by John Updike
But the episode feels exaggerated—more trash than truth, more exploitation than exploration. The frontier has moved on, to buggery, where sex can still touch the forbidden, the religious, the diabolical. Rojak, buggering the German maid in An American Dream, sees her as a Nazi, comes to her “cry of rage,” and feels he has “come to the Devil a fraction too late.” For an age which lusted, as did the late Sixties, for revolution, buggery is the fit deviation; it runs counter to the channels of production, whereas ejaculation into the throat conforms to them, like the liberal variations within the capitalist system. Fellatio feeds; buggery violates.
In these accelerated times, the frontier fills rapidly; Terry Andrews’ novel The Story of Harold (1974) centers its mystique on “fist-fucking” and the brave new world beyond the anus:
I described this whole thing to a friend afterwards … and he asked … “But wasn’t it just like sticking your hand in a bowl of spaghetti?” And the answer is no—oh no, not a bit! It’s like putting your fingers in fold upon fold of hot, wet velvet, some fabric never felt before, that contains a living pulse within it. For you do feel the life. There are arteries, major blood vessels, along which a human existence trills. And they can be played with and plucked and bowed like the strings of a living violin.
And here, like Mr. Sammler before he was emended, I feel not quite devoid of prejudice. This trans-anal passage tells me more than I want to know; it has the frightful melancholy of the purely physical; I can hardly bear to read it. I flinch, as Bellow (evidently) flinched at his own phrase, as some readers may have flinched at my above oral anthology. Where we draw back varies; but our sexual natures, even in this age of competitive license and Freudian sanction, do ask limits, for their own protection. The angel of disgust guards the seeds of life. Sexual excitement arises from an arcanum; some stimuli must be kept in safe deposit. Just as moral prohibitions have as their end our own safely, some boundary to the exploration of the bodies of others, some economy in knowledge, is asked for, that potency be conserved.
Phantom Life
WEST OF THE ROCKIES, by Daniel Fuchs. 166 pp. Knopf, 1971.
Nobody else writes like Daniel Fuchs:
All right, then. Munves pressed her tightly to him and shivered. Ooooh, it felt good. Soft, soft. Women were originally built like a jackknife, like a Westchester roll, all one short round lump, he was thinking, and when God opened them up straight, the body protruded in round curved masses. He hugged her tighter and tighter, his skinny arm on her shoulders aching.
That is a young man learning to dance, in Homage to Blenholt, the middle novel of the three Fuchs published, quickly and obscurely, in the middle Thirties. When they were reprinted, in 1961, Fuchs wrote, “The books didn’t sell—400 copies, 400, 1200. The reviews were scanty, immaterial. The books became odious to me.” He goes on to describe his turning to short stories: “I was in the middle of a fourth novel but broke it up and swiftly turned it into three or four short stories. I worked away all spring, one story after the other—perhaps a dozen or fifteen in all. I rested. It was July. Nothing happened.” He and his young wife made money by going out to the race track and betting. “I had visions of spending the rest of our lives at the races, travelling from track to track with the seasons. Suddenly I heard from my agent. The editors had simply been away on their summer vacations, that was all. They took the stories, all of them—one afternoon three acceptances in the same mail. I had my racetrack winnings in cash all over me in different pockets; I had checks from the magazines laid away in envelopes.” It is a typically happy Fuchs story, and it is how I think of him—as a natural winner, a poet who never had to strain after a poetic effect, a writer so blithely blessed by the gods he never got dug in properly. He gave up short stories in turn and went to Hollywood.
