Herself (54 page)

Sadism is humorous, but some of its sallies—like Maureen’s bloody abortion, effected
commedia dell’arte
style by the black C. Clark Peebles, are more innately humorous than others—more so than say, the infinitely extended torture of the captain by the sergeant, which may or may not be a burlicue of James Jones. A different flavor hangs over the two; Maureen’s scene is the funniness of the birth-process deranged; the long incident between the men has the emotional timbre peculiar to torture, and to that old Kafka-Gide staple, the gratuitous act. The sergeant, throughout all, is true to his back-home love, Amos. Amos is a virgin, a sleepwalker, a Greek and Latin scholar whose simplicity, near birdbrain, has an undeniable something; people wash his feet—he is a catalyst. Is he Jesus, or merely that pure golden boy, our heroine? Or “any man’s son,” the ideational fantasy of all male marriages which will not settle for poodles? Women are a bad show in general, but like Maureen (a knockout portrait of a knocked-up type) can be likeable if they belong to the bad show of things—and if they are the butt and admit it.

But what is most arresting is the continuously off-key sexuality. Off-key, not merely in relation to the dominant symbols in the “major” sexuality of the world, but to any. The body processes all seem to run together: Mrs. Masterson’s coronary, Maureen’s abortion, Cabot Wright’s hot flushes, all bear a less particularised sense of these than they do of some intimacy they share with each other; they are what the body does when it has no fixed image of its parts, or when it will not allow its parts to have separated ones; blood comes from any aperture, and every part of the body is one; even the sadism is not violence but violent effort—a straining to be. Clearly we are participating in what is beyond customary sexuality of
any
kind, or maybe prior to it. And when the fucking stops (if it has been that) certainly nowhere does it much matter who fucks who. (Or marries who, or lives with who—socially we are beyond that.) Here is no mere homosexual code-writing, no Roman Spring in which a middle-aged woman may really be a menopausal man. The scrimmage is everywhere. And it is not of the appetite.

In Albee’s
Tiny Alice
there is a moment when an image fails of the horror it asks, because it does not touch the predominate response: When the Cardinal reminds the Lawyer that his school nickname was Hyena, “Did we not discover about the hyena … that failing all other food it would dine on offal … and that it devours the wounded and the dead. We found that the most shocking: the dead. But we were young. And what horrified us most … was that to devour its dead, scavenged prey, it would often chew into it THROUGH THE ANUS???” (after which the script reads:
Both silent, breathing a little hard
). Lawyer (finally; softly: “Bastard.”)

The capital letters are not mine. They would not be “ours” in general, I think. In the raw world of the “tochus,” the “bum,” the “backside,” the “asshole,” the anus is a somewhat mock-erogenous zone (being a less used one) not as all-important to straight sex as it is to buggery. Since the anus
is
for offal, the hyena’s aim, to “us,” might seem more accurate than not. Whatever, if horror was intended, it failed; muff horror and you may get laughter, as occurred the night I saw the play. Whatever the Cardinal’s insinuation, it belonged like the play’s wisecracks, to a world of the “in”; straights in the audience of theater or books may well understand homosexual symbol while quite unable to honor it with emotion. (If that hyena had gone THROUGH THE COCK or THROUGH THE VAGINA, it might have been different—but that would be in another country, another play.) In
A Delicate Balance,
when Agnes accuses her husband: “We
could
have had another son: we could have tried. But no … those months—or was it a year—? … I think it was a year, when you spilled yourself on my belly, sir?”—the audience does shock, not only at what is not usually said in the middle-class theater, but somehow also at the over-elaborate phrasing, something in it not female to male. As in Agnes’s rejection of her daughter’s confidences, wondering if she herself would be better off as a man: “I shall try to hear you out, but if I feel myself changing in the middle of your … rant, you will have to forgive my male prerogative, if I become uncomfortable, look at my watch or jiggle the change in my pocket …”—where the shock is both at the terms of such a refusal, between mother and daughter—and at a transliteration of the sexes which seems not to lie in the “transferred heads” (and tails) of human imaginative desire, but to be author-enforced, according to some code he is following.

