Andrea Dworkin - The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

when she graded an essay on contemporary education a B

because, as she said to me, some commas were wrong and it

wasn’t anything personal, after a halfhearted and utterly futile

argument I accepted the B. She even put her arm around me,

genuinely adding insult to injury. I knew I’d get her someday

and this is it: eat shit, bitch. No one said that sisterhood was

easy.

26

The High School

Library

Nowadays librarians actively try to get students Internet access

to pornography, at least in the United States. Organized as a

First Amendment lobby group, librarians go to court - or their

professional organizations do - to defend pornographers and

pornography. Truly, this does not happen because James Joyce

and Henry Miller were banned as obscene a hundred years

ago; I once wrote an affidavit for a court on the differences

between Nabokov’s Lolita and a pimp’s pictorial with words,

“Lolita Pissing. ” These are some of life’s easier distinctions. I

used to ask groups of folks how the retailers of pornography

could tell the difference between Joyce and hard-core visual

pornography. I noted that although, generally speaking, they

weren’t the best and the brightest, they managed never to

stock Ulysses . If they could do it, I thought, so could the rest

of us. Instead, the idea seems to be that keeping a child -

someone underaged - away from anything is akin to treason.

One is violating sacred constitutional rights and assassinating

Jefferson, Washington, and Lincoln (for the second time).

27

Heartbreak

In my high school days, librarians were the militia, the first

line of defense in keeping the underaged away from books, al

sorts of books in every field.

My high school library was tall, I remember, as if piles of

books held up the ceiling; it was dense with books organized

according to the Dewey decimal system. I liked to look at and

to touch the books. I believed I could feel the heat emanating

from them, and no heat meant no light. My father had told

me I had to read everything, that to read books of only one

view was the equivalent of a moral wrong. When I asked why,

he uttered the incomprehensible words: “Sometimes writers

lie.” In my early years, my parents made up for the latitude

they gave me in reading by seeing to it that I read on a continuum, both political and literary. When I went weak in the knees for Dostoyevsky, my dad gave me some Mark Twain or

my mother one of Eric Bentley’s books on the theater. I just

wanted to read everything; there was never enough. It wasn’t

quite as simple as it sounds. My mother was more tense about

what I read than my father, but then, she was in the thick of

it: my bad attitudes, bad habits, and bad behavior. I did get

ideas from books: that’s what they’re for. I’ve been astonished

by the pro-pornography argument that people are not influenced by what they read or see. Why, then, bother writing or making films? One wants to persuade. One wants to knock

the reader senseless with the shock of the new or the old

reconceived. Rimbaud articulated the writing ambition when

28

The High School Library

he wanted to derange the senses, though he meant his own.

Sometimes it’s the rawness of the writing that makes everything inside shake and break; sometimes it’s the delicacy of the writing that makes everything inside simply recognize a reality

different from the known one or experience a lyricism heretofore unknown. For me, subtle writing was almost always anti-urban; it took me to the steppes of Russia or Huck Finn*s

South.

The library brought the world to me: I went with Darwin

on the HMS Beagle and I dived with Freud into the mind and

I plot ed with Marx about how to end poverty. I had read

most of Freud, al of Darwin, and most of Marx before I graduated from high school. This was not with the help of the high school librarians.

Instead, I learned their work schedules, because we were not

allowed to take out more than two books a day and I needed

a bigger fix than that. Al records were kept by hand. So if I

went into the library during a new shift, I could get two more

books, then two more, then two more. The librarians treated

the books like contraband, and so did I. My friends and I had

a commitment to Catcher in the Rye , which was not allowed

in the library. We bought a lot of copies over time. We shelved

them. Each time it would be a different one of us who had

the responsibility for get ing the book into the library, on the

shelves. Sometimes we catalogued the book - what was gained

if no one knew it was there? - and other times we shelved it

29

Heartbreak

as if it were plastique. Eventually the head librarian would

find it; we’d know by the dirty looks we got from her long

before we got to check on the book itself.

Catcher was a rallying point for our high school intelligentsia. I remember going to my parents for help: I asked if they would fight with the school board to get the book in the

library. They would not. I found this refusal confusing, an

abrogation of everything they had taught me. Actually it

outraged me. One of my friends had his editorial removed

from the school paper because it was about the wrongness of

banning Catcher from the high school library. So we fought

on, invisible guardians of one orphan book.

Then one day it happened: the school board took things

in hand themselves. They went through the library to get rid

of al socialistic, communistic, anti-God books. Surveying the

damage when they had finished, I saw no Eugene V Debs or

Norman Thomas, certainly no Darwin, Freud, or Marx; but

one slim volume cal ed Guerril a Warfare by a person named

Che Guevara had escaped the purge. I was bound for life to

the man. I studied that book the way the Chinese were forced

to study Chairman Mao. I planned revolutionary attacks on

the local shopping mall. We had a paucity of mountains in