REMEMBERING VALERIE

Valerie Solanas are two words I threw like wild flowers in a short-lived thread about female celebs with the most interesting personalities in a section of "Upsize This". You might recall her better than that. But she’s hardly a celeb. Rather the quarter of an hour kind that the man she shot told us about. Does it matter ? She’s also my heroine. In her lies one of the left wing's crossroads, a question mark unanswered.

Valerie was a cutter up, a messer up, a piss taker, a fuse blower, a grand ton of a witch. She was the Danger Revealed, she was So This Is How It Ends, So This Is Where It Leads You. She was the Crouching Spider, the Unpraying Mantis, the Unforgiven Eve, the Chaos, the Cloacus, the Big Fear, the Big Hate, the Big One. She was one of these news who’d better be in brief, so that they don’t become tomorrow’s headlines. She was the Feminist who Frightens the Feminists.

They say Valerie was an incestuous mess and for all I know it’s probably true. If it is, then she made out of her mess what Beethoven made out of his deafness. Probably even more, since I don’t like Beethoven.

She had founded the Society For Cutting Up Men, whose manifesto she had also written in 1967, and whose membership never exceeded one person. About any document still left about her will explain you how flaming a lampoon it was, keen on nihilistic hatred, obsessed with wiping out malekind and generally as mad as a hatter. As for Valerie herself, she was an obscure New York underground figure, getting by as a panhandler and an occasional hustler, trying to sell her samizdat-published works to your average Joe as she walked the streets…

One day, it all happens : deep in debt, thrown out of her hotel, she finds herself accepting a contract from a publisher willing to stand and deliver for her providing she gives up ownership of all the copyrights. She’s left without a cent, and her work doesn’t belong to her in any way any longer. Everything’s legal. So she submits her sole copy of a play she had written to Andy Warhol, hoping he will help her get it on a stage. Instead of that, he loses it. She goes crazy, shoots him, sinks in a prison, then in a mental asylum. And meanwhile, the publisher releases the SCUM manifesto with two disclaimers (one as a preface, one as a postface), recycling her curse on all men into some juicy business. Outrage, cheap thrills, oooh, aaah, worldwide talk of the town. The author was never to be heard again. She died in obscurity and poverty in 1988, after long stays in various cells.

Valerie probably never enjoyed her brief shot of fame, but she had released a red hot burning potato in the feminists’ playground. Our unexciting times may be merely staring at the embers, but the fire still burns. Feel it when coming nearer.

Nobody could read the Manifesto and go watch TV. And if you were a feminist, it was worse : Valerie was smashing all the taboos, including theirs. For, as wild and extreme as the movement liked to see itself, all the trends, all the tendencies had unanimously claimed to be enemies of patriarchy, not of men. Nobody had ever dared to state how much both were entwined and could not be separated.

But it was a time of solidarity. Even the mild, centrist NOW supported Valerie. However, the support was even more ambiguous than massively enthusiastic : it was all about the victimization of the writer, or the necessity to speak out loud against patriarchy – but not on the ideas expressed in the little book. Valerie had dared to put in words her death wish and her hatred of the opposite sex as boldly and more justifiably than Sade, Hitchcock or Hemingway did with theirs. She had spared nothing and nobody, strangling the bum wiggling bimbos along with the power obsessed, money holding men they were smiling to. She had dared another humor, aggressive, farcical, ubuesque, devoid of any hang-ups – a humor so fearless it could only frighten those who liked to think they could laugh at everything. She had gone all the way to the barbed wire of transgression and desire. She had told the truth, the naked manner.

On the other side of the fence, Valerie’s bashers – the overwhelming majority, do I need to tell – had at heart to isolate the author as a woman in the freak corner or the paranoid ward. The poor gal just needed a shrink.

This stance was supported by the straight, strictly Freudian psycho-analytic intelligentsia, and derived from the dangerous and questionable premise that rebellion is nothing but the consequence of experiencing subjective problems and the expression of a failure in socialization. Of course, Valerie’s attack against Warhol seemed to prove them right. In our reactionary times, it looks like that’s just what’s left of her, assuming something’s left of her : the image of a wacko, not very different from John Lennon's murderer. But she still stands as a cult figure in tiny circles : who knows how, her play, “Up Your Ass” was found and staged.

Was Valerie’s dream an extraordinary revenge, a fantastic way to dynamite the oldest burden of guilt ever imposed by the half of mankind to the other, a gigantic puking, a healthy fantasy all happening on a fantasy level and in no way to be related to a furious emotional reaction against a cheat ? Was it a forbidden door which should never have been opened, not by our side, not by us ?

I didn’t go see “I shot Andy Warhol”. I was repelled by the title. I didn’t go see “Up your ass”. It didn’t play in my area. I’m just left with the SCUM manifesto. No more than a few pages really. But what pages.