by John Waters
I’d buy you another drink, but didn’t somebody just yell “Last call!”?
B O O K W O R M
I’ve jitterbugged with Richard Serra, eaten Thanksgiving dinner with Lana Turner, had tea with Princess Yasmin Aga Khan, gone out drinking with Clint Eastwood, and spent several New Year’s Eve parties in Valentino’s chalet in Gstaad, but what I like best is staying home and reading. Being rich is not about how much money you have or how many homes you own; it’s the freedom to buy any book you want without looking at the price and wondering if you can afford it. Of course, you have to read the books, too. Nothing is more impotent than an unread library.
I have, as of the day of this writing, 8,425 books, all cataloged but no longer in complete order on my shelves. Each week I read Publishers Weekly not so much for the business news but to see what books are coming out and when I can buy them. Like all avid readers, I sob about the death of my favorite bookshops in each city I visit, but I’m secretly thrilled at how easy and cheap it is to order from Amazon.com. But couldn’t they at least reward us with frequent reading points like the airlines? I’m always amazed at friends who say they try to read at night in bed but always end up falling asleep. I have the opposite problem. If a book is good I can’t go to sleep, and stay up way past my bedtime, hooked on the writing. Is anything better than waking up after a late-night read and diving right back into the plot before you even get out of bed to brush your teeth?
You should never just read for “enjoyment.” Read to make yourself smarter! Less judgmental. More apt to understand your friends’ insane behavior, or better yet, your own. Pick “hard books.” Ones you have to concentrate on while reading. And for God’s sake, don’t let me ever hear you say, “I can’t read fiction. I only have time for the truth.” Fiction is the truth, fool! Ever hear of “literature”? That means fiction, too, stupid.
Okay, everybody likes to hear about a good book. Oprah has made book lists a middle-class phenomenon. So what about the rest of us? The outcasts who have no desire to assimilate and love to read about the “little horror stories in other people’s lives,” as Mary Vivian Pearce said in Female Trouble. What should we read? Not to escape but to dwell on all the delicious insanity we are still learning to embrace? Well, I’ve got a list for you, and believe me, it was hard to narrow down. From thousands and thousands and thousands of twisted volumes, here goes—John Waters’s Five Books You Should Read to Live a Happy Life If Something Is Basically the Matter with You.
And yes, it’s all fiction. Maybe there is no better novel in the world than Denton Welch’s In Youth Is Pleasure. Just holding it in my hands, so precious, so beyond gay, so deliciously subversive, is enough to make illiteracy a worse social crime than hunger. Published in the U.K. in 1945, ten years after the terrible accident in which the author, riding his bicycle, was hit by a car and permanently injured, this amazing (and thinly disguised) autobiographical novel is the graceful and astonishingly erotic tale of Orville Pym, a creative child who has lost his mother to some mysterious disease and “has not yet learned to bear the strain of feeling unsafe with another person.” Hating “other people” who imagined “that they understood his mind because he was a boy,” our elegant but damaged little hero, “longing for escape, freedom, loneliness and adventure,” wanders around the grounds of a hotel where he has been taken by his father to vacation with his older brothers.
Have the secret yearnings of childhood sexuality and the wild excitement of the first stirrings of perversity ever been so eloquently described as in this novel? When Orville discovers an old book on physical culture and begins frantically working out to improve his body, he worries that he isn’t sweating enough. Determined, he locks himself in the small bottom drawer of a dressing chest and, immediately “overcome with the horror of being a prisoner,” innocently fantasizes that he is in a dungeon he remembers from one of his aunt’s mid-Victorian novels. Orville instinctively welcomes the guilt of these thrilling, vaguely sexual yearnings, but he is just a child—how can he yet understand the friendly feel of future fetishes? He knows he is not like other boys, but the wonders of deviancy far outweigh any desire to fit in with his peers.
