SOURCE: French, Marilyn, and Maureen Freely. “Woman: Mother Courage: Maureen Freely Talks to Marilyn French.” Guardian (22 October 1998): 4.

[In the following interview, French discusses American conservatism, the record of her battle with cancer in A Season in Hell, and modern feminist literature.]

I first met Marilyn French about 10 years ago, when she came to London to promote a novel called Her Mother's Daughter. I was working for a feminist magazine that was to go out of business a few weeks later. I was going through my black phase, although due to lack of funds the blacks were fast fading into grey. This was in sharp contrast to everyone else in the dining room at Claridge's, and in sharpest contrast to the elegant, bejewelled, supremely urbane feminist icon sitting opposite who was buying me lunch.

I had never interviewed anyone before, and Marilyn could tell. She mothered me expertly through one near-disaster after another. Whenever I got stage fright, she'd suppress a sigh, replace it with a bright smile, and say: ‘Another thing you might be interested to know is how I became involved with the women's movement,’ or ‘You'd probably like to ask me something about my first novel, The Woman's Room,’ or ‘As for my second novel, which as you know, is The Bleeding Heart …’ Halfway through the hors d'oeuvres, she directed my attention to my tape recorder, and suggested that it might not be picking up her voice, as it was underneath a napkin. Her temper did fray a bit during the main course, when I challenged something sweeping she said about men. She gave me a look I had not seen since I got that disappointing grade on a history test, aged 16, and said: ‘I can tell you haven't read my book on women and power.’ She was right! How had she known? After I had spluttered a string of abject apologies, she took pity on me and tried to calm me down by offering me her salad.

Then she asked me to tell her a bit about myself, a mistake, because I was in the middle of a divorce. But she was the perfect listener as I rambled on and on and on. She gave me lots of advice I now know to be good, largely because I didn't follow any of it.

She kept her calm during this endless session by dragging on an endless succession of long, brown cigarettes. As she recounts in her new book, A Season in Hell, these were almost to be the death of her. Five and a half years ago, she was found to have cancer of the oesophagus.

This sort of cancer is almost always fatal. Because it had already metastasised, her doctors expected her to be dead within the year, if not before. When they put her through a severe regimen of chemotherapy and radiation, they went out of their way to convince her that nothing was likely to come of it. But she refused to believe them. She finds this puzzling, she says in her book, because she had always been the sort of person who took great stock in facing facts. What puzzles her and her doctors most, though, is her complete recovery.

Recovery from cancer, that is. She will never recover from the cure, which ravaged her throat, her kidneys and her urinary tract, killed half her heart, gave her diabetes, damaged the part of her brain that governs motor skills, and made her bones so porous that a masseuse giving her a spot of shiatsu actually broke her back. Another thing that will never recover is her bank balance: her medical bills came to more than half a million dollars.

She still takes at least 14 prescription medications, and sometimes as many as 19, every day. No one can say how many years she has left. The only certainty is that she's going to be an invalid for the duration. But the strangest thing about A Season in Hell is that, even though it is a meticulous catalogue of her descent into this other, diminished, way of life, even though it assures you every step of the way that all your worst fears about cancer and its cures are true, it ends up being immensely cheering.

This is partly due to heroic rallying on the part of her children and her friends (Gloria Steinem is one of them). Their efforts seem to have taken even Marilyn by surprise. She lives alone, and until she had cancer, she thought that meant she could not call on others for help. It has been a great comfort to know that others will care for her simply because she has cared for them. But the best thing cancer did, she says, is rob her of her future. ‘Stuck in the present, I can devote myself to it: to daily pleasure, pleasure in the moment, pleasure in everything (or almost everything) I do … I move through the day from pleasure to pleasure like a woman walking through the halls of a great art gallery.’ In the book, she only refers obliquely to the effect this has had on her interest in politics, and the feminist cause that consumed so much of her life, but when we met last weekend, this time at the Connaught, she was happy to spell it out.

The fight had gone out of her, she told me in her new soft rasp of a voice. Between racking but elegant coughs, she assured me it was all a great relief. She had spent too much of her life mothering people, she explained. The habit dated back, she thought, to her childhood realisation that her immigrant parents were ‘shaky in the world and couldn't protect me from it or within it’. Her response was to feel responsible for them: ‘I ended up being their parent. But none of this was I aware of. It's only maybe in the last 10 years or so that I saw that this was my attitude, period. I took this responsibility for my husband, for my children, for my friends …’ And strangers! I almost said. But it was at this point that I chickened out and decided not to remind her that I was that sobbing creature in greying black leggings who had taken so much of her time all those years ago at Claridge's.

