The Last Page
Linfield, Susie
ELLEN WILLIS, who died in November at the age of 64, was such a unique and wonderful set of contradictions— or seeming contradictions. She was a staunchly radical feminist who believed in...
...I think she simply believed that it is important to figure out what's true, and that it is important to change the world, and that those two activities are linked...
...Her writings on pop culture weren't a form of slumming...
...Early on, she saw that the Iranian revolution would be a disaster for women and other freedom-lovers...
...She called herself an "anti-antiZionist," and knew that the world's obsession with Israel's purported crimes wasn't just, or even mainly, about territory: "It's impossible not to notice," she wrote in 2003, "how the runaway inflation of Israel's villainy aligns with ingrained cultural fantasies about the iniquity and power of Jews...
...she genuinely—though not naively— believed in the emancipatory possibilities of the demotic, because she had experienced them herself...
...Ellen didn't get everything right, but she got an awful lot right...
...When some on the left were urging "cultural sensitivity," she condemned the fatwa against Salman Rushdie as a 144 n DISSENT / Winter 2007 barbaric assault...
...SUSIE LINFIELD 144 n DISSENT / Winter 2007...
...In a 2005 piece, she chided Susan Sontag as a "curmudgeon" with a "freefloating animus" toward pop...
...as (tainted) Americans we must turn the other cheek...
...She approached just about everything— George Eliot and The Sopranos, Herbert Marcuse and Lou Reed—with equal thoughtfulness, seriousness, dignity, and care...
...I hope that will change...
...And though Ellen, like so many of us, was increasingly alienated from the culture in which she lived, she never became a mandarin...
...as a friend, she was unfailingly generous and—a surprise to some—so gentle...
...Much has been written about the merging of high and low culture, but Ellen really lived that mix...
...And for me, part of the fun, and the adventure, of being Ellen's friend and colleague was discovering that these disparate characteristics weren't really contradictions at all: that somehow, in her inimitable way, she had put all the pieces together...
...Ellen argued with other feminists and the left for better and more sensible reasons...
...As a thinker, Ellen had an astonishingly trenchant mind...
...Yet unlike, say, Camille Paglia, Ellen was not a provocateur or professional contrarian, nor did she romanticize herself as a brave and lonely warrior...
...This doesn't say much about Ellen, but it says a lot about the hostility of the larger liberal and mainstream-left press to original voices and challenging thoughts...
...Up until almost the moment of Ellen's death, the world, and its possibilities, held her interest...
...or how the traditional pariah status of Jews has been replicated by a Jewish pariah state...
...She was a dyedinthe-wool bohemian who was obsessed with real estate—which is to say, she was a true New Yorker...
...She loved long nineteenth-century novels, but was an ardent reader of the tabloids...
...Her death leaves an enormous hole in the world...
...Many of those pieces were published in periodicals with (very) small readerships, such as Dissent, Radical Society, Situations, and New Politics...
...She was a staunchly radical feminist who believed in pleasure, happiness, and freedom...
...The pacifist left, she charged, holds that "as abstract human beings we are entitled to theoretical justice...
...She was one of the most instinctively ethical people I have ever known, and yet she hated any hint of sanctimony or self-righteousness...
...Ellen wrote a lot in the last few years—on psychoanalysis, terrorism, Joan Didion, Tom Frank—and these essays are some of her best: at once complex and forthright, elegant and colloquial...
...She was a fierce polemicist on the page who, in person, was often painfully shy...
...In a particularly sharp and refreshing piece written after the invasion of Afghanistan, she took on the moralism of the pacifist left: "For at the heart of the matter is an unspoken meta-argument: that America is a sinful country, and must achieve redemption through nonviolence...
...Ellen lacked both pretense and condescension...
Vol. 54 • January 2007 • No. 1
