Reading for My Life Page 7

  Gay Talese’s Thy Neighbor’s Wife

  THINKING ABOUT FICTION in On the Contrary (1961), Mary McCarthy explained:

  Making love, we are all more alike than we are when we are talking or acting. In the climax of the sexual act, moreover, we forget ourselves; that is commonly felt to be one of its recommendations. Sex annihilates identity, and the space given to sex in contemporary novels is an avowal of the absence of character. There are no “people” in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, unless possibly the husband, who is impotent.

  Mull that over for a moment while I circle around.

  Sizing up the competition in Advertisements for Myself (1959), Norman Mailer decided that J. D. Salinger was “no more than the greatest mind ever to stay in prep school.”

  What have Norman Mailer (inventing a new category of literary criticism) and Mary McCarthy (distinguishing between climax and character) to do with Gay Talese, the gifted parajournalist who managed, in the big-game book hunt, first to bag the New York Times and then the Mafia, and who now moves on to shoot at sex in America, from the skin mag to the massage parlor to the commune, new uses for old organs?

  Alas, nobody in Thy Neighbor’s Wife seems ever to have graduated from junior high, not even Mr. Talese; hair grows on every pair of palms. And while the sex is dished up by the oodle—most of it in listless groups and saddened by greed and envy and petulance and bad faith—there is no character. Instead of people, we get recipes, ingredients, tics of personality, and vehement longings—the enigmatic anus!—that are supposed to amount to a person; add sperm and beat vigorously.

  These recipes have real-life names, like Anthony Comstock of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and John Humphrey Noyes of Oneida and Barney Rosset of Grove Press and Hugh Hefner of Playboy and William Hamling of Rogue and Samuel Roth of the Roth decision and Wilhelm Reich of the orgone box, not to mention Masters and Johnson, Alex Comfort, Max Lerner, Hieronymus Bosch, booksellers, body painters, Supreme Court associate justices, centerfolds, and everybody else who helped make the sexual revolution possible. Since Mr. Talese parajournalizes so promiscuously—reaching into their minds, reading their thoughts, scratching their itches—one would expect to emerge from his book, as if from a novel, with some improved comprehension of what they stand for and a different angle on the culture that produced them. One emerges instead, as if from a mediocre movie in the middle of the afternoon, reproached by sunlight and feeling peripheral to the main business of the universe.

  Of course, Maurice Girodias and Ralph Ginzburg and Edward Mishkin and Al Goldstein and Larry Flynt aren’t exactly Lenin or Darwin or Bolivar or Daniel Boone or Captain Kangaroo. What they stand for seems no more complicated than the right to cash in on loneliness; what they have achieved is to make America safe for pubic hair; they wave a fellated flag. The First Amendment, in my opinion, protects even the toads in the erotic garden, but it doesn’t oblige us to admire them. Still, these men had mothers and, like the rest of us, they will die alone. If Mr. Talese—who wrote the advertisement comparing Larry Flynt to a Soviet dissident, which I signed with the usual misgivings—expects us to take his revolutionaries as seriously as he himself takes them, he has to put them in a social context and make them sound interesting. He doesn’t.

  I’ve met Barney Rosset; my appreciation of him is in no way improved by the news that he is descended from “a hapless Russian Jewish patriarch who made corks for champagne bottles.” I’ve met Max Lerner; I would like to know what, if anything, he thought of the Sandstone sex commune run by a part-time engineer who turned himself into a philosopher by reading the novels of Ayn Rand. I haven’t met Howard Rubin, the Chicago boy who grew up to run a massage parlor; why should I care that he favored masturbating in front of photographs of Diane Webber in an “art-camera” magazine in 1957? Nor have I met Hugh Hefner, another Chicago boy who grew up to run the magazine for which I am writing, but I wonder whether I am much the wiser for being told that—

  High Hefner remembers being an usher in a movie theater… he took long walks through the Chicago night looking up “at the luxurious towering apartment houses,” seeing “women standing at the windows,” imagining “that they were as unhappy as he was,” wanting “to know all of them intimately”… he drinks twelve bottles of Pepsi-Cola every day… he bought Barbi Benton a red cotton-candy machine… there are satin sheets on his rotating bed in Chicago… on the other hand, on the round bed in the black DC-9 jet he had to sell, unfortunately, there used to be a Tasmanian opposum fur coverlet… whereas, once upon a time at the Acapulco airport, he stomped on his own briefcase, although we aren’t sure whether he was wearing white socks that day—

