WEBVTT

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The second part of the
book carries forward

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the narrative idea of various
things about the Midwest,

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my grandmother, but
introduces another theme

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which is treated in a
kind of essayic way, which

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is the whole relation
women have to beauty

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and that Americans have to
having made this country

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unbeautiful, that artists have
to having the job of creating

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beauty.

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And I work with a lot
of anecdotes as well.

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And I'm just going to
read you a couple of bits.

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I hope they're pleasant to
listen to just on their own.

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I can't exactly explain to
you how they all connect,

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but they're supposed to.

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Basically, the
idea here is people

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who represented in some way
romantic images of women

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who've given themselves to
beauty in one way or another.

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And I'm going to read
you maybe two portraits.

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There are more than two.

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Orna Tews is the person
in question in this one.

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Orna Tews "was an artist.

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I never saw any
of her paintings.

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Maybe she was a sculptor.

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She was invited by
the nuns every year

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to give one of the
weekly assembly speeches

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at our school.

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To most of the girls,
she was a plain woman

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wearing aggressively
homely clothes,

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shod in sensible shoes like our
own uniform Girl Scout oxfords.

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And how lucky we were
to be wearing them too,

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we were always told.

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How happy we would be years
later when our metatarsal bones

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were straight and true, unlike
the deformed and painful feet

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of foolish public school
girls who wore penny

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loafers or worse, moccasins.

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Here, in this holding
pool for ugly duckling

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who one fine day would give
geese-like cackles when

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they turned into swans that
were Catholic wives and mothers,

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Orna Tews, spinster artist,
was invited by the sisters

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to address us, a
convention of virgins.

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To me, Orna Tews
with her odd"-- this

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isn't her name, which is
why I'm stumbling over it.

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I had to make up a name.

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"To me, Orna Tews with her--"
but it was a weird name.

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This one is not as
good as the other one.

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"To me, Orna Tews, with her
odd and faintly elderly name

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and her aggressive
disregard for fashion,

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was the epitome of
a spinsterish-ness

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that was positively glamorous.

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I hung on her every
assembly-hall-word.

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I believe she had an accent as
if she were a missionary only

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briefly returned to
the tepid homeland

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before rejoining drab herself,
the world of macaws and Jaguars

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and savage religion
to which she belonged.

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An artist speaking of art.

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She said to observe everything.

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Actually, she said,
observe perpetually.

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I went around for a week with my
head in a swivel, eyes popping,

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looking so diligently for
the significant detail

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that I was in a state
of chronic peevish.

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I could hardly fall
asleep at night

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because of my earnest attention,
noticing myself falling asleep.

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I was an exhausted
querulous wreck,

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but I was observing perpetually.

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15 years later when I found
out that Orna Tews' dictum was

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the final entry in
Virginia Woolf's writer's

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diary, a line itself
quoted from Henry James,

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I didn't feel deceived.

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In fact, I was often
drawn to people

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who lived only the shell of life
and are measly present in St.

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Paul, where God had
absent-mindedly dropped

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them, speaking in their own
inauthentic and timorous

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voices, they lived
actually in literature.

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The first boy who kissed
me, a French horn player who

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soon after explained that he
had to be careful of his lip

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and never called again.

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All too true.

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Held me in a long
embrace and said, my god,

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you're fun to kiss.

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Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is
the Night book 2, chapter 9,

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spoken by Dick Diver to
Nicole, their first kiss.

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My French horn player
didn't care if I found out

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his line was not his own.

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It was he, soon after,
who loaned me the novel

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and said I ought to read it.

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The language of the
art-crazed is rarely our own,

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almost never in youth.

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Orna Tews quoting from
Virginia Woolf's diary,

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the boy of my first kiss copying
an exclamation from Fitzgerald,

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we spoke the same language,
though it wasn't ours.

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It was the alluringly aged,
dusty voice of an author.

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It was prose.

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We bowed our heads and
spoke in quotation,

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excising the citations for
the sake of the moment.

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Miss Tews talked about art in
life, the beauty of daily-ness.

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I was all agog.

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Her message seemed to be
that art was made of nothing

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or perhaps that nothing
that is everything was art.

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She dwelt at length
on the art that

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went into making a truly
beautiful cake, girls.

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The care in sifting,
the delicate folding

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of egg whites into
batter, the attention

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to preheated ovens and
well-creamed butter and sugar

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mixtures, details, details.

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The art of the tiny
could fill a lifetime.

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Our mothers were artists.

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Our fathers, oiling a creaking
hinge on a door, were artists.

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Our grandmothers were artists,
the fine old American art

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of darning.

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How many of you girls have ever
thought of darning as an art?

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The well-driven bus, the
carefully plowed street

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in winter, the beautifully
set dinner table,

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the diligently written history
theme, art, art, all art.

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I wanted to sign up
for the whole package.

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The lifetime of Oxford's,
the doughy resilience

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of a belief in the
beauty that resided

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in all things, the
fanatic's ecstasy

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as she toiled her way through
the art of cakes and pastries,

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the itty bitty harmlessnesses
that translated into what

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Miss Tews called, at
the end of her speech,

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formal art were the business
of perpetual observation.

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And perpetual observation
was the first tool

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of any artistic
quester, which is

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what, though she stayed
at home to practice

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her formal and informal arts in
her manic way, Orna Tews was.

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Though deeply unbeautiful,
she had further involved me

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in the pursuit of beauty.

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I didn't know it.

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I only knew what attracted me.

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But now I see her
and aunt Lillian,

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whom you weren't going to
meet at this point, who

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was beautiful and my
grandmother, who also was

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as the triumphant they were, my
figures for the pursuit of what

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I felt I did not
possess myself but which

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I sensed the world
might provide, beauty.

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The loveliness I
was willing to seek,

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to make if I could not be it as
I understood was woman's way."

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[APPLAUSE]

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