Herself

by Hortense Calisher

  Life-in-the-raw, as these literati saw it, could not be meditative too. (In itself, what a litry conception!) The voluminous, ramshackle world-of-comment of the Russian nineteenth-century novel, was momentarily over. Subtly too the reader was downgraded, or divided, into those who read for art’s sake, and those who read for critique divorced as much as possible from an art to which it was very possibly superior—since it made the moral judgments. The literary artist, himself in flight from either church-pamphleteering or happy-ending art, found himself ruled out from direct statement. (As well as somehow politically committed to popularist readers—when a “review” intellectual asked me “Who do you write for?”, my answer, that I visualized a reader sentient and intelligent enough for anything—was taken to be arrogance.) Concurrently, pure prose artists, “imaginative” ones, did not “write” criticism (which high as it was on the litry value-scale, was too low for them), meaning they couldn’t expect to have all the art and the power too, or to be on both sides of the fence—as James and Flaubert, Tolstoi and Turgenev had been. As writers, somewhere in their mutterings, always are.

  All this was to change in a world not only troubled, but media-aware, and rawly or not—meditative. With science morally discredited, God in trouble too, the artists were looked up to by a materialistic world as interpreters from the one remaining medium which had no axe to grind. (Whether it did so or not.) And some writers of course had never abjured statement. Choice of subject is indeed a form of statement. On literature. Pale Fire moreover took in all the antic semantic of some critique, made shifts between poetry and prose (Nigel Dennis, in Cards of Identity had already included a poetry sequence very similarly), and made it plain that any of its critique of literature belonged there, being in its turn a critique of life. Pure critics would praise it, not yet seeing what prerogatives had been snatched from them—and some writers would not see what rights had been returned to them.

  Lolita, wherein sex, however lepidopterously inspired, could be seen as a put-on directed at a sicklily material American gas-station civilisation, was a bonus for everybody. It was hilarious, and done in that nihil, non-person style of character, that rolling-stone rhythm of action, which was being called black comedy—nobody’s yet defined white. Above all, it was sex with intellect—which the quarterly-review porns hadn’t been able to make hilarious. Only by the way, it was a lovely work of art. In which the statement—in spite of all the scathing minutiae—was not strictly direct, the ambiguities pointing like a porcupine’s quills. Heterosex—America’s youthful version of it and denial of perversion in that, was somewhere being laughed at—or if sex with a barely nubile girl was perversion (Islam would not say so) then how natural! Alignments were being changed or crossed, both in the “subject” and the use of it. Sex was once more being used as a critique of life, both from within the core of the work and peripherally, at a point where the work of art itself was also the critical commentary (often of itself). Sex was the metaphor and the moral weapon—but the moral judgments made were never about the sex itself.

  Those were as absent as in any scientific account of the stages of the butterfly.

  Meanwhile, coming up again from the left: Sex Three.

  There is no purely homosexual literature—once it becomes literature. Any more than a novel of note is ever “about” something, on one subject, or in any sense an investigative circling of the fields of fact. (In the way that a helpful reviewer tabbed Cozzens’s Guard of Honor as “the best novel about the Air Force.”) Values, the minute spoken of, derive from others—femaleness is never paid so much literal definition as at a drag ball. And the more a work of art spreads and runs into itself, like a sphere or a double helix or a polyfaceted net, the better it is. But one may see sexual focus, or proclivity, or wavering. Or the mirror-writing which would sink all sex in a vague sea of love or hate. We can never avoid seeing the selfness of a writer—what he thinks it is, and what he uses it for. Or what he sees as the objects of his hate, and uses it against. Sex in D. H. Lawrence is a hatred against, once one sees it outside the rosy penumbra of what it is for. It has sublimated—i.e., made the turn upward or outward from self-hate—to a propounded social usefulness. Just so, the Gidean self-hatred double-turns at the world which denies it, (as heterosexual guilt did after Freud). We begin to have books in which the dominant meetings and partings of people flow toward the homosexual ideal as clearly as old-fashioned love stories once flowed toward marriage. Where the old Yin and Yang sexual oppositions are as clearly no longer dominant—or are repellent or ridiculous. (Or old hat—and non-chic.) Or where the queer is no longer a member of a thieves’ carnival, or an underworld. Or where, like everybody else nowadays, he becomes middle class, with as much right to make social criticism as anybody, and like all minorities, with a sharp tongue and eye for it.

