Katha Pollitt's Learning to Drive
Stansell, Christine
LEARNING TO DRIVE by Katha Pollitt Random House, 2007 224 pp $22.95 AFTER YEARS of feminist pressure to integrate the bylines of America's journals and newspapers of record, women's opinion...
...Years of therapy had led her to believe that the best way of dealing with men like G. was to agree with them completely while maintaining secret reservations and provisos, sort of like the Yalta agreement...
...In Learning to Drive, her new book of essays (most never before published), political commentary recedes, and the domestic backstory takes over...
...Here is the setup: DISSENT / Winter 2008 • 109 MGM BOOKS Observation is my weakness...
...Pollitt's genius is to —. stage the central action around her driving lessons on the streets of New York—a comic premise in itself—undertaken under the tutelage of a kindly young Filipino instructor who provides a gentle but admonitory running commentary on her ineptness for what he views as the most basic of life tasks...
...But that was years ago," she muses in a beautiful passage about the arc of a generation, "when we were drunk on the life force, hunting for fathers for the babies we didn't know we wanted to have...
...When I was younger, not driving had overtones of New York hipness—growing up in the city, I didn't learn to drive because I went to an old-fashioned private girls' school that taught Latin and how to make a linzer torte instead of dorky suburban subjects like driver's ed...
...To start out, there was a shadowy and adored husband who then turned into an exhusband...
...A can of soup is never enough somehow...
...CHRISTINE STANSELL is professor of history at the University of Chicago...
...It's a big question, and an interesting one, and the book makes you want to stay around to find out...
...Flora Lewis and Elizabeth Drew were notable forerunners, but the real change came with the women who broke into print in the late 1980s and 1990s: a group that included Barbara Ehrenreich, Gail Collins, Maureen Dowd, Ellen Goodman, and Katha Pollitt...
...Yet life with men is laudable and necessary, the feminists' version of World Peace in Our Time, or peaceful coexistence in the Middle East...
...Learning to drive is about getting on with life, pulling together a self that had gone lax under the deluding regimen of love—and the self's own comforting fictions...
...It becomes the New York feminist's version of the American myth of heading out to the territories...
...It's what Pollitt, a lifelong New Yorker, had to do in order to get to her country house after the designated driver boyfriend left...
...Excuse me while I set myself on fire," she recently quipped about Michael Ignatieff 's mea culpa about Iraq...
...THE TRIUMPH of Learning to Drive is that even as Pollitt's wonderful fuck-you writing enacts revenge against the "bounder," it cuts loose from the old story...
...The tone was comic and down-to-earth, spiced with the wisecracking asides of an observer/outsider...
...It's this kind of "revelation" that jars readers accustomed to thinking of Pollitt as a "good old fashioned feminist," as one reviewer described her—as if that meant celibacy, Birkenstocks, and scorn for men...
...OT ALL LITERARY sensations age well, but this one has...
...I did not realize that the man I lived with, my soul mate, made for me in Marxist heaven, was a dedicated philanderer, that the drab colleague he insinuated into our social life was his longstanding secret girlfriend, or that the young art critic he mocked as silly and second-rate was being groomed as my replacement...
...Her literary gifts are in full display: characters quickly sketched in, dialogue and description moving in contretemps, narrative and flashbacks skillfully paced...
...Sometimes she was the debater and provocateur (in a notorious piece written after 9/11, she stopped Sophie from hanging an American flag out their apartment window) and sometimes she was the commentator stage right, as she mulled over the Last Marxist's certainties or sifted her daughter's teenage perceptions through the sieve of her own feminist beliefs...
...The characters allowed Pollitt to inject the columnist's monologue with the dramaturgy of heated conversation, an idealized representation of the ongoing talks we all have—or want to have—with the people we're close to about the things that matter...
...The hilarious "In the Study Group" reviews her valiant attempts to make the man's illusions her own by joining his Marxist study group, where her "brilliant underappreciated boyfriend" holds forth on the promise of workers' councils...
...Despite her wry disclaimer, readers see that observational skills, intensified by the superfocus that comedy and irony provide, are anything but Pollitt's weakness...
...The book is replete with wicked aperçus coming from the clandestine mental drop boxes where women trade state secrets of heterosexuality...
...Friends male and female wandered in and out, and sometime in the late nineties, a more assertive domestic partner appeared, the Last Marxist, who took up quite a bit of time on stage (too much for my taste), speaking up for the Old Time Religion...
...Learning to drive means letting go of fantasy, nostalgia, and the little conceits that make up anyone's armor against reality...
...The combination of Pollitt's persona as leading feminist and the personal revelations lent the piece a frisson of amazement, or titillation, or maybe schadenfreude: how had the smart, tough woman we knew from her columns ended up with such a jerk, a "bounder," as her therapist quaintly called him...
...There is never a surplus of detail or a surfeit of emotion, the occupational hazards of memoir writing...
...Men take a lot of attention, she muses out loud...
