Delmore seemed nervous and I began to think he was serious about being unable to look at himself in a mirror. He was wearing a threadbare gray flannel suit and proposed to buy another one just like it. When the salesman asked him what size he wore, Delmore said he didn’t know. Unlike the Jews of his father’s generation, he regarded the subject of clothing as a somehow gentile business.
The salesman held up a suit and Delmore looked blindly at it. What do you think? he said to me, and I realized that this unworldly man saw me as worldly. I remembered another time when he had asked me for an opinion. We were walking that day too and he asked me to walk him home because he wanted to give me his new book, Vaudeville for a Princess. When I objected that he couldn’t afford to give everyone a copy of his book, he said, Not everyone—I want to give a copy to you. You have less talent for concealing your opinion than most of my friends—I can get the truth out of you.
At his apartment he pondered for a long time over an inscription for the book. He had once proposed, he said, to write “hypocrite lecteur,” a phrase from Baudelaire, in a book he was giving to Will Barrett, but Barrett objected. When he finally gave me the book, I saw that he had written, For Anatole, from Delmore, in a microscopic hand.
I took the book home and read it over and over, trying to think of something good to say about it—but I needn’t have worried, because he never asked me.
Delmore went into the dressing room and put on the suit. When he came out, the salesman buttoned the jacket and turned up the trouser cuffs. He tried to usher Delmore to the three-way mirror, but Delmore turned his back to it and asked me again, What do you think?
Delmore had a swaybacked stance that made the jacket gape at the collar and ride up on his belly, so that the skirts pulled together in front. Nobody ever looked less dressed in a suit. He could even turn buying a suit into a tragedy.
He had once been handsome, like poetry itself. I had seen early pictures of him, carefully lighted, shot on a slant, as if he was ascending, or descending. I believe there was sculpture behind him in one shot. But now he was heavy and you could see what he meant by “the withness of the body,” or “the heavy bear who goes with me.”
I gazed at him in the suit. What good could it do? I wondered. Can a suit make him sane? He ought to wear it just like that, with the trousers rolled and the jacket riding up in front.
He raised and lowered his arms. He shrugged his shoulders to settle the suit, but it wouldn’t come right. How do I look? he asked.
Turn around, I said. Let me see the back. And behind his back, I made up my mind.
I thought that here on the sixth floor of Brooks Brothers, the salesman was the public, I was the critic and Delmore was the poet. I thought I saw dried shaving cream in one of Delmore’s ears. I thought of a line by Tristan Tzara: “The lonely poet, great wheelbarrow of the swamps.”
17
After Sheri, I thought once again that now, at last, I would have what people call a normal sex life. I felt like a man who goes back to college after knocking about the world in a tramp steamer. I saw myself as someone who has been robbed of his youth—first by the war and then by Sheri—and I wanted to be young again. I wanted to be ordinary. I could hardly imagine what sleeping with an ordinary girl would be like.
To someone who hasn’t lived through it, it’s almost impossible to describe the sexual atmosphere of 1947. To look back at it from today is like visiting a medieval town in France or Italy and trying to visualize the life of its inhabitants in the thirteenth century. You can see the houses and the cathedral, the twisting streets, you can read about the kind of work they did, the food they ate, or about their religion, but you can’t imagine how they felt; you can’t grasp the actual terms of their consciousness. The mood or atmosphere, the tangibility of their lives, eludes you because we don’t have the same frame of reference. It’s as if the human brain and the five senses were at an earlier stage of development.
In 1947, American life had not yet been split open. It was still all of a piece, intact, bounded on every side, and, above all, regulated. Actions we now regard as commonplace were forbidden by law and by custom. While all kinds of things were censored, we hadn’t even learned to think in terms of censorship, because we were so used to it. The social history of the world is, in some ways, a history of censorship.
Nineteen forty-seven was a time when any suggestion of extramarital sex in a movie had to be punished, just as crime had to be punished. To publish a picture of pubic hair was a criminal offense. Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Tropic of Cancer were banned and Portnoy’s Complaint was twenty-two years away. There was no birth-control pill, no legal abortion—yet none of this tells you what sex at that time was like. The closest I can come to it is to say that sex was as much a superstition, or a religious heresy, as it was a pleasure. It was a combination of Halloween and Christmas—guilty, tormented, clumsy, unexamined, and thrilling. It was as much psychological as physical—the idea of sex was often the major part of foreplay. A naked human body was such a rare and striking thing that the sight of it was more than enough to start our juices flowing. People were still visually hungry; there was no sense of déjà vu as there is now. As a nation, we hadn’t lost our naïveté.
Of course, I’m talking about middle- and upper-middle-class people—that’s where the girls I met came from. They were “good” girls whose sexuality had been shaped by their mothers and by the novels of George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, perhaps even Henry James. They wore padded bras and pantie girdles and they bought their bathing suits a size too large. The suggestion of a nipple through a sweater or a blouse or a panty seam through a skirt would have been considered pornographic.
