She shot Andy WarholPage full of 2 -- IT SEEMS LIKE a feminist apostasy to suggest that the "SCUM Manifesto" makes the perfect hostess gift for a weekend at a summer house. Yet here is the infamous crackpot rant, written in 1967 by Valerie Solanas -- the woman who tried to kill Andy Warhol and who wanted to "destroy the male sex" -- in a stylish new hardcover edition from Verso. This elegant "SCUM Manifesto," bound in flannel gray with shocking-pink endpapers, is a slim volume, covered by a jet-black dust jacket featuring a picture of an even slimmer box cutter -- a reference to Solanas's "Society for Cutting Up Men" doing double-duty as a post-9/11 dare to the Ashcroft Justice Department. Has the "SCUM Manifesto" become a radical-chic bookshelf decoration for the Wallpaper magazine crowd?
Maybe not. It will take more than high-design to reduce the "Manifesto" to the level of home decor or prop (unless it's agitprop). The 35 years that have passed since Solanas flung the book in the world's uncaring face have not diminished its opening salvo: "Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore. . .." At best. It's that phrase that gets you, like Solanas has gone through all life had to offer and arrived at this moment, ablaze with cool frustration. In truth, she had. Before becoming the founder and lone member of SCUM, Solanas led a hard-case life. Ignored by her mother and molested by her father, young Valerie was kicked out of her Catholic school in New Jersey for punching a nun. She returned to public school but lived on her own, evidently supporting herself with prostitution, a line of work she continued as an undergrad. Solanas majored in Psychology at the University of Maryland and, in 1958, began graduate studies at the University of Minnesota, where she worked in an animal research lab before dropping out. By the mid-1960s she'd found her way to downtown New York. There, she lived in cheap hotels and sold sex, conversation, and selections from her own writing on the street. She also met Maurice Girodias, whose Olympia Press published Nabokov and Terry Southern -- and eventually the "SCUM Manifesto." Around the same time, Solanas fell in with Warhol's Factory and appeared in two of its movies. After Warhol misplaced a copy of a play she'd written, her sense of humor failed her. She found a handgun somewhere, went over to Warhol's new offices, and shot him. It was June 3, 1968. Robert Kennedy was murdered the next day in Los Angeles. Warhol struggled but lived. Solanas turned herself in and was sent to a psychiatric hospital. She died alone in a San Francisco welfare hotel in 1988. Anecdotes (as well as Mary Harron's underrated 1996 Solanas biopic, "I Shot Andy Warhol") show Solanas as a tireless writer, but only three works survive: the "Manifesto," an article called "A Young Girl's Primer, or How to Attain the Leisure Class" (from a 1966 "men's magazine"), and the recently rediscovered play: "Up Your Ass." The titles reveal a comic as much as a polemicist, and in fact Solanas is one of American literature's great hard-boiled mockers. Yet even the cultural theorist Avital Ronell, who has provided the Verso edition of the "Manifesto" with a convincing introduction, describes the "SCUM Manifesto" as "indefensible." Ronell is right, and she knows it makes Solanas compelling. Like Nietzsche, to whom Ronell compares her, Solanas is a reverser of all values. She is neither left-wing nor reactionary in any known sense. The "Manifesto," for instance, contains the best excoriation of hippies ever written: "He's way out, Man! . . . all the way out to the cow pasture where he can. . . breed undisturbed and mess around with his beads and flute." Her ideas on community, freedom, philosophy, immortality, "Daddy's girls," and "unwork" (her version of sabotage through serial employment) are startling and clear. Solanas's prose is her grace; the "Manifesto" floats over its own shock value. In retrospect her style seems inevitable; there was no other way for her to present this material. "Niceness [and] politeness," writes Solanas, "are hardly conducive to intensity and wit, qualities a conversation must have to be worthy of the name." If the "SCUM Manifesto" seemed a relic in the sensitive `70s, pass in the androgynous `80s, or nutty-interesting in the `90s, recent world events suggest the book's time has come. A deadpan quotation from Chairman Solanas adorning the back of the new edition's dust jacket reads: "If SCUM ever marches, it will be over the President's stupid, sickening face." When the book was first published it didn't say "the President" in that passage, it said "LBJ." Now another Texan holds the same office and the same place in many hearts. At a reading earlier this month in New York, the performance artists Carmelita Tropicana and Karen Finley and the writer Gary Indiana read from Solanas's "Manifesto" to a large audience at a downtown bistro. Verso handed out box cutters imprinted with the words "SCUM Manifesto" as souvenirs. Tropicana singled out men in the audience as she read, and soon your correspondent found an open copy of the "Manifesto" thrust before him with Tropicana's finger under the word "men" indicating he should read the dirty word aloud. Dutifully, he did. Later, Finley reminded the audience of something important. "There are a lot of crazy people out there," she said, gesturing outside the restaurant in the direction of lost souls looking for things in the garbage. "But they are not writing this book."
A.S. Hamrah is a writer living in Brooklyn. © Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.
|
