Herself

by Hortense Calisher

  American criticism in any case spent scant time on queerishness, maybe because, according to the style of its segregations (and of the review journals) Catholics tended to write on Catholics, women on women, etc.—and it mightn’t have looked right. The college critics and litry journals would treat even a great queer like Gide more for the style of the revelation than for the revelation—recording perhaps how the tradition of Si le grain ne meurt opens its heart in the manner of Rousseau—but letting the matter go. The “other” side of Gide (say that side of The Counterfeiters, or The Immoralist, Lafcadio, et al.) which had nothing to do with litry methodology, had to wait for the younger crowd—and for the paperback. (As much queer writing has.)

  As for pornography and perhaps the Marquis de Sade—he became a philosophe, entirely. And therefore a man for the avant-garde-academic curriculum. In the sixties, pornography-not-per-se would be taken up by just that university crowd, in their forties say, post-social-conscious and even post-Freudian—for whom sex was now the respectability. (College departments and newspaper staffs will recognize some of them, as the men who got drunk once or twice a year with Mailer on the symposium or party circuit, and afterwards wrote articles saying “Norman said to me—”) And as with all such respectabilities, the subject matter was not merely newly decent, but new—to the respectable. They had discovered it.

  For such as these, who had perhaps read Frank Harris in their youth rather than Mlle de Maupin, and whose idea of homosexual critique is still Fiedler’s little divertimento with Huck Finn, pornography is still by and large “square.” A beast with two backs—but the pudenda don’t match. And queers are taken care of more or less manly-classic style, in terms of the old question turned answer: “What they do.” In the “male” novels of the era, any lucky Pierre still gets where he gets by accident. Either by way of adolescence, or merely in the happy melée of the accident school of writing, whose later name, black comedy, was actually a loose term for a number of old genres. (Sometimes nothing but a professor poking the eighteenth-century ash-heaps for some old Humphrey Clinkers. And sometimes pornography, looking under the bed for art. Which it found there, sitting in its own middle-aged white skin, reading Lolita. In the early Paris edition.)

  But meanwhile the younger people, and the old Dostoevski-lovers, and the good Bronx social workers and the beautiful boys flocked East to find out what they were—and all the other elements which make up off-Broadway theater audiences—had long since been reading or seeing Genet. Once more, in that long inheritance which, only yesterday it seemed had brought Sartre to the intellectual Jews and Celine to Kerouac, American literature was being seeded from abroad—and this time the dramatists were the most accessible.

  The picture is still near enough to see how mixed it was. Certainly the idea of politics blending with sex, as in The Balcony—of sexual force and allegory used to flay the moral vision, the moral-political vision—was new for Americans. And exciting intellectually—or exciting in those parts they had always taken to be intellectual. Genet as thief and anti-hero was nothing new; even the avant-garde’s anathema, The New Yorker, had had Cheever’s story of suburbia gone thief. What completed Genet’s respectability here was The Blacks, which those Americans who saw it took to their hearts as the post-war Germans had taken The Diary of Anne Frank.

  Guilt, in no matter what sexual expression, was the point—and certainly not sexual guilt per se, by now old hat in any form. Tangentially, black-white and queer-square antitheses were to shift into all sorts of new alignments and crossings-over, from new political alliances, to newly chic mixed couples: white girls with black men, bright white queers with passive black partners, or notably among Southerners, the reverse. James Baldwin, whose first novel Giovanni’s Room had been cast in the old Gide pattern of sex severely (and romantically) apart from other life elements, indeed a “white” novel in every way, was to shift drastically in his second, mixing up sex, Whitmanesque brotherhood brought to bed, violence-vengeance, and all the old asseverations of extra “Negro vitality” (sexuality) got from the whites—in all of which the Esquire magazine squares now joined in. Sex was now how you expressed your other guilts.

