The Dying Animal (6 page)

The Janie Wyatts of the American sixties knew how to operate around engorged men. They were themselves engorged, so they knew how to transact business with them. The venturous male drive, the male initiative, wasn't a lawless action requiring denunciation and adjudication but a sexual sign that one responds to or not. To control the male impulse and report it? They were not educated in that ideological system. They were far too playful to be indoctrinated with animus and resentment and grievance from above. They were educated in the instinctual system. They weren't interested in replacing the old inhibitions and prohibitions and moral instruction with new forms of surveillance and new systems of control and a new set of orthodox beliefs. They knew where the pleasure was to be had, and they knew how to give over to desire without fear. Unafraid of the aggressive impulse, deep in the transforming fracas—and for the first time on American soil since the Pilgrim women of Plymouth Colony were cloistered by an ecclesiastical government against the corruptions of the flesh and the sinfulness of men—a generation drawing their conclusions from their cunts about the nature of experience and the delights of the world.

Isn't the bolivar the unit of currency in Venezuela? Well, under America's first woman president, I would hope the dollar will become the wyatt. Janie deserves no less. She democratized the entitlement to pleasure.

Sidelight. The English trading outpost at Merry Mount that so incensed the Plymouth Puritans—know about that? Fur-trading settlement, smaller than Plymouth, about thirty miles northwest of Plymouth. Where Quincy, Mass., is today. Men drinking, selling arms to the Indians, palling around with the Indians. Cavorting with the enemy. Copulating with Indian women, whose custom it was to assume the doggie position and to be taken from behind. A pagan hotbed in Puritan Massachusetts, where the Bible was law. Danced around a maypole in animal masks, worshiped at it every month. Hawthorne based a story on that maypole: Governor Endicott sent the Puritan militia under Miles Standish to cut it down, a pine tree festooned with colored banners and ribbons and antlers and roses and standing eighty feet tall. "Jollity and gloom were contending for an empire"—that's how Hawthorne understood it.

Merry Mount was presided over for a time by a speculator, a lawyer, a charismatic privileged character named Thomas Morton. He's a kind of forest creature out of
As You Like It,
a wild demon out of
A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Shakespeare is Morton's contemporary, born only about eleven or so years before Morton. Shakespeare is Morton's rock-and-roll. The Plymouth Puritans busted him, then the Salem Puritans busted him—put him in the stocks, fined him, imprisoned him. He eventually exiled himself to Maine, where he died in his late sixties. But he couldn't resist provoking them. He was a source of prurient fascination for the Puritans. Because if one's piety isn't absolute, it logically leads to a Morton. The Puritans were terrified that their daughters would be carried off and corrupted by this merry miscegenator out at Merry Mount. A white man, a white Indian, luring the virgins away? This was even more sinister than red Indians stealing them. Morton was going to turn their daughters into the Gutter Girls. That was the main concern other than his trading with the Indians and selling them firearms. The Puritans were frantic about the younger generation. Because once they lost their younger generation, the ahistorical experiment in dictatorial intolerance was dead. Age-old American story: save the young from sex. Yet it's always too late. Too late because they've already been born.

Twice they shipped Morton to England to be tried for disobedience, but the English ruling class and the Church of England had no use for the New England Separatists. Morton's case was thrown out of court each time, and Morton made his way back to New England. The English thought, He's right, Morton—we wouldn't want to live with him either, but he's not coercing anyone and these fucking Puritans are crazy.

In
Of Plymouth Plantation,
Governor William Bradford's book, the governor writes amply about the evils of Merry Mount, the "riotous prodigality," the "profuse excess." "They fell to great licentiousness and led a dissolute life, pouring out themselves into all profaneness." Morton's confederates he calls "mad Bacchanalians." Morton he labels "the Lord of Misrule" and the master of "a School of Atheism." Governor Bradford's a powerful ideologue. Piety knew how to write sentences in the seventeenth century. So too did impiety. Morton published a book as well,
The New English Canaan,
grounded in fascinated observation of the Indians' society—but a scurrilous book according to Bradford, because it was also about the Puritans and how they "make a great show of religion but no humanity." Morton is straightforward. Morton doesn't expurgate. You have to wait three hundred years before the voice of Thomas Morton turns up in America again, un-expurgated, as Henry Miller. The clash between Plymouth and Merry Mount, between Bradford and Morton, between rule and misrule—the colonial harbinger of the national upheaval three hundred and thirty-odd years later when Morton's America was born at last, miscegenation and all.

