Reflections In a Jaundiced Eye

by Florence King

  Look away, martini lovers.

  16

  SEX AND THE SAXON CHURL

  On the first day of school, my junior high English teachers made us write an essay called “What I Did on My Vacation.” I always invented healthy, normal activities like sailing and swimming to hide the fact that I had spent the whole two weeks in our beach cottage pantry soaking up Frank Yerby’s historical novels.

  Thirty years later I wrote a historical novel and ended up in similar circumstances. I turned into a drunk and passed out in the pantry.

  By the mid-1970s the anti-feminist backlash had produced a demand for lushly romantic bodice-rippers known in the trade as “sweet savages” after the genre’s first blockbuster, Sweet Savage Love by Rosemary Rogers. Published as original paperbacks with titles composed of three emotionally extravagant trigger words, they sold into the millions and made their authors rich.

  Deciding to get in on the gravy, I contacted a publisher for whom I had done a ghost job.

  “Great!” he said. “But there’s too much Southern plantation and French Revolution. Can you come up with a different background?”

  Unfortunately, I could. My first sweet savage mistake was choosing the fall of Roman Britain to the Anglo-Saxons. The fifth century A.D. was the Big Spillover, the Century That Was, when history hit the fan and splattered everywhere. Between the barbarians sacking Rome and the Christians burning down the Hellenic libraries, there was so much destruction that we don’t really know what happened, which is why footnotes for the period usually kick off with warnings like “Professor Cholmondeley disagrees.”

  Like the annexation of Schleswig-Holstein, the fifth century has a way of getting to people who study it. Poor old Cholmondeley was last seen weeping silently in the stacks of the British Museum and grabbing imaginary flies out of the air, but I had to go and choose the fifth century for the sake of freshness.

  My editor was delighted, seeing helmets with horns and lots of spiked armor for mauling bosoms in the “he pulled her to him” scenes. I pulled the pen name Laura Buchanan out of a quick brown study and set about creating my heroine. Since she was a British Celt, I gave her red hair and named her Lydda. Her name led to the first of those wacky exchanges that masquerade under the impressive name of “editorial conferences.”

  “I don’t like the name,” my editor said. “Too many d’s.”

  “Double-d in Welsh is pronounced th,” I pointed out.

  “Yes, but sweet savage readers don’t know dat.”

  I was attached to the name so I persuaded him to keep it, but we got into another wrangle when we tried to come up with a title.

  “Something Saxon Splendor,” I mused.

  “Sweet savage readers don’t know what Saxon means unless it’s got Anglo with it, and then you open up another whole can of worms. It’ll sound like an ethnic-awareness book. Besides, hyphens scare them.”

  “Because of ethnic sensitivity?”

  “No, because hyphens in titles are scary. They remind them of feminists who keep their maiden names after they get married. We’re talking about nervous, frustrated, lonely women here, that’s why they read this schlock. If we use Saxon we’ve got to do it in a way that won’t make them feel insecure.”

  “How about Sex and the Saxon Churl?”

  “They don’t know what churl means.”

  We were stuck in the Something Saxon Splendor groove until my editor decided to abandon the troika mode entirely and go for the romantic fantasy jackpot with a “princess” title.

  “The Barbarian Princess,” he said proudly.

  “They don’t know the historical meaning of barbarian,” I protested. “They’ll think it’s about a girl with awful table manners. How about The Celtic Princess?”

  “They don’t know what Celtic means either, but it would remind them of basketball, and that would remind them of their husbands sitting in front of the tube instead of carrying them into the bedroom. We’re talking about love-starved women here. Don’t worry about the historical meaning. Barbarian sounds sexy.”

  We called the book The Barbarian Princess and I began constructing a plot. I use the word loosely because not even Aristotle could get a plot out of the fifth century. Besides, I didn’t really need one. A plot is a mathematically balanced and logically structured series of events leading to the resolution of a conflict. The genre I was in called for that incorrect but widespread definition of a plot known as “a lot happens.” In keeping with the typical sweet savage, mine was a sadomasochistic daisy chain of incidents based on the popular wisdom of the hour: “When in doubt, rape.”

