Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM (8 page)

Her good friend Jeremiah Newton, a filmmaker and expert on countercultural New York, could not fully resolve the contradictions of her existence:

I felt bad for Valerie. She was so intelligent and she told me she would have sex with men and she hated men. I said, “How could you do something you don’t really like?” She said, “You have to do things for money.” Well, I thought that’s a bad thing to do. She did it occasionally for money, brought people up on the roof of the Chelsea Hotel. I would never do anything for money that I didn’t want to do. I thought as smart as she was, she was stupid to do that, to have men touch her. It didn’t make sense to me. It was irrational. She was still rational, but that was irrational. You don’t do something you so hate doing for money.
”
100

Valerie’s family seemed hesitant to admit that Valerie prostituted herself for money; to them she talked incessantly about her writings and never about how she actually survived on next to nothing. Robert framed this as her response to her limited options: “Valerie probably worked as a prostitute. If she needed a place to stay, or if she needed money for cigarettes or food, she would prostitute herself. I don’t think she did it on a regular basis. If she had sold her play properly or sold her book properly, she wouldn’t have had to do this to make money. Back then they didn’t have a lot of homeless shelters or social workers so you did what you needed to do for the money. If she prostituted herself, it was for that night, not as a regular hobby or career.”

However difficult her financial and psychological condition, Valerie kept in contact with her family during those years and would visit her father, mother, aunts, uncles, and cousins whenever she could scrape together enough money to travel. She went home for Christmas most years, eager to revel in home cooking and to tell stories about New York and her life as a writer. The family was divided generationally about whether to dismiss Valerie as a kook or see her as fascinating: “We found her to be like one of those characters that we could tell stories about,” Robert said. “The kids all liked to sit around and listen. The older generation thought she should be locked up and didn’t understand it.” Talkative, hyper, and hungry, she told stories about New York over heaping plates of spaghetti. “All she ever wanted to eat when she came down here was spaghetti. My mother would make her roast beef and gravy or anything and she’d say, ‘Don’t you have any spaghetti?’ and my mother would say, ‘All right, we’ll make you some spaghetti.’ As long as she had spaghetti, she didn’t care.
”
101
(Valerie is said to have had a voracious appetite: “I was not halfway through my plate of Chinese vegetables, but she had already finished her steak, French fries, and salad.”)
102

Given the numerous accounts of her wolfing down food when it was available and her nearly constant requests to move in with almost anyone who would listen, it is evident that Valerie lived on the edge: she was often hungry (as are most people who panhandle for a living) and rarely had any stability in where she slept or lived. She was known for asking people if she could live with them even if she loathed them. The Chelsea Hotel evicted her several times, in summer 1967, in fall 1967, and in early 1968. Certainly, Valerie saw men as having unfair access to money, resources, and power. She keenly sensed the inequities building around her in late 1966 and early 1967. Bouncing from place to place, meal to meal, she had little shame about asking for a place to live, a hot meal, or a “piece of the action.” She had work to do, things to say, pieces to write. She needed a place to land. During an interview with the journalist Robert Marmorstein, she asked if he would let her stay with him:

“I’ll keep out of your way. I wouldn’t make a bad looking roommate either, would I?”

“No, you wouldn’t, but why me? I’m flattered. You hardly know me.”

“You’ve got an apartment. That’s all I need to know about you. I’ve got lots of work to get out and no place to stay. It’d just be for a couple of months.”

“I thought you had an apartment.”

“I’m staying with some old dame. But she gets on my nerves. She’s square. Doesn’t know which end is up. Can’t get used to my hours. I’ve got to get out of there.”

“Your manifesto says that a good SCUM girl would just as soon stick a shiv into a man’s back as look at him. How could I feel safe with you in my apartment?”

“Look, I’m a revolutionary, not a nut. That kind of thing takes organization. I’m practical, not stupid. We’re years away from that sort of thing. I’m not ending up in some fink jail.”

“I’m sorry. But I really have no room. How about the girls you have in SCUM? Couldn’t you stay with any of them?”

“They’re all as bad off as I am. All the ones I know are barely scrounging out places themselves. Christ, the shit you have to go through in this world just to survive.
”
103

Shooting

SCUM, Shots, and Stupidstars
1967–1968

Let us burst into history, forcing it by our invasion into universality for the first time. Let us start fighting; and if we’ve no other arms, the waiting knife’s enough.

