Bibliofile: The Village Voice Anthology
In the previous post, I alluded to Karen Durbin’s “On Being a Woman Alone,” an essay that first appeared in The Village Voice on August 30, 1976. I don’t remember how I first heard about the article, since I had just celebrated my first birthday when it was published, but I didn’t track it down in the recent Voice 50th-anniversary retrospective or in a compilation of Durbin’s ’70s essays — no such collection exists, which seems criminal — but rather in The Village Voice Anthology (1956-1980), published in 1982 and now out of print.
The Anthology was edited by Geoffrey Stokes, who calculates that he read “800 pounds” of material before settling on an uneven selection of Voice pieces that are nonetheless very of-their-time. Essays like “Where Have All the Dealers Gone?” (1973) and “Paranoid Notes on the Strange Death of Bruce Lee” (1978) are broken up by Jules Feiffer and Ben Shahn illustrations. The Names you’d expect are included — Norman Mailer, James Wolcott, Robert Christgau — as are pieces that still make entertaining reading, such as “Are Working Women Being Liberated into Slavery?” (1976) and “Rock Death in the ’70s: A Sweepstakes” (Miss Chrissie of the GTOs is at the bottom, while Jimi Hendrix and Ronnie Van Zant tie for first, though Greil Marcus ranks Buddy Holly and Sam Cooke as the all-time winners). But what I really love about this collection are the essays by the women.
From Durbin’s meditation on choosing to move through the world alone to Vivian Gornick’s snapshot of waiting for the IRT in Times Square to Teresa Carpenter’s hair-raising account of the Long Island murder of Ewa Berwid to an anonymous letter to Governor Carey contrasting a personal experience of both an illegal and a legal abortion, the Anthology is a reminder of the degree to which the Voice kept its finger on the pulse of women’s issues and perspectives in the ’70s. Frances FitzGerald, Jamaica Kincaid, Ellen Willis, June Jordan, Thulani Davis, and Susan Brownmiller are a few of the others represented; Stokes laments that he left out Anna Mayo (as well as Nat Hentoff, by his own choice), but I wish the rightsholders and a compatible publisher — The Feminist Press at CUNY? NYU Press? Beacon Press? Seal Press? — would make up for it with another volume of Voice essays by the female journalists of the second-wave era (70s-80s). And, while they’re at it, where’s The Village Voice Anthology (1956-2006) — or even 1980-1995, before the paper ran off the rails?