Valerie Solanas is most famous for shooting Andy Warhol on June 3, 1968. Solanas, a radical thinker whose “SCUM Manifesto” called for the elimination of the male sex, knew Warhol and was angry because she believed he was going to film a play she wrote without paying her for it. She was also afflicted with paranoid schizophrenia and spent time in several psychiatric institutions. In “Valerie Solanas,” Breanne Fahs, an associate professor of women and gender studies at Arizona State University, argues that Solanas is interesting for reasons other than her notoriety for shooting Warhol and her psychological troubles. In a recent email interview, Ms. Fahs discussed Solanas’s relationship with Warhol, why Solanas’s work is still relevant, the difficulties she encountered in researching the biography, and more. Below are edited excerpts from the conversation.
When you approached the feminist scholar Jo Freeman, she told you, “Valerie should be forgotten.” Why do you think she’s wrong?
No matter what people think of Valerie she left a mark on history, and biographers need to chronicle the actions of such people. If I hear someone say that someone should be forgotten, it almost seems like a call to action in the reverse. Valerie was and is a mess of contradictions and open questions, and a wide-open target for people’s projections about women and rage. Anyone who can still raise hell and make people this angry so many years after her death has got to be doing something worthwhile.
What first got you interested in writing a book about Solanas?
When I first read “SCUM Manifesto” as an undergraduate, I found it incredible and compelling in so many ways. It’s a text filled with what I now understand as a fusion of absurdity and truth. I found myself laughing in the way that I do when I listen to the best comedians — Louis C.K., Sarah Silverman, Chris Rock.
Valerie said things that no one else had said — about men, about women’s complicity in their own oppression — and with such anger and power. I got to the end of the manifesto (this was the tiny AK Press edition from 1996) and the book had included only a short bio with minimal information about her life. I felt desperate to know more about her.
What gives “SCUM Manifesto” the “oddly contemporary flair” you describe?
The manifesto as a genre is understudied and undervalued. It’s a genre that goes against most of what we’re taught as scholars to value — citations, caution, distance from the subject, precision, careful use of language, paying homage to those who have gone before.
Students of mine, if I give no context around it (which has its hazards, believe me), often think she’s still alive and wrote it recently. Perhaps that’s because Valerie taps into something emotionally for its readers, evoking women’s anger, men’s guilt or shame, or rage in general. Things haven’t changed as much as we would like to think since the 1960s.
How literally did Solanas intend for its more extreme points to be taken?
I get asked that a lot. I think after careful study of Valerie and her life for all these years that she meant “SCUM Manifesto” entirely seriously but also as a satirical tool. For someone like Valerie — a genius (she scored in the 98th percentile on her IQ tests) who went mad — both realities coexisted. She understood her work as a literary device, and said so in a 1977 interview, but she also took herself and her writing completely seriously. Trying to reduce it to one or the other doesn’t give enough credit to how amazing it is that we still wonder about this and still ask this question.
What attracted Solanas to Andy Warhol, and vice versa?
They had similar backgrounds in terms of social class (both had working class roots), wanting to invent a new self that could transcend that past and not having much regard for social conventions of the time. They were also so different, with Andy having a perpetually cool, distant, detached presence. Nothing seemed to rattle Andy. Valerie, on the other hand, was all heat, fire, rage and force. She met Andy’s cool and calculated amusement with passionate sincerity and intensity, and I can imagine Andy liked being around her (at least sometimes) for that reason. Valerie would send Andy SCUM fliers to “keep under his pillow at night.” They had good banter, enough that Andy stole some of Valerie’s lines for his movies and put her into one of his films (“I, a Man”).
You say that the film director Paul Morrissey saw Solanas as “exploiting Andy’s generosity and goodwill.” Do you think there’s any truth to that view?
Paul Morrissey loathed Valerie, and said plainly to me that he hated that I was writing this book. He screamed and ranted and carried on when we spoke on the phone, seething with resentment and saying that I should write about Lady Gaga instead. Some of the Andy Warhol crowd still harbors similar feelings, while others have taken a more nuanced and semicritical look at Andy. Certainly, the women associated with the Factory have been much more critical of Andy’s treatment of women in general, while the men in the Factory seem to have this unreflective and fanatic worship of Andy that I find troubling artistically and personally. Still, Andy did have streaks of generosity and goodwill, taking into his scene misfits, losers, freaks, drug addicts, gender trouble-makers of all sorts and eccentric artists. That said, I wholeheartedly believe that he made promises to Valerie that he later revoked or simply forgot about, and for Valerie that constituted a serious offense.
Do you think Solanas would have been more influential or less if she had been more stable?
Valerie’s more coherent moments led to incredible bursts of humor, biting satire, fascinating insights and uncanny accuracy about the world. During her more acute breakdowns, her writing suffered and she had to direct her energies to her paranoid urges instead of toward her work.
To imagine living in conditions where you cannot speak for fear that you are being watched and tracked, where you believe a transmitter has been placed into your uterus, where your only recourse is to run from police and dig into your skin with a fork trying to get those transmitters out — this is a truly tragic existence, and one that leads to much speculation about what Valerie’s life would have been like had she gotten some help sooner.
None of the mental hospitals really helped her much at all aside from providing a place to sleep and feeding her (at times) three times a day. The treatment of madness has built within it clear prescriptions about the kind of people we think others should be, even though psychologists try hard to distance themselves from this fact.
Many sources were reluctant to speak to you. Did you ever consider abandoning the project because of difficulty in gathering information?
I never considered abandoning this project, and even now it feels strange that the book is finished. The difficulty of finding information, getting people to talk to me and digging through the scraps Valerie left behind was all quite addictive, really. I had the opportunity to interview people who I admire and respect so deeply — radical activists from the 1960s, artists and filmmakers who care about the work more than the money, feminists who are forces of nature in their own right. I loved it all. Valerie led an incredible life — a sad life, for sure, but also quite remarkable — and her defiance and spirit are worth studying and understanding.