Sex was the last thing such a girl gave a man, an ultimate or ultimatum. It was as much a philosophical decision on her part as an emotional one and it had to be justified on ethical and aesthetic grounds. To sleep with a man was the end of a long chain of behavior that began with calling yourself a liberal, with appreciating modern art—sex was a modern art—and going to see foreign films. Sex too was foreign. It was a postwar thing, a kind of despairing democracy, a halfhearted form of suicide. It was a freedom more than a pleasure, perhaps even a polemic, a revenge against history. Still, there had to be love somewhere in it too—if not love of a particular man, then love of mankind, love of life, love of love, of anything.
In a way I was just as inhibited as they were by my upbringing, which condemned me to a combination of boredom and desire. Like most young men, I hadn’t yet learned how to just be with girls, to exist alongside them, to make friends—and so once my desire was satisfied, I was bored. To make it worse, I suffered from a kind of boyhood chivalry and politeness that kept me from being natural, so that I was acting all the time, and that was fatiguing. I was guiltily aware that I was using girls badly—yet to use them well would have been to love them, and I didn’t have the time or space in my life for that. For all these reasons, there was always an aura of disappointment between us as we kept renewing a bad bargain.
In Portnoy’s Complaint, Portnoy says that underneath their skirts girls all have cunts. What he didn’t say—and this was his trouble, his real complaint—was that underneath their skirts they also had souls. When they were undressed, I saw their souls as well as their cunts. They wore their souls like negligés that they never took off. And one man in a million knows how to make love to a soul.
Sex in 1947 was like one of those complicated toys that comes disassembled, in one hundred pieces, and without instructions. It would be almost impossible for someone today to understand how far we were from explicit ideas like pleasure or gratification. We were more in the situation of Columbus wondering whether the world was flat or round. Because they didn’t know how to make love, girls made gestures. They offered their idiosyncrasies as a kind of passion. In their nervousness, they brought out other, totally dissociated forms of extremity. They gave me their secret literature, their repressed poems and stories, their dances.
/> One of the things we’ve lost is the terrific coaxing that used to go on between men and women, the man pleading with a girl to sleep with him and the girl pleading with him to be patient. I remember the feeling of being incandescent with desire, blessed with it, of talking, talking wonderfully, like singing an opera. It was a time of exaltation, this coaxing, as if I was calling up out of myself a better and more deserving man. Perhaps this is as pure a feeling as men and women ever have.
What an effort we used to make. And how gladly, joyously, we made it. Nothing was too much, too preposterous. I remember one night, or rather a morning, a freezing January morning at about 2:00 A.M.—I was running through the dark, sleeping streets, running as fast as I could. I was wearing only a sweater, and I had no socks on. I didn’t want to stop to put on socks. There was a girl in my apartment who insisted that I wear a condom and I was afraid she would change her mind and leave before I could get back from the all-night drugstore, which was half a mile away. I kept thinking of her as I ran, I saw her rising from the bed, pulling on her stockings, shaking her dress down over her head. I had wanted to take her dress or her shoes with me so she couldn’t leave, but I thought this might antagonize her. Though she wasn’t a girl whom I loved, I would have done anything for her that night. It was crazy, and I was aware that I was acting crazy as I ran through the streets—yet I kept running. Until we became sophisticated about it, sex was everything Freud said it was.
The energy of unspent desire, of looking forward to sex, was an immense current running through American life. It was so much more powerful then because it was delayed, cumulative, and surrounded by doubt. It was fueled by failures, as well as by successes. The force of it would have been enough to send a million rockets to the moon. The structure of desire was an immense cathedral arching inside of us. While sex was almost always disappointing in retrospect, the promise of it ennobled and abstracted us; it made us pensive.
Before sex was explained to us in the sixties, we had to explain it to ourselves, and our versions were infinitely better. Sex seemed so much more extreme before it was explained to us—we reached back into our imaginations and brought out the unheard-of. It was like the sex jokes I was told when we moved from New Orleans to Brooklyn. I was seven years old and when I went out into the street to play, the other kids told me sex jokes. Apart from the fact that I didn’t know anything about sex, these jokes all had a surrealistic cast. They contained elements of fairy tales, science fiction, and horror movies.
Perhaps sex is most wonderful when it preserves a bit of that grotesqueness we all feel in the beginning. It’s the surrealistic moments that frighten and elate you with a kind of impractical, unenactable love, a love that you can’t bring down to earth. I remember a girl, for example, a modern dancer, who had studied with Martha Graham. One day in class Martha Graham had said, Girls, you must breathe with your vaginas. And this girl made up her mind to do this with me. She thought that if it was true for dancing, it must be true for sex too. What could be more natural? She told me that she had tried breathing with her vagina when she was alone and it was a marvelous feeling, like being lighter than air, like filling her lungs with sex. I was very turned on by the idea and I did my best to cooperate. But though we were energetic, it never happened. She was stubborn and she was strong, but at least she gave up. No, she said, her voice full of regret, I can’t do it with you. She lay there thinking; her face was a diagram of thinking. Then she got out of bed and took up a position in front of the bookcase. I had painted the bookcase black and she looked magnificent against the black and the books. She drew herself up very straight—she was tall and muscular. I could see her gathering herself, her muscles rippling. I can’t do it with you, she said, but I can do it by myself. Watch—give me a minute or two. She spread her feet a little and relaxed her knees. Now, she said, I’m doing it now. And she did—I saw her and there wasn’t the slightest doubt in my mind.
