And thus the work of vengeance: after almost three decades of uneasy cohabitation, an AWOL husband was not to be forgotten, let alone forgiven. Hutchins’s bawdiness, one might venture, was a central element in the psychic payback: What better way for a cast-off spouse to embarrass Mr. Perfect than by publishing smutty novels? (“The permissive doctrines of Freud,” intones one of Robert Maynard Hutchins’s biographers, “were anathema” to the sober educator and “the sensual works of Lawrence one of the things . . . wrong with the world.”) The tactic got results: Hutchins’s A Diary of Love—a rather too whimsical exploration of the erotic fantasies of a young woman undergoing a cure for tuberculosis in an Arizona sanatorium—was very nearly prosecuted for obscenity in Illinois in 1950. In Victorine Hutchins is more artful, but no less outrageous. Even as she regales the reader with provocative material—the heroine’s juvenile visions of beautiful “Jesus God” (in “pale blue diaper”), her Lolita-like encounters with various sexed-up local tramps and hired men, or the lascivious three-way tickling match she gets into with “dearest Costello” and Lydia Van Zandt, the blowsy teenaged tomboy who lives down the street—one can imagine the novelist relishing, at least in daydream, a pompous ex-husband’s discomfiture.
Yet it’s hard not to see too the ex-wife’s rage and regret. Toward the end of Victorine Hutchins embeds what is, I believe, a kind of melancholy self-portrait: in the figure of Magda Smith, the attractive and mysterious newcomer to the village who in the book’s climactic scene (and only real piece of extended “plotting”) seduces the youthful Costello. Thin, dark, short-haired, and made up like a demimondaine, Magda has been abandoned by a caddish husband and according to village gossips is “sitting out” the finalization of her divorce. She fills the empty summer days eccentrically, playing with the local children (who adore her) and demonstrating “furious” high dives—jackknifes and backflips and great walloping half nelsons—off the big platform at the outdoor public swimming pool. (“The water boiled but there was no splash; not giving a damn, the dives, that had been only fair when she was happy and unconsciously afraid of losing that happiness by sudden death, were perfect, and the parents gasped and the children cheered as her wet head popped up exactly where her ankles a second ago had disappeared, so straight as an arrow were her dives.”) With her kohl-rimmed eyes, scarlet toenails, and seductive laugh, Magda brightens the small-town scene around her “with primary colours.”
But Magda’s nights are another matter:
At night quantities of sleeping pills did not censor the insidious return of him, that Smith, who had despoiled her and left her to rot, and she moaned and tossed in a nightmare of ambivalence, love and hatred, spellbound as a spider helpless in a shining web made of her own spittle, crucified and naked. Exhausted in the late morning, she drank three cups of black coffee and repainted her cheeks, looking at herself in the mirror and said out loud, “Manslaughter!”
Rot is a strong word: you can only write such a paragraph, perhaps, if you’ve lived it. (Here and elsewhere in Victorine, a certain baroque female anguish, painfully compressed into sentences, can sometimes bring Djuna Barnes to mind.) Yet Hutchins also reimagines—and rewrites—her own story through Magda’s. Almost as soon as she grants Magda (in the form of Costello) a boy lover so virginal and ravishing one wants to cry just thinking about him—playing tennis in new-pressed flannels, snowy white sneakers, and “spotless T shirt” Costello is a sort of teenage Lohengrin—she reunites deserted wife with errant husband. Though Magda’s return to Smith shatters Costello—she leaves town without warning after she and Smith reconcile—we must assume it gives both her and her creator some measure of gratification. Considered in the light of Hutchins’s own life, Magda’s cryptic triumph seems like pure wish fulfillment. Not only is Magda allowed to deflower a luscious boy-god, she gets him back too—Satan in Slacks, the one you love enough to kill, or be killed by.
None of which is to say that Hutchins’s novel need be read solely as displaced autobiography. Any potboiler can supply “autobiographical” interest, but if a work of fiction is to live on beyond the decade of its composition it needs to offer some more probing human truth. Like similar forays by Barnes, Jane Bowles, or Carson McCullers, Victorine makes its claim on us, I think, precisely because it transcends whatever idiosyncratic psychic turmoil it may once have registered. No, Hutchins will never please readers who judge Flaubertian self-effacement essential to literary greatness. She’s far too present in her book—too much of a madcap and a tease. Yet along with all the oddity and narcissism, Victorine has its own feral brilliance. Whatever else she was—embarrassment, goad, erotomane—Hutchins the writer was not, in the end, an amateur.