  Heavy stuff. Why, Talese asks himself, have so “many Americans accused of scandalous publishing and trading” been born and raised in Chicago—like Hefner and Hamling and Rosset, like Marvin Miller of the X-rated movies and the porno paperbacks, like Ed Lange who snapped all those shots of Diane Webber that Howard Rubin used to ogle? And then why did so many end up in Los Angeles? He replies: “It was as if that strongly Irish-Catholic town was destined to produce sexually obsessed native sons, most of whom would eventually exile themselves into more liberal surroundings. Chicago was America’s Dublin.”

  Which makes Los Angeles America’s Paris, crash pad for our home-grown Jimmy Joyces and Sam Becketts? I ask: Why not, instead of Chicago, a strongly Irish-Catholic Boston in Massachusetts, or a strongly Mormon Provo in Utah, or a strongly German Cincinnati in Ohio? I also ask myself why I’m asking. Is Hustler in any way to be distinguished from Playboy or Sunshine & Health? Are the Women Against Pornography merely silly? According to Thy Neighbor’s Wife, feminism never happened. Norman O. Brown had nothing to say on the tyranny of genital organization. Freud is trivialized. Marx, had he but been mentioned, would probably be chastised, because I’m sure Marx, on taking one long look at the romper room in which we live, would have reminded us that the “fetishism of commodities” applies as much to the anatomy as it does to electrical appliances. Children, conveniently, do not exist, or were a mistake, making group sex—Tinkertoys! Erector Sets!—a hassle.

  After everybody else has split for California, where they remove their disposable clothes and go to water bed, I want to have a long talk with the autumnal Freud. Is sublimation really insupportable? If I defer my gratification, will you defer yours? Freud smokes a sad cigar. Did you know, Freud asks me, that Hefner began as a cartoonist, doing obscene parodies of the Dagwood and Blondie comic strip? Freud reminds me that in the motels of California the recipes are discussing “primary relationships.” Freud, had he taken one long look, without reading Screw magazine, would probably not have written:

  Four hundred thousand young people, several of them naked and smoking pot, sat listening to a rock concert in Woodstock, New York.

  —Talese

  Even Grace Slick knows that everybody at Woodstock was stoned, and it had nothing to do with Moses or monotheism or civilization and its discontents. On the whole, Freud would prefer reading Hunter Thompson on the sort of people who made Altamont possible, or Joan Didion on the Manson gang, or Norman Mailer on J. D. Salinger.

  Mary McCarthy, I imagine, is amused to learn that Hefner was disinclined to publish in Playboy advertisements referring to such male frailties as baldness, obesity, acne, halitosis, athlete’s foot, or hernias. She is, perhaps, alarmed to hear that Hefner’s favorite writer was F. Scott Fitzgerald and not Spinoza or St. Augustine.

  Mr. Talese is efficient in reporting the history of obscenity prosecutions in this country; Irving Wallace’s account of the same in his novel Seven Minutes is more fun. Mr. Talese has ambivalent feelings about the sex clubs, like Plato’s Retreat, that are now as endemic to a major metropolis as the municipal strike and the air quality that is unacceptable; I prefer the heightened version provided by Jerzy Kosinski in his latest novel, Passion Play. Mr. Talese is casual in his précis of D. H. Lawrence; one would do better to consult Mr. Mailer in his Prisoner of Sex. M
r. Talese covets Wilhelm Reich; he ought to read Paul Robinson’s The Freudian Left. Mr. Talese is interesting on the sexual politics of the Oneida colony in the nineteenth century; Nathaniel Hawthorne was more interesting in his novel on Brook Farm. What Mr. Talese has to say about Ayn Rand was said better by Whittaker Chambers, the famous ex-Communist who translated Bambi, in his review of Atlas Shrugged in the pages of National Review, a magazine without pubic hair.

