October 22nd, 2025
An Excerpt From The Princess of 72nd Street
I am glad I have the radiance. This time I am wiser. No one will know. Perhaps it is a virus—a virus causing my being to expand and glow instead of causing nausea and weakness. It is not what they think it is. Usually they treat this lovely feeling with drugs. Weren’t they surprised when the lithium salts didn’t work. All of them so sure they could call it manic-depression and level it with those salts. I fooled them. Finally it was cured in the usual way. In fact any feeling can be cured if you want to get rid of it by shooting up large amounts of Thorazine, Stelazine, and more recent derivatives into the buttocks or ass or bottom or gluteus maximus.
What a fool I was to go there all by myself of my own free will last time and live in the green painted room until they made certain that the radiance was gone. When I have this condition it is hard for me to follow directions, difficult to keep to schedules, to play follow the leader. When they cure it with the drugs that make my limbs heavy and my mind stupified, I cannot laugh suddenly or cry or even dance. It is like something is binding me. But I can follow orders very well. I can do whatever I am told. Then they say, she is over the acute stage. I am praised and the dosage is lowered. Finally I am released. I come out into the world with correct patterns of speech, and for a while I see a psychiatrist and take my maintenance dosage and look for a job in the newspaper. It is a pretense. The realization of who I am comes back to me. Not the radiance. You see, the two don’t always go together. I am the Princess of 72nd Street. This is a fact. Something I know deep inside but only mentioned during my first and second radiance. They want me to believe that a radiance follows some terrible rejection or loss of self-esteem and is some kind of defensive device creating chemical changes and loss of boundaries. They are wrong. I have gotten the radiance when I have been depressed about something and also when things were going along in their normal way. The truth that they refuse to admit to is that there is no pattern. None.
For example, I was visiting some friends in the country, somewhere covered with green, somewhere people are proud to live because it is covered with green grass instead of ordinary pavement. This is something I don’t understand—arrogance about life near trees and birds and green grass. I’ve tried. All that green was so dull, so stifling. I had the feeling that the green was sucking up all the air and then spitting out something sickly sweet. But they felt that I should be happy to get away from the city which they think is noisy and smells bad. And so I made the appropriate remarks. Somewhere there must be a book full of them. I learned those things a long time ago. In the evening, to my horror because I hate eating outside, my friend’s husband decided that a barbecue was what I would like. A large lump of meat was placed on some tin contraption, and he kept turning it over with an air of self-importance if I remember correctly. I sat around getting nauseated. I like little pieces of meat eaten quickly inside. My friend Melita was doing things to radishes and lettuce, running inside and outside and upstairs and downstairs, as though it were an occasion. She was wearing a pair of the earrings that she makes in the cellar. Melita has a tiny face and a large tall body. The earrings were long almost shoulder length silver loops with three purple plastic triangles just brushing her shoulders. I’ve never cared for my friend Melita but we think we like each other. It’s a friendship that has been going on since she chose to be my friend at an art school where we were studying to be great painters.
In those days Melita painted plums—three plums on a horizontal canvas, or one plum all alone on a square canvas, or plums scattered about, or plums cut open, and occasionally plums on a white plate. When plums were out of season Melita got upset and sat in a corner of the studio. She said she didn’t understand life or her own feelings or the feelings in the paintings around her. She over ate during these times, and pimples came out on her back and face. Once I suggested to her that she paint the soul of a plum. She was
very suspicious and thought I was being condescending, which I was, but I was also trying to help her pimples. Melita thought about it for a long time and began stretching enormous canvases on which she painted what looked like a sky with a gigantic purple moon. She painted so many of these that she became exhausted and got mononucleosis. Everyone got mononucleosis in those days, but it was probably other things. I think we learned how to induce and produce mononucleosis at will. It was an ultimate solution Everyone understood, having had it, and everyone was kind and expected nothing. You could hav mononucleosis as long as you wanted to. It was better than the way they used to get tuberculosis in the old days. No one died and yet it was long and languorous.
