The Correspondence Artist (13 page)

She says her fingers inside me are for her, not for me. She says she's imagining her cock deep inside of me. Sometimes when I send her dirty pictures, or messages about sex, she'll tell me I've given her a hard-on. Tzipi often refers to her own sexual excitation in masculine terms. Actually, sometimes I do that myself. In fact, I just got my own hard-on thinking about Tzipi's.

 

 

 

I'm not sure what she talks about with her analyst. I imagine they've discussed the mirror stage. It makes perfect sense, of course, that she sees a Lacanian. And yet I can't help but wonder sometimes if this is the best approach, from a therapeutic perspective. Because one of the things that seems to preoccupy her most is the sad truth of that infinite chain of signifiers – the infinite replaceability of her lovers. She's fundamentally a very committed person. Her love for Asher is profound. She still loves Hannah, in spite of everything. Pitzi too, of course. She's a dedicated friend to her circle of progressive and sensitive intellectuals. She's taken risks to defend them. But she's a very seductive person, and even though she complains on occasion about the bother or even terror of men and women falling in love with her, she can't really resist seducing them.

Especially young people. Now there's a little something for the analyst to chew on.

In this respect, Tzipi bears an uncanny resemblance to Simone de Beauvoir. There are a lot of stories about both her and Sartre. Of course she kind of told one of them herself in
She Came to Stay
. You know, the young woman they seduced and shared and then belittled wrote a pretty bitter response herself. There are also some rumors about the adopted daughter who published the letters. This is one reason I wonder about her assertion that she was “carrying out her mother's will” when she published her letters to Algren with all the embarrassing orthographic and grammatical errors she'd expressly said she wanted excised. Anyway, I can't say I'm sorry the letters were published this way.

In January of 1948, Simone de Beauvoir wrote to Algren a description of a New Year's party she'd been to. There was a charming fifteen-year-old girl there, and Simone describes the way she danced. She says that she imagines that if she were a man, she'd be a “very wicked” one because she'd surely take great pleasure in seducing and making love to young girls, and then she'd dump them immediately because they'd begin to get on her nerves. She says, “I feel there is both something appealing and something nauseating in very young girls.”

This is precisely Tzipi's feeling about that “beautiful, dumb Thai girl.” Of course, Simone de Beauvoir didn't need to be a “very wicked man” to seduce and dump a lot of beautiful young people. She managed just fine as a woman.

Do I sound bitter myself? I don't feel bitter – and I certainly can't claim to be an ingénue. When I met Tzipi I'd been around the block. Although she's twenty-three years older than me, I'm at the antique end of her spectrum. And I'm not dumb. Even Tzipi's acknowledged that. I went into this with my eyes wide open, and she's been honest with me every step of the way.

I told you, I have no idea why I got a little reckless with my emotions with her, when I'd managed to be so self-contained with the paramour.

I've been listening to that beautiful Bill Evans album,
Conversations with Myself
. Maybe you can see why this album interests me. It was considered very innovative when he recorded it in 1963, but also a little gimmicky. Evans laid down one solo piano track, and then laid down another on top of that, and then a third. Technically, it's very virtuosic. I mean his piano technique – the recording technique was really just piping these three tracks through a left, a right, and a middle channel. It sounds best if you have your speakers arranged far apart so you get that illusion of spatiality.

The most lyrical song on the album is the “Love Theme from
Spartacus
.” In fact, if I were to choose a song to represent my love affair with Tzipi, it would be this song. I know that sounds pretty tacky. The theme song from a cheesy old movie with Kirk Douglas played on a gimmicky three-track album. But if you listen to it, you'll see what I mean. And
Spartacus
, of course, isn't just cheesy. It's actually kind of great. I watched it recently and at several moments I got tears in my eyes. It's not the love story, of course, that's moving. That part is pretty banal. It's the politics of it. It's so interesting that the first slave who sacrifices himself in order to make a statement about the brutality of slavery is a black man. That self-sacrifice is what politicizes Kirk Douglas, and turns him into a great revolutionary figure. There's the whole gay subplot with Tony Curtis (Laurence Olivier's “body slave”). And then there's the amazing scene when the soldiers come to the camp of rebel slaves and say they'll kill everyone unless Spartacus gives himself up. Kirk Douglas, of course, steps forward, chin first: “I am Spartacus.” And then one by one, each of his comrades in arms also steps forth, willing to sacrifice himself for the higher cause. “I am Spartacus.” “I am Spartacus.” “I am Spartacus.”

