The Devil's Pleasure Palace

by Michael Walsh

  When the businessman/villain Gordon Gekko is asked in the 1987 movie Wall Street why he wants to wreck a company that’s his takeover target, he irritably replies: “Because it’s wreckable, all right?” The hit movie was co-written and directed by another man of the Left, Oliver Stone, and Gekko’s remark was meant to illustrate the mean-spirited avariciousness of the “greed is good” Reagan-era businessmen. And yet, looked at another way, it says more about the ethos of the eliminationist Left than it does about the Right’s putative avarice.

  Even earlier, in The Wild One (1953), the glamorous biker-gang leader Johnny Strabler (Marlon Brando) is asked by a local girl, “Hey, Johnny, what are you rebelling against?” His reply—“Whaddya got?”—is one of the most famous lines in film history and a perfect encapsulation of the sense that for the nihilist new Romantics, civilization tout court was worthless. Significantly, the first complete draft of the script was written by Ben Maddow, who was blacklisted in 1952, taking him off the project as well as stopping his work on the first draft of High Noon. Maddow was a Columbia-educated leftist who under the pseudonym David Wolff was a poet of considerable renown in bien-pensant circles. Allen Ginsberg even cited Wolff’s “The City” (1940), a sprawling account of urban horror and alienation, as the inspiration for Ginsberg’s own, better-known “Howl.” Like many artists who came of age in the inter-war years, Maddow—and the rest of the herd of independent minds—had come to believe that an apocalyptic broom would need to sweep clean the detritus of the broken world and remake it anew.

  The system had to go because it was blocking the Marxist arc of history, that rainbow that would end somewhere, somehow, in a pot of gold in a humble proletarian field. And who better represented “the system” than the modern incarnation of Adam and Eve, a man and a woman, their bodies designed to act reciprocally in the matters of procreation and pleasure, the creatures that God himself had interposed between Heaven and Hell, free to be strong or weak as the mood took them, and thus a perfect target for the satanic impulse, whether literarily or literally?

  The family was the first target, but even that was a feint, collateral damage from the principal target: the nature of the sexual relationship itself. And for that, we must once again turn to our evocation of man’s primal dark side, Goethe’s Faust.

  When Faust first sees Gretchen (in a magic mirror, having been warmed up by a witch’s potion), he is immediately smitten—and just as quickly mocked by the Devil, who remarks: “With this drink, you see Helen of Troy in every woman.” (As it happens, Helen will play a large role in Faust, Part Two.) This is how Faust describes Gretchen to Mephistopheles, after first encountering her in person in the street and having had his advances rebuffed:

  By Heaven, this child is beautiful!

  I’ve never seen anything like her.

  She’s so rich in purity and virtue

  And just a little saucy, too.

  Her lips red, her cheek fair,

  ’Til the end of days I shan’t forget it!

  The way she cast down her eyes

  Deeply impressed itself into my heart;

  How curt she was with me,

  Now that’s pure enchantment!

  Faust is thunderstruck, just as Mephisto had predicted he would be. But look at what he reacts to: his opposite, the “other.” Faust is old; Gretchen is young. Faust has seen everything in the course of his studies; Gretchen is a simple girl, but he has never seen anything like her, nor she him. Faust is stiff and cold; Gretchen is pert, with a telling hint of sexy mischief in her sparkling eyes. Faust is blunt; but with one shy downward glance, Gretchen binds his heart forever.

  Faust, in short, has been bewitched, charmed, enraptured—in other words, he is going through the same thing he is currently experiencing with Mephistopheles, though in the physical realm. But the Ewig-Weibliche, the Eternal Feminine here instantiated by Faust’s fantasy of the pure and innocent Gretchen (soon enough to be defiled) and ultimately the end point of the entire two-part poem, proves a far greater force than Mephistopheles’s satanic temptations. Sex is, for Goethe and innumerable other artists, the greatest single force in creation—so powerful that in Milton, in Book Nine of Paradise Lost, the first thing Adam and Eve do after they both taste the forbidden fruit is to make love in what is one of Western literature’s first sex scenes:

  So said he, and forbore not glance or toy

  Of amorous intent, well understood

  Of Eve, whose eye darted contagious fire.

