Siri Hustvedt - The Blazing World

It was preposterous. Harry Burden, demigod of the studio, trying to resurrect her dead husband and father over and over again, the machinery of grief churning away as she sewed and stuffed and wired and sawed and molded and soldered, but it helped. It helped, and I had come to a pass where I accepted help in all forms.

After a year of frantic spousal and paternal or perhaps spouernal creation, I began to muse about the creatures that lived in my memory, not only actual persons, but those borrowed from my vast collection of books. I don’t mean just characters but ideas, voices, shapes, figures, articulated thoughts, unarticulated feelings. I would call them metamorphs, and they would be cool or warm or hot or room temperature.

It may have been April Rain who told some of the other young stragglers around the neighborhood that I had rooms and beds to spare, but it’s more likely that it was Edgar Holloway III, a refugee from the Upper East Side and musician friend of Ethan’s, several years out of college, who sought work to supplement his rock ’n’ roll dreams. Edgar became my construction assistant. A stocky boy with an upturned nose that looked too small for his face, he was strong, docile, and a quick study when it came to materials and building. He was remarkably dull when it came to conversation, however, but this liberated me from any need to entertain him or explicate the meanings of my rooms or the critters I was putting inside them. I wasn’t sure what I was doing anyway.

What I did know was that I had been sitting on myself for years and that something had happened to me. Dr. Fertig used the word inhibition . I had become less inhibited, untied and unfettered. I could thank all the vomiting. The symptom had prompted the talk and the turn. I had become Harriet Unbound, only fifty-five then, but counting, and I did wonder about other paths, the alternative existences, the other Harry Burden who might have, could have, should have unleashed herself earlier, or a Harry Burden who had looked like April Rain, petite and pinkish, or a Harry who had been born a boy, a real Harry, not a Harriet. I would have made a strapping young man with my height and wild hair. Hadn’t I heard my mother bemoan all those inches wasted on a girl? The thought of another body, another style of being haunted me. Was this a form of regret? I wondered what my consciousness would feel like in Edgar’s body. I certainly did not want Edgar’s mind, filled to the brim with techno bands and run-on sentences with the word man popping up in them as continual, meaningless punctuation. The fantasy that began to take shape revolved around possible trajectories for me, an artist of multifarious shapes.

I suspected that if I had come in another package my work might have been embraced or, at least, approached with greater seriousness. I didn’t believe that there had been a plot against me. Much of prejudice is unconscious. What appears on the surface is an unidentified aversion, which is then justified in some rational way. Perhaps being ignored is worse — that look of boredom in the eyes of the other person, that assurance that nothing from me could be of any possible interest. Nevertheless, I had hoarded my direct hits and humiliations, and they had made me gun-shy.

Not to my face: That’s Felix Lord’s wife. She makes dollhouses. Titters.

To my face: I heard that Jonathan took your work because he’s a friend of Felix. Plus they needed a woman in the stable.

In a rag: The show at Jonathan Palmer by Harriet Burden, wife of legendary art dealer Felix Lord, consists of small architectural works cluttered with various figures and texts. The work has no discipline or focus and seems to be an odd blend of pretentiousness and naïveté. One can only wonder why these pieces were deemed worthy of exhibition. III

Time had made the feelings worse, not better. Despite Rachel’s prompting that I return to the fray, I knew that youth was the desired commodity and that, despite the Guerrilla Girls, it was still better to have a penis.IV I was over the hill and had never had a penis. It was too late for me to go as myself. I had disappeared for good, and the ease with which I had done so had made it clear to me how shallow my relations had been with all of them. They had come to the memorial service, or at least some of them had. By the time he died, Felix’s heyday had passed. He had become historical, the dealer to P. and L. and T. of days gone by. His wife was ahistorical, but what if I could return as another person? I began to make up stories of ingenious disguise. Like a latter-day Holmes, I would dissolve into my costumes and fool even the children and Rachel with my clever personas. I drew images of possible Harrys: Superman Harry with cape; homeless, sexually ambiguous Harry hauling bottles; old man dandy Harry with short, neat white beard; Harry as male cross-dresser (quite convincing); Harry grinning with modest-size-in-the-Hellenic-tradition male genitalia. And I took some inspiration from the past:

[An] His[toric]al and Phy[s]ic[al] Dissertation on the Case of Catherine Vizzani, containing the Adventures of a Young Woman, born at Rome, who for eight years passed in the Habit of a Man, was killed for an Amour with a young Lady; and being found on Dissection, a true Virgin, narrowly escaped being treated as a Saint by the Populace. With some curious and anatomical Remarks on the Nature and Existence of the Hymen. By Giovanni Bianchi, Professor of Anatomy at Sienna, the Surgeon who dissected her. To which are added, certain needful Remarks by the English Editor. (London: Meyer, 1751)

Not long after Professor Bianchi’s treatise was published in England, translated and edited by John Cleland, the notorious author of Fanny Hill , Charles d’Eon de Beaumont, French diplomat, spy, and captain of the dragoons, began to appear in public wearing women’s clothing. He explained that he had been raised as a boy but was in fact a woman. She published a memoir called La Vie militaire, politique et privée de Madmoiselle d’Eon. At her death, she was discovered to have male genitalia.

There was also the remarkable case of Dr. James Barry, who entered medical school at the University of Edinburgh in 1809, passed his examination for the Royal College of Surgeons in England in 1813, became a surgeon in the military, traveled from post to post, and rose through the ranks. When his career ended, he was inspector general in charge of military hospitals in Canada. He died in London in 1865 from dysentery. It was then discovered that he had been a she. Barred from medicine by her sex, she had changed it.

Billie Tipton, successful jazz musician, born Dorothy Lucille Tipton in 1914, was denied a spot in her high school band because she was a girl, began performing as a man, and then moved entirely into a masculine life, had a long-term relationship with one Kitty Oakes, a former stripper, and adopted three sons with her. None of them knew until his death in 1989 that anatomically Billie had been a woman.

There are many stories and as many reasons for leaving the feminine behind and adopting the masculine, or dropping either one for the other, as was convenient. There were women who followed their husbands to war and fought to be near them, and women who fought purely from patriotic fervor and, after the battle, returned to being women. There were women who posed as men to inherit their fathers’ fortunes and women who had lost everything — husbands and children and money — who felt too vulnerable to go on as women and turned themselves into men. Many of them had sympathetic mothers and fathers and siblings and friends who kept their secret. Some garments, a name, a differently inflected voice, and the gestures to go with them were all that was required. After a time being a man became effortless. Moreover, it became real.