Vida

Marge Piercy

Description

Originally published in 1979, Vida is Marge Piercy’s classic bookend to the ’60s. Vida is full of the pleasures and pains, the experiments, disasters, and victories of an extraordinary band of people. At the center of the novel stands Vida Asch. She has lived underground for almost a decade. Back in the ’60s she was a political star of the exuberant antiwar movement—a red-haired beauty photographed for the pages of Life magazine—charismatic, passionate, and totally sure she would prevail. Now, a decade later, Vida is on the run, her star-quality replaced by stubborn courage. She comes briefly to rest in a safe house on Cape Cod. To her surprise and annoyance, she finds another person in the house, a fugitive, Joel, ten years younger than she, a kid who dropped into the underground out of the army. As they spend the next days together, Vida finds herself warming toward a man for the first time in years, knowing the dangers all too well.

As counterpoint to the underground ’70s, Marge Piercy tells the extraordinary tale of the optimistic ’60s, the thousands of people who were members of SAW (Students Against the War) and of the handful who formed a fierce group called the Little Red Wagon. Piercy’s characters make vivid and comprehensible the desperation, the courage, and the blind rage of a time when “action” could appear to some to be a more rational choice than the vote.

A new introduction by Marge Piercy situates the book, and the author, in the times from which they emerged.

Sujets

• Dodecilsulfato sódico
• Prairie Fire
• Political crime
• New Left
• Students for a Democratic Society
• Weathermen
• SDS

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 12 décembre 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781604866704
• Langue: English

Extrait

Other books by Marge Piercy
POETRY
The Hunger Moon: New & Selected Poems, 1980-2010
The Crooked Inheritance
Colors Passing Through Us
The Art of Blessing the Day
What Are Big Girls Made Of?
Available Light
Stone, Paper, Knife
The Moon Is Always Female
Living in the Open
Hard Loving
Breaking Camp
Early Grrrl
Mars and her Children
My Mother’s Body
Circles on the Water (Selected Poems)
The Twelve-Spoked Wheel Flashing
To Be of Use
4-Telling (with Bob Hershon, Emmett Jarrett and Dick Lourie)
NOVELS
Sex Wars
The Third Child
Three Women
Storm Tide (with Ira Wood)
City of Darkness, City of Light
He, She and It
Gone to Soldiers
Braided Lives
Woman on the Edge of Time
Small Changes
Dance the Eagle to Sleep
Going Down Fast
The Longings of Women
Summer People
Fly Away Home
The High Cost of Living
OTHER
Pesach for the Rest of Us
So You Want to Write: How to Master the Craft of Writing
Fiction and the Personal Narrative (with Ira Wood), 1st & 2nd editions
The Last White Class: A Play (with Ira Wood)
Sleeping with Cats: A Memoir
Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt: Essays
Early Ripening: American Women’s Poetry Now: An Anthology

