I AM A MONSTER
A friend recommended an article to me, as much because of the title as because of the introductory story about the author’s father, who lived a spare and distant life in a houseboat without luxury or interruption. It had a lot to do with books. “Women Refusing to Be Like Other Women” New novels by Rachel Cusk and Jhumpa Lahiri explore the liberating power of isolation. CLAIRE DEDERER JUNE 2021 ISSUE
The article in Atlantic goes on to be a review of other distinctive women, but I learned more from reading an earlier article: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/11/20/art-monstrous-men/ it’s mostly about monster men who do admirable work but abuse everyone. Like Woody Allen. But the quote below is how she turns to her own monstrousness and that’s what speaks to me.
“An art monster, I thought when I read this. Yes, I’d like to be one of those. My friends felt the same way. Victoria, an artist, went around chanting “art monster” for a few days.
What if I’m not monster enough?
Sure, I possess the ordinary monstrousness of a real-life person, the unknowable depths, the suppressed Hyde. But I also have a more visible, quantifiable kind of monstrousness — that of the artist who completes her work. Finishers are always monsters.
Hemingway’s girlfriend, the writer Martha Gellhorn, didn’t think the artist needed to be a monster; she thought the monster needed to make himself into an artist. “A man must be a very great genius to make up for being such a loathsome human being.” (Well, I guess she would know.) She’s saying if you’re a really awful person, you are driven to greatness in order to compensate the world for all the awful shit you are going to do to it.”
So far I’m not been much of a monster because I don’t finish things. Both my mother and my husband complained that I started with much enthusiasm, hit the probs, and lost interest. One could even say that about my career as a minister. Bob meant things more like not finishing a doll house for the grandkids. He provided one of the bumps because he so hated the sound of their high voices as they played with the dolls. I thought of it as a kind of therapy because they needed a way to work through their feelings after the death of their mother.
Now that I’ve been more of a monster for twenty years — and I admit it was another monster writer who put my feet on the path at last — I finish things. Like a thousand word blog post every day. (Some might say I cheat by quoting so much, but that’s the definition of a blog: a log of the bits one has been reading on the internet.) It is a discipline that allows me justification to avoid all the others stuff — like housekeeping — that I don’t want to do anyway. But it is a weak defense against those who never read or have no notion of what a blog might be. Their inner disciplines are about cleanliness and prosperity. I don’t care about either.
This sets me apart — just me, not all women — from the gender definitions assigned to those distinguished by their ability to physically produce other human beings, with a little help from friends and enemies. I am technically fertile but a psychological monster because I don’t want babies. Earlier I have responded to other species when they were infants, but now I don’t even like the term “fur babies.” Babies must be tended to — my baby is my writing.
Worthiness doesn’t come into it, since I’ve gone out of my way not to depend on others or even to disclose to very many what it is that I’m thinking. Of course, distance in an overlooked small town is very helpful. Few to none will come here once they realize that Glacier National Park is an hour away on the horizon and the Blackfeet Reservation doesn’t look any different on their side of the boundary than the land on this side.
The biggest danger to my monsterdom is from seduction by the other writers far more intriguing that I’ve found until now. Claire Dederer pulls me off point by being someone I might have been if the ministry in Kirkland, across the lake from Seattle, had succeeded and therefore made me into a hip woman with friends in a pleasant place. Another force against monsterdom is the techno-crashing of the machines that get me to the internet. They demand a lot of time and thought to keep operating properly.
But the magnetism that strengthens my monsterness is my experience in the Sixties and the underlying four years as a theatre student in Chicago, which sealed the importance of being exceptional, contributing and introspective, the Method as instrument to achievement.
So what I met in the Sixties here when I came to teach was a complex and intense world of corruption, collaboration, and concupiscence. The state school system was no match for it and the teachers were lured into the sexual revolution which froze their salaries so they’d leave. At that point I had the romantic notion that a woman should devote herself to a monster/genius and that’s what I did, though one enough age cooled for an amateur like me to relate, buying my way in with service.
When I first walked up the steps to the Scriver Studio, I expected a corny old folk guy from a Fifties TV series. I did not expect to share a love of Malvina Hoffman’s sculpture and the major museums of Chicago that I had explored only months earlier and he had visited in the Fifties. I had not thought about taxidermy at all, except for the decayed and poisonous examples in the background of English movies attacking privilege. This was different and the sculpture was very fine.
But he knew nothing about my world at all, the extreme devotion to monsterdom that is acted out in backstage life that I interpreted as dangerous adventure rewarded by intense understanding. For a while he was intrigued by the idea and I thought I was living it out. I guess I was for many productive years.
