Bitter: #metoo Goes to Academia

Among the five basic tastes, sweet, sour, savory, salty, and bitter, we are most sensitive to bitterness, probably because bitter foods are often poisonous, so we evolved with tongues sensitive to danger. And yet, sometimes we seek out the bitter, in coffee, bitter chocolate, and beer. Jews are required to eat bitter herbs at Passover to remind us of the bitterness of slavery.

Sensitivities to bitterness are inherited, but I had two parents who guzzled black coffee and two kids who appreciate beer. I avoid both.

Keeping secrets is natural to me. One time a guy in a college cafeteria told my friend, Megan, a girl with a rosebud mouth and a halo of honey-colored hair, “You wear your heart on your sleeve.” He turned to me and said, “You should play poker.”

Why be open when you will be disbelieved? My mother called me a liar when I revealed a relative had stuck his tongue down my throat when I was thirteen. She declared it impossible that her friend’s husband, Herb, a lawyer, asked me to enumerate “all the sexual positions you use with your boyfriend.” When I told her a psychiatrist asked to describe how I masturbated she insisted that I had misunderstood him.

I was routinely disbelieved on minor matters too. Sitting in his wheelchair in the hospital solarium, my father told me I was crazy when I reported back that there were only five packs of cigarettes left in the carton he’d left on his bed. Even though I’d already taken calculus, he made me return to his room and count the packs four times before I brought the goddamned box and tossed it in his lap. “Well I’ll be damned,” he said, “there are only five packs left.” No shit Sherlock. I know how to count. I didn’t say that.

A doctor suggested to me that when my father knew that cancer had gotten him for good he didn’t mean anything when he begged me, a twenty-eight year old, to get in his hospital bed with him. “You make too much of things,” the doctor said. I never mentioned it.

My mother says I’m foolish to want to write. She’s a gifted writer herself, but one without aspirations. My father insisted he could write better than I, and it was probably true. The last words he wrote in the journal of his dying were, “Seltzer is great.”

An old boyfriend, a curator at Sotheby’s, urged me to give up my opera studies and confided that “Women’s singing doesn’t appeal to me; singing is for men’s voices.” Another advised, “You shouldn’t worry about writing a novel. I hate the way women write anyway. Nothing ever happens.”

I’d heard that before. In 1968 Kofi Awooner, A Ghanian poet who taught the only creative writing course I took as an undergraduate, told me I wrote like Brontës. It wasn’t a compliment. But when I read at a UN vigil, after my last poem people lit candles and started singing.

When I was trapped on a psychiatric ward at eighteen I had to act the part of someone else to be released. I vowed that I would never be myself in public again. I didn’t want anyone to know that I’d been able to talk to animals or guess the cards a psychic was holding up in a nightclub act. I wasn’t ever going relate to anyone that I knew to call up Billy Rayburn just as he was taking pills to off himself.

Barney, my English composition teacher who’d come east from Minnesota because of Gatsby, said, “You will never be a writer because your mind is too abstract.” But Thelma Post, my fourth grade teacher, wrote on a paper, “You will be a writer someday,” even though the first sentence in my story, “In the garden there stood an apple tree,” was in the passive voice.

When I studied with Jan Kott, the famous Shakespeare critic, he gave me an A in a course on literary theory, the only other A besides that of Charlie Johnson, a winner of the National Book Award. Jan wouldn’t allow me to present my paper to the class, though all the B papers of the boys were read. In his thick Polish accent he explained, “Women don’t belong in academics. The pigs go one way, the women the other.” However, he didn’t have any problem groping me so overtly on the Long Island Railroad that the conductor threatened to throw him off the train.

Jack Ludwig, the inspiration of Saul Bellow’s villain, Valentine Gersbach, in Herzog,and my thesis advisor, told me my work on Pynchon was awful. Just a few minutes earlier he’d come close to nuzzling my neck before he exclaimed, “Mitsouko,” the name of my perfume, as proud as the proverbial Jack when he pulled a plum from a tart. I was pretty impressed by his feat, too. When I politely requested that he read my thesis chapter by chapter instead of waiting for another entire draft to reject he became enraged and circulated a memo that said I was mentally unstable.

Another guy on the committee, who dropped the word adultery into every class session on Neo-Classicism, disagreed and said my dissertation was plagiarized, He assigned finding my source to a new hire. When she could find no evidence of cheating, they blocked my degree just the same. Rose Zimbardo, the discarded wife of the prominent psychologist, Phil, became my champion, and Ruth Miller, Dean of the Humanities, an estranged friend of Bellow’s, said that the first chapter alone entitled me to a PhD. Sallie Sears, a Woolf scholar and abstract painter, advised me to insert the word lawsuit in a conversation with the graduate director. Rose called me an intellectual. The Neo-classicist called me an odd ball. Two years later I got a certified letter from University Microfiche stating that my thesis had been recognized as the best written in 1987 in the US.

I’ll tell you a secret. If they’d come right out and asked I probably would have slept with those guys, and not for career advancement, but for the sheer adventure.

Five years ago, a very important publisher, wrote me that my novel, Daphne,about the Daphne and Apollo myth, was very accomplished, but no one would ever read it. Will Boast has just published a novel, Daphne, with the myth as its starting point. Once, when I was young, Louis Simpson, the Pulitzer Prize winning poet, said my poetry about the Civil War really worked. Then he gave me a silver cup he found in Germany during the war that has a swastika embossed on an American eagle, in case, in his words, “you have Nazi babies.” He lost interest in my poetry.

Here’s the thing — whatever I write I will be accused of being inept, trivial, boastful, lying, crazy, too revealing and too withholding. Strong and unpredictable reactions may arise, like the time the wife of a high school English teacher, an English teacher herself, gave me an F on a paper her husband had already awarded an A and wrote in the reddest pen I’d ever seen that I’d written the worst paper she’d ever read. I know that as a writer I’m not supposed to mind such things, but I do. Terribly.