Shock is valuable in the theater, and in literature—but scale is important to it, subjectivity changes it and repetition dulls it—if it cannot attain to poetry. Much present-day drama moves in terms of the simple actions under or against the accepted symbols of things, or as in Pinter, in showing the actual simplicities of the symbols by which people move. Albee’s strength comes, a lot of it, from these fresh alignments, coolly shocking to us not because they are sexual, but because they are off-base.

And they are not of the appetite. Rather, they are the comedy-of-error tricks, or incomplete tragedies of those who, for all their apertures, have no outlet in generation. Yet are not “impotent.”

As heirs of Freud, we are used to seeing sexual impotence as a theme of life, in our friends, our books and in ourselves, in those husbands and lovers, who are the heroes second-class of a Laurentianism in reverse, in those spinsters whose bed is ice. And we are familiar with the “larger” litry themes that maybe come of it, anything from what “the rat-race” does ta ya, to the Identity Hunts of those who “cannot love.” (Barren women are rather duller, dramaturgically speaking. Except in those biblical milieus where primogeniture is still of the first importance; we tend to see them as victims of the cell rather than the fates, who merely need to go to a good gynecologist.) In a society under protest homosexuals need not feel as alienated as once. They can refuse to have the “children” of its’ ideas. Leaving the sexual refusal with its attendant Freudian dramas, far behind. All those little boys who can’t get born out of the spilled seed of the fathers, or who are revealed never to have existed except in the minds of their mothers, all those innocents dying on the milk-train of other peoples’ charity, are psychodramas going over the old personal revelations—with here and there a hint of the world’s disjointedness. In recent Purdy, it’s a clean sweep into the non-sex of satire, or the “a pox on all of it” of social protest—a somersault over everything, into an impersonality that shock-deadens, fizzes out, sniggering all the way, into down-at-heel hatreds, crudely Gothic humors, rudely interrupted by prissy echoes of the once liveable world. Sex as hostility, as humoresque, is here only the beginning of it. It would be futile to ask of the people in these books that they be more than cardboard, or their blood more than the plasma of the world’s generally laughable sores. Or to ask the style of expression—“amid the industrial world”—that it not waver as “fitfully” as the jewel on the finger of its millionaire. Waver it does; this pen feels less for the word than for the situation, and has no other focus for which it so much cares; it will hunt the ridiculous anywhere. (With, in
Malcolm
; perhaps the last gasp of a gravely Americanized Firbankery, fallen short of those silver flashes from the adorable to the ineffable, but with the same mordant method: giggle-pastiche.) The seriousness is in the intelligence—and feeling is anthropophagous. (Compare it with Bellow, in which intellect and feeling bleed
together.)

Is this “white” comedy? One reels out of these books with the inner ear disturbed—not sure what has been intentional. With a sense that some of the failure may be in ourselves. We are still new to the non-directed. We would prefer though to be able to trust this intelligence more not to demean itself as it sometimes does—either by loving its personae too much, or too often the same ones. The barrenness of the world, as theme, is dignity enough. When a little special sex creeps in, or its propaganda, the satire turns silly. For the modest proposal of this satire at its grim-slim base is that
all
of us are eatable, from the anus if need be. When that intent falters, then what comes—in goblet or glass—is farce curdled by serious intentions. Non-ridiculousness won’t do, in this exhausted air. Where it fails is when it inadvertently reminds us that all is not barren, and all is not ridiculous.

So, as in the old movie, we have circled
la ronde
—except that one doesn’t exit the sideshows of art merely like any good pair taking childie away from the freaks of Eighth Avenue, back to the redempted norm of Queens. The literary thicket is thank God the same; no girl scout exits as entered, only an hour older, with everybody found. Or with a fistful of conclusions for the next troupe’s safe conduct.

Do we live in an age of artistic license? I think so. I hope so. I find it exhilarating. One has only to look at the movies, the films, the ceenaymah—which are always so helpfully the
déjà vu
of the arts. Okay—of all the
other
arts. Literary people resent the lens because it is always so much their shadow, always dressing up in their last year’s thoughts and saying “Look what
I
found!” We should be happier to see change so neatly documented. And at such a pace. Drag documentaries, pussy galore—and they only discovered heterosexuality last year!

