Silences by Shelly Fisher Fishkin Page B

Weeds, to be burned like weeds, or used as compost. When the habits of creation were at last rewon, one book went to the publisher, and I dared to begin my present work.It became my center, engraved on it: “Evil is whatever distracts.” (By now had begun a cost to our family life, to my own participation in life as a human being.) I shall not tell the “rest, residue, and remainder” of what I was “leased, demised, and let unto” when once again I had to leave work at the flood to return to the Time-Master, to business-ese and legalese. This most harmful of all mysilences has ended, but I am not yet recovered; may still be a one-book silence.
    However that will be, we are in a time of more and more hidden and foreground silences, women and men. Denied full writing life, more may try to “nurse through night” (that part-time, part-self night) “the ethereal spark,” but it seems to me there would almost have had to be “flame on flame” first; and time as needed,afterwards; and enough of the self, the capacities, undamaged for the rebeginnings on the frightful task. I would like to believe this for what has not yet been written into literature. But it cannot reconcile for what is lost by unnatural silences.
    1962

    * A Season in Hell.
    * “Entering my eighth decade [I come] into possession of unobstructed leisure . . . just as, in the course of nature,my vigor sensibly declines. What little of it is left, I husband for certain matters as yet incomplete and which indeed may never be completed.” Billy Budd never was completed; it was edited from drafts found after Melville’s death.
    * As Jean Toomer (Cane); Henry Roth (Call It Sleep); Edith Summers Kelley (Weeds) .
    ** Robert Bone. The Negro Novel in America, 1958.
    * Some other foreground silences:Elizabeth (Mrs.) Gaskell, Kate Chopin, Cora Sandel, Cyrus Colter, Hortense Calisher.
    * Half of the working classes are women.
    * “One Out of Twelve” has a more extensive roll of women writers of achievement.
    ** I would now add a fifth—Kate Chopin—also a foreground silence.
    * Among them: George Eliot, Helen Hunt Jackson, Mrs. Gaskell, Kate Chopin, Lady Gregory, Isak Dinesen. Ivy Compton-Burnettfinds this the grim reason for the emergence of British women novelists after World War I: “. . . The men were dead, you see, and the women didn’t marry so much because there was no one for them to marry, and so they had leisure, and, I think, in a good many cases they had money because their brothers were dead, and all that would tend to writing, wouldn’t it, being single, and having some money,and having the time—having no men, you see.”
    ** Already in that changed time when servants were not necessarily a part of the furnishings of almost anyone well educated enough to be making literature.

1971, 1972
    REBECCA HARDING DAVIS
    Her Life and Times
                       Written as an afterword for the 1972 reprint of the 1861 Life in the Iron Mills; or, The Korl Woman by Rebecca Harding Davis ( Atlantic Monthly, April 1861).
                           A few notes have been added to the original ones.
    You are about to give the life of your reading to a forgotten American classic, Rebecca Harding’s Life in the Iron Mills, reprinted here after 111 years from the April 1861 Atlantic Monthly.
    Without precedent or predecessor, it recorded what no one else had recorded; alone in its epoch and for decades to come, saw the significance, the presage, in scorned or unseen native materials—and wrought them into art.
    Written in secret and in isolation by a thirty-year-old unmarried woman who livedfar from literary circles of any kind, it won instant fame—to sleep in ever deepening neglect to our time.
    Remember, as you begin to read of the sullen, clinging industrial smoke, the air thick, clammy with the breath of crowded human beings: this was written when almost everywhere the air was pure; and these lives, hitherto unknown,