Lover. Bertha Harris
about Daughters; Susan Sontag, being “male-identified,” occupied the place in the literary firmament which rightfully belonged to June and if the women’s movement had done its work, instead of screwing around so much, the male literary establishment would by now have been replaced by Daughters, starring June instead of Susan Sontag.
Parke was secretive and close-mouthed about her personal life, her background, and her political beliefs. She behaved as if a sort of House on Un-American Activities, manned by a sort of Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn, had its ears to her ground waiting to use anything she might reveal about herself against her. It’s possible that her extreme reserve happened in reaction to the political demands radical and lesbian feminists were making at the time: that class, racial, ethnic, and sexual bounderies separating women could be abolished only by a detailed public disclosure along these lines about one’s own life. Knowledge, in effect, would invariably bring about understanding of the “other,” and understanding would accomplish a united front. It was acknowledged that lesbians, especially poor and/or black and/or disabled (and so forth) lesbians, were the most “other.”
But Parke loathed being identified as a lesbian, and she was deeply suspicious of the “most other,” who, she was certain, would be breaking down the doors to garner for themselves her money and her privileges of skin and class if they were given half a chance.
Meanwhile, June was out there competing for movement prestige by proclaiming herself a lesbian and enthusiastically letting it be known that Daughters was offering the great unwashed half a chance. June made it impossible for Parke to stay absolutely nailed in the closet. When June was addressing women’s groups, or giving readings, Parke kept herself in the deep background: she didn’t want to seem to agree with June’s lesbian-feminist stance but at the same time she wanted to be around to defend June in case the “most other” went for June’s highly privileged throat. No wonder Parke was a nervous wreck.
Parke was born on February 7 in either 1933 or 1934. She told me that she had been raised, for a while, by her parents in New Jersey, where she would eventually go to college and law school. But while she and her brother, she said, were still children, her grandparents decided that they didn’t want Parke and her brother to be raised by “flappers,” so they went to court and got custody of the two children. Parke gave me the impression that her parents were a sort of jeunesse dorée, New Jersey style. Parke also once told me that her father was someone very important with the Atomic Energy Commission. Which is how, Parke told me, she’d learned how to keep her mouth shut; loose lips sink ships, the government had warned the nation during World War II.
Parke told me that the grandmother who’d raised her finally lived in reclusive splendor in a big isolated house in upstate New York and ordered all her food (mostly cans of petit pois) from S. S. Pierce. The conclusion of Parke’s life was not unlike her grandmother’s.
According to Parke, she had severed every connection with all members of her family very early on. She never told me why. She was neutral and cautious when she talked about her beginnings; if she had any feelings for her family, she did not betray them to me. Given the more difficult aspects of her personality—intolerant, hostile, judgmental, unforgiving—I imagine that she was raised harshly. When June spoke of her own upbringing, and she did, frequently and nostalgically, it sounded to me as if she enjoyed endless love and spoiling, especially from her mother.
The first writer Daughters published who got more attention than June felt she deserved was, of course, Rita Mae Brown.
Daughters Publishing Company, Inc., “Publishers of Fiction by Women,” was created in 1972 to disguise, and legitimize, the fact that June was forced to resort to vanity publishing. Her first novel, Applesauce, written while she was still living in Houston, was published in 1966 by McGraw-Hill and was reprinted by Daughters ten years later.
She wrote her second novel, The Cook and the Carpenter, during her first two or three years with Parke in Vermont. Her first version of the work was an explicit tale of lesbian grand passion, a roman à clef of her relationship with the “cook.” That version, had Parke not interfered with it, might have gotten the mainstream publication June wanted for it, although probably not until June had excised the gender-neutral “na” she used and replaced it with the usual pronouns. But Parke, as she would tell me in detail, was appalled to find herself destined to be in print so openly a lesbian. She demanded from June, and got, cuts, rewrites, equivocation, and dense disguises in the novel’s final version. The Cook and the Carpenter was rejected by all the mainstream publishers.
Hence, Daughters, at a time when June still loved the women’s movement, which would, June was certain, recognize her feminist literary masterpiece in return. And so it did—the educated, habitual book-reading part of the women’s movement, in time, did show a proper appreciation for The Cook and the Carpenter —but not fast enough and never, in June’s view, sufficiently. Nor did the “right” women (the poet Adrienne Rich, for example, and Susan Sontag) ever respond appropriately, or, perhaps, at all. What the movement did respond to, immediately, and with love, was another novel on Daughters’ first list, Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown.
Rita Mae Brown’s first novel is as far removed from the woeful tradition of the Lesbian Gothick as it is from The Cook and the Carpenter’s stylistic mannerisms and equivocation. Rubyfruit is a funny, straightforward tale of the picaresque adventures of Molly Bolt, and Molly Bolt is lesbian mens sana in corpore sano entire. In no time, Molly Bolt became a conquering heroine. To a greater or lesser extent, every woman, gay or straight, who read Rubyfruit wished she could be more like Molly Bolt.
Parke rejoiced in Rubyfruit’s financial success. She had joined in creating Daughters to become a businesswoman. But Rita Mae Brown’s success humiliated June. The popular acclaim June had counted on from the women’s movement had gone to someone else; nor was there any praise forthcoming from New York’s literary community. June’s covert purpose in founding Daughters was annulled in little more than a year. Nearly as demeaning, the same mainstream houses that had rejected The Cook and the Carpenter soon began trying to buy the rights to Rubyfruit Jungle from Daughters. Parke wisely held on to the rights until she got what she considered top dollar in the deal.
Even worse, Rita Mae had unwittingly scored another sort of triumph over June. Like Molly Bolt, Rita Mae Brown was still in her twenties; she was attractive, sexually desirable, and sexually active. Rita Mae’s outrageous mots, and singular fearlessness, coupled as they were with warmth and charm, endeared her to most women. June was old enough to be Rita Mae’s mother. June had, in middle age, the body of a teenage athlete (but so did Rita Mae) but only Parke got to see it. At last a lesbian, June was confined (it was as bad as being a wife) in a relationship with a woman who wasn’t all that crazy about sex but was certainly crazy when it came to sexual jealousy. When June tried to be charming, like Rita Mae, she often came off like a deep-fried version of Scarlett. When she tried to be outrageous, she sounded either pompous or scary. June had a scanty sense of humor; Rita Mae was able to make people laugh. Up from poverty, Rita Mae was a self-made woman. If anything, June’s wealth mititated against her in the women’s movement, which tended, in that era, to equate poverty with political virtue.
Officially, the women’s movement didn’t have stars, but it was composed of human beings so of course it did; and Rita Mae, who had great native charisma as well as political wit, was one of the movement’s first stars. Rita Mae had, in fact, along with Charlotte Bunch, and other members of what was to become the Furies collective in Washington, D.C., been among the first (during the sixties) to posit, and see into print, the politics of lesbian-feminism which June espoused. June had hoped, since the time of the Third Street Building takeover, to be that too: a movement star.
Daughters’ degeneration began with its first list, a year after its founding in 1973, with—as June saw it—the unjust victory of an inferior woman over a superior one. The rest of that first list was, to June, simply high-quality filler.
Parke was proud of Rita Mae’s success. But a united front was crucial to both of the partners. Parke finally, reluctantly, agreed with June that it wasn’t fair.
June