Like many people I know, I devoured my copy of Vivian Gornick’s The Odd Woman and the City. Devoured because I am hungry as a reader, a woman, a feminist.
No, scratch that. Starving.
Consider this a complaint from a feminist dismayed. By women’s-studies programs on campus, which often seem intent on teaching students that they are victims or on broadening feminism until it loses its specificity and meaning. By these programs’ focus on the quantifiable, the politically correct, the facile.
Feminism on campus today seems to lack interest in life’s sweet and sour complexity and in the great 19th- and 20th-century literature energizing Gornick. It seems ablated from life. It makes the impersonal political.
The Odd Woman and the City stands against my dismay. Its particularity about what feminism has done for us — and to us — is spelled out as joyful, terrible, real.
The Odd Woman and the City
By Vivian Gornick (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Like the best books, it provides many things. It is a memoir of living, alone, in New York City, of why it is more tolerable to be alone there than anywhere else. It is a female response to Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City (1951), which seems static in comparison. It is an artful blend of the abstract and the personal, a Montaigne-esque meditation on the limitations of the warts-and-all sharing that modern friendship has become: “It is the great illusion of our culture that what we confess to is who we are.”
Perhaps most important, Gornick’s memoir shows from the inside the ways that feminism has altered how we live, and how difficult those alterations are.
Gornick, who turned 80 this month, is not naïve about how the human preference for comfort retards the kind of political change she agitated for as a young woman. But she is not bitter about it, either. "[Edith] Wharton thought no one could have freedom, but [Henry] James knew no one wanted it,” she muses after telling a story about an upper-crust type who flirted with good works but then retreated to his Park Avenue mansion.
I had to read that line several times. Freedom’s unpalatable qualities are hard to accept.
As are the destructive promises of our cherished myths. Gornick is well acquainted with the desire for romance that — even today — often prevents young women from realizing who they are. About her own experience and that of her contemporaries she writes: “The elusive right man became a staple in our lives, his absence a defining experience. … Longing is what attracted us.”
She also describes how, at the same time that romantic yearning has persisted for an ever-increasing number of single women (and men), the roles and structures protecting us from its ravages have fallen away. She quotes her dear friend, the gay man she calls Leonard: “Forty, fifty years ago we would have been our parents. Who are we now? … We’re standing here naked.”
Odd Woman’s fragmented narrative style is reminiscent of Dos Passos’ U.S.A. trilogy, but without its lumbering pace. The texture of voices Gornick weaves into her personal and literary collage reminds me of Studs Terkel or the rootless cosmopolitanism of the postwar New York intellectuals, but thankfully without their machismo.
Her title takes its name from George Gissing’s 1893 novel The Odd Women, about the early feminist movement — and about the kind of woman who just can’t make peace with the world as it is, Gornick explained in The Paris Review last year. Part of being odd, for Gornick, is pursuing the difficult life of living alone and being a writer — in short, she says, living out one’s conflicts, not one’s fantasies.
There are benefits, such as seeing things that others do not. In an assisted-living facility, the “above-the-fray manner” of an old writer-acquaintance “now came across as Solomonic,” but she withers away because she has no one to talk to, as though she had been “found guilty of having stayed alive too long.” On the street alone, Gornick encounters ragtag characters who teach her about her humanity. Or tell her to bugger off. Both the highs and the lows make her life richer. Would she be so open, so available, so observant, if she were surrounded by the comforts of marriage and family?
And what about sex? There is no one better than Gornick at describing how feminism has changed what happens between men and women. In one memorable scene, she describes the moment when she realized that male will differed from her own. “It was as though an invisible membrane had fallen between me and my lover, one fine enough to be penetrated by desire but opaque enough to obscure human fellowship.”
Gornick eventually realized that she would have to give up men if she wanted to work. She did. And it was terrible. But there is no whinging, just grief over the loss of doing what is necessary.
That is how I think of Gornick — unflinching, wandering the city, sometimes with her old friend Leonard. She wanders through time as well, from her childhood in the Bronx, where she “waited for life to begin,” to the present, when she realizes that “no one is more surprised than me that I turned out to be who I am.”
The Odd Woman and the City strikes me as more consoling than Gornick’s earlier work, in part because she is so at ease describing the artist suffering disappointment. “The doors to the golden company did not open,” she writes about her early failures matter-of-factly. Her observations are painfully exact: “Our loneliness is anguishing and yet, inexplicably, we are loath to give it up.”
The city itself may be Gornick’s closest companion: “Every night when I turn the lights out in my 16th-floor living room before I go to bed, I experience a shock of pleasure as I see the banks of lighted windows rising to the sky, crowding around me, and feel myself embraced by the anonymous ingathering of city dwellers. This swarm of human hives, also hanging anchored in space, is the New York design offering generic connection. The pleasure it gives soothes beyond all explanation.”
Early in the book, Gornick claims that, where the city is concerned, she identifies more with the dark vision of Samuel Johnson, who walked the streets of London to cure his chronic depression, than with Walt Whitman’s celebration.
No. Her memoir is a glorious, heartbroken hello to the feminist lives we are living.
Rachel Shteir, a literary critic, is an associate professor of theater at DePaul University. She is author, most recently, of The Steal: A Cultural History of Shoplifting (Penguin Press, 2011).
