, and could not. That failure told me that I could not be a musician, although I continued

to study music in col ege.

The problem with that part of my musical education was

that I stopped playing piano, and Bennington, the college I

went to, insisted that one play an instrument. I didn’t like my

piano teacher, and I wasn’t going to play or spend one minute

of one day with him hovering over my shoulder and condemning me with a baronial English that left my prior teachers in my mind as plain-speaking people. I loved the theory classes. Mine was with the composer Vivian fine. The first

assignment, which was lovely, was to write a piece for salt and

pepper shakers. I wrote music away from the piano for the

piano, but after the first piano lesson I never deigned to darken

the piano teacher’s doorway again. At the end of the year, this

strategy of noncompliance turned out to be the equivalent of

not attending physical education in high school: you couldn’t

2

Music 1

graduate without having done the awful crap. When my

adviser, also a musician but never a teacher of music to me,

asked me why I hadn’t shown up for any of the piano

lessons, I felt awkward and stupid but I gave him an honest

answer: “I don’t like the asshole. ” My adviser smiled with

one of his this-is-too-good-to-be-true looks - he was amused

- and said he’d take care of it. He must have, or I would not

have passed.

My adviser, the composer Louis Callabro, taught me a lot

about music, but there was always a kind of cross-fertilization

- I’d bring the poems, the short stories, every now and then a

novel. Lou was a drunkard, much more his style than being