Recollections of My Nonexistence A Memoir - Rebecca Solnit Page 0,56

that peculiar business makes me believe that my urge, years earlier, at the Allen Ginsberg photography show, to shout about my nonexistence had a basis.

Some of it was less funny. Talking to Tina in the winter air, I remembered for the first time in years how another powerful old man attempted to destroy that first book altogether. John Coplans had been a cofounder of Artforum, the most daring of the major American art magazines, when it began life in San Francisco in 1962, and he had written about Bay Area artists for the magazine. In the 1980s, he had some success as a photographer. His subject was his own sagging, hairy, aging, nude body depicted up close in black and white as a sort of monolith that took up all the room in the picture.

When my book appeared in 1991, Coplans had a lawyer write a letter to City Lights accusing me of libel. Wally Hedrick, one of the six central subjects of that first book, had painted American flags starting in 1953, and one way or another he’d lost or destroyed all the paintings that might’ve had some minor status as landmarks of American art, since New York painter Jasper Johns was famous for having begun painting American flags slightly later. (He painted a lot of them black to protest the Vietnam War.) One of Hedrick’s paintings, I wrote in my book, “survived until 1963, when (according to Hedrick) the art critic John Coplans borrowed it from a ten-year survey of Hedricks’s work and never returned it. He had asked to bring it to a woman interested in buying it, and the work has never been seen since.”

Coplans claimed that not only did this make him out to be a thief, but that he’d never met Hedrick. As I recall it, the lawyer’s letter suggested that if we destroyed all copies of the book, no further action would be taken. The desire to casually annihilate the years of work and the moment of arrival that a first book represented was stunning. It didn’t help that, so far as I could tell, the editor who received the letter seemed to think it quite plausible that I had gotten my facts gravely wrong. I rarely seemed to be regarded as in possession of much competence and credibility in those days, whether it was about a personal interaction or about history.

I’m still in the habit of amassing evidence to back me up, and that’s what I did then: I went to the SFMOMA museum library and photocopied a pile of material about the two men’s published conversations and collaborations back in the day. My editor, I believe, forwarded the material to the lawyer. All the copies of my book were not destroyed, though it had a very quiet life and is now out of print. One of the two write-ups attributed authorship of the book to poet and critic Bill Berkson, who’d written a very gracious foreword, opening with a quote by Mina Loy: “The common tragedy is to suffer without having appeared.”

In 2008 I wrote an essay called “Men Explain Things to Me” that contains the sentence “Credibility is a basic survival tool.” In a way, credibility is also my profession or at least part of the necessary equipment of any writer of nonfiction. I had to fight for it in the beginning. That is, I had to fight to convince others, in both personal and professional life, to grant me the capacity to perceive events with a reasonable degree of accuracy, and the frequency of this experience sowed self-doubt in me, so the struggle was not only with others.

It is not always possible to say that a given weather event is due to climate change, but that climate change shapes the trends is clear, and the same can be said of discrimination—that this particular event may or may not be due to someone’s attitudes about people in your category, but the cumulative effect suggests a pattern. Looking back now, it seems that had I not lived in a culture where the threats against me and the violence against women around me were real and pressing and the disdain of those writers who were so lionized in my youth wasn’t so scorching, then these actions against me might have seemed a series of unfortunate, unrelated incidents.

My second book was a

readonlinefreenovel.com Copyright 2016 - 2024