A.D.: A Memoir
By Kate Millett
Norton, 256 pages, $23
She was a big woman with a square face, long, straggling dark hair and formidable powers of argument, so when Kate Millett appeared on television in 1970, making newscasters nervous with her book “Sexual Politics,” journalists loosed barbs about her unwomanliness, upbringing and sexual orientation. It was only gradually that what Millett was saying about the systematic oppression of women began filtering into the public mind. In the interval, Millett served as a focus of incomprehension and resentment, and her dauntingly well-documented work and her relationship with another woman earned her private turmoil, a nervous breakdown and a painful period of estrangement from her family.
Her latest book is, in fact, an effort at reconciliation that attempts to assess a lifelong love and a lifelong anger toward a woman she cared passionately for since childhood. The cryptic title, “A.D.,” refers to the family nickname for her Aunt Dorothy, a pillar of St. Paul society who used a smidgen of her vast wealth to send Kate to Oxford. Dorothy’s wit, looks, gaiety, love of literature and art–and cruelty and capriciousness and snobbery and selfishness–compelled attention in a way mere goodheartedness could never do. Once, spending the night at her aunt’s house, Kate was allowed to stay up and finger-paint with Aunt Dorothy and her visitor, the couturier Elsa Schiaparelli. During other visits she lingered by the big Han dynasty horse in her aunt’s living room, found a first edition of “Tristram Shandy” while browsing in the library and formed her taste and opinions cozily reading with her aunt as they lay foot to foot on a long, boat-shaped couch.
Revisiting the house after her aunt’s death, Millett catches its restful luxury in a wonderful description of the living room. “The sofas are just so. White brocade over eiderdown.” Overlooking Lake Minnetonka, the windows “have the quality of portholes onto the sea, the room itself relating by some trick of its design to the level of a ship’s deck just above water, the water pouring in together with the light of day. . . . How carefully she must have planned this effect of safe cool watery air . . . sheer bliss to the eye, to all the senses, restful.”
Strikingly, while Millett describes her aunt’s physical presence and surroundings, making an excellent case for A.D.’s shrewdness in matters of taste, she almost never quotes her aunt’s words. What were her judgments? What kind of jokes did she tell? What did she love to talk about? The author tells us that A.D. was an enchantress who radiated wealth, worldiness, beauty and pleasure in life. But without her voice, she never really becomes that for us.
The ephemera of good times, the jokes and glances, have here disintegrated in memory like the flowery relics of some wonderful picnic, turned scentless and brown between the pages of a book. Unhappily, what has lasted to arrive on the page are the words that really are unforgettable: insults, slights, the cruelties that show A.D. as careless of feelings, cold and less inclined to generosity than the exercise of power.
As Kate Millett says, there was “something immoral” in loving A.D., and we feel it too: that her sharp pronouncements on art were a way of pulling rank, that her knowledgeable talk of great museums was something money had bought, that her high standards were a way to justify not sharing her wealth with those less civilized. This feeling, of loving Aunt Dorothy as an almost guilty act, was compounded by the fact that after her husband abandoned his family, Kate’s mother rightly resented the Millett family for leaving her to raise three daughters on a precarious income. A.D.’s beautiful, luxurious house became “enemy territory.”
A further complication was that A.D., having got wind of the fact that Kate was having a love affair with a woman, offered her an Oxford education she could not otherwise afford, if Kate would abandon the relationship. Kate lied, accepted the money and lived with her lover in England. Her aunt, who traveled widely and had connections everywhere, learned this. When Millett returned to St. Paul, that treasure house of brocade and watered light and rare books became a sort of Paradise Lost, barred by her aunt’s displeasure and her own guilt.
And yet, the former favorite and the wealthy patron occasionally saw one another. It is a weakness of this narrative, which can be both rambling and abrupt, that we never quite understand the occasion of a further turning point in their relationship, when Millett, middle-aged and newly released from a psychiatric hospital, paid her aunt a frantic visit, hoping for “refuge.” Instead, A.D. ignored her obvious distress and issued a bland dinner invitation for a week later, promising the company of a “most amusing” priest.
Although Millett mentions the trial at which she was found sane, the events precipitating this encounter are never described. We are left to wonder why “the family saw fit to lock me up at the university psychiatric `facility.’ ” Elsewhere Millett alludes to contemplating suicide and being “busted into a madhouse in Ireland.” It’s difficult to see why these events are left unexplained. These episodes do figure in earlier books, but Millett can hardly presume we have read them.
The omissions serve only to remind us that Millett is controlling the flow of narrative, and that we will never know how partial, self-favoring or embroidered this account might be. And yet, what is most valuable in this memoir, which struggles to get at the root of how the self is formed in imitation and fear of those we love, and in desperate rebellion against them, is a calm lucidity, the habit of scholarship. It makes the probability of error seem slight. And perhaps hardened to the world’s careless opinion, or in age more confident, Millett uses this “unplanned pregnancy of a book” to strive after the truth.
Where she arrives is an uneasy balance. She can see that her childhood visits to her aunt–on her best behavior, careful not to do the thousand things that might bring down A.D.’s scorn–were like being at a play, “a solemn, often very boring play.” It is the very artificiality of the setting and the personalities that is so fascinating, perhaps because they suggest that the self is not simply given, but to some extent is willed or chosen. At the book’s end she gives the reason for her gratitude more fully. Her aunt was “someone who made you feel that life was a very big thing; really worth the trouble to live well and thoughtfully, whether it was lovely or hateful at a certain moment, season, or year. It was serious in the most beguiling way, whimsical in the most terrifying way, dull in the most fascinating way.” That knowledge is sufficient legacy.
