In thinking about the memoir for this event, I started to see something about the shape of the story I’ve been telling that I had missed. It suddenly seemed to me that what I liked so much about Seberg in the movie wasn’t just that she could have sex without guilt but that she could walk away from her mistakes and see them as material for the novel she said she was writing. My French mistake, then, wasn’t so much about making gender mistakes and obsessing about them as in not noticing what else I had learned in the process – a failing of mine (accentuate the negative) Carolyn never hesitated to point out.
What have we learned from Carolyn’s life? And in particular from the way she chose to end her story, to write it, as she had rehearsed it in her fiction? This is the question I’ve been wanting to avoid but find that I can’t, even if I can’t answer it either. I had dinner a couple of weeks ago with a woman who had just turned 50. She had been a student of Carolyn’s at Columbia but decided not to go on for a Ph.D. She and Carolyn had been having dinner once a month for several years. We talked about the suicide and what it meant for us. She shared her thoughts on the subject with me a few days later on email because I told her I was finding it hard to figure out what to say at the end of my paper about . . . the end of Carolyn’s feminist life. This is part of what Rachel Kranz wrote: “If Carolyn taught us anything, it was that women who could write new lives, couldn’t necessarily live them – and vice versa. For me, as a writer, that is very liberating. It means I’m allowed to imagine beyond what I’m capable of achieving. If someone else reads what I write and lives beyond what I could live, I’ve done my work. And so, I think, she’s done hers.”
As I imagined this event, I felt that it would have satisfied Carolyn’s (not to mention Amanda Cross’s) sense of irony to have eight academic women talk about their feminist lives in Philosophy Hall where she fought so many battles on behalf of the women at Columbia. I imagined telling her that I had spent many hours in this very lounge as a graduate student in the early ’70s, in the years before we became friends, consuming cookies along with the tea graciously poured from a large copper urn by women identified solely by their husbands’ names. I didn’t think I’d end up pouring tea; too much had already changed for that, but I wondered, as I smoked with friends in the late afternoons, whether we would ever succeed in a world in which, despite the first glimmers of affirmative action, faculty wives dramatically outnumbered women faculty.
I doubt that I’ll ever really get over the end of Carolyn’s life, but as Rachel said, she did her work; we can only continue doing ours. She wrote a feminist’s life; how we live the rest of ours remains to be seen.
Works Cited
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Greene, Gayle and Coppélia Kahn, eds. Changing Subjects: The Making of Feminist Literary Criticism. London and New York: Routledge, 1993.
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Heilbrun, Carolyn. “Afterword.” In Changing Subjects: The Making of Feminist Literary Criticism. London and New York: Routledge, 1993.
—–. The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty. New York: Dial Press, 1997.
Kaplan, Alice. French Lessons. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1993.
Kranz, Rachel. Personal communication.
Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. “Asians in Anglo-American Feminism: Reciprocity and Resistance.” In Changing Subjects: The Making of Feminist Literary Criticism, eds. Gayle Greene and Coppélia Kahn. London and New York: Routledge, 1993.
Miller, Nancy K. “The French Mistake.” Getting Personal: Feminist Acts and Other Autobiographical Occasions. New York and London: Routledge, 1991.
—–. “Decades.” In Changing Subjects: The Making of Feminist Literary Criticism, eds. Gayle Greene and Coppélia Kahn. London and New York: Routledge, 1993; rpt. But Enough About Me: Why We Read Other People’s Lives. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.
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—–. “The Marks of Time.” But Enough About Me: Why We Read Other People’s Lives. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.
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