‘I stretched this responsibility to the movement,’ she continued. ‘I have a vision of how human life could be more felicitous for everyone, not just women. I felt responsible for this, for convincing people, for making sure that this vision got realised in the world, and well, in this political climate nothing could be further from possibility, and so I was really getting frustrated … I don't have any of that now, mainly because I feel so shaky myself I don't feel as if I can. It's just fallen away. It's like a shell, it just opened and dropped.’

Did that mean she had given up on her vision? ‘No. I absolutely believe in it, but it's not only someone else's job, it's another generation's. Nothing is going to happen in this climate, nothing good. It's not as if you can even speak about a conspiracy; it's just that the reactionary men like Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch who own the media all agree that the way to deal with women and leftists is just not to print them, or to deprive them of a voice.

‘I can't remember the last time we had a feminist on the op ed page. You'll never find a feminist talking about her long-term vision of change in society. You did in the seventies, but no one would publish it now. Gloria Steinem is the closest and that is because she is charming, and she doesn't say radical things, either. They've closed all the doors to us.’

This was not to say that important things weren't happening at the grassroots level. This had always been where female culture operated: ‘The real feminism isn't located in any group or organisation and this confuses the male world, which always stabilises and concentrates power within an institution. Feminism doesn't do that. It is not like being a Republican. It's way of seeing. It's believing women are as important as men. It's really that simple. So the real feminism is women in groups of one or two or five, doing what needs doing in their neighbourhoods. And they're out there, all across the country, doing local work. But what is going on globally is so terrible and so insidious and we don't have the voice to fight it.’

Nationally, things looked just as hopeless to her. Americans were in for a long and very bumpy ride with the Republican right and its many opportunistic followers.

‘They're so organised. They have such good PR! The rest of us are sitting there floundering.’ It wasn't just feminism that was being corporatised. Now that the American right had successfully fended off socialised medicine, they were working hard to dismantle social security and even public education. ‘It's unbelievable! It's disgusting! They seem to want us to be the last … big … fascist state.’

The fire in her voice as she said this, did not quite fit the frail, elegant body it came out of, and it made you wonder if she really had opted out of her old passions to the degree that she claimed, but as our conversation continued, she threw out more and more sparks. First it was born again piety, in particular the fundamentalists in Congress: ‘They know what God says, which I find really astounding. Do they have a communicative line that I don't have? I've never heard God speak. Have you?’

Then it was masculinist writers dominating the American literary scene. Many of them she admired. Mamet was wonderful, Sam Shepherd was good sometimes, and Mailer could be ‘very talented’ when he wasn't ‘playing the fool’. But Updike and Roth? Puleeze. ‘They've spent the last 10 or 15 years writing books about themselves under an alter-ego. Their self-involvement is really terrible.’ She gave up on Updike, she told me, when she got to that part in Roger's Version ‘when he started stroking his penis and writing a paean to its beauty and its purple-pink colour, and I thought, have they no shame?’

But don't call her a man-basher. Hypocrisy was just as destestable when it was female. Updike got off lightly compared with Simone de Beauvoir. When I asked her about a throwaway remark she had made about this other icon in her book, she sighed and said: ‘We can't really afford to throw stones at our heroines. We're equally limited by our time and our vision. The time will come when they read our feminist stuff and say, God, they were narrow-minded.

‘I never believed all that stuff Simone de Beauvoir said about transcendence, but I'll tell you what I can't forgive—quite apart from the pimping for Sartre and her servility to him, making him look so important when it appears now that at least half the ideas came from her … What I cannot forgive is her behaviour during the German occupation of Paris. I was just flabbergasted when I read about that. This is a moral guide? I've never been able to get over it. I have such a distaste for her. I'm sure she was dirty. I'm sure she smelled.’

She accompanied this statement with a very fierce look, and an emphatic: ‘Anyway. That's how I feel about her.’ At which she caved into another cough. By now her dinner guest had joined us, so I decided to make my apologies for wearing her out, and leave.

As I made my way home, I tried to puzzle out the difference between the old, tactful, forward-planning Marilyn who had once so terrified me, and the new Marilyn, who was so much more cheerful, and so much more entertaining, even when she was explaining why life was hopeless. It seemed to me that the overwhelming sense of responsibility she had described the old Marilyn as feeling, had not just weighed her down in life, but also given a heavy-heartedness to her writing.

Even when she was writing about fictional characters whose lives were far from exemplary, her voice remained maternal—it was as if she thought of her readers as shaky daughters who needed to be handled, and guided, with care. But now she has given up that tiring and exasperating job, and she can speak her own mind. It is a very unusual mind, and far more interesting than even she realises. I hope she has lots of years left to her, and I hope she continues to take pleasure in writing, because she has so much more to say.