Read Online What Do Women Want? by Erica Jong - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Erica Jong
Ads: Link
blossoms spring up with another. The witch can vaporize people at will, keep spring on earth all year long, make the lion lie down with the lamb. She can fly and enable others to fly. She can abolish death.
Surely we would like to be like her, and a book about witchcraft can only be a beginning. Like all secret arts, witchcraft is learned by apprenticeship. Its deepest secrets are printed nowhere. One witch hands down her grimoire to her successor, who alone can decipher its coded spells and recipes. If a true witch were to publish her secrets for all to see, she would immediately lose her powers.
“Power shared is power lost,” say the witches. Legend has it that true books on witchcraft have at times been published, but the pages spontaneously burned to cinders before they could be bound. So I had to be very careful when I published Witches. Like the weaver of a great rug who does not wish to arouse the wrath of Allah, I had to introduce small errors. I had to code certain messages and print my recipes and spells with missing ingredients or missing steps. Otherwise the book would go up in smoke before it could be read. But the clever reader, the witch-to-be, the natural adept of magick, will read about witchcraft holding in her hand a pen dipped in invisible ink. Guided by the unseen force, that hand will supply whatever is missing from my imperfect text. With practice, with deep concentration, the hand of the adept will fill in the missing formulae. Just as the Delphic oracle uttered words whose import she could not divine, the hand of the true witch-in-training will scribble the truth. Watch for those words. They are all the magick you will need to know.
5
BLOOD AND GUTS: A WOMAN WRITER IN THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY
It was better to be in a jail where you could bang the walls than in a jail you could not see.
—CARSON MCCULLERS
In Cynthia Ozick’s short story “Virility,” a talentless male poet gains fame by publishing the verses of his talented aunt under his own name. The book is entitled Virility and is accordingly praised for its “masculine” virtues: strength, power, mastery. The poet wins the homage of critics and the love of women, collects large lecture fees, and for a little while enjoys the kind of unambivalent success that is possible for men in a man’s world. When the aunt dies, the poet breaks down. In a fit of remorse, he publishes her last poems under her own name and confesses his imposture. Do critics thereby conclude that genius has no gender? Do they praise her work at last on its own merits? Of course not. “Lovely girlish verses,” the critics say; “thin, womanish perceptions.” A rose by any other name does not smell as sweet. A poem under a man’s name smells virile. Under a woman’s name, the same poem smells thin.
One of the most notable and faintly horrifying memories from my college years is of the time a distinguished critic came to my creative writing class and delivered himself of this thundering judgment: “Women can’t be writers. They don’t know blood and guts, and puking in the streets, and fucking whores, and swaggering through Pigalle at five A.M. . . .” But the most amazing thing was the response—or lack of it. It was 1961 or ’62, and we all sat there, aspiring women writers that we were, and listened to this claptrap without a word of protest. Our hands folded on our laps, our eyes modestly downcast, our hearts cast even lower than our eyes, we listened meekly—while the male voice of authority told us what women could or couldn’t write.
Things have changed since then. When I went to college (from 1959 to 1963), there were no women’s studies courses, no anthologies that stressed a female heritage, no public women’s movement. Poetry meant William Butler Yeats, James Dickey, Robert Lowell. Without even realizing it, I assumed that the voice of the poet had to be male. Not that I didn’t get a good literary education. I did.
Surely we would like to be like her, and a book about witchcraft can only be a beginning. Like all secret arts, witchcraft is learned by apprenticeship. Its deepest secrets are printed nowhere. One witch hands down her grimoire to her successor, who alone can decipher its coded spells and recipes. If a true witch were to publish her secrets for all to see, she would immediately lose her powers.
“Power shared is power lost,” say the witches. Legend has it that true books on witchcraft have at times been published, but the pages spontaneously burned to cinders before they could be bound. So I had to be very careful when I published Witches. Like the weaver of a great rug who does not wish to arouse the wrath of Allah, I had to introduce small errors. I had to code certain messages and print my recipes and spells with missing ingredients or missing steps. Otherwise the book would go up in smoke before it could be read. But the clever reader, the witch-to-be, the natural adept of magick, will read about witchcraft holding in her hand a pen dipped in invisible ink. Guided by the unseen force, that hand will supply whatever is missing from my imperfect text. With practice, with deep concentration, the hand of the adept will fill in the missing formulae. Just as the Delphic oracle uttered words whose import she could not divine, the hand of the true witch-in-training will scribble the truth. Watch for those words. They are all the magick you will need to know.
5
BLOOD AND GUTS: A WOMAN WRITER IN THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY
It was better to be in a jail where you could bang the walls than in a jail you could not see.
—CARSON MCCULLERS
In Cynthia Ozick’s short story “Virility,” a talentless male poet gains fame by publishing the verses of his talented aunt under his own name. The book is entitled Virility and is accordingly praised for its “masculine” virtues: strength, power, mastery. The poet wins the homage of critics and the love of women, collects large lecture fees, and for a little while enjoys the kind of unambivalent success that is possible for men in a man’s world. When the aunt dies, the poet breaks down. In a fit of remorse, he publishes her last poems under her own name and confesses his imposture. Do critics thereby conclude that genius has no gender? Do they praise her work at last on its own merits? Of course not. “Lovely girlish verses,” the critics say; “thin, womanish perceptions.” A rose by any other name does not smell as sweet. A poem under a man’s name smells virile. Under a woman’s name, the same poem smells thin.
One of the most notable and faintly horrifying memories from my college years is of the time a distinguished critic came to my creative writing class and delivered himself of this thundering judgment: “Women can’t be writers. They don’t know blood and guts, and puking in the streets, and fucking whores, and swaggering through Pigalle at five A.M. . . .” But the most amazing thing was the response—or lack of it. It was 1961 or ’62, and we all sat there, aspiring women writers that we were, and listened to this claptrap without a word of protest. Our hands folded on our laps, our eyes modestly downcast, our hearts cast even lower than our eyes, we listened meekly—while the male voice of authority told us what women could or couldn’t write.
Things have changed since then. When I went to college (from 1959 to 1963), there were no women’s studies courses, no anthologies that stressed a female heritage, no public women’s movement. Poetry meant William Butler Yeats, James Dickey, Robert Lowell. Without even realizing it, I assumed that the voice of the poet had to be male. Not that I didn’t get a good literary education. I did.
Similar Books