—Jean-Paul Sartre, preface to Franz Fanon,
Wretched of the Earth

R
arely has history seen a more curious coupling
than Andy Warhol and Valerie Solanas. Both misfits and outcasts, genderqueers and nonconformists, they operated in their own orbit and, in doing so, left an indelible mark on the world. Despite their connection, to frame the significance of Valerie’s life around her shooting of Andy would minimize her merits as an author and her broader intentions as a revolutionary. Too often when
SCUM Manifesto
is cited as her major achievement, the Warhol shooting is never far behind. When the shooting of 1968 is given as Valerie’s fifteen minutes of fame,
SCUM Manifesto
serves as its footnote. This pairing resolves any form of contradiction that may arise when comparing her life and work, as the contradictions between the manifesto and Valerie’s life, between theory/satire and practice, are masked by the overly reductive formulation of Andy Warhol shooting equals
SCUM Manifesto
in practice.
1

In many ways, her relationship with Andy merely formed a center point for many forces moving through Valerie’s life at the time: her growing anger toward men, particularly men with power, prestige, and wealth; her interest in self-promotion and fame, particularly as a writer; her emerging connection with the avant-garde, queer, and drag scene in New York; her wobbly mental health and the intensifying deterioration in her rational thinking; and the classic contradiction between her desire for acceptance and her outright rejection of all organized groups or movements. Andy tapped into all these, particularly by showing a spark of interest in
Up Your Ass
and Valerie’s tour de force,
SCUM Manifesto.

SCUM Manifesto
(1967)

The
SCUM Manifesto
is an extraordinary document, an authentic love-hate child of its time, written in the unholy accents of inspired madness. . . . Written at white heat, and containing within itself the secret knowledge of the victim, the economical insight of the obsessed, the multiplied courage of the utterly disinherited,
SCUM
is the work of the ultimate loser, of one beyond redemption, and as such its quality is visionary.

—Vivian Gornick, introduction to
S.C.U.M. Manifesto

To understand Valerie’s relationship to Andy—indeed to understand Valerie at all—one must consider Valerie’s unusual relationship to her writing. Shortly after shooting Andy, she hurriedly told a reporter, “Read my manifesto and it will tell you what I am.
”
2
Several scholars have honed in on this quote as both peculiar and notable—she chooses “what I am” rather than “who I am”; she writes herself into the text after just having committed violence against three men; and she maintains, at a moment of intense stress, that her manifesto is
of central importance
.
3

SCUM Manifesto
was written between 1965 and 1967. Valerie published an outline in the
Voice
in February 1967, likely finished an original draft of the book in May, and completed a revised version of it in late June 1967; in a postcard to her father dated June 14, 1967, she wrote that she was nearly finished writing it. The work is as sweeping as it is radical. Copyrighted originally on May 19, 1967, by Valerie, the self-published edition of the manifesto represented the culmination of years of contemplation, effort, and revisions.
SCUM Manifesto
marinated in Valerie’s life for many years, but as Mary Harron aptly put it, “In style it feels as if it were written in one great rush. It isn’t quite like anything else but it does resemble Artaud’s surrealist manifesto—visionary, hallucinatory rhetoric. Also de Sade in its black vision of human nature, its complete inversion of accepted values. And, more disturbingly, it resembles the better bits of writing by the Unibomber. It is a product of a gifted mind working in isolation, with no contact with but also no allegiance to academic structures—isolated and therefore owing nothing to anyone.
”
4

When reading the manifesto, we sense almost immediately that Valerie has
broken things
: rules, norms, barriers, the rhetoric of politeness, academic modalities, reverence for those who came before. It takes on all the characteristics of manifestos distilled to their purest form: urgency, anger, a sweeping sense of the
we
, impatience, irrationality, high polemics, drive, and forward thinking. It has a strange mix of humor, aggression, playfulness, wit, sarcasm, and truth. People often say, after reading
SCUM Manifesto
, that they have never encountered anyone who wrote or thought like Valerie; this, to a certain extent, gives the manifesto its force, its sense of oddly contemporary flair despite its now being written nearly a half century ago.