No, the sixties weren't aberrant. The Wyatt girl wasn't aberrant. She was a natural Mortonian in the conflict that's been ongoing from the beginning. Out in the American wildness, order will reign. The Puritans were the agents of rule and godly virtue and right reason, and on the other side was misrule. But why is it rule and misrule? Why isn't Morton the great theologian of no-rules? Why isn't Morton seen for what he is, the founding father of personal freedom? In the Puritan theocracy you were at liberty to do good; in Morton's Merry Mount you were at liberty—that was it.

And there were lots of Mortons. Mercantile adventurers without the ideology of holiness, people who didn't give a damn whether they were elect or not. They came over with Bradford on the
May
flower,
emigrated later on other ships, but you don't hear about them at Thanksgiving, because they couldn't stand these communities of saints and believers where no deviation was allowed. Our earliest American heroes were Morton's oppressors: Endicott, Bradford, Miles Standish. Merry Mount's been expunged from the official version because it's the story not of a virtuous utopia but of a utopia of candor. Yet it's Morton whose face should be carved in Mount Rushmore. That's going to happen too, the very day they rename the dollar the wyatt.

My Merry Mount? Me and the sixties? Well, I took seriously the disorder of those relatively few years, and I took the word of the moment, liberation, in its fullest meaning. That's when I left my wife. To be accurate, she discovered me with the Gutter Girls and she threw me out. Now, there were others on the faculty who grew their hair long and wore the far-out clothes, but they were just on furlough. They were a mix of voyeur and day-tripper. Occasionally they ventured out, but never did more than a few go over the trench into the field of engagement. But I was determined, once I saw the disorder for what it was, to seize from the moment a rationale for myself, to undo my former allegiances and my current allegiances and not to do it on the side, not to be, as many my age were, either inferior to it or superior to it or simply titillated by it, but to follow the logic of this revolution to its conclusion, and without having become its casualty.

This required some doing. Just because there's no memorial bearing the names of those who out on the rampage came to grief doesn't mean there weren't casualties. There wasn't necessarily carnage, but there was plenty of breakage. This was not a pretty revolution taking place on the dignified theoretical plane. This was a puerile, preposterous, uncontrolled, drastic mess, the whole society in a huge brawl. Though there was comedy too. It was a revolution that at the same time was like the day after the revolution—a big idyll. People took off their underwear and walked around laughing. Often it was no more than farce, childish farce, but astonishingly far-reaching childish farce; often it was no more than a teenage power surge, the adolescence of the biggest, most powerful American generation ever coming into their hormones all at once. Yet the impact was revolutionary. Things forever changed.

One's skepticism, one's cynicism, the cultural-political good sense that normally kept one outside of mass movements, was a useful shield. I wasn't as high as everyone else, and I didn't want to be. For me the job was to detach the revolution from its immediate paraphernalia, from its pathological trappings and its rhetorical inanities and the pharmacological dynamite that made people jump out of windows, to sidestep the worst and to seize and use the idea, to say to oneself, What a chance this is, what an opportunity to live out my own revolution. Why rein myself in because of the accident of the fact that I was born in this year and not in that year?

People fifteen, twenty years younger than I, the privileged beneficiaries of the revolution, could afford to go through it unconsciously. There was this exuberant party, this squalid paradise of disarray, and, without thinking or having to think, they claimed it, and usually with all its trivia and trash. But I had to think. There I was, still in the prime of life and the country entering into this extraordinary time. Am I or am I not a candidate for this wild, sloppy, raucous repudiation, this wholesale wrecking of the inhibitive past? Can I master the discipline of freedom as opposed to the recklessness of freedom? How does one turn freedom into a system?