Melita looked beautiful only when she had mononucleosis. She became slim with her whole body going together without lumps of fat or pimples, and her eyes became large and luminous. That is when Peter noticed her—this very same Peter who was turning the lump of meat over and over and now tended to ignore Melita except when they had company. At that time Peter used to go into the woods to shoot rabbits and ducks which he quicky painted in large sure strokes so he was finished in time to eat them. He was known as the genius, the Manet, of our entire group. No one else could paint so quickly with each stroke being the right choice like a miracle. One day for no reason Peter couldn’t paint anymore. He couldn’t remember how he had been doing it. He stopped hoping for it to come back and studied art history. Even now he teaches courses in art history. His specialty is Vermeer. I don’t know why. Vermeer has nothing to do with ducks or rabbits or even plums. No one ever mentions Peter’s old paintings. Melita is self-conscious
about painting in front of Peter so she makes peculiar jewelry and secretly paints plums when they are in season. I suspect that Peter knows about it, but he never talked about it, at least not then. Peter
couldn’t stand the sight of a plum. Melita explained to me that she must be very careful because he can smell a plum miles away and breaks out in hives. They enjoy swimming in their pool. This is something else that I never understood. I think, in fact, that it is crazy, this moving back and forth in water. Even though we are related to the fish in the embryonic stage, I still think it is unnecessary. I watched them the morning after the barbecue. In the middle of the night Peter had come into my bed. I told him that I love Melita too much to do such a thing. It was easier that way. Peter sulked but finally said that he understood. He understands nothing—nothing of my peculiar morality, nothing of my status as Princess of 72nd Street, and nothing of the irrelevant fact that he repels me. The next morning he was holding Melita’s wet body near the edge of the pool. I don’t swim, just sit dangling my toes in the water. I was watching them swimming back and forth like crazy people with their lips getting blue, both of them thinking there was something good in this. I tried to think of what it could be: gills, legfins, primeval slime, uric acid. Was there some sense of accomplishment they felt? Was it a purely physical sensation, or simply a habit? It certainly made them look ugly and goose-pimpled and blue-lipped and out of breath and wrinkled and pathetic.
Sitting there and watching them I unexpectedly got the radiance. My body felt light as a flower, my breathing itself gave me great pleasure, and my hair seemed to fly up and outward like wispy silk. I smiled and then laughed. Peter and Melita looked up and laughed also. Such musical sounds. Little bells. I began to run around and around on the hot dry grass and to look straight up into the sun. The sun understands me. The sun is a wine fire with strange threads of blue. It roars its comprehension of everything I am. I knew that. Peter and Melita became two exotic wet water flowers simple and spreading out white petals. I embraced both of them. Neither of them liked this. They know me as someone who is not demonstrative. Peter muttered something about how the country air was doing me good and Melita asked if I was hungry. People like to pretend that radiance is something else when they see it. I hardly heard them. I was leaping and singing and reciting poetry—the poetry of sun and fishfins and balloons. I jumped into the pool and lay there for a long time, smiling at the sun and letting the water fill my ears like it rushes into a seashell. I felt an obstruction and took off my bathing suit, letting it fall to the bottom. I am the water.
I was aware of Peter and Melita who were whispering to each other. Melita has always been angry because my body has no flabby parts and looks as young as it did when we were at art school despite the aging of the internal organs. She took Peter into the house. I noticed these things from a distance as though they were part of a dream. Melita, a shape moving about, came near the pool with a purple towel in her hands. Everything Melita has is purple: her dresses, towels, sheets, mascara, jewelry, shoes, bathing suit. I came right out and into the purple towel and said that I wanted to dance on the lovely wet grass. The grass in reality, in one reality, is ugly and dry, burnt out, and hurts the naked feet. My feet were padded with velvet like the hooves put on horses, so the grass felt soft and wet. I danced away from the towel and Melita like a purple whale was running after me. I thought it was a game and kept on laughing. Melita looked so large and beautiful with her towel.
I must always live here where the sun blooms and the water is purple and the streets are soft and the sun blows love upon both of you and the red meat sizzles on flames so I am not myself as you know me but part of the flame of the sun which is also on the flame-shaped blades of grass, I said. They thought I had gone mad, I suppose, but I knew what was going on at the other level. Sometimes I do. I just couldn’t control my radiance which was in my feet and breasts and head and thoughts. I knew that Peter was pacing back and forth looking distraught. The day before Melita had told me about his impotence.
They were whispering about sunstroke. I knew that they would catch me like a butterfly and that I would be imprisoned, but I didn’t mind—not even when they did it, scooping me up like a bird when it isn’t looking. Melita made me lie on the bed and gave me aspirins and put a cold towel on my head. Melita doesn’t like to take care of people. Peter called the doctor who didn’t want to come because it was Sunday. He was probably putting hooks into fish or swimming like a fish or planning a barbecue. He came. They must have told him something alarming or shocking to make him come on a Sunday.
He gave me an injection of something to make me stop bothering everyone with my happiness and then he asked me if some problem was upsetting me. I thought this was a funny question and just laughed. I tried to tickle him between the legs and then the drug put me to sleep.
That was one of my early attacks of radiance. The man I had come to the country to get away from and who detested laughing and was appalled by radiance came to take me away. Mistakenly Melita and Peter had summoned him. We drove straight out of the country right up to Bellevue.
I thought Bellevue was beautiful covered with green grass and full of lovely people. I tried to dance with the people on the grass. I told them how happy I was to be there with them and how lucky we were to have the sun shining so warmly on our fingertips. Some laughed or walked away or looked at me. An old man kept blowing up paper bags and then smashing them. I joined him and we both giggled. In a few days they took it from me. It was like a sudden shock with the people looking sick and crying or screaming and the walls turning a dirty green color. The sun was gone and I wanted to get out. It wasn’t right. In my opinion radiance is my own and my business and too precious to part with in this world.
