I'm not posting this review of a Marge Piercy book because I'm an admirer of her work, because I'm not, but only because the bolded paragraph is emblematic of a certain awful mindset, the possessor of which feel virtuous.
FT WEEKEND - BOOKS: Me and my animal passions: If feminism has given the writer's life a spine, pets have given it pathos, finds Lavinia Greenlaw
Financial Times; Apr 6, 2002
By LAVINIA GREENLAW
SLEEPING WITH CATS: A Memoir by Marge Piercy
Marge Piercy is a novelist andpoet whose work is defined by feminism. Her life, it seems, has been defined by cats. This memoir is full of battles and adventures, tragedy and romance, but when it comes to real character and pathos, it is the cats who triumph. Readers should not be put off by the fact that Piercy has included pictures of her pets. In contrast to the miserable predictability of Piercy's human cast, the cats are a delight.
Piercy grew up in 1950s working-class Detroit, in a family with a very American history of boom and bust, vaudeville, strike-breaking, cocktails, card games and cultural collision. Her mother's background was Jewish, her father's Welsh, and their marriage was fraught and mutually absorbing. This father used to let go of a ladder Piercy's mother was climbing or pin her to the wall with a table they were moving. Piercy decided early on that she did not want to have children, a decision she pursued through a self-induced abortion and eventual sterilisation.
This is the 1950s without any nostalgia for a time of greater innocence. Piercy was embarrassingly intelligent; she learnt to pick locks, fight and "run like hell". Being Jewish meant that she didn't count as either white or black. She was sexually adventurous but for a long time wary of men. One abrupt loss followed another: a kitten was ripped from her arms by a dog and a teenage friend died of a heroin overdose.
She severed ties thoroughly, barely seeing her family after leaving home for university at 17. She discovered espresso and lobster, married a French particle physicist and moved to Paris, where she says she learned how Jewish and American she is. After leaving him, she returned to the US and poverty, eating so much rice that she coloured it blue for variety.
The 1960s, too, have rarely sounded so bleak. Piercy lived in groups, went to group meetings and had group sex. Women still cooked while men poured drinks and told her that her poetry was too female. Her lover sabotaged her first reading by standing up and denouncing the event as "hierarchical". Her second husband was a computer expert with whom she lived in San Francisco, Boston and New York, feeling guilty as bourgeois comforts crept in - good wine, Japanese tableware and credit cards.
In 1970, at the height of hippy urban exodus, she moved to Cape Cod and established the home and garden in which she still lives, enjoying life with her third husband, Ira Wood. Her account of the previous break-up, the end of the open relationship and its attendant ideals, is raw and barbed.
While feminism has given her life a "spine", Piercy's relationships with other women have not been good. It must have been a confusing and competitive time as people strained to submit to the ideals of communality and free love. Piercy has a strong sense of her own worth and requirements and is, as she says, vain, because her body was for so long what was most admired about her. She compares other women to herself and approves of those whom she resembles.
Her tough approach got her into trouble with students who accused her of being male-identified because she wanted them to analyse and criticise. When asked what they did in other classes, they replied: "We discuss our feelings". While constantly negotiating ideologies, she is attractively no-nonsense and recently burned her juvenilia, a novel, because she realised that if she died, someone might actually read the thing. The poems she includes here compare poorly to the prose, being too much like it. They are less original and have a drive towards closure which the narrative resists.
With her cats, Piercy shares the imperatives: "To eat, to have a home and feel loved". They are "athletes of sleep" and she sleeps with them. There is Max who can turn himself "into water" and who herds the others outside; Boris who has "a sexual relationship with nightgowns"; Jim Beam who kicks in the screen door and cries at 3am; and pug-faced Colette who corners Ira when in heat and slings other cats off Piercy's lap. If they go away for too long, Colette will "pluck a bird out of the air and kill it in front of us."
Piercy's relationship with her cats is more intimate and unconditional than any other. She will sit up nursing for nights on end and once even licked a kitten as its mother would. Her writing becomes more detailed and charged when describing them and contains none of the qualifications she applies even to her enduring third marriage. She confronts ageing as she does love, through these animals, their lapses and decrepitudes mirroring her own.
Piercy's sincerity makes this memoir better than many other ironised accounts of what went wrong in the 1960s and is moving in its persistent sadness. When writing about the capricious world of cats, who do not go in for group anything, she is at her best.
Copyright: The Financial Times Limited 1995-2002
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