But the song, “Love Theme from
Spartacus
,” the way that Bill Evans plays it, isn't dramatic this way. What's beautiful about it, the reason I find it so
à propos
of my relationship with Tzipi, is
that it begins so lush and sentimental, so tender, ultra-sensitive – and then it changes character entirely and becomes funny, bebop, clever, sexy, playful. I get sentimental over Tzipi, but she's so smart that however cruel or hard-headed or selfish she can be, in the end I always find myself smiling at her virtuosity.

 

 

 

She wrote me about a month ago about a twenty-one-year-old couple she'd met at a reading she gave at Tel Aviv University with Tanya Reinhart. Afterwards she took the young couple home with her and the three of them had sex – she and the boy took turns working on his girlfriend. She said they were both beautiful and intelligent, and that this encounter was “very important.” But she hasn't said anything about them since then.

 

 

 

In the “Seminar” on Poe, Lacan asks this interesting question: “For a purloined letter to exist, we may ask, to whom does a letter belong?” He notes that there are certain situations in which the sender might reasonably feel some proprietary rights regarding the letter which he's written, even if he sends it to the recipient, ostensibly, as a gift. Clearly, there are both legal and ethical ramifications to this observation which spring to mind. But Lacan is more interested in the psychological ramifications. This is related to that complicated assertion that “a letter always arrives at its destination,” even if the recipient never gets it. Because, as Lacan suggests, it may well be that the person to whom the letter was addressed was never “the real receiver.”

I thought a lot about this while I was reading Simone de Beauvoir's correspondence with Nelson Algren, and
not
reading Nelson Algren's correspondence with Simone de Beauvoir.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tzipi was going to give a talk at Harvard and she invited me up to stay at the hotel with her for two nights. As usual, she'd booked us adjoining rooms. As I said, she liked those pictures by Darger that I sent her. But she wasn't particularly interested in the business about Freud. Even though she's in analysis, it really bothers her when I start in with my Freudian mallet. And she has no patience at all for French feminist theory about the slippery slope of gender identity.
Of course
Tzipi considers herself a feminist, but it's hard to say what that means, exactly. Her politics are very unpredictable.

In one of her letters to Algren, Simone de Beauvoir makes some reference to the fact that he didn't identify as a Jew, or that he acknowledged being Jewish but in a strange way, and the editor explained that in an interview he had said jokingly that he
was a “Swedish Jew,” which was his way of saying that technically he was both of these things but that he didn't really identify as either. This was funny, because when Tzipi was very young, that actress Tippi Hedren was very popular, and Tzipi used to joke that she was going to change her name to Tzipi Hedren, because she thought she was really Swedish. Because of her very public position on Palestine, a lot of people have accused Tzipi of being a “self-hating Jew.” She's not, of course. She's just a Swedish Jew. I'm not sure what kind of feminist she is.

 

 

 

We were planning a visit. Tzipi was spending a few weeks on Mykonos, working on the manuscript of
Problems are Defiant like Unattractive Angels
. She'd rented a little villa that had a guestroom. She invited me to spend a few days with her. The messages Tzipi sent me from Greece were glorious. Of course we talked more about Sappho, and about Nietzsche. She shares my enthusiasm for
The Birth of Tragedy
. I told her that from a distance, before I met her, she'd always struck me as a Bacchante, but when I got to know her I realized how Apollinian she was. She said, “Oh, I am very Apollinian.” I told her about a film documentation I'd seen of Richard Schechner's famous theatrical production,
Dionysus in '69
. The actual production was done in 1968. It was based on
The Bacchae
, but the hippie actors would suddenly slip out of character and say their real names and talk like cool cats, and make references to sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. They acted out a Native American birthing ritual in the nude, and then they started playing bongo drums and making out with the audience. The film was shot by Brian de Palma before he became famous. I guess then he was just a guy with a camera – or actually, two cameras. It was a split screen. The whole thing was very hallucinogenic and sexy and could never happen today. I'm kind of jealous that Tzipi got to be a part of that generation.