Orville yearns to be butch. Endlessly experimenting with fashion and different looks, he finally paints the toes and heels of his white gym shoes black, hoping to appear “daring and vulgar.” While he leaves his hair “rough” and appears in his new, supposedly masculine outfit, his brother humors him by saying, “My God you look tough.” But little Orville can’t help his feminine side. He has always been obsessed with broken bits of china he collects at thrift shops (“No one ever wrote more beautifully about chipped tea services,” a writer for The New York Times would comment decades after the novel was written). When Orville felt these girly items “pressing gently against his side” as he carried them in his pocket, “it gave him a sudden and peculiar pleasure, a feeling of protection in an enemy world.”
It isn’t easy being a creative child. As happy as Orville is when he’s alone, he still feels the urge to create his own drama. When he sneaks into an abandoned ballroom at the hotel and finds himself onstage (my parents actually built me my own little stage at the top of the stairs in our first house, where I performed endless indulgent “shows” for my very tolerant Aunt Rachel whenever she visited), our little master of masochism uncovers a musical instrument enclosed in a case with a broken strap. Suddenly inspired, Orville runs to the musician’s cloakroom and locks himself in, strips off his clothes, and starts whipping himself with the strap. In his furtive imagination, he was “Henry II, doing penance, at Beckett’s tomb…a convict tied to a tree in Tasmania. A galley slave, a Christian martyr, a noble hermit alive in the desert.” This kid knew how to play. God, I wished he had lived in my neighborhood. We could have really put on a show on my little stage!
Orville knew that after his fantasy was over, “his behavior, if discovered, would be thought rather peculiar,” but he marched on bravely, looking for further stimuli. Stumbling upon a large chain in the meadow outside, he realized one end was “embedded so that it wouldn’t come way. Almost automatically, Orville knotted the extremely dirty and heavy chain around his waist and then swayed from side to side, quite carried away by some new reverie.” His little scenario continued. “Now he was chained up forever” in his mind and he “would have to drag it [the chain] backwards and forwards on the grass for the rest of his life,” “chanting a new dirge-like song.” But then reality hits. His brother catches him in full fantasy. “‘Christ! What are you doing?’ he howls in utter amazement.” “‘You’d be locked up if anyone else found you doing this sort of thing.’”
But nothing can stop Orville’s inner drama. When he invades an empty church for more elaborate fantasies, I really identified with this child! First, Orville makes out with a brass statue of a woman on a tomb, reasoning that she “hasn’t been kissed for five hundred years.” He then climbs under the altar cloths, glad to be “in complete darkness and enclosed on all sides.” “A thrill of pleasure” sweeps over our little lunatic, but that isn’t enough. “What would happen,” he wondered, if during Mass “at the vital moment, I should leap from my hiding place with an unearthly scream? The congregation would rise in panic thinking the devil had come down to earth. For a few moments I would be left to dance about madly…” Oh God, Denton Welch, you sure understand childhood rage. I still feel like doing the exact things you imagined for Orville every time I step into a church…even today!
Little Orville was a watch-queen, too. He loved to spy on the gruff and rugged schoolmaster and his two “deprived” older boy students, who were camping in the nearby woods on a much more physical vacation. When Orville sneaks back in a rainstorm and finds the schoolmaster alone, he gets caught peeping but is invited inside the hut for tea. Orville is ordered to take off his wet clothes and change into a dressing gown. The erotic tension between Orville and the schoolteacher is so thick you could cut it with a knife, but it might only be real in the c
hild’s mind. You’re never sure. When Orville admits he has been watching the deprived boys, the schoolmaster asks nonchalantly, “Why don’t you come down and help me with them sometimes?” Orville sputters, “They’d think it was queer,” but the older man shrugs and answers, “They’d think all those things if you put them into their heads. Otherwise they’d think you were a perfectly ordinary person.”
But Orville doesn’t want to be a perfectly ordinary person. He wants to be this man’s slave, and after washing up the dishes for the schoolmaster, he offers, “Will you be wanting anything else, sir?” The older man, maybe quite innocently, encourages Orville’s fantasy by replying, “You can polish my brown shoes if you like.” Little does the master realize Orville’s lust as he begins the task. “In a dazed way, Orville fetched the shoes and started to polish them. As he thrust his hand into one of them, he thought, ‘It’s always mysterious inside shoes; like a dark cave’…He placed his fingers in the little hollows—like a string of graded pearls—made by the toes. Pressing his knuckles up, he touched the over-arching leather which seemed cracked yet humid. He thought that there was a whole atmosphere and little world inside the shoe.”
