Loose Upper Lib

By H.R.

by KATE MILLETT

545 pages. Knopf. $8.95.

Back in 1967 a shy young artist named Kate Millett had her first one-woman New York show. LIFE magazine ran photographs of her most striking sculptures: two-legged piano stools in boots (with socks painted to order), selling for $40 apiece. It was the kind of publicity that artists starve for. Now, in a passionately unhappy book, the same Kate Millett feels compelled to write: "As the subject of controversy I suddenly acquired significance for others just as I ceased to hold any for myself . . . no longer mine, my life grew loathsome."

She was not referring to the celebrity of those piano stools, though, but to the brouhaha that followed the publication, in 1970, of her feminist doctoral thesis, Sexual Politics. Millett studied literature at Minnesota and Oxford and taught at Columbia. She had always been primarily an academic, as the book showed by combining turgid prose with a tendency to uncharitable generalization. But the burgeoning women's liberation movement needed a source book, and the press needed a symbol. In a matter of weeks, Kate Millett saw herself metamorphosed from "unknown sculptor to media nut."

Flying, her second book, records that painful process and the events of the frenetic year after the publication of Sexual Politics, when the author was being hailed as the Karl Marx and the Mao Tse-tung of women's liberation. Millett describes how her "sisters" alternately pushed her into the spotlight and chastised her for being a star. While making a feminist film documentary (Three Lives) in London and New York, and trying to maintain her quiet artist's life with her Japanese husband Fumio, she had to deal with the more bizarre aspects of what she calls the movement's "fascist era." Speaking at meetings all over the country, she was assaulted by the sisters: "We want to know why you signed your book." "Are you a lesbian? Say it. Are you?" When Millett revealed her bisexuality, she was promptly branded, as she puts it, "a lesbian in ninety-three languages." That coming out was no party.

Setting to work on Flying was her instinctive response to the strain--a desperate, rambling attempt at self-definition. The result is a confused rag bag of reportage, memories and confession. She describes her Irish Catholic childhood in St. Paul--her father's desertion of his wife and three daughters, the "ripe eroticism" of her convent-school days. She analyzes her intellectual and artistic development, her marriage and, above all, again and again in paralyzing detail, the sexual relationships with women that began when she was at college and still dominate her life.

Such material stirs the voyeuristic curiosity that propels readers through endless memoirs in search of a scrap of scandal. Millett's crowd routinely indulged in bohemian excesses: drinking instead of working, sawing up the marital bed at divorce parties, and hurtling melodramatically over the countryside after errant lovers and/or spouses. As Millett's mom once said: "Kate does everything intensely." Obsessed by the need for total exposure, the author compulsively catalogues the minutiae of her life: "We chatter and compare armpit hair." Pages of hot and heavy breathing, in which lovemaking is seen in dimly sacramental terms, alternate with miserable self-admonition: "I must accept her completely." Streams of consciousness run purple: "She made love to my poor beauty while her own shone like power above me, the great courageous fire of her eyes."

The book has its attractive and humane moments but is ultimately consumed by a conflict between sexual insecurity and evangelism. Millett possesses no trace of that perspective or irony that even autobiographers (by definition selfabsorbed) must have about their own actions. For all its self-revelation, Flying reveals almost nothing about the nature of possessive love, the conflicts of personality v. politics, her real feelings about women's liberation or bisexuality. About all the book demonstrates is that love affairs follow the same old routes, whatever the sex of the participants.

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