  Meanwhile: Godot—gone from Broadway into the universities (where I saw it in Iowa, in 1958), followed by the other Beckett plays, and to a smaller audience, the novels. … And altogether—in spite of Irish quirkery and French logic—an asexual art, surely an art whose device and delight was to show how nearly it and man could be, or were, solipsist. Absolute personality, on a pin in a void, watched its own neutral despairs, with a faintly giggly cosmic hope. Maybe even theater art then, much less the novel, didn’t have to be sexual? Or human beings didn’t, or not as much as had been thought—what was this hollowly taped cosmological echo-of-a-breath saying in its writer-translator English?

  And don’t forget the English—not that we’ve been allowed to. Any change in the class-structure tosses up art with it—witness us Americans ourselves, at least in our beginnings. That change took the English once more by the throat—in the spoken word. And from theater-stall to the lumpkins of country or town, the sexual attitude is much the same. What Pinter is saying about sex is as obscure as the rest of him, except for one surety; he’s not saying it separately, that is, apart from the rest of what bothers the human hegemony—and not differently for women and men. His whole metaphor is to realign the old emotional proportions of things. In that metaphor, individualized sex seems to be going out. Which also seemed to be much the tone of whatever else was being said there in the kitsch of that time, from the Sassoon haircuts of the girls to the Carnaby Street modsters, and even the Beatles’ trail of bobby-soxers, whose yowl came straight from still undifferentiated sex, a mass sex in which the other girls around one are part of it too. The line between this and the old upper-class sexuality—hockey-girls and Oxford dramatic societies—is not far.

  Returning to the theater proper—it’s noticeable that Frank Marcus’ Sister George, technically a quite ordinary comedy in the old style, at times almost music-hall (and not at all that serious-play-which-fell-short-of-itself which, because of its sexual material, Walter Kerr in solemnly called it) was remarkable not only for the frank tongue of its Lesbians, but for its flat-tongued pursuit of people as people, in a notable lack of tea-and-sympathy guilt wringing its hands in the wings over the pity or evil of it all. Charles Dyer’s The Staircase, of perhaps more serious intent, or less televisionery method, did much the same for a pair of queers. Osborne’s A Patriot For Me, did go at it in the old grand style, tracing a Prussian Officer’s slow self-revelation of homo sexuality—here that word suited—while the audience went raving bored with unsurprise, but then topping it with a drag-ball scene, extremely funny—and entirely in the “square” mode. (As over here, Warhol’s Chelsea Girls, a window-dresser’s idea of a documentary, was entirely not.) In all the English muddle, it was idly funny that one could see Sister George in the West End, but for the old-fashioned Patriot had to join a club—it’s guilt that’s private in the end, according to Lord Chamberlains.

  So, as might be expected of the English, they have finally been the first to redefine the third sex’s legal rights in their nation, openly linking sex and law, and politics—precisely as they had for women, once. The key to English emotion is perhaps not sexuality anyway, but sympathy. Character in the end takes preference over difference. In their literature, presently their drama, the language itself, backed by an hereditary eighteenth-century dryness and Congrevian sharpness, leads them into attitudes which show once again how European they are—while we are still mired in counter-Victorian.

  And so—around the rim of the circle, the new suffragettes arrive. If irreverent or anti-social sex is now a vehicle for protests other than the sexual—who better can express to the extreme their horror of all a society’s norms than those who will have nothing to do with it? They don’t have to join that bandwagon; they are already there. (For among the repudiations of society which are possible to
humans, surely a refusal to have its children, therefore its future, must be a basic one.)

  Meanwhile, since nothing in art or life stands still, the stance of homosexual repudiation has shifted also, away from the old-fashioned guilt and alienation, and toward social protest, their own stylized version of it—often still peculiarly square. Like the women in this country, homosexual men aren’t allowed to go to war. But in the arts, war in the samurai sense is no longer possible (fashionable) as a direct and serious subject: the basically jingoistic “manliness” of the huntin’ and fishin’ set is artistically dead, at least for a while. (Even the commercial historical novelists don’t celebrate the nation any more, instead bending their nostalgias toward how it went wrong, and may yet go right of course, or else deserting us altogether for the far Peloponnese.) More important, the nation itself has the horrors less over sex-in-any-form than over drugs—for which sex is subordinate—and over the newest bogey, violence-at-home. Sex isn’t everything anymore.