  What has possessed Mr. Talese, whom I have met and who has never before been dull? The reporter in him flounders, except for a memorable moment when one of his recipes visits the headquarters of an insurance company in Manhattan:

  Visiting the archives of New York Life during his first week in the building, Bullaro saw in glass cases the famous signatures of entombed policyholders: General Custer, Rogers Hornsby, Franklin D. Roosevelt; and there were also on display the photographs of disasters that had been costly to the company—the Iroquois Theater fire in Chicago in 1903 in which nineteen policyholders burned to death; the San Francisco earthquake of 1904 which included in its devastation a branch office of New York Life; the supposedly indestructible Titanic which sank in 1912 with eleven policyholders aboard, and the liner Lusitania that was torpedoed in 1915 by German submarines, causing the death of eighteen passengers who had been insured by New York Life.

  Neat stuff, although—and I am reading a Xerox of Thy Neighbor’s Wife, probably unedited, because the lead time for Mr. Hefner’s magazine, in which you will never hear about the heartbreak of psoriasis, is many months earlier than books are published or children are born—a professional parajournalist would have known that the San Francisco earth actually quaked in 1906; and that the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, California, started off in 1964, not 1965 (I met FSM, too: 1964, in particular, was a very good year for revolting in the Bay Area); and that, while he might have wound up as a Los Angeles Ram, the Bernie Casey who cohabited with Max Lerner and Alex Comfort and Daniel Ellsberg at Sandstone in the nude spent most of his professional football career with the San Francisco 49ers.

  Quibbles. As Thy Neighbor’s Wife percolates at Doubleday, these questions may be moot. So, too, may any complaints about style self-destroy: The lazy misuse of “presently” and “hopefully” will disappear; the relentless, almost maniacal splitting of infinitives, four or more to the page, will be corrected; and when a husband calls his wife prior to group sex and a divorce action, most of you will not be required to read, from the husband’s point of view, these locutions:

  1. Calling Judith to suggest that they have dinner at their favorite restaurant, she refused…

  2. Still speechless on the phone, Judith asked if he could hear her.

  And nobody, anymor, can spelllt.

  But what, after his years in massage parlors and New York magazine and Hefner’s cerebellum and this month’s (November) Esquire, has Mr. Talese decided is good or bad about our sexual seething? Is the act itself, no-holds-barred, recreational and hygienic, rather like horizontal jogging, healthy and annihilating? Mr. Talese teases. Sometimes the little boy outside the window of the toy-sex shop, he seems to slaver; elsewhere, where his brain-clock is wound up and ticks, he appears to want to punish his Bullaros for their foolish risk and their membership in the John Birch Society. At a nudist colony, one finds oneself without the pockets where one is accustomed to hide one’s irony.

  Freud, who is considering a Retreat to Plato, just asked me whether, in the postindustrial whatever, we insist on service centers for a baffled eros; if, as cars have filling stations, the rest of us need emptying, on odd and even days. According to Mr. Talese, Arthur Bremer, wearing a tie and a vest, failed to achieve orgasm in a massage parlor only a month before he shot and paralyzed Governor George Wallace. I told Freud to read Thomas Mann and J. D. Salinger.

  We all flounder, left in junior high school. According to Tallulah Bankhead:

  I don’t know what I am, dahling. I’ve tried several varieties of sex. The conventional position makes me claustrophobic. And the others either give me a stiff neck or lockjaw.

  According to Irving Howe, who does not approve of the Me-First decade, romper room is

  a curious analogue to laissez-faire economics… by means of which innumerable units in conflict with one another achieve a resultant of cooperation. Is there, however, much reason to suppose that this will prove more satisfactory in the economy of moral conduct than it has in the morality of economic relations?… Against me, against my ideas, it is possible to argue, but how, according to this new dispensation, can anyone argue against my need?

  Is anybody happier? According to Mr. Talese, history and stamina and celebration and mystery, along with birth, blood, death, and beauty, not to mention earth, fire, water, work, politics, and everything else that isn’t our urgent plumbing, that refuses to swim in our libidinal, all is uncool. Have hormones, lack character, need higher education.