  Her hand he seized, and to a shady bank,

  Thick overhead with verdant roof embow’red

  He led her, nothing loath; flowers were the couch,

  Pansies, and violets, and asphodel,

  And hyacinth, Earth’s freshest softest lap.

  There they their fill of love and love’s disport

  Took largely, of their mutual guilt the seal,

  The solace of their sin, till dewy sleep

  Oppressed them, weary with their amorous play.

  After you disobey the only commandment God has given you, what else is there to do but have sex?

  And so we have a twinning in the cultural mythos of forbidden fruit and Eros/Thanatos, for both Adam and Eve realize that now they must surely die, now that they have tasted both celestial knowledge and human love in its purest form, and have experienced for the first time la petite mort of orgasm. And the twinning is crucial to the formation of humanity—another unsuspected benefit of the Fall. The heterosexual human sex act is unlike that of most mammals in that it can happen at any time, not only when the human animal is rutting (our species is always rutting, for good or ill).

  Animals respond to the power of the sexual urge; they flock to its smell and its call; they indulge in it with ferocious, sometimes lethal abandon. Humans (and not just in the female’s fertile months) are always on the lookout for the entire panoply of human sexual experience: the main chance, the quick score, the illicit affair, the eternal love, the one-night stand, and the enduring relationship that survives even death. At once unspoken and yet the subject of countless works of literature, poetry, theater, film, and the musical arts both high and low, this salient feature of the Fall is continually celebrated by mankind even as its primal power causes us so much pain and heartache.

  At the first sight of Gretchen, Faust’s lust for knowledge is alchemized into his lust for her. The embodiment of the Eternal Feminine, she is what drives him from this point in the poem—onward but not necessarily upward. Seduced and impregnated, Gretchen (saucy but pure) is the innocent Eve turned murderess. Awaiting Faust’s arrival in her virgin bedchamber, she inadvertently kills her mother by administering a fatal dose of sleeping potion; later, she drowns her bastard child and is condemned to death. Upon seeing Mephisto appear alongside Faust in her dungeon, she calls Satan the spawn of darkness: “Was steigt aus dem Boden herauf?” (“What climbs out of the earth?”)

  This is the elemental power of sex—that for all its complexity and difficulty, it nevertheless points the way to transcendence. Almost every religious cult is based around it (with the transient guru having unlimited access to the most nubile and desirable females). Those that aren’t—say, the Shakers (the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing)—rejected it as too powerful but still throw themselves into transports of quasi-sexual religious ecstasy, sublimating the erotic impulse while paying it religious homage.

  Critical Theory attacked all of this, principally the idea of transcendence. Not every sex act has larger meaning, of course, but the goal of Critical Theory was to reduce human beings to the level of animals (“If it feels good, do it”) and to deny the transcendent component that had driven creative artists for centuries. Tellingly, the word “sex” came to mean the same thing as “gender,” an impersonal grammatical term that includes masculine, feminine, and neuter. Primal notions of masculinity and femininity were redefined and “nuanced,” which in practice meant shattered and rendered meaningless. Herbert Marcuse, t
he author of Eros and Civilization, celebrated “polymorphous perversity,” advocating the liberating power of sex, but only in the narrowest sense: liberation from the (in his view) arbitrary and capricious strictures laid down by culture and civilization. By following the directive to “make love, not war,” the gullible individual might well have felt that he was striking a blow at the hierarchy; in reality, though, perhaps he was simply expending his creative, sexual energy in useless and unproductive ways. But Marcuse knew that a populace engaged in pointless sexual intercourse was a populace uninterested in much of anything else; thus “polymorphous perversity” weakens the foundations of the society he sought to undermine.

  Again, we must use the word “satanic,” which, rightly defined, means the desire to tear down a longstanding, even elemental, order and replace it with . . . nothing. Critical Theory very effectively harnesses resentment, transmuting it into rage; it excuses solipsistic indolence, presenting it as “self-realization.” The Frankfurt School rejected Jung’s collective unconscious—the only truly collective thing about humanity—describing it as an “obscurantist pseudo-mythology,” vastly preferring Freudianism. The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, who founded “socialist humanism,” in particular devoted a great deal of his attention to Freudian theory, and while he found “contradictions” within it, he described Freud as one of the “architects of the modern age,” placing him in the pantheon alongside Marx and Einstein.