With a girl, there was always the definition of terms: what getting into bed meant to her and what it could mean to me. Why are we doing this? she would ask, and I would have to make up a lie because I didn’t know the answer. As we pressed up against the idea of love, as we felt its heat and blinked in its light, the personal and the philosophical met in a blur.
I would be seized with an incredible sincerity, and while I knew that this sincerity was temporary, there was a sense in which it was eternal too. The girl and I were like two bows bent all the way back, with only one arrow between us. Seduction was a touching and beautiful genre, the most heartfelt literature of the self. At such times, I saw myself as I might be, as lovable. And I think the girl saw herself at her best too, as inspiring.
There was a wonderful embarrassment about it all, a moral nakedness. A contemporary writer, a psychotherapist, defined embarrassment as radiance that doesn’t know what to do with itself—and that’s what we had. We had radiance. When people are embarrassed, it’s as if they’ve fallen out of their compulsive rhythms and are framed for a moment in an absolute, undefended stillness.
Undressing was a drama in itself. A girl standing with her arms behind her back, at the clasp of her bra, had some of the beauty of a crucifixion. She also looked as if she was hiding something behind her, a gift. Pausing, gazing past me into the middle distance, her arms still back, handcuffed by hesitation and desire, she was trying to see the future or the end of love. And when at last her breasts sprang loose, she looked down at them with as much amazement as I did.
When a girl took off her underpants in 1947, she was more naked than any woman before her had ever been. It was as if time or history itself had been evolving toward her nakedness, yearning for it. The men of my generation had thought obsessively about her body, had been elaborately prepared for it, led up to it by the great curve of civilization. Her body was on the tip of our minds, a pinup on the brink of our progress, our freedom. We’d carried it, like a gun, all through the war. The nakedness of women was such an anticipated object that it was out in front of American culture, like the radiator ornament on the hood of a car. We were at that point in our social evolution where we had taken in as much awareness of women’s bodies as we could stand without going mad. We were a nation of voyeurs.
Perhaps, when she had undressed, a girl would apologize for her body, say that it was too thin or fat, that her breasts were too small. It was always she who had to measure up, who had to justify men’s furious imaginings. If she had dared to refer to it, she might have apologized for her sex—its wetness, its pungency, its hairiness, its peculiar, almost furtive location. She might end her undressing with a little shrug, as if to say, This is all I have.
I loved the awkwardness of these girls. There were times when it broke my heart. Afraid to take any sort of initiative, they hovered and fumbled, loitered and digressed. This awkwardness was, for me, a kind of sublime, an unconscious statement of their innocence. I remember a girl whose awkwardness took the form of stepping in dog shit in the street when we were on the way to my apartment. It happened three or four times and I asked her, Don’t you see where you’re going? But that was precisely what she didn’t want to do. She didn’t want to see. Stepping in dog shit was like retreating all the way back to the pregenital. It was a proof of her inadvertence, her sublimity.
One girl in particular sums up that time for me. She was a perfect example of what I mean when I say that sex used to be more individual, more personally marked, than it is now. She stands out beyond the others not because she was more original than they were, but because a combination of circumstances allowed her to spin out her idiosyncracy, to find what it needed.
Her name was Virginia and she was a rich girl who had come to New York to study art—not to paint or sculpt, but study, to be with art, to live near it. When she arrived in the Village, she made a great hit because she had high cheekbones. In 1947, high cheekbones were the best thing a girl could have, better than big breasts or great legs. Cubism had reached the human face and people in the Village l
iked to talk about bone structure.
What impressed me almost as much as her cheekbones was a remark Virginia made the first time we talked. She had told me that she was from a coastal town in New England and, trying to imagine the circumstances of her life, I asked her how close her house was to the water.
Quite close, she said. Close enough so that when I lay in bed at night with the windows open I can distinguish the sound of the water lapping against the hull of my boat from that of the other boats. I thought this quite a fine distinction, like a piece of aquatic literary criticism. She had a low voice and a clipped, toothy way of talking.
On the strength of her cheekbones and that remark, I took her out. But her conversation was so polite, so relentlessly general, that I couldn’t get up the necessary momentum, couldn’t set in motion the kind of rhetoric that would have made it possible to ask her to come home with me. It was not until the fourth time we went out that I asked her. I gave up any idea of leading up to it and just asked. I hadn’t even touched her, but I said, I want you to stay with me tonight.
Without appearing to hear what I said she told me that she had to exercise her dog. She had a saluki, a very fast and elegant breed that had to be run every day. I thought this meant taking the dog to Washington Square and throwing a stick, but Virginia had more style than that. We got into her MG, one of the early, rakish models, and the dog leapt gracefully onto the folded canvas top.
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