Lily Briscoe. Mary Meigs
with Edmund created in me a mixture of fear, shyness, humility, anger, uneasy love, pride, and a terrible anxiety that, through my unworthiness, I would lose his friendship. Our friendship was complicated (for me, at least) by the fact that, for several years, he believed himself to be in love with me. I was, in fact, one of a good many women he loved during this time, but I was close at hand, whereas they (except for Elena, his wife) were far away. I did not want Edmund to be in love with me; I could not believe he really was, yet I was afraid he would cease to be, knowing the indifference that follows on the heels of love. “We belong to the same generation,” he used to say, though he was old enough to be my father. He meant that we both belonged to the time of “ladies” and “gentlemen”; that we both had authentic good manners and impressive pedigrees. He had all the courtliness and gallantry of an old-fashioned gentleman, but at the same time, he belonged to the world of brutal maleness, of the Minotaur, that still frightens me; the world that accepts sex and its violence as a matter of course. How could he know not only that I was profoundly ignorant of this world, but also that I had yet to come to terms with myself, that the question, which seemed inexcusable to me when he asked it, was probably for him quite ordinary? “You’re really a sort of Lesbian, aren’t you?” He said this to me one evening when we were alone and I was in the state of slight apprehension I always felt with him. It was the first time in my life that anyone had associated the word “Lesbian” with me in my presence and the question made me feel faint and sick with terror. It was there, faceless, like the “Thing” that swelled and hummed in the dark when I was a child in bed at night, a black something, an extension of me that got bigger and bigger until it filled the whole room. I heard my stifled voice say, “I wouldn’t say that,” felt myself leave the house to go home where I spent a tormented and sleepless night. The next morning, Edmund called to apologize for having upset me, for mixed in with his blindness was a surprising delicacy, which made him, when I least expected it, protective of my feelings.
A “sort of.” Perhaps all women artists are “sort of’s”? The mitigating “sort of,” lightly touching, without accusation, with an indulgent smile, all those women who wore pants before the time of pants, who inspired passions in other women, who, very often (fortunately for their biographers), had male lovers and husbands. They were bisexual, a respectable thing to be these days. Käthe Kollwitz, for instance, say her biographers, Mina and Arthur Klein, “though for her attraction for the masculine sex dominated . . . had found an inclination toward her own sex which she grew to understand only in her maturity. She came then to believe that such bisexuality is essential for the highest attainments in art. The masculine element within her, she felt, strengthened her own creative work.” Facts like these about women artists, long hidden or glossed over, are now acceptable elements of their biographies, though in the eyes of the world, it is permissible for a woman to have “an inclination toward her own sex,” only if she has married and produced at least one child. The marriage, the child, are the payment she must make to convention in order to have the freedom to love women. Kathe Kollwitz had the good fortune to be able to love her husband and children, to be an admirable mother and a toweringly great artist, and to love women without the pain and dislocation of her life that other androgynous women have suffered.
When Edmund asked if I wasn’t really a “sort of Lesbian,” I still lived in the shadowy world of denial and pretense, even though I was then living with another woman. How would I have felt if he had said, “You’re really androgynous, aren’t you?” Would I have been as terrified? Even then, the word “androgynous” did not carry a weight of opprobrium like the word “Lesbian”; on the other hand, “androgynous” which, unlike “hermaphrodite,” seems to imply a spiritual and mental, rather than physical blending of the sexes, had not yet acquired its current dignity. “Androgyny,” as the word is now used, has nothing to do with sex; it implies, rather, a new being, free of sexual stereotypes, a person who may be heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual. But a “sort of Lesbian,” the “sort of” added for the sake of politeness, was something else again. No one had ever dared say to me what I was and I had not dared say it to myself with the proper conviction. Under pressure from a heterosexual friend, I had (before I knew Edmund) a week-long affair with a man in Italy, pleasant enough, but ending in recrimination on both sides. From the time I was very young, I fell in love with men, women, heads, eyes and voices. I even fell in love, as I still do, with objects. I remember at six, being so enamoured of a jack-in-the-box for sale in a booth in the Tuileries that I howled all day long when my mother refused to buy it for me, and I believe the passion for things to be one of the many forms that sexual repression can take.
