In a way this subsubculture of literary blogs, fluid, amorphous, non-hierarchical, functions as a community of solidarity, privately and publicly — fighting against feelings of illegitimacy and invisibility, of feeling like ghosts in the physical world. We send our love, constantly. We have never or rarely met, and we might never meet, in person. We are sometimes transatlantic penpals, intimates. Bett Williams refers to this online community of mostly women writers as a “brainy coven”—I like that. The necessity to have this sort of community in our semi-public existences as writers, a desire to rally against the threat of one’s own invisibility and inconseqentiality.
(Although I don’t mean to pretend a utopian community online — for all of the generosity I’m describing, I’ve also experienced the opposite online, even between and with writers I admire, a competiveness or cattiness that mirrors and mimics all of the little literary cliques and enclaves of the past, like mean girls McCarthy and Hardwick dismissing Mrs. Trilling or Anaïs Nin. The oldguard oftentimes devouring the young.)
Yet in this small circle I’m writing towards, the bloggers and writers I met on FFIMS, many of us write passionate essays about each other’s posts or books. We mythologize ourselves and our processes, not unlike what Flaubert did, his community of family and friends who gathered around and listened to the words he wrote that day. God, think about Flaubert, who was so confident and full of himself, and had the support system of friends and family enabling him to write for years and years without publishing, all the while maintaining his belief in himself as a writer. This we must remember, when we fight feelings of illegitimacy because we are not published or are semi-published, on a small scale. Anaïs Nin who so agonized about this. In her journals, she bemoaned the small audiences for her books, she who self-published, who worried over her career, her invisibility, her publicness, always. (Certainly Anaïs Nin would have blogged.)
So much of modernism is about mythology. The Bloomsbury Group were always writing about each other, performing and posing for each other, publishing each other on presses and little reviews, publicizing each other. Even when they were self-published (like Virginia Woolf on her Hogarth press). They themselves were a large part of why they are remembered. Now we don’t have Peggy Guggenheim to help support us, unlike Jane Bowles or Djuna Barnes, or even much of a chance of ever getting a Guggenheim. We take to the online culture to publicize ourselves and our friends. Alienated from the capitalist machine and the big New York presses, misfits of the academy, perhaps we have started to reinvent the spaces of modernism with their networks and little magazines.
I think what publishing can do is help cement one’s own self-identity as a writer — one can do without it, of course, but eventually most writers feel some need for readers, for a communion with the outside. But perhaps the Internet has changed this — perhaps the very act of having readers now makes authors of us. Self-published, Xeroxed in zines, blogged on LiveJournal, later Tumblr, Wordpress, Xanga, Blogger, in micropresses, in comments sections, we write in the margins.
The girl-student with her Marilyn Monroe purse who told me she wanted to write, desperately — but didn’t have an agent. This is the idea we need to destroy. We need to foster our own method of agency.
We cannot wait around to be discovered. If you can’t write masterpieces why write? the doctors said to Zelda. Perhaps the goal is not to be the next Great American (Male) Novelist. This is perhaps closed to us anyway. The point, perhaps, is to write — by god to write — to write and refuse erasure while we’re living at least — and to use up all the channels possible through which to scream, to sing, to singe. All of these things. To write because we desire to, because we need to — and to refuse to be ignored. Or stopped.
The key is to convince ourselves, as Fitzgerald and Flaubert, Eliot and Ezra did, of our eventual genius.
A new ritual I practice, as I get ready to write, I put on my new 4-inch platforms and stand in front of my floorlength mirror, sometimes as I’m eating chocolate almond-milk ice cream, and I intone to the mirror to myself: You’re a fucking genius.
Now you try it.
The only way our narratives will be told is if we write them ourselves. I urge you to write your own selves, your true and complicated selves. My scribbling sisters. We are amateurs. We are dilettantes. We are all those terms they use to dismiss the girl writing. We need, perhaps, to reclaim these terms, as well as these categories of “minor” or “outsider” or “illegitimate.”
If I have communicated anything to you I hope it is the absolute urgency to write yourself, your body, your own experience. The absolute necessity for you to write yourself in order to understand yourself, in order to become yourself. I ask you to fight against your own disappearance. To refuse to self-immolate. Or to launch yourself as a burning, glorious spectacle into outer space. To scratch yourself out and begin again, to die and resurrect.
A different sort of nerve is needed. To say fuck you to these internal and social prohibitions dictating what literature should be about. Fuck you to the objective correlative. Fuck the canon. Fuck the boys with their big books.
For, after all, we must be our own heroines.
Working Bibliography
This book is a work of synthesis, a sort of stewing upon a vast number of things, how they intersect, contradict, reveal and obscure, mythologize and memorialize. I sometimes quote from biographies without citation. Most of the time when referencing Vivien(ne) Eliot or Zelda Fitzgerald I am quoting from either the Carole Seymour-Jones biography of Vivien(ne) or Sally Cline’s biography of Zelda, both biographies that I would recommend if you want to read more in detail about these women, along with Hermione Lee’s biography of Virginia Woolf and Millicent Dillon’s on Jane Bowles. David Laskin’s book Partisans was an excellent, and extremely important cultural history that I mined for biographical detail about Elizabeth Hardwick and Mary McCarthy. For a consideration of the connection between automatic writing and l’écriture féminine, I am indebted to Katharine Conley’s Automatic Woman. In considering a feminist as well as Foucauldian context in the history of diagnosis of mental disorders, I was inspired by both Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady and Foucault’s own work.
Ackroyd, Peter. T.S. Eliot: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984.
Adler, Renata. Speedboat. New York: Picador, 1978.
Alvarez, A. The Savage God: A Study of Suicide. New York: W.W. Norton, 1990.
Angell, Marcia. “The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why?” New York Review of Books, June 23, 2011.
. “The Illusions of Psychiatry” New York Review of Books, July 14, 2011.
Angier, Carole. Jean Rhys: Life and Work. Boston: Little, Brown, 1990.
Appignanesi, Lisa. Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors. New York: W.W. Norton, 2008.
Aviv, Rachel. “Which Way Madness Lies: Can Psychosis Be Prevented?” Harper’s, December 2010.
Bachmann, Ingeborg. Malina. Translated by Philip Boehm. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1999.
Bair, Deirdre. Anaïs Nin: A Biography. London: Bloomsbury, 1995.
Barnes, Djuna. Nightwood. Introduction by T.S. Eliot. New York: New Directions, 1937.
. Nightwood: The Original Version and Related Drafts. Edited by Cheryl J. Plumb. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995.