At the moment, it may be that the really lively use of sex-as-theme and sex-as-comment is on the stage side of literature. Where an
Indira Gandhi’s Daring Device
—whose variously whirling copulations included a Marie Montez in drag, a satyriac with a yardlong penis and a bedstyle choral ballet—made sufficiently rousing comment on India’s food-birthrate lockstep to draw protest from that government. Where the “chicken-in-the-basket” routine in John Guare’s spoof on the American commuter,
Muzeeka
, could draw praise from the
New Yorker
—if only in paraphrase. And where, in
Futz
, a piglet-incest tale very reminiscent of an old one of Coppard’s, the La Mama troupe demonstrated, as Stanislavsky often had, that “method” in itself might be a kind of literature.

In the academic “serious” American novel—which often means as written by humorous professors—the black-comedy sex-routines are at the moment still drearily grinding and bumping in a kind of ritual macadamese. (See Barth, where the goings-on might be called university-perverse.) The “popular” novel, carrying cash between its legs instead of metaphor, is often funnier. Abstract expressionism is never “over” in any art, but as the dominance in literature of the moment, it has had its day; as practiced, it is already second-rate. Man, whelmed by wars, by an astrological perspective almost too vast for him to carry, has periods when he cannot see himself as important enough to bother with—and great human perspectives come of this. But the figure willy-nilly always re-emerges again. In literature of the past, this has meant “character.” But fixed character, as novels have known it, is now historical, no more possible than old melody is to music. What is authentic in environmental reality, and what is pastiche there, changes constantly. We are in one of the great eras of confusion partly because everything in the environment itself makes us daily more aware of that. McLuhan’s acceptance of this was a paraphrase of what every tabloid-reader and televiewer, every purchaser of Tide and
Time
already knew in his bones.

The arts had long since phrased it. Since their impulse is always to spy out the organized in the confused, the philosophy in the flux of the now, they will undoubtedly once again rephrase the human figure—along with the society which will also. I should be surprised if Sexes One Two Three ever totally disappear from it—except of course under the dignified pressure of the millennia. But in this country and century, their present frameworks and boundaries well may—under the assault of more than art, more than literature. Sexual themes find their best proportion whenever
other
concerns overtake them.

Literature itself takes strength from its own catholicity. (How many times in recent years has the pictorial been predicted as its killer—yet it is merely the magazine that dies, not the Word.) In the end, it has no trouble taking anything into it. Or expelling anything. In practice, female writers may take their sensibility out of mothballs, homosexuals may broaden their spectrum past hatred, and males may narrow their fear of being otherwise; all the sexes may begin writing like each other, as with the journalists. (Not that I would necessarily fancy it.) Sexual demagoguery and cannibalism may pass into such bland ententes that their era may even be regretted. Or will sexual emphases shift altogether, as we pass out of the white ages into the era of blackthink? I doubt it. Sexual blackthink so far seems to be conventionalised right out of the departments of whitethink; only the language is more interesting. In Cleaver, the sex is tired, or the same; in Fanon the medical approach is. The originality of the black man seems to lie in his blackness; as with anyone, their best essence lies in what they humanly are.

In American society, that meretricious sexual image which it had made out of the pioneer platitudes, and which was to be direct ancestor of the maw-and-paw, covered-wagon sexuality of a Hemingway, is now more and more identified with middle-age or beyond; the young are no longer that provincial anywhere. Their hetero image is certainly changing, well beyond the mere costumery. In the colleges, it is often fashionable for a girl to have had a little Lesbian experience and a male a little of the homosexual; it is chic to seek these as part of general experience. And in all the group therapies—the new touch-me disciplines, a vaguer, more diffuse sexuality is the likely result, if only as being more patriotic to everybody. Heterosexuality may not quickly disappear. But it could be the
last
suffragette.

What sex is art anyway? From art’s annals, what we most want from it is to be taken into the involute of life. In that, we are all ultimately—square. But from those annals also, the genius of art is that when in search of itself it is always, part of the time—transvestite.