Vivian Gornick, who turned 80 this year, is one of the second-wave (white, straight, American) feminist writers. She wrote her first books in the 1970s and then really took off in the 80s, 90s and 2000s. Here is one of her very quotable radical feminist declarations:
The point of women’s liberation is not to stand at the door of the male world, beating our fists, and crying, ‘Let me in, damn you, let me in!’ The point is to walk away from the world and concentrate on creating a new woman.
Gornick’s latest book, The Odd Woman And The City: A Memoir, is a collection of philosophical ruminations, anecdotes and memories about New York City, the urban life, books, friends, lovers, family, her childhood, and activism. All these jigsaw pieces unite to create some of the most well-rounded non-fiction I’ve read. But it’s the anecdotes that really hit hard. The reader is bombarded with one after another, each leaving her more breathless than the next – little everyday stories coming at you at 60 miles per hour, like tennis balls out of a machine. And none of them leave you knowing exactly what to think.
The book’s title is from The Odd Women, a 1893 novel by British novelist George Gissing. The novel’s “odd women” are spinsters who live on the margins of a married world. Gornick writes:
[I]t was George Gissing’s The Odd Women that spoke most directly to me. His were the characters I could see and hear as if they were women and men of my own acquaintance. What’s more, I recognized myself as one of the ‘odd’ women. Every fifty years from the time of the French Revolution, feminists had been described as ‘new’ women, ‘free’ women, ‘liberated’ women – but Gissing had gotten it just right. We were the ‘odd’ women.
An odd woman need not be a woman, though. We hear about Gornick’s male friend, Leonard, with whom she has a complex relationship:
My friend Leonard is a witty, intelligent gay man, sophisticated about his own unhappiness. The sophistication is energizing.
A typical conversation between her and Leonard goes like this:
‘So,’ I begin. ‘How does your life feel to you these days?’
‘Like a chicken bone stuck in my craw,’ he says. ‘I can’t swallow it and I can’t cough it up. Right now I’m trying to just not choke on it.
Or:
‘I’m not the right person for this life,’ I say. ‘Who is?’ he says, exhaling in my direction.
As odd women, Leonard and Gornick have a lot in common. The backbone of the book is the vivid presentation of the city for those who just can’t resist stepping out on the streets, and this is true of both of them:
[H]e’s never been at home in his apartment any more than I am in mine; he, too, needs to feel concrete beneath his feet.
And this is the context in which Gornick proceeds to relate dozens of anecdotes from her urban encounters – thrilling, chilling, heartening, disappointing, hilarious, and surreal:
On Broadway at Forty-Third Street on a windy evening in winter, a black man on a makeshift platform is speaking into a microphone. Ranged around the platform are perhaps a dozen black men and women. The man at the mike sounds like a television broadcaster. People hunched over against the wind are rushing past him, but he goes on speaking in the smooth, imperturbable tones of the evening news anchor. ‘It has come to my attention lately,’ he says, ‘that sales are up on suntan lotion and sunblock. Now who do you think are the customers for this item? I’ll tell you who. White people, that’s who. Not you or I, brother. No, it’s white people.’ His voice deepens. ‘Now what do you think of a people who keep telling us they’re superior, and…’ Without warning he pauses, his eyes squeeze shut, and he screams, ‘They can’t even make it in the fuckin’ sun!’ Back to broadcast news. ‘You – ‘ He points calmly at the heads of the fleeing crowd. ‘The white people. Don’t even belong. On the planet.’
Waiting at a pharmacy with a friend, a sort of communion takes place between strangers:
[A]s I haven’t seen her in a long while, on impulse I offer to wait with her. We sit down in two of the three chairs lined up near the prescription counter, me in the middle, Vera on my left, and on my right a pleasant-looking man reading a book.
‘Still living in the same place?’ I ask.
‘Where’m I gonna go?’ she says, loudly enough for a man on the pickup line to turn in our direction. ‘But y’know, dolling? The stairs keep me strong.’
‘And your husband? How’s he taking the stairs?’
‘Oh, him,’ she says. ‘He died.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ I murmur.
Her hand pushes away the air.
‘It wasn’t a good marriage,’ she announces. Three people on the line turn around. ‘But, y’know? In the end it doesn’t really matter.’
I nod my head. I understand. The apartment is empty.
‘One thing I gotta say,’ she goes on, ‘he was a no-good husband, but he was a great lover.’
I can feel a slight jolt in the body of the man sitting beside me.
‘Well, that’s certainly important,’ I say.
