by Gore Vidal
It is usual for this sort of book to end upon the hortatory note: if only we join together and force the newspapers to be objective, all will again be well. It is to Mr. Fonzi’s credit that he tells his sad story simply for its own sake. There is nothing to be done about Walter except defeat the jokester who appointed him and boycott all Triangle publications. The first is possible; the second…so what? In any case, as one who loves wit and the appositeness of things, I cannot help but feel Mr. Fonzi is too melodramatic and, finally, unjust. It is altogether right that Walter Annenberg should represent not only the present administration but the nation which elected it. Birds of a feather, as they say; and what birds! Eagles, no less, and like the predatory American eagle, near to extinction as a result of our poisoned environment.
The New York Review of Books, April 9, 1970
MEREDITH
“He did the best things best.” Henry James’s famous epitaph for George Meredith strikes an ominous note. “He was the finest contriver,” wrote E. M. Forster, noun carefully chosen to deflate reluctant superlative. Literary critics tend to regard Meredith’s novels much the way music critics responded a few years ago to a singer with a three-octave range; absolutely secure in her highest and lowest notes, she lacked nothing save that middle register in which most music is written. Nevertheless, virtuosity of any kind is so rare in the arts that other artists tend to be fascinated by it. In a letter to Stevenson, James refers to Meredith’s “charming accueil, his impenetrable shining scales, and the (to me) general mystery of his perversity.” Charm and glitter; mystery and perversity.
In the Clark Lectures for 1969 V. S. Pritchett (a critic who can usually be counted on to do the good things well) does his best to come to terms with the Meredithean mystery, and in the process says a number of things about the English novel in general, and its comic tradition in particular.
Mr. Pritchett proposes three literary categories: the masculine, the feminine, and the mythic or fantastic. The masculine line is concerned with the life of the town—that is, “the world” in the eighteenth-century sense. Fielding, Scott, Austen, George Eliot “are robust and hard-headed. They know that in the long run feeling must submit to intelligence.” The feminine tradition reverses the field. “The disorderly, talkative, fantasticating tradition” of Sterne in which “the ‘I’ is not a fixture; it dissolves every minute….Not action but inaction, being washed along by the tide is the principle, astonished that we are a form of life.” Among the feminine, Peacock, some of Meredith and Dickens, Firbank, Virginia Woolf, Joyce, with Beckett now busily—no, not busily—contriving game’s end.
The fantastic or mythic line reflects a shift in emphasis. Town has been replaced by impersonal city. The Great Crowding has begun. Obsession flourishes, and worldly conversation is replaced by solipsistic monologue. Dickens’s characters now “speak as if they were the only persons in the world.” People “whose inner life was hanging out, so to speak, on their tongues, outside their persons.” Mr. Pritchett’s categories are nicely drawn and useful if not strictly applied—as Mrs. Woolf once noted, the best writers are androgynes.
Mr. Pritchett examines in some detail Harry Richmond, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (of all English novelists, Meredith wrote morning best), The Egoist, and Beauchamp’s Career (“His bye-elections are very real”). Education and ordeal are the recurring themes. “Meredith is above all a novelist of youth and growth; for he accepts with pleasure the conceit, the severity, the aggressiveness and self-encumberedness of young men and women, the uncritical impulses and solemn ambitions.”
The technique of the novels is theatrical. A series of carefully staged conflicts provide the ordeal through which the hero must pass if he is to arrive at that clarification and sad wisdom which can only be achieved when all pride and self-delusion are burnt away. But it is not the inventions which give the novels their force, it is Meredith himself. He is constantly at stage center, commenting in a first person altogether too singular upon the narrative, upstaging at will his own bright creations. Yet for those of us who are devotees (interest is now declared), Meredith’s energy, wit, comedic invention are not only satisfying but like no one else’s.
Also, for those who care about such things, Meredith was an innovator whose “originality lies in rejecting realism and parcelling out events among people’s minds.” While his “dialogue brings in the modern wave. It is brisk, abrupt, allusive and born to its moment….” Finally, he concerns himself with that ever-valid theme, the crippling aspects of egoism and “the death of heart and sense, in those who feed back a false public image into private life.” In this, the Tory-Radical Meredith was responding fiercely to those incorrigible self-lovers, the ruling class of his place and time. Only connect? No, only erupt, he seems to say, and in the bright lava flow, if not a cleansing an illumination.