Now, out of Hollywood, after more than three decades in the desert, comes the fourth Fuchs novel: West of the Rockies. It is shorter than the others—scenario-length, with odd blank or hurried patches, perhaps for the director to fill in. In his prose of glimmering diffidence, Fuchs tells the story of Adele Hogue, a movie star, and Burt Claris, a handsome nobody who works for her talent agency. The beginning of their romance is tersely sketched indeed: “He had taken up with her, had gotten into her good graces, slept with her. Claris was no better than most. She was accessible.” (One of the book’s incidental mirages is that Fuchs always refers to the hero as “Claris,” which sounds feminine, and often to the heroine as “Hogue,” which seems masculine.) The novel centers upon a Palm Springs resort to which Adele Hogue has fled after bolting the set of a movie in production; Burt Claris, on behalf of the agency, has chased her there. The action generally observes the unities of this place in these few days of crisis; as a result, Fuchs spends a high proportion of his pages filling us in—on Adele’s old romance with Harry Case, a racketeer whose ex-wife, Fannie, runs the resort; on Adele’s recent disastrous fling with the international jet set and an aristocratic English husband who has bankrupted her; on Burt’s marriage to an immature young heiress; on the ins and outs of motion-picture financing and the ruin facing the producer, Robert Wigler, who is present, in “the great 117-degree afternoon desert heat,” along with Burt’s skirt-chasing superior at the talent agency, and the three children the actress has spawned in the course of her marriages, and a hungry host of reporters, and the perennial resort guests, the sun-bathing, well-preserved “second and third wives of men who made big money in meat, oil, or textiles.” Even when the action is before his eyes, the author’s tone is one of reverie:
She held her shoulders straight, carrying her body with that clear-striding, forthright sexual quality they had and which they knew they had. It was the way they were put together; it was the bones in them. It was a readiness or acquiescence to use the body for all the pleasure it could give, a readiness they picked up from their mothers, in the Hollywood malt shops, out of the air.
Constructions involving “or” and “way” recur—“either because she considered him of no account or because she was too careworn or because it was her way,” “in the ways they had,” “whether it was for this reason or because of some other mental quirk”—as if Fuchs were groping through a dream that puzzles him, dazzles him. The blinding California brightness seems pre-smog, and in the end the reader is told that all this slice of “phantom life” happened “some twelve years ago, when television was comparatively new and the big picture studios still throbbed, the collapse yet to come.”
What might be faults in another novel feed this one’s dreamlike, movie-like glow. Gentle improbabilities hurry events along. Servants are remarkably obliging: a Filipino hotel steward volunteers his room as a love nest, and a baby’s nurse spontaneously tells Burt where his wife has hidden her love letters. The imperfectly guessed motives and sketchily summarized lives give a mysterious largeness to the world beyond the plot’s circumference. Los Angeles becomes a nostalgic presence: “It had been another time, everything closer to the studios in those days, the Los Angeles area still spread thin and relatively undeveloped, a third of what it was to become.… The wide boulevards with sandy, neglected islands in the middle of them, the sun pouring down, so still and breathtakingly brilliant, as it was in those earlier years.”
This tone is far from the self-promoting satire and rage usually offered by “Hollywood novels.” Yet the reality to which Fuchs lends his love is recognizably cruel. A jam halts traffic on the desert thruway: “Claris looked down and saw the hard, murderous grain of the pavement concrete, the slits and abrasions, the concrete suddenly stationary and as if magnified.” Contracts, erotic as well as financial, take effect in an arid atmosphere purged of any Old World notions of honor or noblesse oblige. The dreams of success and love are acted out against a hard awareness of the “they” who control destinies—the bankers, the gangsters, as implacable and irrational as Greek deities. The women who populate Palm Springs form an ominous chorus of Furies. They lie in the sun discussing girdles and beauty operations, th
ey make love with necklaces on, they fly decorators in from New York and Texas, they are not unkind, having “all been in the business at one time or another, as stand-ins or stock girls,” but with men their ardor is “overwhelmingly tender and solicitous and at the same time impersonal, a kindness which they could discontinue seemingly without an instant’s feeling or trace of remembrance”: they are all, Wigler tells Burt Claris, “secret agents.” They have all made their “adjustments,” and in this they differ from Adele Hogue.
Fuchs’s portrait of a star is masterly. He seems to do everything to diminish her. She appears frightened, sick, vulgar, and foolish, callous to her children and destructive wherever she can reach. Even her body is seen sadly: “Claris saw the roundness at the upper arms and shoulders, the weight taking hold there, packing in; he saw the slack, plump roll of the belly, the widening at the waist—that thickening which, it had been surveyed and studied in the business, the young people in the movie houses spotted and resented.” And when this Venus does her thing and makes love, the prose plunges into melancholy:
She opened her arms to him, embraced and clasped him to her, taking him on.… Claris responded to the pressure, winding through the ritual, the kisses, the fondling, the contriving of an illusion of love—that knavish, coward’s thing people relentlessly do with one another.
