Accidents of Influence: Writing as a Woman and a Jew in America

Low Thoughts Among the High-Minded

Low Thoughts Among the HighMinded What is the point of a stubbornly recurring memory? Does it prod us to recoup the past in a recuperative way? "So that's what that meant," we say at last when consciousness lays a disentangling finger on a hardened knot of memory. Such recognition is not always pleasing. Still, there's the relief, the release, the knot untied. Emotions about the family in which one grew up take a lifetime to unravel, and even then.... The school, perhaps, takes time to unravel too. What was the woman's college I attended really like? I loved it the moment I saw it, admired high-minded female forebears, felt upheld by the nobility of the New England lives of women who had passed through before me. Yet the hardened knot of a painful moment is still tangled up in memory. Thus far there is no recouping ; there are only questions. Acres of rolling countryside-and I a city girl-with buildings scattered like outposts of nature itself; pictures of studentancestors bending, with leg-of-mutton sleeves and long dark skirts of durable stuff, over basement laundry vats-this was Heaven to me. Those ancestor-females went on to vats of chemicals, too, and larger deeds of energy and courage. My college was one of the "Seven Sisters," proud female counterparts to the male Ivy League whose doors were shut to females. In the library women were named who once set out for teaching posts in China and India. Numbers appeared to have drowned in floods; still they kept setting out. The example of those early women, transcending the austerity of an ill-equipped "daughters" school of the early 1800s, firing their ambition in chilly rooms, sparingly fed, seemed to release energy into the halls and onto the paths when I was there. One was 165 166 LIFE NOTES going to do something oneself-even if not drown in a flood-that would be splendid. But one day something happened that made me wonder what it was I had been seeing. We had planned an act of colorful bravado in the midst of New England austerity compounded by wartime-a dance recital for a local men's club. From a New York theater supplier the dance teacher bought loud-colored leotards (mine was yellow) and gauzy stuff for skirts. With the dance teacher's encouragement I thought myself the most "avant" of avant-garde for my dance composed to words by Gertrude Stein: "In a ribbon, in a ribbon there is red-red, and white, and blue ... I like shells as bells!" After reciting and running , intoning and turning, lilting and leaping, I threw myself face down into a stiff-armed fall, lifted a leg and shook it in air. If I shook long enough, I had learned, my breath crept back. As I practiced one last shake before curtain time, another dancer with whom I had rehearsed and practiced for weeks, with whom I had shared nervousness and hope, bent to my ear. "Don't do that in front of them," she whispered. "It's like-you know-it looks like ... you shouldn't!" Almost standing on my head, breathless, I felt that my fellow dancer wanted me to fail, to fall, to gasp and be undone, and in a moment so near the time of performing that I could not avert or redeem it. Almost standing on my head I wondered-what is this place? Where am I? Is anything here what it seemed or is it all overturned, the opposite of what I thought? Not in college but later I read Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own," and wondered whether my school resembled less the high-minded energy of the early nineteenth-century women I so admired, and more the woman's college Virginia Woolf called Fernham, where the beef at dinner suggests "the rumps of cattle in a muddy market." And where spiritless food (at Fernham, desserts of prunes and custard; at my college a black and white pudding as tasteless as its name, "Intermarriage") bred a "dubious and qualifying state of mind." At the great university for men built on solid foundations of money to which she compares the unfortunate Fernham, fine food and wine are served. In the expansiveness of such air, the lamp in the spine lights up, says Virginia Woolf. At Low Thoughts Among the High-Minded 167 Fernham-and at my college, she would have...