The brilliance is at least threefold. The book’s first claim is broadly literary-historical: Victorine is a quirky, yet pliant, example of the classic American bildungsroman—one everywhere quickened by surreal touches and bathed in a florid Kodachrome fifties glow. (Gleaming with metallic reds, gold and copper highlights, umbrous browns, and warm peach flesh tones, Hutchins’s color schemes make for the same kind of sumptuous, saturated mise-en-scène one finds in the film melodramas of Douglas Sirk.) Though no doubt peculiar in some of its details, Hutchins’s portrait of adolescence and its intensities places her firmly in the cherishable American line of Twain, Cather, Salinger, Updike, Capote, McCullers, and Welty. Victorine is a precocious child-woman in the bittersweet mode of Frankie in The Member of the Wedding: intrigued by adult secrets but terrified to plumb them too deeply. At sixteen, her brother Costello is further along in the developmental process—male, stronger, less intimidated—yet has in his own way just as much innocence to lose. (The cinematic connection here might be with Nicholas Ray’s 1955 Rebel Without a Cause. Costello has the same masculine softness communicated by James Dean in the role of Jim Stark.) By contrasting Victorine’s resistance with Costello’s vulnerability, Hutchins gives the conventional allegory of emotional growth an androgynous double twist, dramatizing anew the curious stuttering process by which girls become women and boys become men.
The novel’s second claim might loosely be called a philosophical one. Like every worthwhile novelist from Defoe to Coetzee, Hutchins offers a bold and sometimes painful endorsement of psychological truth-telling. Little Victorine L’Hommedieu’s favorite “man-god” may be Jesus Christ (at least till someone better comes along), but Maude Hutchins’s seems to have been Sigmund Freud, the early twentieth century’s painful-truth-teller par excellence. Freud’s popular reputation was at its zenith in America in the 1940s and 1950s and everything about Hutchins’s fiction suggests she was a true believer. (The contumely of “squares,” including her ex-husband, no doubt made such allegiance all the more piquant.) In the admirable frankness with which she treats Victorine’s central topic—the acquisition of sexual knowledge—Hutchins both adapts the theory in her own antic manner and pays homage to Freud’s eminently unromantic view of human nature.
Granted, one’s heart sinks a bit as the fact hits home. Victorine is full of what used to be called “Freudian” jokes and symbols—starting with an outré little jest in the title itself. Besides being a name, the term victorine—or so the Oxford English Dictionary informs us—is also a word for a “kind of fur tippet worn by ladies, fastened in front of the neck and having two loose ends hanging down.” Hutchins, alas, knows all about it. Midway through the novel, having just fled an unsettling Sapphic encounter with Lydia Van Zandt (whose crush on Costello doesn’t keep her from horsing around with his little sister), Victorine is shown afterward in her room, pensively examining an old doll. The doll is one of a dozen or so relegated to a toy chest—“semi-clothed, naked, sprawling uncomfortably, indecently intertwined . . . as if an atrocity had buried them”—and forgotten about till now:
As if in a dream of an earlier self Victorine lifted the prettiest one gently out and hugged it to her breast. Fishing about among the others she found a jacket, a bonnet, a tippet and a muff, with all of which she adorned the senseless doll. She
washed its face and combed its hair. After that she carefully undressed it again, speaking all the while in a caressing undertone, and wrapped it in a shawl. On tiptoe she showed it the sunset and then, careful not to let the little rocker squeak on a loose board, she rocked the doll to sleep. Its eyes shut down with a click and she kissed its slippery cheek.
When her toying is interrupted by someone calling her name, “she couldn’t have felt guiltier if she had been caught naked in the most self-indulgent act of all.”