  Robert Stone’s A Flag for Sunrise

  HOLD ON TO your tricorn hat, or your cruciform, or your Uzi. In his third novel, after A Hall of Mirrors and Dog Soldiers, Robert Stone decides to be Dostoyevsky. Perhaps, on conceiving A Flag for Sunrise, he was more modest. He would be Graham Greene, sending various quiet, stupid Yanquis to Central America. He would be Joseph Conrad, hyperventilating near a convenient pyramid. He would be Herman Melville, reversing Billy Budd, as if Christ were a black hole or a woman’s glove. But he thrashes his way—spaced out on ideas and angry love, possessed by comparative religion, punished by God and history—to Fyodor and a blue eye that turns into a blind sun. He swaggers in evil.

  Here are the components of an exalted thriller: courage, dream, sex, compromise, betrayal, blood, ambivalence. Tecan, a serf state somewhere in the “waist” of the two American hemispheres, is on the verge of revolution; this time, the mineral-hungry oligarchs have gone too far. That revolution will be abetted by Atapa Indians so brutal in their simplicity, their “vulgarization,” as to prove Marx prescient; by an American nun, “the Queen of Swords”; by a psychopath who has deserted from the United States Coast Guard; by gunrunners who seem to have wandered in from a bad Fellini film, and by the usual Comintern riffraff, including Hungarian Stalinists and Spanish romantics.

  Rehearsal for Slaughter

  Opposing the revolution are several less-than-charming employees of the Central Intelligence Agency, a remittance man for international capital, a homicidal Tecan police lieutenant, an albino dwarf, Mafia drug dealers and chicken hawks, and many jeeps, like taxis to disaster, and many helicopters, like carrion birds. Looking on are an American journalist who disappears in the mountains, an American priest who drinks his way to heresy, and an American anthropologist who believes that “Mickey Mouse will see you dead.”

  Before the revolution, as if in dress rehearsal for the slaughter of the innocent, dogs die—and children and young women just passing through. Anybody in A Flag for Sunrise who isn’t just passing through—anachronistic hippies, European apparatchiks, “dilettantes” of apocalypse, tourists of a South that “reeks of poverty and revenge”—has been “turned around.” Intellectuals have been “turned around” to become intelligence agents; the Coast Guard deserter is “turned around” any time anyone hurts his feelings; the face of God is “turned around.” Turning around requires a “cover.”

  The anthropologist, Frank Holliwell, falls in love with the Queen of Swords, Sister Justin: “It would be strange to see people who believed in things, and acted in the world according to what they believed.” Sister Justin—“shroud weaver,” imagining “serenity”—wants to be “used,” if not by God then by history. If we aren’t in Holliwell’s mind or Justin’s, we are with Pablo, the deserter and psychopath with a diamond in the pocket of his shirt and a knife strapped in a plastic sheath to his leg.

  Holliwell seems to be our best bet. A man of “no blood or folk,” from another planet, “forever inquiring of helpful strangers the nature of their bonds with one another” and for whom “regret” is “secon
d nature, the very fluid of his veins,” he is nevertheless a husband, father, and teacher, “capable of honor and sacrifice,” disdainful of murder, vampires, phantom worship, “the gang,” positive thinkers with “their eyes awash in their own juice.” He tells us, and Justin, “When I decide what happened, I’ll decide to live with it.”

  What he can’t live with is Vietnam, where he was compromised. For most of the Americans in A Flag for Sunrise, Vietnam is a disease: “Cooking oil, excrement, incense, death. The smell of the world turning.” Another turnaround. For these Americans, Vietnam holds “a kind of moral fascination.” They liked being there, and can’t forgive themselves. They no longer believe in “the just rule of the Lord” that is proposed by the Roman Catholic revolutionaries. Their Lord was north, and blue-eyed. The Lord never should have discovered that “each is alone” and “the rest is fantasy.” Holliwell can’t rid himself of “the saffron taste” of Vietnam. “The green places of the world” swarm and bleed and avenge; we experience “existential dread,” which is easy.

  This thriller has gotten out of hand, hasn’t it? We are made to understand why, as a nation, we are hated. The blue eye is blind, sacrificed. Mr. Stone tells us more than we want to know about guilt and strangers. His novel smells of bars and jukeboxes, of boats and ideas, of a Roman Catholicism in the sweat tank of conscience, hoping for a symbol and achieving merely a gesture. That his characters can breathe at all, between the fingers clenched about their dream, is amazing.