Valerie theorized from the gutter, from the sidelines, from
scum
, from the foulness of humanity. She dove into the swamp of patriarchy and slogged through the muck. She understood that this mentality—theorizing from the “garbage pail that men have made of the world”—was all women had left to use. In her writing, she became a verbal sniper, picking off the key tenets of sexism, taking aim at nearly every major institution men promote and celebrate:

war, money, marriage and prostitution, work, prevention of automation, nice-ness, politeness, clean language, “dignity,” censorship, trivial “entertainment,” secrecy, suppression of knowledge and ideas, ignorance, fatherhood and mental illness (fear, cowardice, timidity, humility, insecurity, passivity), authority, government, boredom, monotony, “Great Art,” “Culture,” philosophy, religion, morality based on sex, competition, prestige, status, formal education, prejudice (racial, ethnic, religious, etc.), social and economic classes, domesticity motherhood, materialism, sexuality, ugliness, destruction of cities, poisoning of air, hate, contempt, distrust, prevention of conversation and friendship and love, isolation, suburbs, violence, disease and death.
5

SCUM Manifesto
had such a profoundly unique style and tone that it evades categorization. Drawing on men’s biological inferiority, Valerie began the manifesto with all the dynamism and radicalism she could muster: “Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation, and destroy the male sex.
”
6

The text then bends and swerves through nearly every major institution that oppresses women, spliced with humor, irreverence, seriousness, swipes at Daddy’s girls (“The effect of fatherhood on females is to make them male—dependent, passive, domestic, animalistic, nice, insecure, approval and security seekers, cowardly, humble, ‘respectful’ of authorities and men, closed, not fully responsive, half dead, trivial, dull, conventional, flattened out and thoroughly contemptible”), hippies, suburban moms, and corporate businessmen. Men, in other words, feel so insecure about their masculinity that they intrude on, and generally obliterate, the autonomy of their wives and daughters and even female strangers. Their sweeping women off to the suburbs, for example, reveals men’s deep-seated insecurity and need for women’s comfort and company. Men prevent women’s friendships, define Great Art as a reflection of themselves, go to war for meaningless reasons, demand “respect” from women and children, develop educational institutions based only on exclusivity, and cannot love anyone or anything. “The male cannot progress socially, but merely swings back and forth from isolation to gang-banging” (10, 16).

Key to
SCUM Manifesto
are Valerie’s rants against sexuality itself; she paints sexual desire as a complete waste of time, something women should forget altogether and eliminate:

Sex is the refuge of the mindless. And the more mindless the woman, the more deeply embedded in the male “culture,” in short, the nicer she is, the more sexual she is. . . . On the other hand, those females least embedded in the male “Culture,” the least nice, those crass and simple souls who reduce fucking to fucking; who are too childish for the grown-up world of suburbs, mortgages, mops and baby shit; too selfish to raise kids and husbands; too uncivilized to give a shit for anyone’s opinion of them; too arrogant to respect Daddy, the “Greats” or the deep wisdom of the Ancients; who trust only their animal, gutter instincts; who equate Culture with chicks; whose sole diversion is prowling for emotional thrills and excitement; who are given to disgusting, nasty, upsetting “scenes;” hateful, violent bitches given to slamming those who unduly irritate them in the teeth; who’d sink a shiv into a man’s chest or ram an icepick up his asshole as soon as look at him, if they knew they could get away with it, in short, those who, by the standards of our “culture” are SCUM. . . . These females are cool and relatively cerebral and skirting asexuality. (27–28)

Valerie also counters accusations of Freudian penis envy: “Women, in other words, don’t have penis envy; men have pussy envy. . . . Screwing is, for a man, a defense against his desire to be female. Sex is itself a sublimation. The male, because of his obsession to compensate for not being female combined with his inability to relate and to feel compassion, has made of the world a shitpile” (4).

Advocating a unique philosophy of “unworking,” Valerie outlines a plan for SCUM to take over the country within a year “by systematically fucking up the system, selectively destroying property, and murder”:

SCUM will become members of the unwork force, the fuck-up force; they will get jobs of various kinds and unwork.

SCUM will unwork at a job until fired, then get a new job to unwork at.