At the age of eleven, I had never heard of sex, did not know that people made love, and had never wondered where babies came from. On a voyage to Europe at this time, I wrote a poem about the sea beating against “Miss Porthole,” which I found thirty years later and showed Edmund, who kept it for himself. “A sexual image,” I could almost hear him thinking as he laughed delightedly over it, but couldn’t Miss Porthole really have been a porthole, and the sea, the sea? For anyone who has read Freud, everything in nature contains a sexual overtone, and a little girl who has never seen a vagina, who does not know the meaning of the word “virgin,” somehow achieves a prophetic use of sexual imagery. The fact was that for a long time my loves were purely visual and belonged to a realm where sex is non-existent. Perhaps they caused my childish heart to beat, but the physical reality, the coming close of any body with its everyday details, was invariably a shock to me. Objects and animals remained the same or were even more seductive if you looked closely at them, but men turned into the sum of their details: their huge feet, the hair that often covered their arms, legs, chests, or even sprouted from their ears, emphasizing their close cousinship with the apes, their mouths, their chins, like rough sandpaper, the friction of which, in those days of dancing cheek to cheek, left one’s face sore for days. My fallings in love were a succession of failures, much more pronounced with men, but bedeviling even my relationships with women, as if a disgust of bodies had been planted in me like a curse. My interest in male bodies was purely plastic: I liked to look at men or boys who were clad in their skins like beautiful animals, with a rippling of hidden muscles when they moved, or when they posed negligently, with one hip bone thrown a little outward, with their hands on their hips, thumbs turned backwards, broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped like 6th Century Greek Kouroi, or like the walking Egyptian figures I have seen in the Louvre. Women, too, appear in those distant times to have had broad shoulders and narrow hips, or so one would infer from a 7th Century B.C. stone statue of an Egyptian woman in the Louvre, or from Hera of Samos (6th Century B.C.), herself the shape of a Kouros in her exquisite fine-fluted robe. These androgynous women seemed much more beautiful to me than the curvaceous and overly-modest Venus de Milo or the women with massive thighs and buttocks beloved by Rubens and Courbet. If I have never succeeded in liking Rubens, it is because of the sheer weight of all that well-fed female flesh—pink with what must have been the excellent circulation of the time. As for Courbet, whom I revere, the pallid and bloated bodies of his women suggest, not robust health, but the imminence of death—or perhaps a very cold studio.
My father and brothers did not take the unselfconscious poses of Greek statues, but had, nevertheless, much of their fineness of bone: beautiful wrists, ankles, feet and hands. Each was unhappy in his body, like an awkward adolescent, and hid it under clothes or droopy bathing suits (men had not yet begun to bare their torsos when I was little). The three men in our house had none of the redolence of men, the heaviness, the suggestion of sensuality. They had all been indoctrinated, like the female inhabitants of the house, with the idea that the body should, as far as possible, cease to exist. We were still encumbered by our bodies, which were like forbidden subjects, literally hidden by clothes and denied their physicality.
Later, I was both unconscious of my body and self-conscious, and my self-consciousness prevented me from putting the pagan energy into love-making that most people take for granted. My brief experience with a man gave me pleasure because I was scarcely aware of our bodies in the dark, just of a cool harmony with its terminal delight. Perhaps the reader will find it hard to believe that it is possible for a woman to make love with a man without ever setting eyes on his body, but such was my case. I remember how one afternoon Patricio and I walked to a lonely field on the heights of Anticoli (the little Italian village where we spent the summer) and how he sank down on me in the warm, dry grass with all the discretion of the swan