‘Boy, was it ever! I met him in Detroit during the Second World War. We were organizing. In those days, everybody slept with everybody, so I did, too. But you wouldn’t believe it…’ And here she lowers her voice dramatically, as though she has a secret of some importance to relate ‘Most of the guys I slept with? They were no good in bed. I mean, they were bad, really bad.’
Now I feel the man on my right stifling a laugh.
‘So when you found a good one’ – Vera shrugs – ‘you held on to him.’
‘I know just what you mean,’ I say.
‘Do you, dolling?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘You mean they’re still bad?’
‘Listen to us,’ I say. ‘Two old women talking about lousy lovers.’
This time the man beside me laughs out loud. I turn and take a good long look at him.
‘We’re sleeping with the same guys, right?’ I say.
Yes, he nods. ‘And with the same ratio of satisfaction.’
For a split second the three of us look at one another, and then, all at once, we begin to howl. When the howling stops, we are all beaming. Together we have performed, and separately we have been received.
One day:
I run into Victor, an unhappy dentist who has lived in my neighborhood for years. Tall and slim, with a Caesar haircut and sad brown eyes, he is a nervous man who smiles compulsively. Whenever he sees me he coos, ‘Dahling, sweetness, beautiful girl, how a-a-are you?’ Then, like a mother in a permanent state of interested alarm, he peers intently into my face and very gently asks, ‘You still writing, dahling?’ Some years ago Victor, in search of inner peace, began traveling regularly to Japan to consult the Zen healer who has given him the wherewithal to get out of bed in the morning in New York. He must be sixty by now.
Standing here on Fourteenth Street, a Con Ed drill blasting in our ears, Victor croons at me, ‘Dahling, sweetness, beautiful girl, how are you, still living in the same building?’
‘Yes,’ I reply.
‘Still doing journalistic work?’
‘No, Victor, I teach now.’
He pushes his chin out at me as though to say, ‘Tell me.’
I tell him. He listens intently as the words fall rapidly from my mouth, nodding steadily as I speak of the deprivation of spirit I suffer living for months at a time in one university town or another.
‘It’s exile!’ I cry at last. ‘Exile pure and simple.’
Victor nods and nods. His brown eyes are dissolving in watery pain. He knows exactly what I mean, oh, no one in the world will ever know better than he what I mean. His face goes dreamy. My own starts feeling compromised. Car brakes screech, sirens pierce the air, the Con Ed drill stops and starts, stops and starts. No matter. Victor and I are now quarantined on this island of noise, spellbound by matters of the soul.
‘But you know, dahling?’ he says ever so softly. ‘I have discovered there’s a lot of love out there.’
‘Oh yes,’ I reply quickly, suddenly aware of the harm my relentless negatives may be doing.
‘A lot of love,’ he repeats reverentially.
‘Absolutely,’ I agree. ‘Absolutely.’
The Con Ed drill starts up again.
‘I mean, people care.’ By now Victor’s face is radiant. ‘They really do.’
And it is me who is nodding and nodding. Victor puts his hand on my arm, leans toward me, looks searchingly into my eyes, and delivers himself of his wisdom.
‘Dahling,’ he whispers in my ear, ‘we’ve got to let it go.’
Yes, yes, oh yes, I know just what you mean.
‘Let it all go.’
A baffling yet enlightening conversation with her doorman:
Yesterday, I came out of the supermarket at the end of my block and, from the side of my eye, registered the beggar who regularly occupies the space in front of the store: a small white guy with a hand perpetually outstretched and a face full of broken blood vessels. ‘I need something to eat,’ he was whining as usual, ‘that’s all I want, something to eat, anything you can spare, just something to eat.’ As I passed him I heard a voice directly behind me say, ‘Here, bro. You want something to eat? Here’s something to eat.’ I turned back and saw a short black man with cold eyes standing in front of the beggar, a slice of pizza in his outstretched hand.
‘Aw, man,’ the beggar pleaded, ‘you know what I…’ The man’s voice went as cold as his eyes. ‘You say you want something to eat. Here’s something to eat,’ he repeated. ‘I bought this for you. Eat it!’ The beggar recoiled visibly. The man standing in front of him turned away and, in a motion of deep disgust, threw the pizza into a wastebasket. When I got to my building I couldn’t help stopping to tell Jose, the doorman – I had to tell someone – what had just happened. Jose’s eyes widened. When I finished he said, ‘Oh, Miss Gornick, I know just what y’mean. My father once gave me such a slap for exactly the same thing.’ Now it was my eyes that widened.