Vida
Marge Piercy
© Middlemarsh, Inc 2012
This edition © 2012 PM Press
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-60486-487-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2011927950
Cover by John Yates / www.stealworks.com
Interior design by briandesign
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
PM Press
PO Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
www.pmpress.org
Printed in the USA on recycled paper, by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan.
www.thomsonshore.com
Published in the UK by Green Print, an imprint of The Merlin Press Ltd.,
6 Crane Street Chambers, Crane Street, Pontypool NP4 6ND, Wales
ISBN: 978-1-85425-102-2
Introduction to the New Edition
It has turned out to be far more difficult and emotional for me to write this introduction than it was to produce an introduction for Dance the Eagle to Sleep. Perhaps because I chose to write that earlier novel as speculative fiction, it felt more distanced. Vida did not. It took me back to those years. The rich details made remembering much more vivid, maybe too vivid.
One flaw I did not commit was to make all my political characters tremendously heroic, flawless. I remember that some people on the Left criticized me at the time for that. The characters are quite human. All the major characters are rounded, possessing both virtues and vices, strengths and weaknesses. People have asked me over the years if Vida herself was based on a particular woman who went underground. The answer is loudly, no. She has traits of a number of the women in the Weather Underground and also other individuals who were political fugitives during that era. She also has some of my own traits both positive and negative, as I imagined what I would have felt like, how I would have behaved, if I had chosen to join the Weather faction in Students for a Democratic Society.
I had friends in all the factions, but I was probably saved by my increasing feminism. When the super militancy started, I understood it, I empathized, but I was determined by then to work only with women and on women’s issues, as I did exclusively for the next decade. A number of those people who did end up underground were my friends and remained so, whether I agreed or disagreed with their analysis and policies. I have learned over the years, after a couple of years of fanaticism during the Vietnam War, not to let differences of opinion separate me from people I care for.
This is not a novel about terrorists. The fugitives I was writing about were not terrorists. Terrorists target people, usually random people who happen to be in a market or on a bus or in any other public place. That very randomness and willingness to kill and maim anyone who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time is how they aim to produce terror. Assassins aim to kill particular public personages. They usually imagine that killing some political actor will change the policies of a government, or sometimes they imagine that a death can prevent a change they dislike or fear.
The fugitives I was writing about in Vida targeted institutions and corporations, usually as a means of making public the actions, the policies, the power of those entities. It was political education through action. They tried and succeeded in not harming anyone working in the facility they were about to attack. I never knew the people in Wisconsin who killed a mathematician, as they were not part of any group I was familiar with. 1
As I reread the novel that I had not touched in at least twenty-five years, I was astounded by my grasp of detail of the political scene on the Left in every year I wrote about, and the details of life in those years. Vida has become, for better or worse, a historical novel. If you have any desire to understand the New Left during the latter days of the Vietnam War, if you wonder how people ended up forming an underground, why they bombed what they did, what led them into danger and broke off their previous lives like an ax cutting down a tree, then perhaps Vida will help you to explore what led to their choices and everything that followed from those decisions.
I still remember the shock of walking into a post office and seeing on the walls wanted posters featuring my friends and acquaintances. But Vida also brings back to me the years before Nixon’s Cointelpro had sent agent provocateurs into every group opposing the war, fighting for civil rights, fighting for women’s and gay and lesbian rights, peace groups, anybody who tried to work for change whether they were pacifists or religious opponents of war or feminists or socialists or Maoists or anarchists. A huge amount of money was spent infiltrating groups working for social change. The FBI agents increased divisiveness, pushed for illegal actions, undermined leaders.
I remember with some nostalgia how it felt before the government infiltrated groups, when we actually believed we could change the world peacefully and that a much better, kinder, and more just society could be built on the foundation we were trying to create. I have never in my life been closer to more people I cared about than during that time. We truly tried to be "brothers and sisters" no matter how often we failed. In writing Vida, I attempted not to glamorize that period or any of the other events of the ‘60s and ‘70s I have written about, as well as not glamorizing the protagonists. Ira Wood tells me I have not the slightest romantic tendency and perhaps that keeps me from making people and events prettier than they were.
I would like it if those who were active at the time I am writing about find in Vida something that brings back the excitement, the fear, the hope of that era. I would be pleased if those too young to have lived through those times might find something of value in our struggles, might learn from our successes and our failures and be inspired to imagine a movement that might again try to change the structure and direction of our country into a more humane, just and equal society.
Marge Piercy, 2011

1 The Sterling Hall bombing on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus on August 24, 1970, that aimed to destroy the Army Mathematics Research Center in protest against the university’s military connections during the Vietnam War. It resulted in the death of a university physics researcher, Robert Fassnacht.
PART I
September 1979
1
"No, thanks" Vida placed her hand over the top of the tulip-shaped wineglass.
"No more for me. Thank you."
"This is a good Vouvray. Louis in the wine store recommended it" Hank tried to nudge her hand aside with the cold dripping base of the bottle.
"It’s lovely. I’ve just had enough." She made herself smile. It felt like a date, a bad date. She had to keep smiling across the debris of the dinner for two. "The chicken was wonderful!"
"Recipe from one of my books. Skinny-Dipping, or How to Eat Yourself Slender"
"You wrote a cookbook?" Keep him talking. She nibbled another olive, although she felt bloated with the best and certainly largest meal she had eaten in weeks.
"I produced it. For Family Day. Supermarket package" Catching her as soon as she lifted her hand from the glass, he poured more wine. "Of course, what I’m really doing is the oral history of the ‘60s"
Annoyed she pushed the glass away. "How’s that going?"
"Come on, Vida, you used to love wine. Remember when I got Hill at Random House to take us out to lunch, and you startled the shit out of him by ordering the wine. A Montrachet."
"A Puligny-Montrachet. Even I wouldn’t have had that much nerve … I wonder if you could remember to call me Cynthia?" It was not the name on her current I.D., but the name she used when she didn’t quite trust enough to expose her present cover. "I don’t drink much now, Hank. Really, the wine’s lovely." She felt a headache starting behind her eyes.
"That’s when I was producing that tome on Students Against the War. You SAW stinkers tried to hold me up" He grinned, fingering his goatee. He had had a full beard then. Every time she saw Hank, every couple of years when she needed shelter in New York, he had a differen