In dream and fantasy, Freud proposed in Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex, fur typically stands for “the hairiness of the mons veneris.” Fiddling with her doll’s victorine—and used thus the word sounds lewd enough—is Victorine somehow replaying the scene with Lydia? Or worse yet: playing with herself? The coarse symbolism at once underlines the pubescent Victorine’s guilty pleasure in masturbation—the “spot thrill” she discovers every night “between her legs”—and hints at her psychological dilemma. Like Dora in Freud’s famous case history, Victorine is “lost in her feelings as thoroughly as in the backwoods”—caught between her curiosity about Eros and her fear of it. For a girl-child suspended in this ambiguous transitional phase—the reactionary, stalled-out part of early adolescence Freud dubbed the latency period—a weirdly sexualized doll would seem to be the perfect sublimation-toy. Though Victorine knows quite well what’s what—she’s watched hens and roosters copulating in her parents’ farmyard after all—she nonetheless retreats into babyish disavowal whenever possible. It’s all very Psych 101—and spectacularly vulgar.
Yet Hutchins has deeper insights to impart too. Tippets not-withstanding, when it came to delineating the intimate psychic forces shaping bourgeois family life, Hutchins, like Freud, lacked neither courage or candor. In Victorine the seemingly conventional L’Hommedieu home turns out to be a veritable hothouse of “unspeakable” desires: Ozzie and Harriet meets Totem and Taboo. Which isn’t to say that any of the grown-ups in the novel are prepared to admit it. Parents come off badly in Victorine, as both repressive and profoundly stupid. Thus the unflattering portrait of Victorine and Costello’s father, Homer, a hypocritical philanderer whose ultra-banal life motto is “put nothing in writing.” Even as he debates how to shut up his ex-mistress—she’s come to the house in the hope of blackmailing him—he remains farcically oblivious to the sexy agitation evident in both of his older offspring. (Too young to be absorbed into the general confusion, Victorine and Costello’s three-year-old brother, Dennis, “a little ape-man with a flower between his legs,” serves as a sort of putto or Cupid figure in the novel—an infantine emblem of Libido. Hutchins clearly adores him: “Immodest, noisy, unclean, he had not caught on to the niceties at all that might have made him acceptable to a sister as fastidious as Victorine.”)
Though treated with more sympathy, Homer’s invalid wife, Allison, seems scarcely more perceptive than her spouse: she has long blinded herself to her husband’s duplicities and taken permanently to her chaise longue. She’s a frigid, second-tier Clarissa Dalloway type, solipsistic and “unpossessable,” but without that character’s gaiety and cool intelligence. (“Homer was her only blunder. How she loved him!”) She is bored and irritated by her growing children and has no idea what’s going on either inside or outside the family circle. When at novel’s end Homer’s cover is blown—all his dull mendacities revealed—Allison, we learn, goes “into a decline,” though it’s hard to see how someone who’s been flatlining for years could actually decline any further.
Hutchins, like some nutty bohemian aunt, has no time for such inertness. She’s the Anti-Parent, a muckraker, a lady on a Truth Mission. Her motto might as well be “put everything in writing”—above all, the tragicomic pathos of the American nuclear family. “Dearest Costello” provides her with the most lucid way into the latter subject, and from the middle of the novel on she pays him ever more conspicuous attention. This authorial shift away from Victorine, it should be admitted, is not entirely unwelcome. Once you “get” Victorine’s problem (I’m not ready to grow up yet!) and track a few of her hysterical refusals, there’s not too much else to learn about her. Her sporadic encounters with local oddballs like “Fool Fred,” simpleton son of the village grande dame, have a surreal, Alice in Wonderland quality to them, but can’t be said to be emotionally involving. Victorine is suspended in a kind of mental cocoon, lost in her “self-centered dream,” and after a while even Hutchins seems to tire of her. Certainly the reader does.
Costello, by contrast, is both sharply attuned to others and quietly thrumming with fascinating ardors. Hutchins, predictably enough, empathizes fully with this “tempestuous son of Homer.” Though shy and polite to his elders, Costello is fraught with Oedipal tumult: when Homer warns him not to get Lydia Van Zandt “in trouble,” Costello is so irrationally incensed that he moves impulsively as if to strike him. (“It was patricide he wished for.”) He stops himself before delivering a blow, but Homer, shocked out of his usual lumpen insensibility, has to stare his son down to preserve paternal control, his eyes as “wide and unswerving as a dead man’s.” No surprise, really, that the elder L’Hommedieu gets knocked off by novel’s end: like some court-appointed guardian of the Unconscious, Hutchins takes care of it on Costello’s behalf.
