A Revealing Private Eye

At a lazy Sunday brunch in Santa Monica recently, a prominent artist who teaches said he disliked catching himself mulling over solutions to his students’ art-making problems because he needs his brain to be working full time on his own photography.

Being an artist in any field requires an unusual amount of self-centeredness; the world around you inevitably becomes source material for your work, and you need the maximum time and mental space to pursue your ideas.

Being a woman, on the other hand, traditionally has meant being available for others who crave attention, love, meals and all-around nurturing. How have women artists who’ve chosen to marry or have long-term relationships managed to balance the double demands of life and art?

For 20 years, Nancy Jo Hoy, head of the French department at Irvine Valley College, has pursued this theme in a series of interviews with creative women both famous and relatively obscure.

The fruits of this long project were published this year as “The Power to Dream: Interviews With Women in the Creative Arts” (Global City Press, N.Y., $14).

A majority of the 16 interviews are with writers (among them, ecologist Frances Moore Lappe, diarist Anais Nin, novelists Alice Walker and Maxine Hong Kingston and poet Diane Wakoski), but there are also visual artists (Beatrice Wood, Judy Chicago, Judy Dater, Phoebe Helman), an opera singer (Barbara Hendricks) and a choreographer (Bella Lewitzky).

The great strength of the book--the chance to hear each woman talk, sometimes uninterruptedly and at considerable length, about passions dear to her--derives from Hoy’s evident preparation for each interview, her patient and sensitive questions and her virtually egoless ability to bond with her interviewees.

This process yields many memorable passages revealing the speaker’s vulnerability, wisdom and sensual and intellectual awareness.

These passages include Lewitzky’s idyllic reminiscence of growing up in San Bernardino; Nin on fears of exposing herself by publishing her diary (“I had this terrifying dream that I opened my door and was struck by mortal radiation”); novelist Esther Broner on her eroticism (“I will blow in every orifice”); Kingston on worrying that her writing was incoherent; Wakoski on her “secret life,” first nurtured while growing up “in a very physically poor and shabby world”; and Wood on practically everything.

Along the way, certain issues crop up repeatedly: competition between women, power, success, public and private lives. But because Hoy chose women with diverse outlooks and backgrounds and refused to impose any particular world view on them, the book as a whole generously surmounts the humorless dogmatism that characterized interviews with women artists back in the ‘70s.

Feeling more and more irritated at Chicago’s assertion that she wishes to “tell the truth” (as if there were only one), her ridiculous notion that “the only revolutionary thinking today is being done by women” and her narrowly hieratic concept of artistic success (why must it be limited to the traditional male model?), I turned to Helman and Wakoski for more believable expressions of passion and struggle.

For some tastes, Hoy’s unchallenging acceptance of her subjects’ every utterance will seem timid, perhaps even inappropriate for a book seeking the opinions of highly educated and intelligent women.

Still, it was probably inevitable that, despite Hoy’s stated objectives, some of her interviewees are much less forthcoming about personal matters than others.

Photographer Dater, for example, merely says she was involved with her teacher Jack Welpott, “and we married and later divorced.” Hoy doesn’t probe for possible personal and professional conflicts involved in marrying one’s mentor.

Helman, a New York sculptor, is engrossing on her feelings about making art, from her “tremendous sense of depression when I completed something” to the importance of showing work (“like a symphony that is finally played”).

But she bristles--and rightly so, thinks this reviewer--when Hoy asks her a touchy-feely question about achieving “loving acceptance of oneself.”

“Never,” Helman replies. “I’m hypercritical all the time. God forbid I should lose the hypercritical eye. I need it.”

That’s the kind of moxie that fuels this book, and Hoy generously preserves every word.