In retelling her life – which she did more than once and in more than one way – the narrative of feminism Carolyn produces is not the triumph of belonging and community, but a chronicle rather of consolation and change, occasions for joy, and, to a degree, a process of repair. At the very least, through her writings, she showed there could be life as well as death in a tenured position, even for her, but especially for us. At last year’s MLA panels honoring Carolyn’s legacy, various people remarked on Carolyn’s insistence on age – and usually in decades: “Virginia Woolf in her Fifties,” where Carolyn defends Woolf’s choice of suicide; The Last Gift of Time, whose subtitle is Life Beyond Sixty, and where Heilbrun announces that while she enjoyed her sixties and lived past 70- beyond the year she had contemplated as her last – how much longer the choice to remain alive will hold is left in abeyance.
It struck me as I prepared for this conference that in writing about my feminist life in decades I had created a narrative rather different from Carolyn’s, but not only because we did not belong to the same generation or share an age; my decades did not line up with hers in part because I never had children; in part because I never enjoyed the success she had from which to measure my decline; in part because I haven’t yet retired – though everything she has written on the subject fills me with the dread of identification. Writing the memoir “Out of Breath” as a full-fledged narrative in which I finally tell the story of what happened in those years of Paris when I was young has been my way of doing something with the time that remains before retirement, doing something I have never done.
Before I conclude with some thoughts about the end of Carolyn’s feminist life, I’m going to read a few passages from the epilogue to the memoir.
By the time I went to Paris in August to collect my belongings from the apartment, the events of May ’68 had become part of the city’s mythology. I had missed the excitement of the barricades, but like the young American hero of Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, who walks away from the scenes of violence eagerly greeted by his French lovers, I knew I lacked the courage to heave paving stones at the cops, set cars on fire.
In the Latin Quarter where the students had taken to the streets when the police invaded the Sorbonne, I cruised the bookstores. Books about the events of May and souvenirs were proliferating, already objects of kitsch, like little Eiffel towers, as though what had happened months before were already past history. I bought posters from what the date “May ’68” had become – “The more I make revolution, the more I make love,” “Forbidden to forbid” – to decorate my bedroom walls.
I loved Paris – even in August, when it was embarrassing still to be in town.
A Bout de Souffle, the French title of the movie that had set me gasping after experience, means two things: breathless with anticipation, and out of breath. Between the time I saw the movie in New York and the time I left Paris, I had exhausted the dictionary definition. At the end of Breathless, Belmondo as Michel’s life is over, but Jean Seberg as Patricia’s isn’t. The movie doesn’t let us know whether she will ever write her novel, whether she’ll go home again after she finishes school at the Sorbonne to please her parents who are paying for it, or just keep selling the New York Herald Tribune until the next man comes along – we already know she won’t have to wait long. We don’t find out whether she’s really pregnant or what she’ll do about it. But we figure she’ll make out.
My copycat adventures had always been doomed to failure because that was precisely what had to happen for me to grow up. Wasn’t that really the lesson of Breathless? It’s not for nothing that the movie begins with Belmondo imitating Bogart’s trademark gesture of passing his thumb over his lips. Belmondo can’t even make it as a successful hood, as my father would have said then. Paris was full of Americans suffering from the disease of imitation. Jim [my ex-husband], who couldn’t write, took himself for James Joyce in exile from a country that his parents had already left. Jim thought marrying a Jew would save him from the priests. I thought marrying him would save me from the rabbis. Dr. Mendelsohn [the shrink I consulted in New York when my marriage was falling apart] was right: Jim was not the worst choice I could have made. But we were so busy using each other to avoid becoming the people we didn’t want to be that we missed recognizing who else we were – what we wanted from the world when we weren’t reading books, or eating. I couldn’t stay married to someone who was making everything up all the time, including me.
You never get over your first great love, Colette says in one of her novels, alluding to the wounds inflicted by the first of her husbands. Tucked away in a secret compartment, that hurt lives on – a permanent resident with a lifetime visa. How could the circuits of hope have collapsed so quickly, you wonder, stunned by the evidence of your misery. When did the paths leading to the happy ending veer off into the grooves of despair? The answer never matches the question. You just know that you won’t ever be the same. Eventually, that’s the good news.