The weight of Hogue’s mortal envelope is frightful: “Claris wondered … at the mauling she had absorbed in her time—the curettages, the operations, the bad operation … the brutal intensive reducing regimens, when … she installed herself in the hospital and they systematically sloughed the weight off her so that she herself came to view her body with a sick distaste.” Since neither beauty nor skill (“She didn’t know anything about acting, never had, would be the first to say so”) has lifted her up from the high-school malt shops through the petty prostitutions and mismarriages and neurotic ailments into stardom, what has? Fuchs answers, “Fanatic energy.” Adele explains it to herself: “Her special effectiveness with the audience was spontaneous, something organic, beyond control. She believed it was the product of the nervous system you were endowed with, and she was convinced her nerves were used up, that you were given just so much.” So “star quality” exacts an exceptional toll, and reader and author and lover together come to adore anew this exasperating and worse-than-average woman. Using as his material the shabbiest truths, Fuchs rebuilds the Hollywood myth; a happy ending evolves in an atmosphere of exhausted illusion. When, at the end, Adele Hogue stands with Burt on the edge of a marital partnership perhaps—who knows?—as profitable as that of Doris Day and Marty Melcher, and turns to him in the mass of reporters and mouths “I love you” as if on a sound stage, her sincerity is beyond gauging; we are dazzled by her courage, her real will to go on living her life of unreality.
* Mary Hemingway’s 53-word Note scarcely counts; it admits to “some cuts” and correction of spelling and punctuation and that is all.
† “Tony went back to school on Monday and Nailles—drugged—went off to work and everything was as wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful as it had been.” Cf. As You Like It, act III, scene ii, Celia saying: “O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful wonderful! and yet again wonderful, and after that, out of all whooping!”
‡ My smart-aleck characterization of course pre-dates the politicization of the magazine’s conscience, as expressed in its front columns, by such fiery unsigned editorialists as Jonathan Schell and Richard Harris, who have so much to say the space fairly groans.
§ The other judges were Granville Hicks and the late Josephine Herbst. We having made, not too contentiously, our decision, they invited me to write the citation, and I scratched this off. They had no suggestions for its improvement; otherwise I would not thus include it as my work.
NON-FICTION
Black Suicide
BLACK SUICIDE, by Herbert Hendin. 176 pp. Basic Books, 1969.
Suicide, that most absolute of acts, is yet relative and can serve as a window into the peculiar stresses of a cultural group. In support of this thesis, Herbert Hendin, a professor at the Columbia University Psychoanalytic Clinic, has produced two books: his well-known, well-applauded study Suicide and Scandinavia (1964) and an equally fascinating and surpassingly relevant, though largely ignored, volume, Black Suicide. Dr. Hendin proposes, and demonstrates, that suicide is different things in different places. In Denmark, it is commonly an attempt to inflict guilt upon others or to rejoin a loved one in a sentimentally conceived hereafter. In Sweden, suicide tends to be of a “performance” rather than a “dependency” type; the self-hatred of a competitive failure, however, is deepened by a peculiar Swedish coldness that emphasizes emotional control and erects between the sexes a wall of frozen silence. In the black ghettos of America, suicide is one face of a rage that, though ultimately caused by the Negro’s frustrating position in the society, originates for almost every individual in maternal rejection.
Not that uniformity prevails in Dr. Hendin’s cross section of twenty-five suicide attempts admitted to the Harlem Hospital. Four older men attempted suicide after professional reverses, suggesting the “performance” motive common in Sweden—but with the difference that not so much a rigid achievement standard as an adaptive pattern fragilely based upon outward compliance and contained anger had broken down. These Uncle Toms, after lifetimes spent pushing brooms or hand trucks, found themselves still economically defenseless, and, having been taught docile compliance as a mode of goodness, construed their adaptive failure in moral terms and sought to take their lives in atonement. Again, many of the females included in this study attempted suicide after abandonment by a husband or lover—but there is a radical difference between the Danish matrix of interdependence and the sorry turmoil of abandonment, violence, foster parentage, and neglect that has served black females as models of family life.
The interviews and life histories presented in Black Suicide do not bear out the notion that the black female is relatively insulated from the effects of racial discrimination.