‘We was at a ball game, and a bum asked me for something to eat. So I bought a hot dog and gave it to him. My dad, he whacked me across the face. “If you’re gonna do a thing,” he said, “do it right. You don’t buy someone a hot dog without you also buying him a soda!”‘
Another day, another beggar:
On upper Broadway a beggar approaches a middle-aged woman. ‘I don’t drink, I don’t do drugs, I just need – ,’ he starts. To his amazement, the woman yells directly into his face, ‘I just had my pocket picked!’ The beggar turns his face northward and calls to a colleague up the block, ‘Hey, Bobby, leave her alone, she just got robbed.’
Yet another:
The front door of my building is just a few steps from a subway entrance. Between the two a man stands, begging. He’s been standing here almost every day now for more than two years. His name is Arthur. He is black, in his thirties, handsome, neatly dressed. He holds a paper cup in his hand and in a warm, patient voice intones over and over again, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I wonder if you can help me out. I don’ have anywhere to sleep, and I’d sure like a little food in my stomach. I don’ drink, take drugs, or do any criminal activities. All I’m askin’ for is your support in these hard times. Anything you can spare will be appreciated.’
I hardly ever give Arthur money – as a child of the Left I remain categorically opposed to begging – but I talk to anyone who talks to me. Arthur and I chat every morning. (How ya doin’? Okay, and you? Not bad, not bad. Don’t stay out too long, it’s gonna be cold today.) Sometimes if I’m in a hurry, all I do is wave hello. Invariably, he’ll then rag me. ‘Lookin’ good ta-day,’ he’ll call out, ‘real good.’ I’ll start to laugh and his voice will follow me, continuing to call out in that tender, baiting way he has.
The other day a man came up out of the subway just as I was walking through my front door. Arthur held out his cup. The man jerked his body away from Arthur’s hand as though from something diseased, on his face a look of murderous disgust. Arthur went on droning as though nothing out of the way had occurred, but I felt ill.
‘What is this all about?’ I cried. ‘Are you going to do this for the rest of your life?’
His laughing eyes looked down at me. I was a mark like any other. ‘Ma’am,’ he said, and went into his routine, ‘I look for a job, the Man he don’ wanna help me, he does everything he can to keep me down, he don’ care if I starve in the street.’
Arthur is smart and he has words, but so do I. I stood there arguing with him. Then, in the middle of a sentence, he said sharply, ‘I’ll decide when the vacation is over.’
I stared at him. I don’t know what he saw in my face, but his own softened perceptibly. Very quietly he said, ‘It doesn’t mean what it meant when you were young.’
Not all her anecdotes leave the reader with such a sense of closure, though.
Having just finished interviewing a city official for a piece I was writing, I was sitting at the counter of a coffee shop across the street from City Hall, drinking coffee, eating a bagel, and writing down remembered snatches of the conversation I’d just had when a man sat down one stool away from me. He wore dark pants and a tweed jacket, looked to be in his fifties, and I took him to be a middle-rank civil servant. When I had finished eating, drinking, and writing, I stood up, and as I was gathering myself together, he said to me, ‘I hope you won’t mind, I haven’t been able to read a word you’re writing, but I’d like to tell you some things I know about you from your handwriting.’ Startled, I said, ‘Sure, go ahead.’ I took a better look at him then and saw that he wore a large Native American turquoise-and-silver ring and a string tie. He leaned toward me and said slowly but intently, ‘You’re generous. That is, you are inclined to be generous, but circumstances don’t allow you to be. So you’re often not. You’re assertive. And a bit aggressive. And that small script … you’re very literate, very intelligent.’ I stared at him for a fraction of a second. ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘That’s a fine flattering portrait you’ve drawn.’ He looked relieved that I wasn’t somehow offended. Then I said, ‘Is my handwriting really so small?’ He nodded and said yes, it was, and small handwriting, he repeated, is the mark of the very intelligent. Of course, he added (very softly), there are people who have much smaller handwriting, and they… ‘Are the mad or the brilliant,’ I said, finishing his sentence for him. He paused. ‘Yes,’ he said, again softly, ‘they’re often very brilliant.’ I stood there, looking steadily, perhaps even gravely, at him. He smiled and said, ‘Oh, don’t worry, my handwriting is twice as large as yours.’ I did burst out laughing then, but the remark kept crawling around under my skin for the whole rest of that day.
We’ve all felt that skin-crawl, and we’re all juggling five different things crawling under our skins every day. Gornick has a way of literally getting under our skins, grabbing us by the short and curlies, with these stories. They force me to recognize the poverty of my own urban encounters. It would seem that only a true “odd woman” would experience this sort of thing. Which makes the ubiquitous hashtag #FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) rear its head: “Why don’t I talk to strangers more?” Unspoken challenges like this one are the USP of The Odd Woman And The City. For instance, “Are you an odd or an even woman?” And the mocking: “Afraid of a little skin-crawl?”