To live by a morality such as mine would be insane, at least in our times. People would throw stones at me, laugh, put me in solitary confinement, or send me to a behavioral psychologist to be changed. I never mention it. I have never given voice to my deep inner beliefs. Who has? Nor do I live by them—not exactly, not nearly. Before the radiance overwhelms me, now once and for all, I want to tell how I really think about things. I mean things relating to men and women. It takes some courage, understand, particularly since the flittering things are beginning to tickle the inside of my head. First of all if a man is with a woman—even walking down the street or sitting in a restaurant—he should not be permitted to look at the
faces or bodies of other women. I would have his eyes put out. Men should be blind. This is something I have worked over in my mind after taking careful note of the way they use their eyes. They cannot
focus, have in fact darting eyes, spinning thorny eyes. If a married man looks at a woman younger than his wife or prettier or even of the same prettiness, then he shall forever dwell in darkness. It makes perfect sense. Marriage is sacred although no one dares to admit it. If a man who is married should lie with another woman, then I would have him castrated. What lies behind this morality is not cruelty—quite the contrary. The highest ideals of love, kindness, and felicity to one’s mate lie therein.
When a man walking down 72nd Street with a woman let his darting eyes stick to any part of me I used to shout, look at the woman you are with you greedy, eye-darting fool. Now I am silent, not wanting to cause more pain or heartache to the woman since she may not have noticed. Let me say I hate this quality in men and most men have it except those who are nearly blind, totally blind, or without side vision. Many times have I taken great pains with my appearance and dress when with some particular man, only to have him suddenly screech some vulgar sound, hiss, whistle, or moan when he sees a woman who looks the reverse of myself. Or ignoring my beauty, which is being appreciated by men with other women, he will leer at a poster, at a girl in torn jeans, at anything and everything. This has hurt my feelings in the past. One of my lovers seeing me small and exotic, like a true Princess of 72nd Street West must be, developed a yearning for “tall Nordic goddesses,” as he so crudely put it. I have matured and adapted to my society and its men, so I simply lowered my eyes. To comment, I have learned, only fouls the air further.
If you marry a man for money then you don’t have to concern yourself. Every man will make both the most beautiful or the most homely woman, according to current standards, feel unattractive most of the time. I don’t think they do it purposely or unconsciously. It is in their eyes.
The women who go about barefaced, scrubbed clean with tiny eyes and no lips in the name of what is called the women’s movement are saying, like me for what I really am. Well they are fools! No one likes anyone for what they really are. But even if they were to improve their faces as they used to, they would get the same result. Then why not remove the eyes of men so that they might sense the souls of women and focus better.
I am also severe, though not quite as punitive with members of my own sex. They don’t have such mobile eyes. Any woman who breaks up a marriage by enticing or bewitching a married man
should be exiled. Let those women live together on an island fa away from all men. When a woman is introduced to another woman’s lover or husband she ought not pay attention to him. She should speak in a dull voice of dull things to his wife. Her eyes must be lowered at all times. Some of our women, unfortunately, are most attracted by those who belong to another, liking to play for power or act out father-fixations. These should be banished or deprived of estrogen and progesterone. In my experience of watching everything, women’s eyes and attention do not often stray to other men—at least hardly so in proportion to the sins of the male. Still if everyone were blind, would they not make better choices by sound, be less prejudiced, and pay attention to the person they are at the movies with? What then of painting? Perhaps those truly dedicated to painting might keep their eyes in return for voluntarily giving up sexual activity through slow deletion of the proper hormones. Then who would look at their paintings? Let future, more civilized people who have earned the right to have eyes look upon them. Meanwhile sculpture, music, and literature can flourish with the aid of braille.
As you may have concluded, I am an absolutist about monogamy, about fidelity, about eternal relationships. As for those who like people of their own sex, sexually, I would prefer that they also
marry and form perfect unions.
While having this morality, this humanistic, ethical morality, I must endure the agony of seeing it defiled day after day by almost everyone and by everything in print. I am forced, yes forced, to make my way in this terrible world of covetous eyes and greedy fingers. Necessity has made me try to see individual cases, be sympathetic to weaknesses—even to have affairs with men who are in love with every female in the world, with several, or with one living in their head who has never been born. I tolerate conversations in which my lover listens, with his eyes on someone else’s naked back or buttocks while I am expressing my deepest ideas. And despite my position and my morality, I have discovered myself to be making love with someone who is whispering things about a woman he saw on a subway poster, a child whose panties he pulled down when he was ten, or about an imaginary girls’ gymnasium with pubescent girls chinning, lifting weights, and playing volleyball in strange costumes. Men have a need to communicate these visions during intercourse. The alternative is total isolation. Perhaps total isolation is best. It is no comfort to me that other eyes are invading my body or putting me into erotic fantasies when I am not present. Watch those married men who take their children to the zoo on Sunday. Watch their eyes and you will see the horror of it. Evidently they believe themselves starved of a million pulchritudinous behinds and other artifacts of freedom.