Andrea Dworkin: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

an alcoholic. I had met him without knowing it on first

ar iving at Bennington. I loved the old music building and

sort of haunted it. He came out of his studio, pissing drunk,

stared at me, and said, “Never sleep with a man if you want

to be his friend. ” I adored the guy. Eventually I’d show him

my music and he’d show me his short stories. It was a new

version of I’l -show-you-mine-if-you-show-me-yours. I later

understood that the all-girl Bennington’s expectation was that

the girl, the woman, any female student, should learn how to

be the mistress of an artist, not the artist herself: this in the

college that was the early home of Martha Graham. The

equality between Lou and myself, our mutual recognition,

was no part of the school’s agenda. This is not to suggest that

Lou did not screw his students: he did; they al did. I always

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Heartbreak

thought that I would go to heaven because at Bennington I

never slept with faculty members, only their wives.

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Music 2

Mrs. Smith used to give her students stars and points for

memorizing pieces. I was used to being a good student. I got

a lot of stars and a lot of points. But there was a piece I could

never remember. I worked on it for months, and the denouement was in the two terrible black stars she gave me to mark my failure. The piece was Tales from the Vienna Wods by

Strauss. I like to think that my inability to stomach that piece

was a repudiation of the later Strauss’s Nazi politics, even

though I didn’t know about the former or the lat er’s politics

at the time (and they’re not related). In the same way, there

was a recur ent nightmare I had when I stayed with my

mother’s mother, Sadie Spiegel. The room got smaller and

smaller and I had trouble breathing. The tin soldiers I associated with Tales were like a drum corps around the shrinking room. Later, cousins told me about their father’s sexual

molestation of them. Their father was Sadie’s favorite, the

youngest of her children; he was bril iant as well as blond

and beautiful, had a role in inventing the microchip, and he

stuck his penis down the throats of at least two of his children

when they were very young, including when they were infants

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Heartbreak

- I assume to elicit the involuntary sucking response. Even

though my cousins told me this horror years later, I like to

think that reality runs like a stream, except that time isn’t linear and the nightmare was a synthesis, Strauss and my uncle, Nazis both. And yes, I mean it. A man who sticks his cock in

an infant’s mouth belongs in Himmler’s circle of hel .

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Music 3

There was jazz and Bessie Smith. When I'd cut high school or

college and go to Eighth Street in New York City, I'd find

used albums. I listened to every jazz great I could find. My

best friend in high school particularly liked Maynard

Fergusson, a white jazz man. I went to hear him at the Steel

Pier in Atlantic City when I was a kid. (I also went to hear

Ricky Nelson at the Steel Pier. I stood among hundreds of

screaming girl teens but up front. The teens who fainted, I am

here to tel you, fainted from the heat of a South Jersey

summer misspent in a closed bal room. Still, I adored Ricky

and Pat Boone and, special among specials, Tab Hunter with

his cover of “Red Sails in the Sunset. ”) There was no gambling then, just miles of boardwalk with penny arcades, cotton candy, saltwater taf y, root-beer sodas in frosted-glass mugs; and sand, ocean, music. I listened to Coltrane, had a

visceral love of Charlie Parker that I still have, listened to

“K. C. Blues” covers wherever I could find them. When I was

a teen, I also came across Bil ie Holiday, and her voice haunts

me to this day - I can hear it in my head anytime - and with

“Strange Fruit” and “God Bless the Child” she sounded more

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Heartbreak

like a blues singer than a jazz woman; but the bulk of her

work, which I heard later, was jazz. It was her voice that was

blues. When her voice wasn’t blues, it meant the heroin had

dragged her way down and she couldn’t go lower. “Strange

Fruit” was worth anything it took from her, and so was “God

Bless the Child. ” I’m not happy with art as necrophilia, but I

think these two songs, and “Strange Fruit” in particular, were

worth her life. They’d be worth mine.

My brother, Mark, and I both had a taste for the Ahmad

Jamal Quartet. I loved the live jazz in the clubs, the informal

jazz I found live in the apartments of various lovers, and I

wanted to hear anyone I was lucky enough to hear about. I

craved jazz music, and the black world was where one found

it. There was a tangle of sex and jazz, black culture and black

male love. There was a Gordian knot made of black men and

Jewish white women in particular. Speaking only for myself,

I wasn’t going to settle in the suburbs, and New York City

meant black, jazz meant black, blues meant black.

Philadelphia, in contrast, had folk music and coffeehouses

with live performers. Most were white. I liked Dave Van Ronk

and in junior high school stole an album of his from a big

Philadelphia department store; or maybe it was just the bearded

white face on the album cover, an archetype egging me on.

My best friend in high school liked the Philly scene with its

scuzzy, mostly failed musicians and its folk music. I'd go with

her when I could because Phil y promised excitement, though

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