Out of Brownsville: Encounters with Nobel Laureates and Other Jewish Writers

Adrienne Rich, Anne Halley, Marilyn Hacker

58 Adrienne Rich, Anne Halley, Marilyn Hacker Ifirst met Adrienne Rich at a meeting of the New University Conference (NUC) at Wesleyan College in Connecticut, home of several ardent anti-Vietnam War academics. NUC had been organized, chiefly, I believe, by Paul Lauter and Florence Howe (then a married couple), and Louis Kampf and his then wife, Ellen Cantarow, as an anti-war outgrowth of the New Left. A collateral goal of the organization was to radicalize curriculum and teaching in colleges and universities . I had joined when we met in our living room in Amherst—my wife, Anne Halley, though actively anti-war, was not a joiner, except for the feminist encounter groups that sprang up shortly thereafter. So she did not meet Rich then, though deep into Adrienne’s work. As a poetry editor of The Massachusetts Review, Anne corresponded and met with her, as I did, and published her poetry many times. At Wesleyan Adrienne galvanized us with an outraged and painful reading of a poem by a male leading light of the time (Donald Hall? James Dickey?) in which was imagined the beating of a woman with a heavy belt and then her being tossed, or falling, from an airplane. Was it supposed to be funny? Or a fantasy of male supremacy? In any case it made us, mostly men there, keenly aware, for perhaps the first 59 time, of the blithely accepted misogyny of our mainstream literature. It took a movement to change that. So much grew out of the anti-war and civil rights movements , certainly feminism, and for many, as pluralism and minority presence grew to be the newly perceived reality about American identity, the Jewish connections. Sometimes , as in Adrienne’s and Anne Halley’s case, perhaps Denise Levertov’s, as “half Jews.” I remember Levertov’s passionate anti-war speech at an Amherst rally, and years later divorced but joyous at a dinner party in Medford at the home of our mutual pacifist friends, Martin Green and Carol Hurd Green, encouraging Carol in her work on Dorothy Day and Ethel Rosenberg! Ethel Rosenberg. Carol, a Catholic, was an administrator and teacher at Boston College. She and Martin had two adopted African American children. That dinner party arose from The Movement. Rich has recalled that her father, a Jewish doctor who grew up in the south, was totally assimilated, but that as she contemplated the Jewish part of her life, and of course the Holocaust, when in her early days she had thought of herself as neither Gentile (her mother was a Protestant southerner) nor Jew, and neither Yankee nor “rebel,” she came to see that part of herself as more and more integral to her multi-faceted identity, and she embraced it. She goes into all these issues in her fine poem “Yom Kippur 1984” and in “Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity.” In the world in which she was raised, she writes in that extraordinary 1982 essay, “the world of acceptable folk was white, gentile (Christian, really), and had ‘ideals,’ (which Adrienne Rich, Anne Halley, Marilyn Hacker 60 colored people and white ‘common’ people were not supposed to have). ‘Ideals’ and ‘manners’ included not hurting someone’s feelings by calling her or him a Negro or a Jew— naming the hated identity.” Rich goes on, “…writing this, I feel dimly like a betrayer, of my father, who did not speak the word; of my mother, who must have trained me in the messages; of my caste and class; of my whiteness itself.” It is a brave essay, which she concludes as follows: “Sometimes I feel I have seen too long from too many disconnected angles: white, Jewish, anti-Semite, racist, anti-racist, once-married, lesbian, middle-class, feminist, exmatriate southerner, split at the root that I will never bring them whole.... This essay then has no conclusions: it is another beginning for me. Not just a way of saying, in 1982 Right Wing America, I too, will wear the yellow star. It’s a moving into accountability, enlarging the range of accountability.” Thus Rich is the moral writer which that other doyenne of fiction and criticism, Cynthia Ozick, might desire, though they obviously don’t share an ideology and a politics. Still, Adrienne Rich is one of many who have taken the path of “wearing the yellow star.” What interests me is...