But that’s just the foreplay. The schoolmaster offers to “show him some knots” and then ties Orville’s hands and hoists him up. “Let me down,” Orville cried, “you’ll wrench my arms out of their sockets.” But the schoolmaster just “poked him sharply in the ribs and slapped his behind resoundingly” before offering to trade positions. “Now it’s your turn…you can tie me up exactly as you like.” Orville eagerly accepts the challenge and when the man complains, “The cords are cutting into me,” Orville feels “great pleasure” before coming to his senses and politely announcing, “I think I ought to go now…thank you so much for a very delightful afternoon. I hope we’ll meet again.” Somehow Denton Welch has captured the undiscovered innocence of the Marquis de Sade and the ingrained perversity that only children can fathom.
“I don’t understand how to live, what to do,” Orville despairs; and who does when you’re this age? Parents should understand that their young kids are not like them and need to have the privacy to fantasize both their good and bad desires. What you may find shocking about the perverse behavior of your child may not even be remembered by your offspring later in life. But what you may pooh-pooh as their silly young fears can be more debilitating to your children than you will ever imagine. When Orville later becomes scared by an older boy, roughhousing with him on a train ride, threatening to “trim his eyelashes” (how’s that for a new kind of elegant torture?), Orville suddenly begins to scream. “The sound is piercing, like steam escaping. The people in the carriage looked at him with blank faces. And as Orville screamed he knew that he could not stop, that he had been working up to this scream all his life. Through his madness spoke these very clear thoughts, ‘Now they’ll never touch you again. You can be mad for the rest of your life, and they’ll leave you alone.’” Amen, Denton Welch, amen.
Okay, I admit Denton Welch isn’t for everybody. But Lionel Shriver’s scary psychological novel We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003) certainly is. Here’s a page-turner from the Devil’s Reading List about a child all parents pray they never have. Fifteen-year-old Kevin, three days before the legal age of accountability, has murdered seven of his high school classmates, a cafeteria worker, and a teacher, but is furious if anyone compares his crime to Columbine. “I just wanna go on the record that those two weenies were not pros. Their bombs were duds and they just shot plain old anybody. My crowd was hand-picked.” The story is told in letters between Kevin’s parents, who are no longer together. The mother, Eva, “exhausted with shame,” desperately tries to understand not only her son’s violent behavior but her own vague dislike of him. She hadn’t really wanted to get pregnant, but gave in to her husband’s demands so he could be a father. She hated giving birth and found breast-feeding unfulfilling. But did she deserve this?!
After his conviction, Eva visits Kevin in the juvenile correctional facility, but her son tells her, “Keep it up if you want a gold star. But don’t be dragging your ass back here on my account. Because I hate you.” After a moment’s hesitation, Eva replies, “I often hate you, too, Kevin,” and finally they have somewhere to start in rebuilding their relationship. Now Eva can ask questions about the victims. “Why those particular kids?” “Uh, duh,” he answers, “I didn’t like them.” When she wonders in anguish, “Do you blame me?” he snaps back, “Why should you get all the credit?” Slowly she begins to see his twisted thinking. “‘Now he doesn’t have to worry which he is—a freak or a geek, a grid or a jock or a nerd,’ she explains, ‘he’s a murderer.’” In a final attempt to understand her homicidal son, she asks why he didn’t murder her. Kevin replies with bone-chilling reasoning, “When you’re putting on a show, you don’t shoot the audience.”
Who’s to blame when your kid goes nuts? Is it a blessing to not have children? We Need to Talk About Kevin became a hit cult book for women without offspring who were finally able to admit they didn’t want to give birth. They felt complete, thank you very much, and lived in silent resentment for years at other womens’ pious, unwanted sympathy toward them for not having babies. With even gay couples having children these days, aren’t happy heterosexual women who don’t want to have kids the most ostracized of all? To me they are beautiful feminists. If you’re not sure you could love your children, please don’t have them, because they might grow up and kill us.
