Guest Post from Laurie Stone

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Fangirling a little hosting one of my favorite writers here, the phenomenal Laurie Stone. I love her voice—one of the most unique contemporary writers, and a standout in the homogeneity of literary language. I’m also grateful she agreed to publish in the newsletter during a very busy time in the semester, when most of my writing time has been consumed by my book project and academic pieces. As an academic, I’m so grateful to have read this piece. Enjoy! —ET

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The past is not what I remember.

It’s not even the past.

As I read old notebooks, I see how much I unsoured the grapes of the past. In the story I invented of my earlier years, there were few obstacles and lots of help. What memory has sanded down and the notebooks show is the way I felt in the face of rejection. And how much rejection there was.

I pressed on because I don't need to believe in my abilities to go after something. If I keep wanting it, I keep wanting it.

Reading the notebooks, I see the faces of people I’ve forgotten and rooms where I felt small and underestimated. There’s so much more: Woman, listen to me, and let me correct and evaluate you, than I’ve wanted to retain. It’s why the women’s movement needed to swirl into the golem it became. It’s comforting to think the problem was solved just by recoiling from it.

In a notebook entry written in 1977, I record an exchange with Steven Marcus, who was the advisor for my dissertation at Columbia University. In those days, Marcus was pretty much the head honcho of 19th Century studies in the graduate English department. He had written a sexy book about Victorian pornography called The Other Victorians (1966). He wrote books about Dickens, Freud, and a book about Engels I have to tell you I learned a lot from.

I learned from all his books. He was not a sexy man. He was a smart man with a raspy, Bugs Bunny voice a friend of mine could take off. I chose to work with him because I thought I was supposed to be with the smartest man in any room. The concept of “the smart man” was a real thing to me. That the smart man had a lot of dumb ideas that seeped from his belief in the concept of “the smart man” was not at that time an understanding I’d formed.

In choosing Marcus as the smartest man in the room, there was a kind of sex vibe for me. I mean a kind of erotic energy that doesn’t mean I want to fuck you. I wanted Marcus to like me, and when you want someone to like you, when you can feel it overtaking you, they are never going to like you. This fact underlies the whole erotic machinery of the world, and that’s funny if you live long enough to find most things funny that are implacable.

I was also floating around the world with the thought men are my friends. Men are the people who like me. I like women, and women also scare me. I was floating around depending on men are my friends. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, If you’re such a big fat feminist, why didn’t you understand that men on an individual basis—not only gathered as a force of we own everything—if you’re such a big fat feminist, why didn’t you understand that individual men could not like you on a personal basis? My answer to this is If men can’t be relied on to be nice to me, I’m in the world on a cold, wind-swept wasteland, alone.

Marcus can hardly bring himself to speak to me when I arrive at his office to discuss my work. I’ve already passed my orals with a “distinction.” Marcus wasn’t on my committee. I don’t remember him there. In those days, the oral exam went on for several hours and covered four giant blocks of scholarship, in my case: Victorian literature, modern drama, medieval literature, and William Blake. I knew the stuff. I was at the net, slamming back answers. “Where is Harriet Mill buried?” “Avignon,” I said, with a silent, you think that’s a hard question?

I’m writing my dissertation about Charlotte Brontë, and on the first chapter I give Marcus, there are no positive comments. He writes, "Your writing isn't up to the level which I know you are capable of, it obscures the clarity of the ideas, etc. I don't ever want to see anything like this again." He continues about the organization—“it lacks a center, a focus, a thesis, and many particular details are either imprecise or wrong.”

Writing to you now, I love the phrase, “it lacks a center, a focus, a thesis, and many particular details are either imprecise or wrong.” I seem to have turned that little curse into a style. Maybe it was already my style, and Marcus was never going to be my reader.

He’s not the only reason I let go of the dissertation. I let go of the dissertation, but I didn’t let go of the Brontës. If you want to read something I wrote about them, here’s a link to a post on my stack about Charlotte and Emily:

Sister Act

The story I told myself after more or less dropping out of graduate school—something I did not do, I mean dropping out, before this experience or after it—I told myself I didn't care about becoming a scholar, which is true. I did not care. It was never going to be my life. I told myself I had become the kind of writer I wanted to be. I was being published in the Village Voice and in Ms. Magazine—places I wanted to be published in, and so I didn’t need to finish the dissertation. It wasn't true then, and it isn't true now.

I was demoralized. I was rejected on an intellectual basis and on what felt like a personal basis. I didn’t fight my way out of these feelings. I didn’t know how to. I went through a similar shut-down after being fired from the Village Voice by two men, Don Forst and Doug Simmons, who looked at me with fangs dripping after finding a reason to stop paying me that had nothing to do with my work. It would turn out they were on a campaign to fire as many people as they could, and soon the heads of most of the regulars at the paper would roll. At the time I was fired, in 1999, I didn’t know this sweep of firings was coming. Looking back, knowing the firing wasn’t that personal or meaningful, a lot of the pain drains away, but it doesn’t undo the fact that part of me was stopped and sad and entered a period of what do I do next?

Is this piece about blame? I don’t think it’s about blame. I think it’s about times when all the mirrors in the fun house make you look broken.

During the time Richard and I have lived in our house in Hudson, New York, he’s told me he’s heard his name called out six times by ghosts. One afternoon at Yaddo, the artist colony where we met, he was walking around the grounds when he felt a cold wind swirl around him and a ghost move through him. I hardly knew him, and after he told me the story I felt a body move through my body, the way you do when you are falling in love. At our house the other day, I heard my name called out, and when I went to his studio, I said, “Did you call me?” He said, “No.”

We keep hearing our names called out because it’s the past wanting back in and for us to tell another story about it. The past wants to be seen as it was, and we can’t do that. We can only see the past through now, and that’s funny to me, even if it might not be funny to the person I once was.

There are moments in life you look back at and you say, Ha, oh, that was a turning point. If I hadn’t gone west on Canal Street instead of East, as I was planning, the giant curtain that became my life in year X would not have opened. At any age, you can look back and see these forks in the garden of forking paths, and the sense you have seen one will be accurate enough in the moment you are seeing it. It’s not the truth of anything, and your life does not need a truth of anything for you to see your route from point A to point B. Have I mentioned how much I dislike stories that start with the knowledge of where they are ending?

Laurie Stone is author of six books of fiction, memoir, criticism, and hybrid writing, most recently Streaming Now, Postcards from the Thing that is Happening (Dottir Press 2022), longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. She was a longime writer for The Village Voice, theater critic for The Nation, and critic-at-large on Fresh Air. More recently, she has written regularly for N+1, Paris Review, and Evergreen Review. She writes the literary Substack Everything is Personal, with over 12,000 subscribers, that Lit Hub recently named one of the seven best literary publications on Substack. You can subscribe to her Substack for free or with paid support for independent literary publishing at: lauriestone.substack.com/subscribe.