Andrea Dworkin - The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

the suburbs, so it was hard to apply many of Che’s strategic

points; the land was flat, flat, flat; the mall - the first in the

country - was boring, boring, boring, emphatical y not Havana.

I studied Che’s principles of revolution day in and day out,

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The High School Library

and the school board was none the wiser. The shelves in the

library now were roomy, and the room itself seemed lower.

There weren’t books in piles to hold up the ceiling, nor were

there books that emanated heat and with the heat enough

light to be a candle in the darkness. It was as if anything the

school board recognized it did away with. I was almost out.

My term of imprisonment was almost up. My own hard time

was coming to an end. The pedophilic teacher had a lot of

anger and despair to fool around with, and he didn’t let any

of it go to waste. He’d tell you any story you wanted to hear,

give you the narrative of any book gone missing; Anna

Karenina went from being Tolstoy’s to being his.

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The Bookstore

Sometime during high school the very best thing happened:

at the mal a bookstore opened. This was a spectacular bookstore, independent, few hardcover books but they were out of my socioeconomic league anyway; and there was a whole rack

of City Lights books, yes, Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti and

Robert Duncan and Paul Blackburn and Gregory Corso and

Yevteshenko - anything City Lights published would show up

on that rack. It was al contemporary, al poetry, al incendiary,

al revolutionary, each book a Molotov cocktail. I'd be down

and the owners would point me to something, and I'd be up

and they’d point me to something else. It was a whole world

of books that I never dreamed could be so close to me, to

where I was physical y on the planet: this horrible, awful, stupid

suburb. The store was owned and run by two adults, Stan and

Phyl is Pogran, who were not trying to get between you and

the books; they brought you right to the trough and let you

drink. You could read the books in the store (there were no

chairs in bookstores back then); you didn’t have to buy and I

rarely could, although any money I had went to buy books or

music, which is stil the case. I had never met adults like Stan

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The Bookstore

and Phyllis. Later they separated and divorced, but I swear

they kept me alive and kicking: I never had a mood I couldn’t

find on their shelves.

There was never a book they tried to hide from you. At the

same time, they weren’t trying to use you - you weren’t the

day’s kick for them; they were the opposite of the pedophilic

teacher. They let me talk to them about books and about

being a writer and they talked right back about books and

writing. Amid the vulgarity of the shopping mall, with its

caged birds and fountains, its gushing-over department stores

and restaurants, there was this one island of insanity, since the

rest passed for normal. You could get close to any poet you

wanted and they, the booksellers, didn’t enforce the law on

you: they didn’t bayonet your guts until al the poetry had

spilled out, al the desire for poetry had been bled to death, al

the music in your heart had been lanced, al your dreams

trounced on and ripped to pieces. I found James Baldwin there

and read everything he had writ en; I breathed with him. I

found Mailer and Gore Vidal. I found Tennessee Williams and

Edward Albee. I’d walk over from my house in any spare time

I had - “I’m going to the mall, Ma” had its own legitimacy, a

reassuring, implicit conformity - and I’d haunt the shelves and

I’d find the world outside the world in which I was living.

I’d find a world of beauty and ideas. Corso liked Shel ey, so

I read Shelley and from him Byron and Keats. I read Joyce

and Miller and Homer and Euripides and Hemingway and

33

Heartbreak

Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein. They were al there, in this one

tiny bookstore, and my love af air with books became a wild

and long ride, bucking bronco after bucking bronco; I found

Genet and Burroughs; I read The Blacks and Naked Lunch.

Literature exploded. I found and read the early pirated edition

of The Story of O.

The only bad part was that I couldn’t live there, sleep in a

corner resting my head on a messed-up coat; the store would

close and I had to go home. By the next day I’d barely be able

to breathe from the thrill of knowing I was going to find a

way to get back to the bookstore and find another book and

one after that, another author and one after that.

It would be a few years before the feminist ferment would

begin to produce a renaissance of luminous and groundbreaking books; and Sexual Politics by Kate Millett did change my life. I was one of the ones it was writ en for, because I had

absorbed the writers she exposed, I had believed in them; in

the euphoria of finding what I thought were truth-tellers, I

had forgotten my father’s warning that some writers lie. But

stil , one doesn’t know what one doesn’t know, even Mailer,

even Albee. It’s not as if there’s an empty patch that one can

see and so one can say, “There’s my ignorance; it’s about ten

by ten and a dozen feet high and someday someone wil fil

in the empty patch and I’l find what I need, what I must

know in order to lead a ful and honorable life. ” These writers,

Stein excepted, did not acknowledge women as other than

34

The Bookstore

subhuman monsters of sex and predation; and their prose and

chutzpah made me a fellow traveler. Al one can do is to fight