  In the Burroughs’ world of Nova Express, the sex that is natural is homosex, but the battles between good and bad, paranoid-real and sane-real, still take place in a romantic no-man’s-land of the spirit, countered by terrible physical honesties, always presided over by the cloud-cuckoo metaphor of the drug. The struggle is a spiritual one, in language which is mystical, or even built upon a theology which is traceable from book to book, and the end impression is of a struggle unabashedly toward some ideal which is “loved.” Sex falls back, secondary, before the daemon of the drug. Lyrism, Byronic grandiosities, stagey asides, all have a place in this grim arena—and a humor like the chuckle of a prompter from below. It is proper. This is the cops-and-robbers posturing of the soul. Whose very existence admitted, whose Utopia promised, dignifies all. Society in recognizable terms scarcely enters.

  Purdy’s world and its malevolencies are altogether more concrete. They are staged in the mess men and women have made of the social world, by a writer who at first seems tough-minded in all directions. The manner is a mixture: Congreve without epigram, a Restoration esprit with a fondness for typifying, mock-naming, and high-jinks in high places, and a rodomontade which stalks (goblets!), but also has a nose for the absurdities of the lower middle, and, a special sarcastical talent for describing the city strata as seen through the shrewd, traveled eyes of once-beglamored Southern Illinois.

  The game here is not grandeur, but the world coccu in which nobody’s redemption is urged. Specifically the “American” world—but as target of an objectivity which could go anywhere. Clearly the author’s objectivity is not the usual “ours,” but it is well defined. Is he really crying a pox on all our houses, his aim to cleanse the world of its constitutional horrors and cants? Or is his satire sprung from something far more parochial—the distaste of men who bug, for men and women who breed? Who’s getting coccu here? And how?

  Certainly the sexual symbology “we” are used to has changed, and the social structure with it. Here are no families based even in the beginning on the breeding purpose; we are in some outland of Babitry, of which the people here are the detritus. Couples are composed not of the two “straight” sexes which have classically set themselves up as the center of things, but of all the oddments of the comedie humaine: men live with grandmothers who are rich, and bring their men home to mother; wives are elderly with income, with itinerant spouses from the heartland and not hip yet; or are Griseldas too farcically enslaved to give their husbands the status of sadist or pimp. Men living with wives slide off expectedly toward other men, as toward a norm. Cabot Wright sets about raping five hundred women, in a gagstyle romp aimed at American heterosex—a one-man gang-bang in reverse.

  Sadism is humorous, but some of its sallies—like Maureen’s bloody abortion, effected commedia dell’arte style by the black C. Clark Peebles, are more innately humorous than others—more so than say, the infinitely extended torture of the captain by the sergeant, which may or may not be a burlicue of James Jones. A different flavor hangs over the two; Maureen’s scene is the funniness of the birth-process deranged; the long incident between the men has the emotional timbre peculiar to torture, and to that
old Kafka-Gide staple, the gratuitous act. The sergeant, throughout all, is true to his back-home love, Amos. Amos is a virgin, a sleepwalker, a Greek and Latin scholar whose simplicity, near birdbrain, has an undeniable something; people wash his feet—he is a catalyst. Is he Jesus, or merely that pure golden boy, our heroine? Or “any man’s son,” the ideational fantasy of all male marriages which will not settle for poodles? Women are a bad show in general, but like Maureen (a knockout portrait of a knocked-up type) can be likeable if they belong to the bad show of things—and if they are the butt and admit it.