At the same time, absent any love from Allison, Costello lusts haplessly after various sexy mother surrogates, the first and worst of them being his father’s own cast-off mistress, Millie. When the nefarious Millie, hoping to “get even with Homer,” lures Costello to her flat in Chapter VII and tries (unsuccessfully) to seduce him, she plays low-rent Jocasta to his dumbstruck Oedipus. Dazed by her overture (“as if she had given him a Mickey Finn”) he manages to wriggle away from her toward the door, at which point she excoriates him with positively primordial venom:
Millie gave a raucous, mean laugh. “Your father didn’t have any trouble!” she said. He had gently opened the door, she knew he was really leaving, and she wanted to get at him, hurt him bad. “Your father. . .” she repeated, “your father was a man—he . . . why, you little fairy!”
Ouch and ouch again. It will take all the Good-Mother ministrations of Magda Smith to rectify the ruthless snip-snip performed here.
Yet of all the erotic “truths” exposed in Victorine the most striking, if not sensational, involve Costello and Victorine. The bond between the L’Hommedieu siblings is from the start a paradoxical one—at once lyrical and bumptious, chaste and carnal. It inspires some of Hutchins’s most subtle writing. Still, even the twenty-first-century reader may be shocked by how flagrantly she eroticizes the relationship. His other fixations notwithstanding, Costello is plainly in love with Victorine, and Victorine, in her own dopey and half-conscious way, knows it. Hutchins for her part seems to delight in the sheer perversity of the situation. Almost as soon Costello is introduced—at the end of Chapter I—she plunges in with her usual dizzying indiscretion:
His sister’s beauty teased him. He longed to find her weakness and put his finger on it. He wanted at the moment to muss her up, turn her upside down, pull her hair and chew her ears as he used to when they were small. How she had fought back! And then how suddenly she had become limp in his arms, her eyes darkening, her wet mouth shining and he would let go of her, frightened.
No avoiding the disturbing news here: tickling one’s sister can turn—in a single uncanny instant—to forbidden passion. Whether it will remains to be seen: the point is it can. “It would be a long time,” the narrator comments, and “this story well over, before Costello would love anyone as much as he had, and did, his little sister.”
A bit later on, rather like a salacious George Eliot, Hutchins explains why Victorine has sought to bring such scary-delicious play to an end:
How did she know that the time had come for them to separate?. . . . Well, their childish games had given Victorine, perhaps, an insight, or else, as her love for him blossomed under the intimacy of their rough-housing, the play that gives a skin trust, better t
han anything else, brother and sister blood kin, she withdrew because it was too much for her. The intensity of her look, the twin veils that shuttered her eyes like a dog’s before he sleeps, the sudden rigidity of her body under Costello’s violent and imaginative play, had frightened him, too, and once as he had straddled her, her hips locked between his legs as if in a vice, his knees deep in the chilly marshland by the bay, she had gone suddenly quite limp and lost consciousness, and he never attempted to scalp her again. The two red Indians had walked home subdued, on either side of the road, without a word. And love, if love it was, Victorine searched for elsewhere, a less violent, less bodily love, but it wasn’t easy, and the dark winding passages in her mind remained dark, winding, and secret passages. And she put aside her body, as it were, for someone else, much later, who might, or might not, resemble her dearest brother, and who might or might not awaken the almost spontaneous response that came to her in Costello’s wild brotherly embrace.
This is how repression starts, Hutchins suggests: when two red Indians realize they can’t scalp each other anymore.
But one should not miss the insight embedded here and everywhere in Victorine: that the incestuous contacts of infancy and childhood (and they are nothing other than that) provide the model, quite literally, for sensuality itself. “Skin trust”—the feeling of physical plenitude that is simply “better than anything else”—is passed on directly from parent to child or between “brother and sister blood kin.” Can such primal arousal ever be forgotten? Not likely, according to Hutchins: it functions as a sort of necessary psychic imprinting. Though the older Victorine will likely suppress any memory of Costello’s “wild brotherly embrace,” both his love and that embrace, the narrator predicts, will shape her adult desires. The logic is, again, impeccably Freudian, but no less controversial for that. Indeed, in this brother-sister variant on Freud’s celebrated (and much-reviled) family romance—that “parable too hot to print”—sibling amorosity finds perhaps its most unabashed literary champion since Byron or Emily Brontë.
Victorine Page 2