  My editor counseled me carefully on the need to strike the proper balance between erotic titillation and romantic idealism. He was worried about me, and with good reason. So far my “real” books under my own name had been nonfiction, and I was known as a humorist—always fatal to romance. We’re talking about women who take sex seriously here. Worse, I had been a pornographer; between 1968 and 1972 I wrote thirty-seven paperback porn novels in which I was supposed to sound like a man and did.

  “Remember,” he cautioned, “keep the heroine a virgin as long as possible, and never let her have sex willingly with a man she doesn’t love.”

  I began in a mood of enthusiasm that was not entirely mercenary. I love history and wanted to be factually correct, to give the book an authentic period flavor. Since Roman Britons spoke Latin, I decided to toss in a few obvious phrases for the sake of verisimilitude.

  The story opens in the early spring of 409 with Lydda swimming naked in the Bristol Channel, so when she entered the water I had her exclaim “Quam frigida est!” Chased by a boatful of Roman sailors patrolling for Saxon and Hibernian pirates, she cries “Desiste!” when one of them jumps into the water and grabs her. Later, unable to find her mirror while dressing for dinner, she asks her maid, “Ubi speculum est?”

  My editor called me as soon as he read it.

  “Go easy on the Latin. Sweet savage readers can’t handle all that. You can have her scream desiste when she gets raped, though.”

  Since time and place were right, I gave Lydda a childhood sweetheart named Patricius who tells her about a strange dream he had about wandering through the neighboring island of Hibernia fighting off snakes. It brought a delighted phone call from my editor.

  “I told Publicity we’re going to be first on the market with the seduction of Saint Patrick!”

  I devised a better idea that would save Lydda’s virginity and allow me to dramatize a factual incident. She and Patricius go for a chariot ride and end up necking in a field. Just as he is about to “take” her, Hibernian pirates burst out of the woods, throw nets over them, and drag them back to the ship to sell them as slaves in the snake-infested Auld Sod. (This is how Ireland ended up with a Brit for her patron saint).

  Screaming “desiste!” Lydda is taken to the captain’s quarters, but just as he is about to rape her, she kicks him in the globuli and jumps overboard. Since I set her up as a strong swimmer in the first chapter, she makes it back to Britannia, where more trouble bodes. As soon as she recovers from her ordeal, her father announces that he has chosen a husband for her: the evil and corrupt Roman, Vitellinus, whom she hates.

  In Londinium for her wedding, Lydda meets the Saxon general Thel, a blond hunk in spiked armor who has come to negotiate a peaceful colonization plan with the Roman Britons to save him the trouble of conquering their country.

  It’s love-hate at first sight. Thel pulls Lydda to him the first chance he gets. “Desiste!” she cries, as well she might, because by the time I got through with his armor it looked like Kaiser Bill’s helmet.

  On their wedding night, Vitellinus doesn’t notice the shredded condition of her bosom because he has no interest in her front. Just to keep her virginity perking along, I made him a sodomist who forces her to submit to beastly practices that leave her hymen intact.

  They go to Rome where Lydda meets the emperor’s promiscuous sister, Placidia, whose ho
bby is destroying innocence. She offers Lydda her own newest lover, a Saxon general of immense talents (here I borrowed Mrs. Patrick Campbell’s famous assessment, “Six-feet-four and everything in proportion”) who has recently arrived in Rome.

  None other than Thel the Hunk. It’s desiste time again, but since Lydda loves-hates him, she lets him ravish her. Not long after their passionate interlude, she is conveniently widowed when the psychotic Vitellinus commits suicide. Now she and Thel are free to marry and live happily ever after, but I was only on page two hundred. The lovers had to be separated somehow so Lydda could live to scream “desiste!” some more.

  History came to my rescue. By now it was August of 410, so I sent Thel out of town on a government mission and left Lydda alone in Rome so she could be kidnapped by Alaric the Goth when he swings through on his sack.