  But what is most arresting is the continuously off-key sexuality. Off-key, not merely in relation to the dominant symbols in the “major” sexuality of the world, but to any. The body processes all seem to run together: Mrs. Masterson’s coronary, Maureen’s abortion, Cabot Wright’s hot flushes, all bear a less particularised sense of these than they do of some intimacy they share with each other; they are what the body does when it has no fixed image of its parts, or when it will not allow its parts to have separated ones; blood comes from any aperture, and every part of the body is one; even the sadism is not violence but violent effort—a straining to be. Clearly we are participating in what is beyond customary sexuality of any kind, or maybe prior to it. And when the fucking stops (if it has been that) certainly nowhere does it much matter who fucks who. (Or marries who, or lives with who—socially we are beyond that.) Here is no mere homosexual code-writing, no Roman Spring in which a middle-aged woman may really be a menopausal man. The scrimmage is everywhere. And it is not of the appetite.

  In Albee’s Tiny Alice there is a moment when an image fails of the horror it asks, because it does not touch the predominate response: When the Cardinal reminds the Lawyer that his school nickname was Hyena, “Did we not discover about the hyena … that failing all other food it would dine on offal … and that it devours the wounded and the dead. We found that the most shocking: the dead. But we were young. And what horrified us most … was that to devour its dead, scavenged prey, it would often chew into it THROUGH THE ANUS???” (after which the script reads: Both silent, breathing a little hard). Lawyer (finally; softly: “Bastard.”)

  The capital letters are not mine. They would not be “ours” in general, I think. In the raw world of the “tochus,” the “bum,” the “backside,” the “asshole,” the anus is a somewhat mock-erogenous zone (being a less used one) not as all-important to straight sex as it is to buggery. Since the anus is for offal, the hyena’s aim, to “us,” might seem more accurate than not. Whatever, if horror was intended, it failed; muff horror and you may get laughter, as occurred the night I saw the play. Whatever the Cardinal’s insinuation, it belonged like the play’s wisecracks, to a world of the “in”; straights in the audience of theater or books may well understand homosexual symbol while quite unable to honor it with emotion. (If that hyena had gone THROUGH THE COCK or THROUGH THE VAGINA, it might have been different—but that would be in another country, another play.) In A Delicate Balance, when Agnes accuses her husband: “We could have had another son: we could have tried. But no … those months—or was it a year—? … I think it was a year, when you spilled yourself on my belly, sir?”—the audience does shock, not only at what is not usually said in the middle-class theater, but somehow also at the over-elaborate phrasing, something in it not female to male. As in Agnes’s rejection of her daughter’s confidences, wondering if she herself would be better off as a man: “I shall try to hear you out, but if I feel myself changing in the middle of your … rant, you will have to forgive my male prerogative, if I become uncomfortable, look at my watch or jiggle the change in my pocket …”—where the shock is both at the terms of such a refusal, between mother and daughter—and at a transliteration of the sexes which seems not to lie in the “transferred heads” (and tails) of human imaginative desire, but to be author-enforced, according to some code he is following.

  Shock is valuable in the theater, and in literature—but scale is important to it, subjectivity changes it and repetition dulls it—if it cannot attain to poetry. Much present-day drama moves in terms of the simple actions under or against the accepted symbols of things, or as in Pinter, in showing the actual simplicities of the symbols by which people move. Albee’s strength comes, a lot of it, from these fresh alignments, coolly shocking to us not because they are sexual, but because they are off-base.

  And they are not of the appetite. Rather, they are the comedy-of-error tricks, or incomplete tragedies of those who, for all their apertures, have no outlet in generation. Yet are not “impotent.”

