The following letter is in response to two articles in Sinister Wisdom, 9: Bertha Harris's “Melancholia, and Why It Feels Good” and Irena Klepfisz's “Lesbian Literature and Criticism.”

Dear Sinister Wisdom

Someone ought to step between Irena Klepfisz and Bertha Harris. Bertha is being outrageous, as usual, and she rather deserves the Response, but Bertha is – in her indirect, dramatized way – right too, especially in one throwaway line: “the onerous inhibitions lesbian-feminist politics seek to place on the writer of genuine talent.”

Bertha Harris is the author of a very fine book, the best Lesbian novel I've ever read and possibly the best novel of the last thirty years. Lover. Lover has been mostly ignored in the women's press and when it hasn't, it's been called politically incorrect (to my knowledge) though a Feminist Review of Books reviewer recently rediscovered it.

Why?

Most artistic and literary criticism in the women's press is very bad. It reacts to having its P.C. buttons pushed. Much of it is practiced by refugees from the misuse of the high culture tradition in high schools and colleges to bully and stupidify the young – this is largely class warfare, owing most of its virulence to the teachers' own insecure class position and their defensiveness about it, teaching having become (since high schools and colleges lost their elite character some time in this century) a road to upward mobility for children of the lower middle class. There is also the problem of the compensatory Instant Junk Food commercial culture which pretends to be a popular alternative to the poisoned (and often poisonous) high culture, and the consequent false split between “art” and “entertainment.” And of course there is the priggishness of certain revolutionaries who really wish to escape from individual personality, individual voice, idiosyncrasy, and any interpretation of life that demands all three. Women (as Phyllis Chesler once said) have a real terror of difference.

What Bertha is trying to defend, in her exasperated, flamboyantly offensive, Southern Gothic fashion is (I think) her right to her own artistic obsessions and her own sense of fantasy – that is, she's defending in a deliberately nasty way (because attacked and exasperated) what every artist must defend: the absolutely inescapable, crucial fact that expression is logically and chronologically absolutely prior to analysis.