  In his most important work, Escape from Freedom (1941), Fromm explicitly rejected Western notions of personal freedom, preferring instead the ordered society of—of all things—feudal Europe. (There is no Progressive like a Regressive.) “In having a distinct, unchangeable, and unquestionable place in the social world from the moment of birth, man was rooted in a structuralized whole, and thus life had a meaning which left no place, and no need for doubt.” (“Structural” is a favorite word of the Marxists, believing as they do in a “scientific” basis for what is little more than a resentful nineteenth-century revenge fantasy.)

  To take a step back from the Frankfurt School and its curious, culture-specific obsessions is to note what a stunningly self-referential and limited world these intellectuals inhabited. They were a group of tiresome, quarrelsome, pedantic, mostly German- or Austrian-born intellectuals endlessly rehashing the theories and merits of an earlier generation of tiresome, pedantic, mostly German- or Austrian-born intellectuals, with the added layer of their largely shared (or rejected) Jewishness in common.

  One is reminded of the historian Paul Johnson’s memorable chapter on Marx in Intellectuals, with a title that recalls Satan himself: “Howling Gigantic Curses.” In it, Johnson describes the political devil of our narrative as he set about his war with God:

  He never received any Jewish education or attempted to acquire any, or showed any interest in Jewish causes. But it must be said that he developed traits characteristic of a certain type of scholar, especially Talmudic ones: a tendency to accumulate immense masses of half-assimilated materials and to plan encyclopedic works which were never completed; a withering contempt for all non-scholars, and extreme assertiveness and irascibility in dealing with other scholars. Virtually all his work, indeed, has the hallmark of Talmudic study: It is essentially a commentary on, a critique of the work of others in the field.

  Perhaps that is ascribing too much to Marx’s Jewish roots, which included prominent rabbis on both sides of the family; as Johnson notes, Marx’s father was baptized in the wake of an 1816 Prussian edict that banned Jews from the legal and medical fields, and he had his six children baptized as well. Ascribing innate “racial” or cultural traits is a dangerous business in the aftermath of the Holocaust; still, the fact remains that the overwhelming majority of the members of the Frankfurt School were Jewish, as were many of the early Bolsheviks, including Trotsky, Sverdlov, and Zinoviev; like all Bolsheviks, they were fiercely anti-Jewish, banning teaching in Hebrew and religious instruction (not that it saved them from Stalin, whose own Georgian anti-Semitism rivaled Hitler’s). Nevertheless, although Jews made up a high percentage of the German intellectuals of the period, well out of proportion to their small share of the population, the philosophical terms of the debate were German, not Jewish.

  Another of Marx’s traits was evident from his youth: his passion for destruction, expressed in the poetry he wrote as a young man, including “Savage Songs,” one of whose verses ran: “We are chained, shattered, empty, frightened / Eternally chained to this marble block of being / . . . We are the apes of a cold God.” Faust was one of his favorite poems, of course, but he took the side of Mephistopheles, quoting the Devil’s aphorism “Everything that exists deserves to perish” in his essay The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Johnson concludes his study by remarking: “Marx is an eschatological writer from start to finish.”

  In other words, not to put too fine a point on it: a madman. For Marx resembles nothing more than those monomaniacs convinced of the righteousness of their cause (or, in this case, an anti-cause dressed up as a cause), desperately scribbling upon acres of foolscap and furiously buttonholing just about everyone they meet, with a lecture or harangue always ready to hand. How anyone could have fallen for this load of quasi-scientific, pseudo-intellectual, anti-human codswallop remains a mystery, and yet in a world where even Charles Manson can find love behind prison bars, anything is possible. A selfish, ravaging monster in his personal life, Marx is the archetype of the modern leftist, an apotheosis of hypocrisy who makes others suffer and die for his sins.

