But some stories can’t help being soggy, as on one dusk-time in New Hampshire, when I find myself in my man-boy costume. Lugging skis and a pack, I have just come from Tuckerman’s Ravine, a bowl whose walls are famously steep, and I am feeling like an epic hero for having skied down them alone. This time, instead of mysteriously ending up half-clothed, I’ve just as mysteriously ended up on the road with too large a load. My thumb brings no luck as the sky turns black and sends down starlight only in the form of giant flakes.
Finally, a semi stops — its headlights bore a tunnel through the swirling globs of wet snow while I climb into its cab. The driver reacts with surprise when he realizes I am a girl, and for a while I try to talk to him in French, though in no time I fall asleep. It is a mystery to me, how we crossed the border — and I wake up slumped against him. My drool is cold and wets his sleeve.
Bonnie Without Clyde: The Romance of Being Bad
The movie Bonnie and Clyde opens with Faye Dunaway wearing not a stitch — she’s just a daybreak cloud in false eyelashes. When she looks through the bars of her iron headboard, we know this shot means to show us that she feels like she’s in prison there in her mama’s house. And also that her body is part of the prison problem, that she wants to make some kind of storm with its rosy cloud. The lightning will come from her tommy gun and the rain will be her blood. So the movie’s violent final splatter tells us nothing we don’t already know two minutes in.
The appeal of the clodhopper who is Warren Beatty’s Clyde is that he intuits all this about her when he shows up out of nowhere to steal her mama’s car. Good thing he’s impotent, that instead of his penis he puts a gun into her hands, which suits her better anyhow, since she can be photographed with the gun as though it were her own lethal erection. And though the critic Pauline Kael was a fan of the movie, she faulted its cheesy climax, when Clyde is cured. What finally makes him hard (and though it may be cheesy, I do love this about the story) is Bonnie’s writing a poem about him and then getting it published. To him, a published poem means bona fide (boner-fied!) immortality.
Kael points out that the movie’s concoction of Bonnie is confused in the way it collapses time: the story takes place in the 1930s, but her makeup and hairdo put her in the 1960s, when the movie was made. If I think about an outlaw woman poet of the 1960s, the person who pops first into my head is Sylvia Plath, calling her daddy a bastard. This is a curious reversaclass="underline" the child accusing the father of being illegitimate. It’s a blasphemy that seems as ancient as it is screwball.
I remember vividly when my sister called my father a bastard. It only happened once, which gave the word special power to burn a permanent neural pathway in my brain. We-the-family were on our yearly Hajj to a whitewashed motel in Virginia called the Whispering Pines, a crumbling ruin, though the fame of its restaurant traveled miles. There, surreally dark-skinned waitresses served the soft-shelled crabs my father loved. Bonnie Parker happened to be what Pauline Kael calls a “waitress-slut,” but the waitresses at the Whispering Pines were mythic, as formal as a Greek chorus, in starched white uniforms that sparked against their skin. In particular, I remember a woman in thick glasses who bussed the tables and wore a nametag that read I AM DEAF.
I should also mention that my father, whose frothing volatility masked his basic mildness, responded by slapping my sister’s cheek. When I talk about this memory — the shy girl spitting out the curse and the ensuing crack-sound of the slap — my sister has no recollection of it. But I do, I swear, and because I’m the one writing this I get to control this version of the past, and I say that the bone of their contention was our daily outing in the Cadillac. On this day we were bound for the ferry to Tangier Island, a trip that my sister refused to take and so was hauled by force into the car.
In the end, she won because she got her wish not to ride the ferry: by the time we arrived, the boat had ceased operating for the day. Silently the six of us — or was it five? I don’t remember my older brother’s being present — rode back to the motel through the dead-flat countryside, with the air conditioning blasting and the Caddy’s windows rolled up while, outside, the grass blazed up with the teardrop-shapes of flames. My mother kept us in line throughout the year by suggesting, at the climax of our battles, that we might move to this place “A place that would be good for you children.” We thought it shared the desolation of the dust-bowl countryside that Bonnie and Clyde rode through, and the thought of living there shut us up real quick.
Though it was the male poets of the last midcentury who first started writing autobiographically, it was the women who got slapped with the confessional label, which has come to mean a large degree of self-absorption combined with poorly edited melodrama. If one were to get paranoid about this, it might seem that the term confessional poetry was coined so that any eruptions coming from female quarters could be squelched. Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton get singled out as the gun molls of the autobiographical/confessional gang, which has pretty much lost its male leaders, its Clydes — who ride now in a more luxury-class automobile of their own. Both Plath and Sexton were, however, influenced by Robert Lowell, who would make a very good Clyde indeed.
But Plath is not really a poet of social rebellion. She dons the roles of wife and mother willingly enough; although, granted, her take on these functions is peculiar, she doesn’t necessarily resist them, except perhaps in her uncharacteristic poem “The Applicant,” where a woman interviewing for the role of wife is instructed to wear a rubber crotch.
It is Sexton’s poem “Her Kind” that ought to serve as a capsule of the feminist upheavals that were about to follow in the poem’s wake (it was published in 1960). This is the early, formal, disciplined Sexton, and I have felt wronged by seeing it drop from the Norton Anthology of Poetry as Sexton’s stock has fallen, perhaps because of the autobiographical Sexton’s showboat qualities, which adhered to her poetry as her life burned on despite her attempts to extinguish it. In contrast to this aggrandized persona, the witch in the cart is archetypaclass="underline"
I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.
That’s the first stanza of the poem, perhaps a simplistic encapsulation of the isolation that many women felt in the suburbs after the Second World War (capsules need to be short and tart if they’re to be carried around in the back of the brain). The poem puts its finger on the idea of dreaming evil, the primary operation of the female poet’s outlaw fantasy life, a fantasy that served, in Sexton’s case, as retaliation against life in the postwar suburbs.
In my observation, this fantasy past is created most often now by women who have chickened out on, or are recuperating from, our chance to hop in the car, and have instead become librarians and professors and schoolteachers and — oh worst — happy wives. In fact, we do not drink and fumble around in coatrooms with men, if we ever did at all, though we harbor the illusion that we did, along with the wish that we still lived in the days pre-AIDS, pre-hepatitis C and human papilloma virus and meth and crack and tweakers, in that narrow window of time — the 1970s I guess — when a lot of bad behavior was suddenly (thanks to the pill and penicillin) consequence-less. Fumbling around in coatrooms now comes off as merely self-indulgent, plus hetero-sexuality itself is a bit passé.