Tolstoi Meets Mary Daly: The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For

At about this time a year ago, a guilty and nearly boundless pleasure was reading the new translation of Tolstoi’s War and Peace by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. This year’s equivalent is the encyclopaedic page turner The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel.

Fans of alternative newsweeklies like me – I worked at a legendary exemplar, Maine Times, for four years in the 80s – could not help but notice Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For comic strip since its advent in 1987. But, in candor, I never paid it much mind. Perhaps the lesbian culture that Bechdel chronicles was just a bit too unsettling, because of the possibilities it raises, for those of us males whose emotional well-being turns in significant part on the kind intimate regard of women. Maybe I was too busy reading the classifieds that surrounded the strip. Whatever.

Bechdel officially became an author to watch out for when her autobiography in the form of a graphic novel – Fun Home – was named by The New York Times and other opinionmakers as one of the best books of 2006. The laurels were well-deserved. But it was a compelling review a few weeks ago of Essential Dykes in Vermont’s alternative newsweekly Seven Days, by Bechdel’s former assistant, Cathy Resmer – that caused me to run right out to my local independent bookseller (the Norwich Bookstore) and acquire a copy.

Resmer praises her mentor as an “obsessive documentarian” of the world Bechdel inhabits. The reviewer first credits Bechdel with giving gazillions of lonely young women like herself their first reassuring glimpse of the real lives of non-heterosexuals – a reality that Bechdel confronts with deep ambivalence, grippingly rendered in the unprecedented graphic preface to the collection – and then the reviewer documents a few examples of how those around Bechdel influenced the course of the stip.

This was endearing enough to get me and my wallet into the bookstore. But then I got home and found I couldn’t put down the anthology. I kept thinking about reading Tolstoi 12 months previously.

The analogy is not as labored as it might seem. Like Tolstoi, Bechdel is both an emphatic social commentator and a person with a genuinely humble appreciation for the shortcomings of the individual people who actually make history. The main character of Dykes to Watch out for is Mo – who, in addition to her physical resemblance to Bechdel, is fond of distancing herself from the emotional reality of her love life by resorting to articulate tirades about the latest social outrages (of which there have been many, in a socially enlightened strip that began in the era of Iran-Contra and concludes, apparently, with the authoritarian regime of Cheney-Bush). In her earnest fallibility, Mo is not unlike Tolstoi’s proxy in War and Peace, Pierre Bolkonsky.

Pierre’s wealth is thrust upon him as a confusion-inducing birthright, much as Mo is born a lesbian. He stumbles, earnestly and heroically, through Napoleon’s siege of Moscow, much as Mo is both a victim of and a hero within the globalization siege that destroys the lesbian bookstore that had been her workplace and spiritual home. And the funny drama of Mo, her series of intimate partnerships (starting with the somewhat frumpy Harriet, and culminating with the loquacious professor Sydney, whose utterly endearing approach to seduction consists largely of arguing with and infuriating the object of her desire) and the life struggles her friends (my favorite of which, naturally, is Clarissa, since her legal career is roughly contemporaneous with mine) all play out in juxtaposition to historic battles, just as the lives of the characters in War and Peace did. Make no mistake: American history since 1987 has been every bit as violent, unsettling and morally outrageous as the Napoleonic war between Russia and France was. Nobody got waterboarded during that horrible Moscow winter.

And, finally, there is this parallel between Tolstoi and Bechdel. Just as a new translation offered an excuse to take a look at War and Peace and, indeed, made it newly accessible to folks who had previously ignored it, so too does the publication of The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For offer a compelling reason to consider a body of work previously overlooked by people like me (i.e., the non-lesbians among us). What seemed inconsequential, the grand scheme of things, when rendered piecemeal suddenly becomes a magnum opus of Tolstoian significance when assembled as a coherent whole. Characters develop. Lives change. People err, triumph, reproduce, cope, and evolve. Sydney gets cancer. Bechdel toys artfully with reader sympathy for her; post-cancer, Sydney appears to be cheating cyber-sexually on Mo, until Bechdel reveals, deliciously, that she and Mo truly have a sexual union for the 21st Century. Sydney has integrity after all, to the delight of me and her other secret admirers.

And, indeed, here is where Bechdel leaves Tolstoi in the dust. Dykes to Watch Out For has a sexual explicitness about it that might mark the biggest breakthrough in literary depiction of the subject since D.H. Lawrence. If you are not a lesbian, and don’t really know what lesbians actually do with each other when making love, all is revealed here, no holds (literally) barred. But it is neither the centerpiece of the lives of these women, nor is it trivial. They’re doing it, they’re talking about doing it, they’re enjoying it, they’re not enjoying it, they’re making it an act of political defiance, they’re proving how comical it is. They’re giving sex, and argument, and moral outrage, an even better name than these things had previously.

I miss Bill Watterson, whose Calvin and Hobbes, inter alia, was so beautifully drawn. What is so offensive about virtually all comic strips today is how devoid of talent their creators are; that guy who draws Dilbert not only has nothing of any significance to say but also has no more facility as an illustrator than does the kid who bags my groceries at the Co-op. Bechdel draws as beautifully as Watterson does -- in her own style of course – and, while Calvin is trapped for all time in the body of a six-year-old, the dykes in Dykes to Watch Out For are evolving reassuringly.

Finally, “the co-op” is part of the everyday scenery in Dykes to Watch Out For. Brava! Watch out for them if only to find out where they live. Then move there.

Oh . . . one more thing. First mention of "global warming" in the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For? It was in 1987. Twenty-two years ago! This might be a good book to take with you if you are ever exiled to a desert island -- like, say, Florida, circa 2050 . . .?