To find out cost plenty. I have a son of forty-two who hates me. We needn't go into that. The point is that the mob didn't come and open my cell door. The erratic mob was there, but as it happened, I had to open the door myself. Because I too was compliant and fundamentally thwarted, even if, while I was married, I was sneaking out of the house fucking whomever I could. That kind of sixties deliverance was what I'd had in mind from the beginning, but in the beginning, my beginning, there was nothing resembling a communal endorsement of anything like it, no social torrent to sweep you up and carry you along. There were only obstacles, one of which was one's civil nature, one of which was one's provincial beginnings, one of which was one's education in genteel notions of seriousness that one could not buck alone. The trajectory of my upbringing and my education was to delude me into entering a domestic vocation for which I had no tolerance. The family man, conscientious, married and with the kid—and then the revolution begins. The whole thing explodes and there are these girls all around me, and what was I to do, continue on married and having my adulteries and thinking, This is it, this is the bound way you live?

I didn't find my way because I was born in the forest and raised by wild beasts and therefore came by release naturally. I wasn't born smart about any of this. I too lacked the authority to do openly what I wanted to do. It's not the man you're sitting across from who got married in 1956. To gain a confident idea of the scope of one's autonomy you needed guidance that was nowhere to be found, not in my little world anyway, which is why marrying and having a child seemed, in '56, the natural thing even for me to do.

One wasn't an enfranchised man in the sexual realm while I was growing up. One was a second-story man. One was a thief in the sexual realm. You "copped" a feel. You stole sex. You cajoled, you begged, you flattered, you insisted—all sex had to be struggled for, against the values if not the will of the girl. The set of rules was that you had to impose your will on her. That's how she was taught to maintain the spectacle of her virtue. That an ordinary girl should volunteer, without endless importuning, to break the code and commit the sex act would have confused me. Because no one of either sex had any sense of an erotic birthright. Unknown. She might, if she fell for you, agree to a hand job—which meant essentially using your hand with hers as an insert—but that someone would consent to anything without the ritual of psychological besiegement, of unremitting, monomaniacal tenacity and exhortation, well, that was unthinkable. There was no way to get a blow job, certainly, other than by dint of superhuman perseverance. I got one in four years of college. That's all you were allowed. In the Catskill hick town where my family ran a small resort hotel and I came of age in the forties, the only way to consensual sex was either with a prostitute or with someone who'd been your girl for the better part of your life and whom everybody figured you were going to marry. And there you paid your dues because often enough you did marry her.

My parents? They were parents. I was sentimentally educated, believe me. When my father, pushed by my mother, had at last to have the discussion with me about sex, I was already sixteen, it was 1946, and I was disgusted by his way of not knowing what to tell me, this gentle soul born in a Lower East Side tenement in 1898. Mainly what he wanted to tell me was what usually emanated from the kindly Jewish father of that generation: "You're a peach, you're a plum, you can ruin your life..." Of course, he didn't know that I already had a venereal disease from the loose girl in town whom everyone fucked. So much for parents in those far-off days.

Look, heterosexual men going into marriage are like priests going into the Church: they take the vow of chastity, only seemingly without knowing it until three, four, five years down the line. The nature of ordinary marriage is no less suffocating to the virile heterosexual—given the sexual preferences of a virile heterosexual—than it is to the gay or the lesbian. Though now even gays want to get married. Church wedding. Two, three hundred witnesses. And wait till they see what becomes of the desire that got them into being gay in the first place. I expected more from those guys, but it turns out there's no realism in them either. Though I suppose it has to do with AIDS. The Fall and Rise of the Condom is the sexual story of the second half of the twentieth century. The condom came back. And with the condom, the return of all that got blown out in the sixties. What man can say he enjoys sex with a condom the way he does without? What's really in it for him? That's why the organs of digestion have, in our time, come to vie for supremacy as a sexual orifice. The crying need for the mucous membrane. To get rid of the condom, they have to have a steady partner, therefore they marry. The gays are militant: they want marriage and they want openly to join the army and be accepted. The two institutions I loathed. And for the same reason: regimentation.