Seducing the Demon Read Free Page B

and celebrating the graduates and faculty at the home of the president of CSI. Most of the students and faculty I met were energized by my speech. They were glad it had not been standard-issue platitudes.
    The next day the local papers reported that I was both cheered and booed—but stressed the booing. It was as if I’d been set up. My web site contained both reactions—“you commie, kike bitch” and “thank God you told the truth.”
    My books had always gotten both hate mail and huzzas. I was used to it. What use is a writer if she doesn’t rile people up? What use is a teacher if he isn’t made to drink hemlock in the end? In the olden days they threw writers into oubliettes and eventually condemned them to death. Witches—any women who questioned the status quo—were burned at the stake. How could I complain about a few boos? Boos were honors. They meant I was questioning authority, speaking truth to power. They meant I was trying to tell the truth—my quixotic calling.
    So here I am, writing for my life: telling how I published two well-received volumes of poetry in my twenties and then went all to hell with a scandalous first novel that I didn’t even think was scandalous when I was writing it.
    Telling how “that book” went on and on and on so it almost obliterated everything else I did; how I became a mother (once), a stepmother (once), a grandmother (twice so far) and a wife (four times) and still went on trying to tell the truth as I saw it. I’m not planning to cover up all my stumbles along the way nor my many mistakes nor all the times I made an absolute fool of myself.
    Writing a book in your twenties that becomes a worldwide phenomenon hardly prepares you for the silence and despair of a writer’s life. My life was not typical. But no writer’s life is typical. By its very nature, writing is unique to every writer. Practicing writing is like practicing freedom. You are always on your way, never there. People are constantly asking, “How did you do it?” After a while you start to ask yourself. This book is an attempt to answer that question—regrets, mistakes, divorces, lawsuits and all.

I .
    SLEEPING with DEMONS, or SEDUCTION
    I loved the entanglings of genitals,
And out of blood and love, I carved my poems.
    PABLO NERUDA
    I saac Bashevis Singer wrote a wonderful story called “Taibele and Her Demon.” In it, a man pretending to be a demon visits by night a pretty young woman whose children have died and whose husband has walked out in utter despair.
    At first the demon terrifies her with his ugliness, but then she falls in love with him—as much for his vivid stories of hell and heaven as for his demonic lovemaking. She completely forgets that he’s ugly and becomes more and more attached to him—even though after a while she can see his human failings. Yes, this demon “perspired, sneezed, hiccupped, yawned.” Yes, “sometimes his breath smelled of onion, sometimes of garlic.... His body felt like the body of her husband, bony and hairy, with an Adam’s apple and a navel.... His feet were not goose feet, but human with nails and frost blisters.
    “Once Taibele asked him the meaning of these things, and Hurmizah [the demon’s assumed name] explained: ‘When one of us consorts with a human female, he assumes the shape of a man. Otherwise she would die of fright.’
    “Yes, Taibele got used to him and loved him. She was no longer terrified of him and his impish antics.”
    Perhaps she suspected he was really a man, but not wanting to know it, she refused to. Singer’s story is a kind of reverse Scheherazade: the woman falls in love with the teller of tales and welcomes his lovemaking no matter what his looks. But it is more than that. It’s a fable of disguise between a woman and a man, who both need the disguise to give each other permission to love each other. She needs to believe he is a demon so that she thinks she has no choice but to submit to him. He needs to be