  Somewhere around this time I started to drink. I had always liked a little snort but now I began downing bourbon in the classic Southern manner. No matter how much pride I took in my research, no matter how much Latin I added for flavor, the fact remained that I was spinning a pointless, plotless, endless chase scene whose only purpose was keeping a good-bad girl one step ahead of the long short-arm of the lawless.

  Since Alaric the Goth died of a stroke three weeks after the sack of Rome, I made it happen while he was raping Lydda. Fleeing from his tent, she steals a horse and gallops off to find Thel, but she is waylaid by an evil Egyptian sea captain who kidnaps her to Alexandria and delivers her to the sexually insatiable Roman prefect, Orestes, for whom he pimps. Orestes installs her in his luxurious palace and she becomes, against her will, a bird in a gilded cage.

  In Alexandria, Lydda makes friends with the famous female scholar Hypatia. The association between the city’s most notorious courtesan and its most liberated career woman provokes the ire of Archbishop Cyril, Alexandria’s misogynistic prelate, who sends a band of monks to murder them. As Lydda watches in horror, the monks cut Hypatia to pieces with oyster shells (true) and then come after her.

  Leaping into a tradesman’s parked wagon, she flees into the desert where she is taken hostage by a pair of early Christian hermits busily mortifying their flesh. To prove their immunity to female charms, they strip her naked and force her to lie in bed between them while they pray.

  Just as she is about to be beaten for causing an erection, Roman troops arrive and torch the hermit colony. Fleeing from the burning hut without a stitch on, Lydda is arrested by Lucius the Centurion, who takes his pleasure with her and then turns her over to his men. Screaming “desistite!” (gang rape takes the plural), she proves such a delectable spitfire that Lucius decides to sell her to the keeper of Constantinople’s most select brothel.

  There she meets Marcellus the Eunuch, who becomes her friend (my editor called this her “free time”). Together they concoct a plan to escape from their mutual captivity and stow away on a ship bound for Britannia.

  By now I was drinking one day, sobering up the next, and writing on the third, which explains what happens next. During a storm at sea, a falling mast crushes Marcellus, and the captain and the entire crew are washed overboard, leaving Lydda alone on a rudderless ship.

  Weak from hunger, she faints just as the ship founders on a craggy rock. She comes to in the arms of a craggy man in black robes.

  “Where am I?” she asks.

  “Caledonia.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Nagar the Druid.”

  That was the day I passed out in the pantry.

  Of course Nagar ravishes her—it’s the only way sweet savage characters can get a conversation going. He does it on a stone altar in the sacred oak grove, injecting her with so much Celtic awareness that she becomes a Druid priestess and leads an army of wild Caledonians into Britannia to wrest her homeland from the Saxon churls.

  Borne on her chariot, her face painted blue, she charges the leader of the hated Sassenach, but lo and behold … .

  Reunited with Thel the Hunk on the battlefield, she is routed, raped, and married in short order. The wedding ceremony is performed by Patricius, home on leave from a now snake-free Hibernia, and nine months later he baptizes their son.

  By now I weighed one hundred and eighty pounds and had a twitching eyelid. The hectic mess I had written sold for such a large sum that my editor asked me to write another one, this time using a background of ancient Greece. The title search began all over again.

  “How about Something Golden Glory?” he said.

  “How about Chaos and Meander?”

  “Too mythy.”

  That did it. Another round of this would kill me.

  “It’s time to cease and desiste,” I said.

  17

  PHALLUS IN WONDERLAND

  Mel Berger

  William Morris Agency

  1350 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, New York 10019

  Dear Mel:

  I got a call from a lady at Lear’s magazine who asked me if I could do a critique of John Updike’s novels. I said yes, but we’ve got a problem. Remember when a reporter asked Gerald Ford what he thought of Solzhenitsyn and Ford said, “I understand he’s superb”?

  I’ve never read John Updike. Naturally I didn’t tell the Lear’s lady that, so when you call her to negotiate the nuts and bolts, please invent some reason to ask for a long deadline so I’ll have time to read the major novels.