  Those homosexuals, and those artists, for whom it still is, may soon find themselves ranged with the middle class. In the most recent bohemias, where once the “beats” were an active protest still mainly artistic, the later hippies were a passive one, focused on a mandala-blur of protest, the weakest ray of which was sexual. Either has produced artists only in terms of those who, like Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, cling to some above-the-drug-reality—to berate or to engage. If Ginsberg already seems establishment to the rank-and-file of the young bohemia or the merely young, it is not only because of age and a verse-line like Walt Whitman’s; it is because he still has a reality to berate—“ours.” And if Burroughs doesn’t yet seem derrière-garde to them, it is because, under the drugs and the inverted sexuality, and most profoundly, under the spiky shape of his art, he hides from them—not from himself—that he too is engaged with it. Past forty, these two, past any number of things; still, in their own fashion, Cynara baby—they too celebrate life.

  All influences of course, influence each other. Looking superficially backward over the novels of the ’40s and on, for examples of homosexuality as subject, we turn up Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar, an elegant Cook’s tour of the queer world drawing-room style, as I remember it, and Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms, a coming of age and to an identity, one which however counts for less in the book, and less for us, than the plangent imagery and inimitably freakish youthful art. On to The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, and alas, to ridicule. No matter who is sexually envying what, the menopause, when circumlocuted in the hushed, veiled tone of Bulwer, Lytton on the mysterious East—is funny. This novel’s elevated tone toward it reminds me of a host whom I once heard excuse his wife to her arriving guests because “It’s her time of the moon.” Equally, “Mrs.” Stone’s excitement, when she sees the Italian boy pee against the wall, is not really female-sexual as intended, but has all sorts of swelling montages to the left of it. We laugh at any art that risks intensity, if it is imprecise. Here, “society” is ruthlessly seconded by our own knowledge of human nature.

  A good deal of queer literature has this kind of cross-wiring intentionally—becoming a kind of roman-à-clef of the emotions inverted, from which the reader, potentially queer or in the know, is to get his titillation. Unintentionally, queer writing for queers has the same effect that any writing has when it is intended for one sex, the nearest analogy being the “kitchenmaid” novels of Queen Victoria’s day—any sex can be “Victorian.”

  John Rechy’s sentimentality is borrowed from elsewhere. The tone is tender expose, plus special pleading—oh the agony that is here, sister! There is an attempt to make the drag world a microcosm for us all—which should be possible. (As, in a way, Genet’s Madonna of the Flowers speaks for cunts.) But Rechy the writer adopts the contortions of his own exhibitionists. What it reminds most of is Nelson Algren—a sentimentality which is butch. Even so, we are now approaching the world of social protest for everybody—done on queer terms. In the work of Purdy, it is reached. (In Cold Blood, aside from its marked resemblance to The Fifty-Minute Hour and similar documentary, may suggest itself as deriving from homosexual sub-sympathy with its protagonists, but surely in its method, from social-workery through the waving Kansas wheat of its lyrical breezes, it is managed on cannily square terms.)

  Purdy’s work has always veered interestingly, beginning, in the shorter stories of Color of Darkness, with those gothic depths of childhood where so many good writers start, but in the longer 63 Dream Palace giving us another kind of lushly invertebrate, Frenchified fancy, as do Alfred Chester’s early tales. Comparing Purdy’s Malcolm with Chester’s earlier novel Jamie is My Heart’s Desire, perhaps that same literary derivation comes out in the kind of prettification that overtakes the one, and the uglification that somewhat conventionalizes the other—for where Purdy by now is playfully shocking, in that fancy undersense of the word which Schiaparelli once gave to “shocking” pink, Chester chooses grotesquerie in the relentlessly gris style of Genet; always consciously underground, a world of subways.