  As heirs of Freud, we are used to seeing sexual impotence as a theme of life, in our friends, our books and in ourselves, in those husbands and lovers, who are the heroes second-class of a Laurentianism in reverse, in those spinsters whose bed is ice. And we are familiar with the “larger” litry themes that maybe come of it, anything from what “the rat-race” does ta ya, to the Identity Hunts of those who “cannot love.” (Barren women are rather duller, dramaturgically speaking. Except in those biblical milieus where primogeniture is still of the first importance; we tend to see them as victims of the cell rather than the fates, who merely need to go to a good gynecologist.) In a society under protest homosexuals need not feel as alienated as once. They can refuse to have the “children” of its’ ideas. Leaving the sexual refusal with its attendant Freudian dramas, far behind. All those little boys who can’t get born out of the spilled seed of the fathers, or who are revealed never to have existed except in the minds of their mothers, all those innocents dying on the milk-train of other peoples’ charity, are psychodramas going over the old personal revelations—with here and there a hint of the world’s disjointedness. In recent Purdy, it’s a clean sweep into the non-sex of satire, or the “a pox on all of it” of social protest—a somersault over everything, into an impersonality that shock-deadens, fizzes out, sniggering all the way, into down-at-heel hatreds, crudely Gothic humors, rudely interrupted by prissy echoes of the once liveable world. Sex as hostility, as humoresque, is here only the beginning of it. It would be futile to ask of the people in these books that they be more than cardboard, or their blood more than the plasma of the world’s generally laughable sores. Or to ask the style of expression—“amid the industrial world”—that it not waver as “fitfully” as the jewel on the finger of its millionaire. Waver it does; this pen feels less for the word than for the situation, and has no other focus for which it so much cares; it will hunt the ridiculous anywhere. (With, in Malcolm; perhaps the last gasp of a gravely Americanized Firbankery, fallen short of those silver flashes from the adorable to the ineffable, but with the same mordant method: giggle-pastiche.) The seriousness is in the intelligence—and feeling is anthropophagous. (Compare it with Bellow, in which intellect and feeling bleed together.)

  Is this “white” comedy? One reels out of these books with the inner ear disturbed—not sure what has been intentional. With a sense that some of the failure may be in ourselves. We are still new to the non-directed. We would prefer though to be able to trust this intelligence more not to demean itself as it sometimes does—either by loving its personae too much, or too often the same ones. The barrenness of the world, as theme, is dignity enough. When a little special sex creeps in, or its propaganda, the satire turns silly. For the modest proposal of this satire at its grim-slim base is that all of us are eatable, from the anus if need be. When that intent falters, then what comes—in goblet or glass—is farce curdled by serious intentions. Non-ridiculousness won’t do, in this exhausted air. Where it fails is when it inadvertently reminds us that all is not barren, and all is not ridiculous.

  So, as in the old movie, we have circled la ronde—except that one doesn’t exit the sideshows of art merely like any good pair taking childie away from the freaks of Eighth Avenue, back to the redempted norm of Queens. The literary thicket is thank God the same; no girl scout exits as entered, only an hour older, with everybody found. Or with a fistful of conclusions for
the next troupe’s safe conduct.

  Do we live in an age of artistic license? I think so. I hope so. I find it exhilarating. One has only to look at the movies, the films, the ceenaymah—which are always so helpfully the déjà vu of the arts. Okay—of all the other arts. Literary people resent the lens because it is always so much their shadow, always dressing up in their last year’s thoughts and saying “Look what I found!” We should be happier to see change so neatly documented. And at such a pace. Drag documentaries, pussy galore—and they only discovered heterosexuality last year!

  At the moment, it may be that the really lively use of sex-as-theme and sex-as-comment is on the stage side of literature. Where an Indira Gandhi’s Daring Device—whose variously whirling copulations included a Marie Montez in drag, a satyriac with a yardlong penis and a bedstyle choral ballet—made sufficiently rousing comment on India’s food-birthrate lockstep to draw protest from that government. Where the “chicken-in-the-basket” routine in John Guare’s spoof on the American commuter, Muzeeka, could draw praise from the New Yorker—if only in paraphrase. And where, in Futz, a piglet-incest tale very reminiscent of an old one of Coppard’s, the La Mama troupe demonstrated, as Stanislavsky often had, that “method” in itself might be a kind of literature.