  Florence

  Florence King

  1861 Robert E. Lee St.

  Fredericksburg, Virginia 22401

  Dear Florence:

  It’s all set. I told the Lear’s lady you needed some time “to refresh your memory” so you’ve got two months. I understand Updike is a genius. Read him in good health.

  Mel

  Dear Mel:

  I’ve started Poorhouse Fair. Updike’s style is an exquisite blend of Melville and Austen: reading him is like cutting through whale blubber with embroidery scissors.

  Here’s the sunrise: “Despite the low orange sun, still wet from its dawning, crescents of mist like the webs of tent caterpillars adhered in the crotches of the hills.”

  Here’s the sunset: “Opaque air had descended to the horizon, hills beyond the housetops of the town. On one side, the northern, a slab of blue-black, the mantle of purple altered, reared upward; on the other inky rivers tinged with pink fled in one diagonal direction. Between these two masses glowed a long throat, a gap flooded with a lucent yellow whiter than gold, that seemed to mark the place where, trailing blue clouds, a sublime creature had plunged to death … .”

  It goes on like that for a whole page. Somebody also has “wine-dark lips.” Isn’t that from The Odyssey?

  He was awfully young when he wrote Poorhouse Fair so I’m going to skip it and start Rabbit, Run. I’m sure I’ll like it better—the critic Milton Rugoff once said it had “all the force and brilliance of a hallucination.”

  Florence

  Dear Mel:

  It does. Listen to this: “They pelted the soldiers with remarks like balls of dust and the men sneezed into laughter.” That’s the kind of sentence that makes Magic Markers the biggest-selling item in undergraduate bookstores—it saves writing “How true!” in the margins.

  Rabbit, Run is about a sensitive, tormented basketball star who runs away from his wife—a belles-lettres version of Hoosiers with an undescended testicle. Rabbit is searching for “something that wants him to find it.” He spends a lot of time wandering around trying to decide what it is he’s searching for. To discover the object of Rabbit’s quest, I consulted one of those slim lit. crit. monographs that English professors like to write. This is what the author, Rachael Burchard, said:

  The author seems to be telling us that “the search is the thing,” that instinct or intuition demands that we search. Or perhaps he is saying that anyone, whether he be intellectual or faithful or immoral and simple can sense the reality of God. Perhaps he is saying that God tries to reach us.

  Florence
/>   Dear Florence:

  Keep them searches and seizures coming.

  Mel

  Dear Mel:

  I gave up on Rabbit and started on The Centaur. It opens with a high school teacher named George Caldwell being shot in the ankle with an arrow in the middle of a lecture on the solar system. As he leaves the classroom in search of first aid, he turns into Chiron the Centaur.

  The novel is an allegory based on ancient Greek mythology—except when it isn’t.

  Turning back into a man, Caldwell goes to Hummel’s Auto Body Shop to get his ankle treated.

  You heard me: He goes to a mechanic to get the arrow removed from his ankle. Why? Because he has trusted mechanics ever since one told him his car was a heap. He received the news with joy, saying, “You’ve told me what you think is the truth and that’s the greatest favor one man can do for another.”

  I consulted the lit. crit. monograph again. Here’s what author Burchard wrote:

  The Centaur appears to be a part of Updike’s search for new dimensions in religion which will satisfy the needs of the neoteric individual. As in much of the poetry and in Rabbit, Run, it stresses the confusion of our time, especially for the dedicated seeker after Truth.

  So, being a dedicated seeker after Truth, Caldwell gets Honest Hummel to yank the arrow. Afterwards he returns to school. As he passes the girls’ gym he sees Hummel’s wife, Vera, who teaches phys. ed., standing naked in the dressing room, “her amber pudenda whitened by drops of dew.”

  Says she: “Why should my brother Chiron stand gaping like a satyr? The gods are not strange to him.” The allegory is on again; Caldwell has turned back into a centaur and Vera has become Venus. She continues: “Father Kronos, in the shape of a horse, sired you upon Philyra in the fullness of his health; whereas at my begetting he tossed the severed genitals of Uranus like garbage into the foam.”