We Need to Talk About Kevin could bring any parent sobbing to his (or her) knees, yet somehow this book is easy to like. The plot twists keep coming and we never anticipate the new shocks until we’re gasping out loud. And what a great ending this thrilling yet oddly commercial novel has! The sudden psychological awareness between Eva and Kevin takes the private pain of family torture and reinvents their sadness into a secret partnership. Kevin and his mom now deserve each other. It’s a new kind of love story for the criminally insane, so no wonder somebody’s going to make a movie version. It better be good, too!
Sick of reading about weird children? Let’s turn to the rage in adults. I love to read about anger. A “feel bad” book always makes me feel good. And no other novel in the history of literature is more depressing than Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children. This devastating portrait of one of the most hateful, spiteful, unhappy marriages ever imagined was originally published in 1940 with little fanfare and some backhanded good reviews (“Eventually, Christina Stead will impose herself upon the literature of English-speaking countries,” Clifton Fadiman wrote in The New Yorker. “I say ‘impose herself’ because her qualities are not apt to win her an immediate, warm acceptance”). Her fellow novelist Mary McCarthy was not kind, calling the book “an hysterical tirade” filled with “fearful, discorded vindictiveness.” It’s hardly surprising that The Man Who Loved Children quickly disappeared. But when it was rereleased in 1965, the book finally found the praise it deserved: “a long neglected masterpiece” and a “big black diamond of a book.” I became a rabid fan.
Henny Pollit, our furious heroine, is trapped in a marriage to a sanctimonious bore who keeps her pregnant. Worse, he constantly lectures her on “love and goodness.” When he begins one of his pompous sermons and sees Henny is frantically scribbling something down on paper as she listens, he thinks his wife is so inspired she’s taking notes, but when he looks over her shoulder he reads, “Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.” Henny hates her husband with such venom that the reader feels like visiting the emergency room of a hospital after hearing her tirades of vitriol.
“How dare you say that! How dare you—” her husband sputters, but when Henny starts, nobody can control her bitter attacks. “You took me and you maltreated me,” she rages, “and starved me half to death because you couldn’t make a living and sponged off of my father and used his affluence, hoisting yourself up on all my aches and miseries…boasting and blowing about your own success when all the time it was m
e, my poor body that was what you took your success out of. You were breaking my bones and spirit and forcing your beastly love on me…slobbering around me and calling it love and filling me with children month after month and year after year while I hated you and detested you and screamed in your ears to get away from me.”
Let’s form a “Hate Book Club” and read the dialogue from this amazing novel out loud. Come on, you play Henny and I’ll play the husband and we’ll shout out the malignant taunts and experience together the group horror of a failed marriage. Go on, give Henny’s furor a voice! Rant aloud what she’s had to put up with: “Your everlasting talk, talk, talk, talk, talk…boring me, filling me, filling my ears with talk, jaw, jaw, till I thought the only way was to kill myself to escape you…I’m through; you can pack your bags and get out.” Okay, build now! Start bitching about his family, “your loudmouth, dung-haired sister,” shout out, “Take your whore sister with you!” like Henny did. Now I’ll play the husband and smack you. And then just like in the book, you attack me with a knife. Maybe the neighbors downstairs will hear all the commotion coming from inside our Hate Book Club and will rush up in concern to investigate. Once we get them inside, we can force them to read The Man Who Loved Children, too, and then they can imagine the terrible calm at the end of this scene, when Henny lies defeated on the floor and I, playing the husband, whisper the most maddeningly abusive dialogue of all: “The worst part of it is, Pet, that you love me still in a way; everything you do—even this!—shows me that. I know it!”
Okay, you want something happier to read? Even absurd? The author was an alcoholic and spent a lot of time in mental hospitals, but Jane Bowles’s Two Serious Ladies, Tennessee Williams’s “favorite book,” might just perk up your mood. I remember when Elloyd Hanson, the late, great co-owner of the Provincetown Bookshop, recommended this novel to me when it was rereleased in 1966. Once I read it, I felt insanely grateful to have gone beyond the door of literate lunacy into a world of complete obliviousness to emotional reality. I’ve never come back. Two Serious Ladies made a real reader out of me, and if you give it a chance, it will do the same for you.