LITMIR.BIZ

SUSAN GRIFFIN: THE ARDENT INTELLECTUAL

      (1943–)

      We are women. We rise from the wave. We are gazelle and doe, elephant and whale, lilies and roses and peach, we are air, we are flame, we are oyster and pearl, we are girls. We are woman and nature.

      —S.G., WOMAN AND NATURE: THE ROARING INSIDE HER, 1978

      Susan Griffin is a poet, philosopher, playwright, scriptwriter, and champion of The Sensual. Due to a marvelous ability to drape events in irony and comedic insight, she is also a veritable hoot to be around. Early on her writing was associated with a feminist-invented theme: literature springing from everyday female experience such as being a single mother, subjects that were not considered by male critics to be worthy of the paper they were scrawled upon. But when her play Voices: A Play for Women was shown on PBS in 1975, she won an Emmy Award. Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her came next, in 1978. This was a pioneering prose poem that instigated a feminist interpretation of the relationship of woman and the natural world to patriarchal society; its underlying theme—the connection of female oppression with the exploitation of nature—had not been thought about or discussed before.

      It is through this work that Susan became known for the style that she would spend decades developing. She is the mistress of uncommon juxtaposition, reminding us anew that the nature of the human mind is to integrate, to bind together facets and phenomena into the Whole that they in fact make up. Her facile imagination allows her to leap beyond the limits of cause-and-effect logic and reflect how people do in fact experience, think, and make sense of things: as oneiric unfolding.

      Each of Susan’s subsequent works deepened this approach. In Pornography and Silence: Culture’s Revenge against Nature, she applied Western culture’s identification of woman with nature, coupled with its urge to dominate both, to pornographic literature and imagery. After the 1990 publication of A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War, she invented the term “social autobiography” to describe the approach taken in this volume, as well as in two subsequent books also combining memoir with history; the expression has since become an accepted category of literature. The next volumes in the trilogy are What Her Body Thought, an account of her experience with illness and poverty, and in the wake of 9/11 and the U.S. government’s rescinding of civil rights, Wrestling with the Angel of Democracy, exploring the psychological qualities necessary to sustain democracy.

      During this time she wrote a collection of essays called The Eros of Everyday Life and The Book of the Courtesans. She also published two volumes of poetry, Unremembered Country and Bending Home; the script for Berkeley in the Sixties, a theatrical piece written in poetry called Thicket, and a play to be set to music called Canto about massacres in El Salvador.

      Susan is a striking woman, her posture presenting both a compassionate sensibility and a sense of purpose. Her blonde (now white) hair often boasts a simple cut with straight bangs, and she possesses a talent for putting together attire that reflects, in her own words, “an understated androgynous style with sudden flares of eccentricity”—like all black covering her body, set off by glasses with brilliant red rims.

      She has used this same panache to create a home reflecting her artistic sensibility and love of imagination, filled with mementos of the very themes she has explored in her writing. In the living room a photograph of Sarah Bernhardt performing Camille sits on a bookshelf. Native American art, paintings by her adoptive father Morton Dimondstein, and works by friends adorn the ochre walls. Hand-painted plates from Italy are displayed on a primitive-style cabinet, Moroccan tiles embellish the fireplace, and the French doors invite one to step onto a courtyard shaded by an orange tree.

      Most of all, I remember the kitchens in her houses on Hawthorne Terrace and Keeler Avenue. Magical places, these—emanating warmth with their pottery crafted in the 1800s and market baskets bursting with tomatoes and lemons. A heavy wooden table covered by a cloth from the Basque countryside defines the dining area. During a luncheon date, one might imagine that one is in Provence or the American Southwest. Or another century.

      To Susan, her house is an art form no different from a poem.