  In Purdy, one may see some Firbankery too. Malcolm’s allegory is, however, middle class. And with him, Purdy begins his own succession of those painfully golden male innocents, half Pamela and half Jesus-boy, who are so often the symbolically pure heroines of the most sophisticated homosexual. Against these, his novel The Nephew is the real shocker; its writer hasn’t forgotten that he is from Southern Illinois, and now any literary tradition invoked comes twining from the haunted porches of the Middlewest, from Wescott’s The Grandmothers, Ruth Suckow, Sherwood Anderson. Not yet from Dreiser, that determined face already turned to the urban and to the casebook sociological—a great digression which Purdy, like so many others, will finally join.

  When a writer returns to his origin, or stays there, he is never a lone example; rather, he is alone with literature. But after The Nephew, most of Purdy’s work has the emigré tenseness of the early denizens of Greenwich Village—of those who had had to come to urbs, urbis, but never grew too sophisticated to forget what they had left.

  The eastward-to-Europe drive of writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald was met by some ethnic surprises on the eastern shore of their own country, as “American” literature finally lost its New England character and became the literature of New York. Antiposed by a powerful wave from the South.

  In this pinch, the literature of the Middlewest began to be identified with “farm” literature, with “growth of the soil” stereotypes like Hamsun and early August Derleth—actually a stage which it had long since passed through. (As, in the ’60s, the work of Lois Hudson, Curtis Harnack, William Gass, would show.) It remained chic enough to come from the Middlewest—as dozens of well-known journalists were doing—but impossible to write about it. In a curious about-face—and against all the industrial socio-economic facts, as well as the hordes of flat-tongued middlewesterners in all the Departments of English in the colleges—the center of the country as literary subject matter sank either under the smalltown stereotype Sinclair Lewis had made of it, or under the label “regional.”

  The South of course had never allowed itself to become merely that; any writer who came from there spoke from a proven civil agony against which a merely sexual revolution would have looked small. And in prose, after Faulkner, its outstanding writers were women—Porter, Welty, O’Connor—who again had other things to win. In all this, we curiously tend to forget, because New York is the center of literary activity, that the literature of “the city” can be as regional as anything which comes from the farm. As practiced in some quarterly reviews, it was to be so.

  The Jews of course were to be our next mainline local-colorists—though never named so. (Or not perhaps after the era of Samuel Ornitz, A. Singer, and Israel Zangwill.) In the quarterlies of the ’40s and ’50s, the Jewish urban childhood became “the farm”; the gutter-ghetto and peddler-pavement became the new “soil.” So tenacious was the image of “the city” as taken to be that of all l
iterature—and so largely urban both the Jew and his reader each to all intents a “New York Jew,” wherever he came from—that they too escaped the label “parochial.” Also, like the Irishman and the Southerner, the Jew can be broadly funny—as those writer-heirs of Transcendentalism, or of more generally white-American-Protestant sociologies, so often could not—and the country-at-large had long loved his vaudeville. Finally, under Hitler, the Jew became our Everyman—as the black is becoming now.

  Actually, of course, there were to be hierarchies among Jews-as-writers, as among Jews anywhere. For which read—difference. Aside from I. B. Singer—a beautiful throwback to a classic distance preserved, and Bernard Malamud, whose work, heir in part to a less rabbinical side of the folklore, is also a complex of American “academic” strains—most of the others are heirs to Bellow, linguistically the most gifted, who also from the first had the prescience to write with European politico-philosophical scope—not as a Jewish writer, but as a writer who is a Jew. Wryly verbal, this group’s contribution to the many genres of black humor was to be mostly via language and metaphor (as a vaudevillian’s is), using that poetic argot which is as much Russian, Polish and even post-First World War German as it is Jewish—the bitter, broadly peasant argot of European Untermensch anywhere. Plus all those changes that arise when the practitioner is both American and on the way to being economically comfortable.