The legend of Meredith’s difficult style has been a formidable and now, one suspects, permanent barrier to that dwindling crew of eccentrics who enjoy reading novels. Yet the famous style is no more demanding than Proust’s, simpler, than Joyce’s, less enervating than Beckett’s, and if one makes the effort to submit to its strange rhythm, quite addictive in the end. But despite Mr. Pritchett’s efforts it is unlikely that Meredith will ever again be much read except by those solemn embalmers, the Specialists in English Lit., for we live at a chiliastic time when even Cyril Connolly has been forced, he tells us, to give up reading Henry James on the grounds that nowadays one can only cope with a single slow exigent master and his is Proust.
Meredith was always odd bird out in Britain’s literary aviary. All plumes and hectic color, he is total Cavalier, and so anathema to those Roundheads who form a permanent majority in the literary worlds of both Atlantic East and Atlantic West. The puritan dislike of show, of wit, of uncommon skill continues as relentlessly today as it did in his own time. But (these “buts” are a feeble attempt at selling Meredith) he had a “young pre-adult heart like Dickens”; also unusual among English writers, he not only liked women, he liked them as equals. His comic creations were of such a high order that Mark Twain stole a pair (The Duke and the Dauphin) from Harry Richmond in order to enliven Huckleberry Finn. As for Meredith’s beautifully concentrated elliptical dialogue, it continues to sound in the work of Ivy Compton-Burnett and her imitators while, according to Mr. Pritchett, “…the sardonic and reiterated stress on a single essence in his characters” was an influence on D. H. Lawrence. If nothing else, Meredith is a permanent footnote to the great puritan tradition.
“A very honorable disinterested figure in his old age,” wrote Henry James, “and very superior to any other here, in his scorn of the beefy British public and all its vulgarities and brutalities.” A century later that beefy public is busy writing most of the novels (though still not reading them) and the great good (yes, often silly) places that those two mandarins so powerfully imagined are casualties of lost empire, class shiftings and, above all, that electronic revolution which has found a new way of peopling the popular imagination with alternative worlds. Mr. Pritchett acknowledges as much and notes that Meredith’s highly subjective tone is “not so far from the agitated prose of those modern writers who seem to have sensed that the prose of the future will be heard and seen, and perhaps never read.”
As prose fiction stutters into silence, it is possible to look back without sadness (three centuries is quite long enough for any literary form) and note that the imperium James and Meredith dreamed of was just that, a territory translated from the quotidian by a rare combination of will and genius. They knew that literature was (let us use the past tense) never a democracy or even a republic. It was a kingdom, and there for a time ruled George Meredith, the tailor’s son whose unique art made him what all of Richmond Roy’s con-man’s cleverness could not, a king.
London Times, May 2, 1970
DOC REUBEN
Everything you always wanted to know about sex*
Expla
ined by David Reuben, M.D.
*But were afraid to ask
The title of the current number-one nonfiction best seller is cute as a bug’s ear, and we know what Freud thought of those who were cute about sex. (“Very uptight”—Sigmund Freud, M.D.). If a jocose approach to sexual matters is a mask for unease, then David Reuben, M.D. (“currently in private psychiatric practice in San Diego, California”), is in a state of communicable panic and I would be most unwilling to have him privately practice psychiatry on me, even in San Diego, the Vatican of the John Birch Society.
David Reuben, M.D., is a relentlessly cheery, often genuinely funny writer whose essential uncertainty about sex is betrayed by a manner which shifts in a very odd way from night-club comedian to reform rabbi, touching en route almost every base except the scientific. Essentially he is a moralist, expressing the hang-ups of today’s middle-aged, middle-class urban American Jews, hang-ups which are not (as I shall attempt to show) necessarily those of the gentile population or, for that matter, of the rising generation of American Jews.
Yes, I am going to talk about class and race-religion, two unmentionables in our free land, and I am going to make a case that Jewish family patterns, sexual taboos, and superstitions are often very different from those of the rest of the population, black, white, and yellow, Roman Catholic, Protestant and Moslem. For gentile readers much of the charm of Portnoy’s Complaint was its exoticism. And despite those ecumenical reviewers who insist that everyone’s mother is a Jewish mother, the truth is that Mrs. Portnoy was the result of a specific set of historical circumstances, not applicable to anyone else, including the next generation of American Jews, if we are to believe in her child Alexander’s rebellion. Certainly his son (assuming he has not entirely wasted his posterity) will probably resemble next-door neighbor George Apley III rather more than father or grandfather.
