Andrea Dworkin: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

Music 3

it rarely delivered. She and I flirted with a small Bohemia, not

life-threatening, whereas when I was alone in New York City

there was no net. In the environs of Philly I went to hear Joan

Baez, whose voice was splendid, and I listened to folk music

on record, Baez, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and Ramblin’ Jack Eliot,

who rambled in those days mostly in Philadelphia. These took

me back to Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, and Cisco Houston.

By the time Bob Dylan came along, I was uninterested in the

genre altogether until some friends in college made me sit

down to listen to Dylan soi-meme. Even then, it was his politics that moved me, not his music. That changed. It changed the first time because he was an acquired taste, and after

listening enough I acquired sufficient love of the music-with-

lyric to be one with my generation; and it changed the second

time, years later, maybe decades later, when his mar iage fel

apart and I found out that he had been a batterer. He lost

me. I can’t claim any purity on this, because I’ve never lost

my taste for Miles Davis, and he was a really bad guy to

women, including through battery. So I love ol’ Miles, but I

sure do have trouble put ing any CD of his in the machine. In

Amsterdam I met Ben Webster, but so did any white girl. He

was way past his prime, but he still played his heart out.

I remember the saliva dripping from his lips and the sweat

that blanketed his fat body or the visible parts of it. He’d sit

in the sun in Leidseplein; he always wore a suit; and he’d be

the Pied Piper. I wished he had been Fats Wal er, whom I’ve

9

Heartbreak

rediscovered on CD. I heard B. B. King in concert a few times

there, and the Band once. I loved B. B., whom I met years

later, and I loved the Band.

But it was Bessie who came to stand for art in my mind. I

found her albums, three for 33 cents, in a bin on Eighth Street

while I was in high school, and once I listened to her I was

never the same. I don’t mean her kick-ass lyrics, though those

are pretty much the only blues lyrics I can still stomach. I

mean her stance. She had at itude on every level and at the

same time a cold artistry, entirely unsentimental. Her detachment equaled her commitment: she was going to sing the song through your corporeality. Unlike smoke, which circled

the body, her song went right through you, and either you

took what you could get of it for the moment the note was

moving inside you or she wasn’t for you and you were a bar ier

she penetrated. Any song she sang was a second-by-second

lesson in the meaning of mortality. The notes came from her

and tramped through your three-dimensional body but graceful y, a spartan, bearlike bal et. I listened to those three albums hundreds of times, and each time I learned more about what

art took from you to make: not love but art.

Before the compact-disc revolution, you couldn’t get good

or even passable albums by Ma Rainey, so she was a taste

deferred, and the brilliant Alberta Hunter came into my life

when I was in college and she was singing at the Cookery in

New York City, a very old black woman with a pianist as her

10

Music 3

sole accompaniment. I would have done pretty much anything

to hear Big Mama Thornton live, and, of course, for me,

college-aged, Janis Joplin was the top, the best, the risk-taker,

the one who left blood on the stage. When I lived on Crete,

still col ege-aged, Elvis won me with “Heartbreak Hotel. ”

Even now I can’t hear it without the winds from the Aegean

blowing right by me. But when it comes to conveying ideas

without words, jazz triumphs. A U. S. writer without jazz and

blues in her veins must have ice water instead.

11

The Pedophilic

Teacher

I was lucky enough to have three brilliant teachers in junior

high and high school. The first, in junior high, was Mr. Smith,

who was a political conservative at a time when the word was

not in common usage and not many people, including me,

knew what it meant. He taught English, especially how to

parse and diagram sentences, over and over, so that the structure of the language became embedded in one’s brain and was like gravity - no personal concern yet omnipresent. You could

run your fingers through English the way God could run his

fingers through your hair. He was the Czerny of grammar.

The second was Mr. Belfield, who taught honors American

history. I had him for two years, the eleventh and twelfth

grades. Very lit le at Bennington later was as interesting or as

demanding. He had unspeakably high standards, as befitted

someone who had wanted to be secretary of state. It was wonderful not to be condescended to; not to be simply passing time; not to waste the hours waiting for some minor diversion to make one alert; to have one’s own intellect stretched

12

The Pedophilic Teacher

until it was about ready to break. He too was a political

conservative and seemed to live a solitary, affectionless life.

But then, I wouldn’t know, would I? And that is exactly right.

There is no reason for any student to know. The line separating student and teacher needs to be drawn, and it’s up to the teacher to do it. The combination of Mr. Belfield’s own

intel ectual rigor and his substantive demands were a total

blessing: he taught me how to write a book. I worked hard in

his class, and I cannot think of any other teacher who was so

authentic and commit ed, whose pedagogy was disinterested

in the best sense, not a toying with the minds of students nor

fucking with their aspirations for bet er or worse: he wanted

heroic work - he demanded it. You might say that he was the

Wagner of American history without the loathsome anti-

Semitism and misshapen ego. Other people accused him of

ar ogance, but I thought he was humble - he was modest to

use his gifts to teach us. Neither Mr. Smith nor Mr. Belfield

ever al owed the deep sleep of mediocrity; neither wanted