Wendy Steiner

Early one morning in Philadelphia, I was walking over the South Street Bridge on my way to work. My path was a narrow walkway between steel-bolted panels on the traffic side and a lacework of wrought iron on the other. The Schuylkill River shimmered through the iron curlicues in oily ripples, and at regular intervals, the lacework opened into bays overlooking the water. But I was not looking at the river. My eyes were fixed on the steel panels on the opposite side of the road, where someone had spray-painted a poem over half the length of the bridge. It was about lost people looking for each other by the river, but because the poet had been able to fit only a word or two on each panel, the poem unfolded very slowly. I kept craning my neck and squinting to see how each line would end, wishing I could walk as fast as the poem demanded. Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a pair of legs in a bay ten seconds in front of me. I exclaimed involuntarily, for what I saw was not only legs, bent at the knees, lying on the ground in weathered trousers – perhaps green – but a dark penis, too, and a hand idly rubbing it up and down. The body and head were hidden in the bay. I was over halfway across the bridge; it would have been very inconvenient to turn back. I could not climb over the steel panels either, since I would have landed in traffic. Besides, that seemed an inappropriately desperate response to the situation. If he did not mind lying there like that, I reasoned, he would not mind my walking by. And so, in the nanosecond in which such decisions are made, I resolved to keep going, and before I exhaled again, I was past him.

Gertrude Stein knew how to make herself happy. Sometimes she was heroic, as when she delivered medical supplies to soldiers during the First World War by toddling over enemy lines in an old Ford. And in World War Two, she was honoured by the French Resistance for transmitting information during the Occupation. ‘Gertrude Stein, safe, safe, is safe’, came the press release from liberated Culoz. But Stein’s fearlessness was tested much more in everyday situations where she did not hesitate to please herself. She loved to eat and her body showed it. At 12, her mother noted, Gertrude was five feet tall and weighed 135 pounds, and the ratio did not improve with time; nevertheless, she went on to participate, somewhat to her friends’ dismay, in nude bathing parties. ‘She had none of the funny embarrassment Anglo-Saxons have about flesh’, wrote Mabel Dodge Luhan. ‘She gloried in hers’.

‘Sticks and stones may break my bones …’ Like most children, I learned this piece of wisdom with tears streaming down my face, hurt to the quick by the taunts of my playmates. At the time, it seemed a very foolish statement. What was this splitting of hurt into ‘real’ injury and ‘unreal’ feeling? I certainly felt hurt. Recently I learned that there is a second verse: ‘When you die you’ll go to hell, and suffer all you called me.’ I think I would have liked these lines when I was a child. Growing up in a secular culture, I never expected retribution in another world – unreal words turned back into real hurts and visited on their perpetrators. I lived instead with a paradoxical stoicism: that insults were not injury, words were not deeds, representation not reality, and art not life, but at the same time that insults, words, representations and art were important in the realm of the real. This is a piece of casuistry necessary, as I see it, to First Amendment freedoms, liberal democracy and sanity. But that does not mean that it is any the less problematic than that first, childhood splitting of word and reality.’

Suffering pain, writer’s block, and the rage of critics, Philip Roth’s hero Zuckerman resolves to quit writing fiction and go to medical school. ‘Who quarrels with an obstetrician?’ he reasons:

There was a time when phrases like ‘sexual politics’, ‘male chauvinism’ and ‘phallogocentrism’ carried a certain paradoxical éclat, yoking, as they do, the private realm of sex with the public realms of politics and language. We have grown so accustomed to the merging of public and private that it is hard to feel the force of such conceits these days, hard to remember that getting married was not always an act of political defiance (or defeat) and having children was not invariably a part of ‘having it all’. Ruth Brandon’s intelligent study, The New Women and the Old Men: Love, Sex and the Woman Question, focuses on a crucial stage in the politicisation of privacy, describing the personal involvements of social reformers in Britain between 1880 and 1914 as they enacted the Woman Question in their own lives.