I mention Alexander Portnoy because David Reuben, M.D., is his contemporary and they have a good deal in common. But where Portnoy’s creator is a highly talented artist often able to view objectively the prejudices and tribal taboos of his mother’s ghetto culture, Dr. Reuben is still very much in her thrall. Essentially he is not a man of science but a moderately swinging rabbi who buttresses his prejudices with pious quotations from the Old Testament (a single reference to the New Testament is inaccurate); surprisingly, the only mental therapist he mentions is Freud—in order to set him straight.
But then Dr. Reuben seems not to have been affected at all by the discipline of science. He explodes with snappy generalities (“All children at the time of puberty develop pimples”) and opinions (“Ail prostitutes hate men”) and statistics which he seems to have made up (“Seventy to eighty percent of Americans engage in fellatio and cunnilingus”). He makes no attempt to prove anything; he merely states his prejudices and enthusiasms as though they were in some way self-evident. It is possible that his advice to middle-aged, middle-class Jewish heterosexuals is useful, but they make up a very small part of the population he now wants to convert to his notions of “mature” sexuality. Certainly a white Protestant will find much of what he has to say inscrutable, while a black will no doubt regard him as something from outer space (that is to say, suburbia) and yet another good reason for replacing Jerusalem with Mecca.
At two points Dr. Reuben is at odds with Moses. He thinks Onan was quite a guy, and his lonely practice particularly useful in toning up those of our senior citizens whose wheelchairs will not accommodate two people; and he has a positively Updikean enthusiasm for cunnilingus. Dr. Reuben would like everyone to indulge in this chivalrous practice—except women, of course: Lesbianism is “immature.” He is also sufficiently American to believe that more of everything is best. At times he sounds not unlike the late Bruce Barton extolling God as a super-salesman. “Success in the outside world breeds success in the inside world of sex,” sermonizes Dr. Reuben. “Conversely, the more potent a man becomes in the bedroom, the more potent he is in business.” Is God a super-salesman? You bet!—and get this—God eats it, too!
On those rare occasions when Dr. Reuben is not proselytizing, he can be most instructive, particularly when he describes what happens to the body during orgasm (I assume he is correct about the plumbing), and as he lists all the things that take place between the first thought of sex (D. H. Lawrence, apparently, was wrong: sex is all in the head) and final emission, the male reader is certain to be impotent for the next twenty-four hours (“You will never again,” said Leo Tolstoi wickedly, “step on a crack without thinking of a white bear”). Dr. Reuben also has a good plan for eliminating venereal disease by a mass inoculation of the entire population, which he only slightly spoils by suggesting that we use “our gigantic Civil Defense network,” which was set up for “just such a mass medical program (in case of bacteriological warfare). This would be a wonderful opportunity for a dry run which might pay off in case of a real war.” Well, he does live in San Diego.
Dr. Reuben is also a liberal on abortion, and informative on the subject of contraceptives. He finds something a bit wrong with all the present methods and suspects that the eventual solution will be a morning-after pill for women—as a Jewish patriarch he believes that woman, the lesser vessel, should bear the responsibility. He is also filled with wonderful lore, some of which I hope is true. Want to know the best nonmedical contraceptive? “Coca-Cola. Long a favorite soft drink, it is, coincidentally, the best douche available. A Coke contains carbolic acid which kills the sperm and sugar which explodes the sperm cells…The six-ounce bottle is just the right size for one application.” Yes, but won’t it rot her teeth?
Between mature guys and gals, anything goes (though anal penetration of the gal leaves Doc a bit queasy). Male impotence and female frigidity he recognizes as hazards, but psychiatry, he is quick to point out, will work wonders. He is a remorseless self-advertiser. Every few pages he gives us a commercial with brisk dialogue and characters named Emily who suffer from frigidity until…But let’s listen in on Emily and her doctor after some months of treatment. Is Emily frigid now? Lordy no! Emily is fucking like a minx. “I’m happy to say, Doctor, this is just a social call. I wanted to tell you how happy I am. I don’t know what it’s done for other people but psychiatry did what Mother Nature couldn’t do—it made a woman out of me!” Music up and out.
