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A Millett confession

By Helen Weinberg

Kate Millett's Flying (Knopf; $8.95) is first of all pretty: silver jacket with pink and black lettering. Its lavish physicality reflects its inner lavishness: 546 pages of minutely described intensely personal experience. The book seems some last gesture of the extremity of the gaudy 1960s, though it has the quality of turning inward to which the 70s have returned. On the whole it is a stylish-perhaps a bit selfindulgent, perhaps a bit decadentperformance.

Reading it in the summer one feels the luxury of summer and the season's indolent pleasures. Flying itself is about amoral, gratuitous, meaningless pleasure-the sensuality of lesbianism. I hasten to add that it is not entirely about lesbianism, but I suspect that the primacy of that theme dictated the just-before-summer date of publication, the glamorous cover, the carefree-seeming title, which may be making witty reference to Erika Jong's heterosexual novel, "Fear of Flying." And surely it is the description of lesbianism, including elaborate (romantic and clinical) details of the sexual act itself, which will make the book the best seller for beach and porch it is packaged to become.

However, this autobiographical book. with the confessional tone of an Augustine and the apologia aspect of a Newman, is also about Kate Millett's Roman Catholic childhood in St. Paul; her years as student in Minnesota and Oxford; her experiences in Japan and London; her art as sculptor; her marriage to Fumio, a Japanese sculptor; her writing; her film-making; her role in the women's movement; her feelings about being a public figure after the publication of "Sexual Politics," her first book and the first book to call attention to the seriousness of the present women's movement, an important item in the feminist bibliography.

With memories providing information about the more distant past, Miss Millett in a rather free and filmic way documents the present as it happens, the present being roughly the time from the publication of "Sexual Politics" in 1970 to last summer in Provincetown when she overcame her disappointment in a former lover, Celia. with a new lover. Claire, who proves a truer friend.

The loss of Celia, coupled with the media publicity stemming from her role in the women's movement which made her seem, she thought, a monster, brought her near to madness, she reports; and so for her second book she shuns the academic discipline of the first in order to tell the story of her self and its rebirth as creative, loving, living, flying. She gives her new and unqualified affirmation of herself as a woman who loves women credit for the recovery of her vitality.

Kate Millett

Lesbianism in the women's movement is an embarrassment to most feminists, but for Kate Millett it is her way of being a feminist and a creative person. The women's movement must include her and others like her.

understanding of women who, more quietA formal argument for the better ly than Kate Millett, are instinctively lesbian in their loves is made by Doris Klaich in Woman Plus Woman: Attitudes Toward Lesbianism (Simon and Schuster: $8.95). Not a feminist book, it specifically undertakes to defend, explain, even praise lesbianism as a valuable, not neurotic, way of life. Miss Kalich systematically discusses the main psychiatric analyses of lesbianism; describes, in the best section of her book, the life and work of lesbian poets. writers and painters, from Sappho to Gertrude Stein; and presents interviews with a number of contemporary but anonymous lesbian women.

After reading both these books I know more about lesbianism than I had thought I wanted to know. In spite of myself. I find I understand the apparent attractiveness for many women of what they consider a love between equals. If finally gratuitous sex seems decadent to most socially minded or religious people, at least the idealized love that lesbian friends aspire to may somewhat soften the usually harsh judgments the heterosexual majority has made for thousands of years on these exceptional

women.