Dorothy Allison: Finding Her Place in the City of Literature
DOROTHY ALLISON is an atheist who made literature her religion. As a girl and young woman, she brought to the reading of books what other people might bring to church. Novels written with craft, meaning and inspiration had for her a meaning far beyond the reach of ordinary life and mundane things.
Born in Greenville, South Carolina in 1949 to an unwed 15-year-old mother, Allison was, all through her childhood, a victim of sexual abuse from her stepfather. Trying to escape in her mind, she read books and thought of Literature as a city where the books of “great writers” lived in grand homes downtown, on ancient squares or on broad boulevards of learning and good taste. Popular fiction lived on the bustling streets where business was done but whose homes were a little tacky.
She dreamed that someday she’d live in that city. Certainly not in a grand old home such as Melville or Faulkner kept up. Perhaps in one of the city’s seedier districts. Still she hoped to be a professional writer, to live someday within those city limits.
She realized early that she was attracted to women, not men, and she learned to fear any new book about poor people or lesbians or southern women; the book would likely be “cruel, small and false,” and would deny or grossly simplify people like her. All the characters would be hot-headed, impulsive, uneducated, loud and proud…
It would be so nice, she thought, to see people like me written about with liking and sympathy, with some appreciation for our patience and for the long spells of our creativity. She was convinced that even a book about lesbians or the poor that was obsessively mean could be valid if it felt REAL. But most of these books were not real — not to Dorothy Allison, anyway.
And though she felt a lot of grief and rage, “politically correct parables” didn’t satisfy her either — left-leaning lessons illustrated by simple-minded stories. She didn’t want stories that conform to simple political positions; she wanted to be written about compassionately but with the complications — and even the nastiness — left in.
She was sure the stories that result from honest story-telling are better, no matter how painful they are to read, and to stomach. The violence in them stuns us at first, pushes us back. There is something hushed in the taking in of evil. There is an indrawn breath. The stories haunt us but the best of them we can’t forget because they’re also literature.
She began to write, to risk things in her writing, to dream of being a writer read by others. But as a lesbian, she thought she couldn’t write about women wanting other women sexually or she’d never be allowed into the City of Literature.
If stories about blue collar lesbians in love kept filling her imagination, she felt she had two choices. One choice was to give up writing.
The second choice was disguise, to be concealed by appearances, to write about love and sex making the lovers upper middle-class and making one of the women into a man. Hiding, in a way.
And then it hit her. No wonder so many writers drink too much or do drugs and go “slowly crazy”! Again and again, they claim something as true which they know is false until they can’t handle all of this pretending.
Then Dorothy went off to Florida Presbyterian College, the first in her family to go to college. There she became a feminist, and suddenly her brain was exploding. Many hours that had once been spent dreaming or writing she now spent at political meetings and marches and demonstrations, or helping launch feminist journals and feminist presses. It was exhausting.
Imagine, she used to ask her friends, how few paintings would be painted if painters had to make all their own canvases, make all their own paints, and build and staff any gallery that just might show their work.
It was an ecstatic liberation to realize that feminist literature saw nothing wrong with being a lesbian.
But the feminism she was ingesting portrayed the City of Literature — that notion Dorothy had so loved — as an armed compound patrolled by men, and incredibly hostile to women. In the City of Literature, feminists said, lies were told and re-told, sometimes by cynical propagandists and sometimes by sincere and innocent people who’d never known anything but the lies of men and of conventional morality. The City of Literature loves and enforces social norms and insists on positive messages.
Now Dorothy no longer wanted to live in that city. But she felt a desire and a need to mourn the dream she’d lost, along with a pained pride in her exile. She still read some of the “great western writers” feeling like ‘an apostate mumbling prayers in times of crisis.’
To reject the strict canon of “Great Western Writers” felt satisfying, but to reject all criteria for distinguishing great writing from good, and good writing from bad, seemed to her a basic mistake.
She could admit silently that a good deal of feminist novel-writing was awful — as happens whenever mediocre talents plunge into political causes and use novels as props or cultural documents. But to call other feminists out as bad writers seemed disloyal. This was a sisterhood, and there were enemies enough outside the gates; why fight with a lesbian sister?
Finally, Dorothy Allison decided that each novelist and short story writer must decide for himself or herself what good fiction is. She began teaching writing, and told her students: Others can’t be trusted to tell you when your work is excellent. Professional critics or novelists turned book reviewers can only judge your work if they have the same goals and standards you do. Your friends and lovers know how much you love your work, and how much it costs you, and they’ll tell you your work is good because they fear the truth will be too much for your relationship to bear. So you must decide for yourself.
Her own writing was powerful, with shocking images. In 1992, she published the autobiographical novel “Bastard Out of Carolina.” She wrote about pain and shame and sexual abuse not just because it was what she knew but because she hoped somehow to justify the awful price she’d paid as a girl. Some readers would be hurt by these stories, and some would be enlightened. What, Dorothy Allison wondered, was the balance?
In the end, she concluded that if we agree as a society that some ideas are too dangerous to be featured in the stories we tell, then we silence the truth-tellers and are headed for some sort of collective disaster.
Dorothy Allison once wrote, “There is a place where we are always alone, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto — God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger. Sometimes I think they are all the same.”
She also says, “Change, when it comes, cracks everything open.”