  Again, note the Christian allegory. Marxism is often compared to a religious cult in its outward trappings and external rituals, but a closer look at its founder and practitioners reveals even greater similarities. Marx’s own self-identification with Mephistopheles might well be proof enough, but let us go further. The sense of having been wronged—by fate? the universe?—runs throughout the Left’s list of grievances against a God they profess not to believe in. Their own lives bear little scrutiny, as they are too often revealed as duplicitous, deceitful, and treacherous toward even those they claim to love. The media today shriek in glee whenever a putative conservative is caught with some part of his body in a honey pot, yet they consistently turn a blind eye to those on their side in the same predicaments. Their lame explanation is always the same: Conservative (or better yet, religious fundamentalist) hypocrisy is news. After all, it is a violation of Alinsky’s Rule No. 4: “Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.” Whereas the Left has no rules, only objectives, and since “by any means necessary” is a perfectly acceptable moral code, there can be no hypocrisy among leftists, just as there can be no enemies.

  Consider that much of leftists’ enthusiasm for sexual freedom stems from their own, shall we say, irregular personal lives; for them, the love that dare not say its name instead shouts it from the rooftops. And, by extension, they have assumed that what works for people who are often engaged in creative and artistic pursuits (who tend to be highly sexed) ought to work for everybody else, even those whom they dismiss as plebeian. The Bloomsbury Circle was a hotbed of hot beds, both gay and straight; the rapaciously bisexual Simone de Beauvoir was an early advocate of women’s adopting a masculine view of serial sexual conquest, passing along her often underage female conquests to her lifelong partner, Jean-Paul Sartre. Famously, the lascivious Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife, became the butt of jokes in the Soviet Union, the most famous of which goes like this:

  A Soviet filmmaker makes a film called “Lenin in Warsaw.” Everybody shows up for the premiere. The film opens—on Krupskaya, naked, having mad sex with another man. And then another. And another. And so on. The film goes on and on in the same vein for ninety minutes. Finally, the lights come up and the director takes questions from the audience. First question: “Very interesting movie, comrade, but—where was Lenin?” The director answers: “In Warsaw.” (Marx’s own sex life, like Rousseau’s, also bears little scrutiny.)

  And yet the Judeo-Chri
stian example is always reproachfully before the “transgressive” leftists, the thing they cannot avoid even when they try. In 1898, Debussy tried to rebel against the musically puritanical Wagnerism outlined in Wagner’s seminal 1849 essay, “Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft” (“The Artwork of the Future”), but that Wagner expressed most completely in Das Rheingold (with its lack of arias, choruses, etc.). As I mentioned in the previous chapter, the French master wound up writing the ineffable Pelléas et Mélisande, which conforms precisely—in a way that even Rheingold does not—to Wagner’s theoretical strictures. Wagner’s ideas themselves were a direct reaction to the “Franco-Jewishness” of the works of Giacomo Meyerbeer, then the darling of the Paris Opera and a man whose success Wagner fervently desired to emulate and, failing thereat, decided to resent.

  One of Meyerbeer’s greatest successes was the satanic opera Robert le diable, from whose themes Liszt fashioned one of his most popular concert showpieces. Wagner himself picked up the Meyerbeerian thread with his early opera The Flying Dutchman (1840), bringing the circle of resentment and imitation to completion. Art imitating life, or life imitating art? Or something even more elemental, the unity of the two?

  Robert le diable, shockingly for the day, featured a chorus of dead nuns rising from the grave, casting off their habits, and writhing temptingly nude before the hero. In Dutchman, by contrast, the temptation is toward goodness and the light, as exemplified by Senta, the village girl who eventually frees the Dutchman from the power of his terrible curse, sending his doomed ship to the bottom and both him and her to Heaven through her Selbstmord (suicide). Both operas, though, feature the Ewig-Weibliche to drive home the elemental point: Eros and Thanatos, together again, with Eros triumphant.

  Wagner’s heroines are a panoply of redemptive femininity: Senta, Elisabeth (Tannhäuser), Elsa (Lohengrin), Isolde (Tristan und Isolde), Eva (Die Meistersinger), Brünnhilde—strong women who often outlive the men they love. They are the musical and dramatic idealizations of Gretchen, both temptress and redeemer, the spark of the divine made flesh that drives their poor, often weak heroes to their deeds of glory. All of them owe a debt of gratitude to the archetypal operatic feminist heroine, Beethoven’s Leonore in Fidelio, who rescues her imprisoned husband, Florestan, by disguising herself as a boy and then holding the evil governor of the prison, Don Pizarro, at gunpoint until the cavalry finally arrives.