The most disastrous impact of racial institutions seems to be felt so early in life and so overwhelmingly that the plight of the female seems as bad as that of the male. Frustration, rage, and violence already characterize the lives of both sexes when they are teenagers, and there is little difference between men and women in the degree of despair that is so often present by the time they are young adults.
Given a set of tests called the Buss-Durkee Hostility Inventory, the women in this group of would-be suicides scored higher than the men, and in the “assault category” two females—called “Ina Tracy” and “Agnes Carreth”—obtained perfect scores of ten. Ina Tracy, a tall woman of thirty-one who lived in Alabama until she was twenty, describes one of her frequent fights with friends: “I beat her as long as she moved. As long as she moved I kicked her. Blood both frightens and excites me.” Of her childhood, she says, “My mother once told me that she wished I had been born dead or that she had gotten rid of me. The way things worked out, I wished it too.… My mother would make me break a branch and she’d beat me with it—hit me wherever it landed. I wanted to take her and choke her to death. Wished that I would die or she would.” Yet her mother’s desires appear to have controlled her behavior; teased for tallness at school, she was not much of a fighter until, running from another girl one day, she saw her mother, “who she knew would be furious at her running away.” Similarly: “At seventeen she told her mother she had never liked boys. When her mother replied that she should, she decided to have sexual relations with the first boy who was willing and soon after became pregnant.” Ina left the child with her mother a few years afterward and came to New York alone. Her first suicide attempt came a year later. A recurrent nightmare involves a “very large man who had been dead a long time, so long that one could smell him.” This image seems the only peaceful one in the frenzied alternation of her homicidal and suicidal fantasies.
“Louise Greene,” an attractive and engagingl
y childlike woman of twenty-six, scored low on the hostility tests, yet a legacy of maternal rejection also perpetuates itself through her. She was raised by her grandparents in Georgia, and did not meet her mother until the age of twelve, when a woman suddenly appeared and demanded that Louise, her first-born, come live with her and care for the younger children she had had by a variety of men. Though compelled to obey, Louise frequently ran off back to her grandparents, and after one fight was prevented from taking rat poison. She has had two children, by two men, neither of whom she wished to marry; when she did marry, she and her husband quarreled over her refusal to quit her job and stay home with the one child that was, for an interval, living with her. When this man died, under violent circumstances she never investigated, Louise came to New York, where she works as a drugstore waitress. She sends part of her salary south for the care of her children, who live with her aunt and uncle; she insists—even in her suicide note—on her love for her children. Hendin concludes: “Louise feels too keenly her position as a rejected daughter to be able to see herself as a mother.… Furious with her mother for abandoning her and for not providing her with a father, Louise is following in her mother’s footsteps in having children with various fathers and then rejecting them.”
Another type of casualty inflicted by the black home is illustrated by four male homosexuals who turned up among the twelve male suicide attempts—a surprising incidence; among male white suicides fewer than one in twelve is a homosexual. In the homes of these men—and though the statistical sample of homosexuals is small, it has been augmented by six other non-suicidal cases—a father was usually present, but so violent toward mother and son that heterosexuality became intimidating. Also, the boys were disturbed by their mothers’ extramarital sexual activities. “Benjamin Ellis” remembers discovering his mother in bed with a man and says, “It jarred me so much I wept.” The violent father and promiscuous mother curiously reverse the typical recessive father and nonsexual mother of white homosexuals. Curious, too, is the usual preference of black homosexuals for white partners: a tragic indication of an unconfessed racial shame. “Andrew Vallen” insists he is proud to be a Negro but wants to have an operation to make his thick lips thinner. “Leroi Nifson,” a medium-brown offspring of a black father and a Syrian mother, when asked why he confined his homosexual contacts to whites and Puerto Ricans, answered that he considered himself Arabic, “a white man sympathetic to the Negro cause.” Benjamin Ellis, the oldest of the three, and the only one who achieved a high guilt rating in the psychological tests, associates dirt, masculinity, and blackness—“I do things with men, don’t with women because men are dirty anyhow. The man was Negro and not as clean as he could be”—but also says, “White men don’t care what they do. They’ll do anything. Negroes have limitations. If it lowers their pride, they won’t do it.” His double need to be degraded and to be protected is best served by a white lover.