...The breakup weaves through the story, but the real story itself is elsewhere: Pollitt is on the road, so to speak...
...To varying degrees, they transformed the voice of the pundit on high to an identifiably female one, routinely treating "women's" issues, setting up confiding relationships with readers, and using feminist tartness as a weapon of choice when it came to deflating and skewering enemies...
...LEARNING TO DRIVE by Katha Pollitt Random House, 2007 224 pp $22.95 AFTER YEARS of feminist pressure to integrate the bylines of America's journals and newspapers of record, women's opinion pieces and political commentary remain scarce...
...The book is exciting, and funny, and acute precisely because it floats free of the deadening claims of feminine—or feminist—injury...
...The friend doesn't really believe this, Pollitt notes, but advises this as the best diplomatic strategy...
...Rich meant to announce an era when the jig was up and women got on with another tale...
...before you know it you're ordering huge quantities of Chinese food...
...DISSENT / Winter 2008 n 111...
...a toddler when we first met her, Sophie became a young woman over the years Pollitt was writing...
...Pollitt refuses both sentimental pathos and political rectitude...
...she asks, he denies...
...It wasn't the usual feminine stance of virtue traduced and betrayed...
...She is uninterested in denunciations of male perfidy, in heightening her understanding of patriarchy, or in clambering up to a position of right thinking...
...And, on the surface, Pollitt seems to have joined a throng of women voicing a ubiquitous complaint...
...Webstalker" chronicles Pollitt's obsessive late nights at the computer as Internet gumshoe, Googling clues to G.'s life with the other woman...
...I am a fifty-two-year-old woman who has yet to get a driver's license...
...We've trained it like ivy to our walls/baked it like bread in our ovens...
...You might think the subject is odd, you might even think it's unbecoming, or sad, or pathetic, for a woman known as one of the country's leading feminists...
...But there was something more that fascinated readers, I think—it was Pollitt's sheer brazenness in telling the story without a shade of remorse or embarrassment...
...She is finishing a book about the history of feminism, 1792-2002 (forthcoming, 2009...
...In "Sisterhood" she tries to salve her wounds by bonding with the other jilted women in the boyfriend's past, exchanging spurious assurances of injured solidarity: "You are a good person who deserves happiness, we told each other over and over, attractive, kind, loving, generous, forgiving...
...Thirty years later, though, it sometimes seems as if the old story is hardwired into the culture's 1 10 n DISSENT / Winter 2008 BOOKS DNA...
...She's a woman of our time/obsessed/with Love, our subject," the poet Adrienne Rich mordantly encased the matter in 1973...
...What about now...
...Over the years, a domestic backstory has wound through her articles in The Nation, turning the column into a little stage where family members and friends might stroll on from the wings to advocate positions, argue with the writer, and play out scenes about political ambiguities and debates...
...A friend urges her to apologize to the boyfriend for purportedly failing in their relationship...
...After my boyfriend left me, I went a little crazy for a while," she reports matter-of-factly, as if she were a foreign correspondent returned from the scene of disaster...
...When she does imagine a solution by conjuring up a virtuous heroine, it's always the occasion for comedy...
...Driving around in her student car, she thinks about how much fun it would be to spot G. in a crosswalk and run him down, and then imagines a politically correct outcome: she'd go to jail for decades and "I could settle into comfy middle age, reorganizing the prison library and becoming a lesbian...
...she yearns, he runs...
...Pollitt's daughter, Sophie, was always a regular guest, a funny preternaturally perceptive New York child...
...Learning to Drive" is the title essay...
...the problem is, men are rats...
...The essay was something of a succès de scandale when it appeared in the New Yorker in summer 2002...
...Pollitt owns up to the humbling compromises and tradeoffs involved in turning one's back on the fantasized Herland radical feminists once envisioned and occupying a heterosexual democracy that is anything but perfect...
...You couldn't help but get interested in these people, and take sides with or against them, and admire their cleverness, and wonder about the "real" story—which, of course, you never really knew...
...The crux of the book concerns Pollitt's horrible breakup with her partner G. (aka the Last Marxist), when he left her for another woman with whom, Pollitt discovered, he had been having an affair for years...
...What interests her—and us—is the play of illusion, self-delusion, and observational power as they compete with one another to shape our knowledge of our relationships...
...There's a lot of putting down of books involved, a lot of turning down of radio just when a story comes on you really want to hear, to say nothing of the day turning into one meal after another...
...I say "varying degrees," because each used these components in a different mixture, with Goodman, for example, writing closer to a genderless stance and Dowd lurching between feminism and acid misogyny, whichever suits her essentially destructive purposes of the moment...
...Female novelists, poets, and pop singers put female heartbreak in an updated brittle stoic register, but it's the same complaint: she trusts, he lies...
...It's been Pollitt who's gone the farthest in using the feminine "I" as the linchpin of something new, an amalgam of opinion and personal essay...
Vol. 55 • January 2008 • No. 1