Or take the case of Joni, the beautiful airline stewardess who couldn’t achieve the big O no matter how hard she (he) tried. After being told that the values she had learned as a girl on a farm in Iowa (Christian puritanism) were not applicable to a flying bunny, she was able in a matter of months to write her doctor “at Christmastime” (when, presumably, all thoughts flow toward the orgasm), “I may have been a stewardess, but I really ‘won my wings’ in the psychiatrist’s office.” To one who locates psychiatry somewhere between astrology and phrenology on the scale of human gullibility, the cold-blooded desire to make money by giving one’s fellows (at best) obvious advice and (at worst) notions even sillier than the ones that made them suffer smacks of Schadenfreude.
Along with testimonials to the efficacy of his art, Dr. Reuben has a good deal to say about many subjects, and since he never attempts to prove anything, his opinions must be taken as just that. Some examples. “Orgasm among nymphomaniacs is as rare as orgasm among prostitutes.” To which any liberal arts professor would scribble in the margin, “prove.” For Dr. Reuben’s instruction, the only bona fide nymphomaniac I ever went to bed with (I had two assistants, let me quickly add; I am no Miller-Mailer man) promptly produced a splendid series of orgasms of the variety known as “skimming.” In fact, she enjoyed having orgasms so much that she thought it fun to have sex with a lot of different people, thus betraying her immaturity. Three point two times a week year in and year out with the same mature and loving mate ought to have been quite enough for the saucy shiksa.
Then there is Smiling Jack, who suffers from premature ejaculation. Why? Because he wants to punish women. “The smi
le is characteristic of men with premature ejaculation—they are all profusely apologetic but their regrets have a hollow ring.” Fast comer, wipe that smile off your face before you stretch out on Dr. Reuben’s couch.
“Blind girls become particularly adept at secret masturbation. They…” No. You had better read this section for yourself. At least the author had the courtesy to wait until Helen Keller was dead before rushing into print with the news. Then “The chap who pays to see two ladies perform homosexually also has his problems, as do the father and son who patronize the same hustler.” A breath-taking non sequitur, as usual unprovable and also, as usual, an echo of Mosaic law: Thou shalt not look upon thy father’s nakedness.
The looniest of Dr. Reuben’s folklore is “Food seems to have a mysterious fascination for homosexuals. Many of the world’s greatest chefs have been homosexuals.” (Who? I’m really curious. Not Brillat-Savarin, not Fanny Farmer.) “Some of the country’s best restaurants are run by homosexuals” (Those two at Twenty One?). “Some of the fattest people are homosexuals” (King Farouk? Orson Welles? President Taft?). “The exact reason is complex….” It certainly is, since there is no evidence one way or the other. But if there were, Dr. Reuben had best find himself a friendly shrink because he makes at least eight references in his book to the penis as food, usually “limp as a noodle”; in fact, food is seldom far from the good doctor’s mind when he contemplates genitalia—no doubt for a very complex reason (when I met him three years ago in San Diego he was round as a…well, butterball; since then, according to the dustjacket photo, he has “matured” and lost weight).
But Reuben the folklorist is nothing compared to Reuben the statistician. “At least seventy-five to eighty-five percent of [prostitutes’] clients want to have their penises sucked.” “Ninety-nine percent of johns refuse to wear condoms [with prostitutes].” “Only about one tenth of [aging] females choose celibacy.” “Chronic or repeated impotence probably affects about thirty to forty percent of men at any given time.” And of course those 70 to 80 percent of men who engage in cunnilingus. Since two can play these games, I shall now open my own private files to the public. Right off, 92 percent of those men who get cancer of the tongue have practiced cunnilingus from once to 3309 times in their lives. Those who practice fellatio, however, are not only better dressed but will take at least one long trip in the coming year. Ninety-six percent of those who practice sixty-nine (for Dr. Reuben’s heteros a must) periodically complain of a sense of suffocation. Finally, all major American novelists after forty occasionally have orgasm without a full erection. Further statistics on this poignant condition will be revealed as soon as I have heard from Saul, Vladimir and Mary.