SCUM will forcibly relieve bus drivers, cab drivers, and subway-token sellers of their jobs and run busses and cabs and dispense free tokens to the public.

SCUM will destroy all useless and harmful objects—cars, store windows, “Great Art,” etc.

Eventually SCUM will take over the airwaves—radio and TV networks—by forcibly relieving of their jobs all radio and TV employees who would impede SCUM’s entry into the broadcasting studios.

SCUM will couple bust—barge into mixed (male-female) couples, wherever they are, and bust them up.

SCUM will kill all men who are not in the Men’s Auxiliary of SCUM. Men in the Men’s Auxiliary are those men who are working diligently to eliminate themselves, men who, regardless of their motives, do good, men who are playing ball with SCUM. (38–39)

Valerie ends
SCUM Manifesto
as forcefully as she began it: “The sick, irrational men, those who attempt to defend themselves against their disgustingness, when they see SCUM barreling down on them, will cling in terror to Big Mama with her Big Bouncy Boobies, but Boobies won’t protect them against SCUM; Big Mama will be clinging to Big Daddy, who will be in the corner shitting in his forceful, dynamic pants. Men who are rational, however, won’t kick or struggle or raise a distressing fuss, but will just sit back, relax, enjoy the show, and ride the waves to their demise” (47).

Valerie did not write
SCUM Manifesto
while having a psychotic break or while on a bender. It did not derive from her “madness” per se, but rather, slowly emerged after dozens of revisions and rewrites over many years. If
SCUM Manifesto
is mad, it bubbles up from a collective madness brewing in many women, not from Valerie’s own personal explosion of inner turmoil. On this point, the critical theory scholar Avital Ronell wrote in her introduction to the 2004 edition:

It is important to note that psychosis speaks, that it often catches a fire from a spark in the real; it is fuelled and fanned and remains unsettling because, as wounded utterance, it is not merely or solely demented. I am not persuaded that we have before us only a psychotic text. But it does rise out of the steady psychoticization of women, a threat under which most of us live and against whose coarse endurance we contribute enormous amounts of energy. Unless one is able to perform the Freudian
Spaltung
, a protective self-splitting, many of we minoritized, evicted creatures spend ourselves staving off the pressures of social psychoticization. But even in the land of social derangement Valerie Solanas got to travel the blind alleys and sidestreets of grand feminist mappings. It is not as though language and lit show no tolerance for a girl’s derangement. On the contrary, some types of accepted derangement are hard-won. We have fought for every inch of clinical corroboration and for the symptomal housing projects that shelter our anguish. Certain diseases become a woman. Strengthening her stature in unexplored domains of suffering, they encourage her daredevil collapses, linguistic feints. Valerie, however, poor Valerie refuses the prestige and license of hysteria or any of the neighboring neurotic dialects that might be understood in feminist precincts. She is no Dora, no Anna O., no Marquise von O. . . . She bears none of the finely crafted, delicate, brilliant flush of symptoms with which, thanks to the work of outstanding feminist theorists, a new form of dissidence and social disruption could be tried. Our Valerie, by contrast, was a psycho.
7

In many ways, Valerie understood this reality all too well—she walked a fine line between madness and sanity when writing
SCUM Manifesto
, undoing the world as she traveled in spheres of aloneness. She did not have the luxuries other “madwomen” have sometimes had; she could not take to the fainting couch, join up with the (then nonexistent) feminist movement, fight hard against the cruel treatment of women and the violence against them, or rely on the company of others. She forged ahead alone, clawing her way out.

In the end, Valerie produced a document about which she felt enormous pride. She shared an early draft with Jeremiah Newton and expressed how much the manifesto meant to her; as this close friend recalled, “She wouldn’t let me touch it. I think she read it to me. It was the only copy she had. She believed in it. She worked very hard to create it. She was very proud of it. It was so important to her.” Jeremiah believed that Valerie had touched on a truth: that men’s selfishness and evil had made a mess of the world and that women should rule instead. “That’s why she liked me,” he said; “I didn’t fight with her and say, ‘Oh, you’re full of shit, you bitter lesbian bitch.’ I agreed with her. I said, ‘You’re absolutely right.’ I think women are fine to rule the world and I can assure you women didn’t at that point.”