The essential Ellen Willis

"I LOVE ELLEN WILLIS," a friend told me upon hearing there would be an anthology collecting the work of the cultural critic, who was also The New Yorker's first pop music writer. "She makes me feel less embarrassed to enjoy the Who." What is embarrassing about the Who? Guitars bashed, exploding drum kits. Come to think of it, guitars, period. Songs that are insistently melodic, which signals a fundamental optimism, which is to say a terminal uncoolness. Anthems about their generation, which celebrate the fiction of collective transcendence, of freedom achieved through rock music. The Who is everything about the '60s that we now like to repudiate as laughably naïve - everything about the '60s that inspired Willis, a Bronx-born, Queens-raised Barnard grad, to leave her first marriage, become a writer and fight for a sexual revolution. The Who thrilled her because, as she wrote in 1969 (the same year she formed, with Shulamith Firestone, the radical feminist group Redstockings), "they are no longer kids, but they have not forgotten." "The Essential Ellen Willis," which gathers 40 years of her work, carries the sound of a feminist who never forgot the ideals of the '60s, and who never stopped arguing for what those years gave her and others. (Willis died in 2006.) "The valorization of too much allowed me, for the first time in my life, to have something like enough," she recalled in 1989, in an article for The Village Voice. The collection is edited by Willis's daughter, Nona Willis Aronowitz, and divided by decade; it begins with a 1969 essay on Willis's awakening to feminism and concludes with excerpts from an unfinished book exploring the "cultural unconscious in American politics." In between, there is relentlessly rigorous thinking on Janis Joplin, Bell Hooks, child care, Bill Clinton, "The Sopranos," and Sept. 11. To emphasize Willis's continuing importance, her daughter, who was born in 1984, chose "Willis-like" writers of her own generation - Ann Friedman, Irin Carmon, Spencer Ackerman, Cord Jefferson, and Sara Marcus - to contribute prefaces for each decade. They rightfully note that Willis's critiques remain depressingly relevant. (Take this sentence, written in 1979, in an essay on the rise of family values: "The pursuit of ecstasy - in freedom of the imagination and a sense of communal possibility as much as in sex, drugs, or rock and roll - was no longer our inalienable right. Babies, however, were a socially acceptable source of joy.") But their prefaces are nearly indistinguishable from one another in sentiment and tone, and there's a striking difference between those pages and the penetrative depth of Willis's thinking - the result of a painstakingly slow writing process and scrupulous self-questioning that gave her work moral and intellectual authority. That disparity may lead one to wonder if such thinking is even possible at a time when discourse is shaped by the Internet, which demands self-congratulatory clique-building and fresh outrage every hour on the hour. No one sounded like Willis then, and no one sounds like her now: wry, playful, humble, genuinely searching, intellectually formidable. Though Willis admitted she had an addiction to being right, that didn't mean she had an addiction to being correct. She couldn't quite get with the left's reflexive anti-Americanism and its preoccupation with postmodern theories that emphasized difference, which kept the left unhelpfully divided against itself. Nor was she vehemently anticapitalist; consumerism provided a little power and pleasure in a culture that didn't give anyone much of either. But who gets to define freedom? For Willis, this was the essential question, and those on the left were ceding precious ground if they continued to let the right talk as if conservatives had trademarked the concept. She was committed to calling out the way Americans preferred to further entrench themselves in anxiety and denial rather than live as if they really did believe in the pursuit of happiness they mouthed off about back in 1776. The year she died, Willis wrote: "If an ambivalent public hears only one side of a question, the conservative side, passionately argued ... and they perceive that the putative spokespeople for feminism and liberalism are actually uncomfortable about advancing their views - the passionate arguers will carry the day." We are still in desperate need of a passionate argument for a less punitive, more pleasurable life. If the culture were to believe, as Willis did, that sexual satisfaction was a human need rather than a hard-won holiday, a woman's right to exist as both sexual being and rational creature might no longer remain at the mercy of election cycles and judicial prejudice. WRITING ABOUT STEVIE WONDER, Willis noticed that he had "the power to make optimism ... marvelously credible." So does she. But her hope was never starry-eyed. See the last lines of an essay on the Velvet Underground. "I believe that we are all, openly or secretly, struggling against one or another kind of nihilism," she wrote. "I believe that body and spirit are not really separate, though it often seems that way. I believe that redemption is never impossible and always equivocal. But I guess that I just don't know." The self-described optimist and utopian was also a self-described lover of irony, one who could look back at her '60s self and appraise it drolly: "As the noted feminist Mick Jagger was to put it a couple of years later, American girls want everything - and I was no exception." Her visions were rooted in a reflection on what she called the concrete realities of daily life, on our limitations and insecurities. She once wrote that the reason she preferred Lou Reed and Iggy Pop to David Bowie was that Bowie didn't seem quite real. Or, as she explained, "Real to me, that is - which in rock and roll is the only fantasy that counts." For Willis, if your revolutionary thinking didn't accurately reflect reality, it couldn't change reality. In her version of liberation, sexual revolutionaries aren't smug, performative hedonists who play out their fantasies in villas on Mustique; they wonder instead how thin the line is between courage and delusion while drinking coffee alone in their apartments or sitting on benches outside the Laundromat. And rock writers don't turn their prose up to 11 to compete with the bands they're covering, or get so bound up in the role of gnomic wizard that they can't just shrug their shoulders and say, as Willis did, well, I was wrong about the Ramones; they admit to communing with what she called "the screaming teenager" inside. To Willis, acknowledging the real meant acknowledging that we are minds connected to bodies, and that what may not seem real at all - the unconscious and the psyche - are very powerful forces. Nearly every piece is a reminder that the culture we live in, even when we don't profess its prevailing beliefs, has an effect on the psyche; that we internalize expectations even when we think we're free; that we need to gather in groups to change our minds and the minds of others, because otherwise we stand alone in our pain and confusion, thinking that we're the problem. One of the book's best essays is about a trip to Israel, when Willis immersed herself in the Orthodox Judaism her brother had given his life over to. In it Willis portrays herself, often comically, as both stiffnecked and nearly seduced by the promise of silencing her own struggles. "Find out what you're living for, Ellen!" a rabbi says to her during that journey. "Clarity or death!" Each sentence in this collection bears the mark of a writer haunted by the notion that without a constant search for clarity on what mattered most to her, she would never realize the life - or love, or society - she hoped for. If we persist in thinking that the members of her generation deceived themselves when they believed they were beginning to see the light, we deserve every bit of darkness that is blinding us now. For those of us who would rather not get fooled again, we have these 513 pages as a guide. CARLENE BAUER is the author of the novel "Frances and Bernard" and the memoir "Not That Kind of Girl."