Lilith
Copyright © 2011 by J. R. Salamanca.
ON THE COVER: Portrait of Lilith Arthur by Lucy Salamanca, mother of J. R. Salamanca.
This electronic format is published by Tantor eBooks, a division of Tantor Media, Incorporated,
and was produced in the year 2011.
By John White
IT is an honor and a pleasure for me to reintroduce readers to the writing of J. R. Salamanca via the new medium of e-books. I regard Salamanca as one of the world’s preeminent authors because of his exquisite use of language, his fine craftsmanship in constructing a story and delineating characters, and his insightful treatment of elevated themes. However, his work has not been published in electronic format before.
Lilith
is the best book with which to begin that process, and I am grateful to Tantor Media for the opportunity to perform this homage.
Jack Richard Salamanca is the author of six highly celebrated novels. He has also been for many years a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Maryland in College Park. He was born in 1921 in Florida and raised there and in Virginia. From 1939-42 he attended George Washington University. During World War II he served for three years in the U.S. Army Air Corps as a C-47 transport plane radio-gunner in the Far Eastern Theater, where he received the Air Medal.
Immediately after the war, Salamanca worked for a year and a half at Chestnut Lodge, a private mental hospital in Rockville, Maryland. Then he became an actor on the stage and on radio, both professionally and semiprofessionally, in Maryland, New York and London. In 1950 he married Mimi Norton, an actress and leading lady in the theater company where he was employed.
Shortly thereafter the couple moved to Paris and then, still in 1950, to London, where Salamanca enrolled at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. He graduated from R.A.D.A. in 1953. He then entered the University of London to study drama further and earned a Diploma in 1954. Simultaneously he studied drama at the Royal Academy of Music, and received a Diploma in 1955.
The Salamancas’ first and only child, Richard, was born in 1954 in London.
While in London, Salamanca wrote his first novel, a sensitive, lyrical tale about young love entitled
The Lost Country
. Published by Simon & Schuster in 1958, it received good reviews and launched his career as a novelist. His life as an author would continue in parallel with his career as a college professor.
The Lost Country
brought financial success to Salamanca when it was bought for the movies by producer Jerry Wald, who previously had made
A Streetcar Named Desire
, starring Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh. However, Wald bought the novel as a vehicle for a young rock and roll star who had decided to become a serious actor. The actor was Elvis Presley. Wald turned Salamanca’s story about a boy’s coming of age into a musical entitled
Wild in the Country
and distributed it through Twentieth Century Fox. “It was a huge mistake on his [Presley] and everyone else’s part, and the less said about it the better,” Salamanca wrote in
Contemporary Authors
(Vol. 193). Recently he told me that he still winces when he sees the film is running on television.
Salamanca’s second novel was
Lilith
, published by Simon & Schuster in 1961. It was written over several years while the Salamanca family resided in France and England.
Lilith
expanded Salamanca’s fame and fortune. It became a bestseller, with eventually more than one million copies in print. It also was serialized in condensed form in
Good Housekeeping
and was selected for the Book of the Month Club. Last of all, it was purchased for filming by Robert Rossen, producer of
The Hustler
, which starred Paul Newman and George C. Scott. Columbia Pictures distributed the film.
Lilith
opened in theaters in 1964, starring Warren Beatty as Vincent Bruce and Jean Seberg as Lilith Arthur, with supporting roles by Peter Fonda and Gene Hackman. Salamanca greatly admired Rossen’s work. “He was very faithful to the text and made a fine film of it,” he told
Contemporary Authors
. “It was a commercial failure in this country but a great critical success in Europe.”
Salamanca’s next novel was
A Sea Change
, published by Knopf in 1973. Remaining with Knopf, he published
Embarkation
in 1980 and
Southern Light
in 1986. There followed a long period of silence from him, caused in great part by a house fire which destroyed all his possessions, including his manuscripts. Starting over, he wrote his final novel,
That Summer’s Trance
, which was published in 2000 by a small, innovative publisher, Welcome Rain.
Lilith
is set in an insane asylum in Maryland shortly after World War Two. The setting is imaginatively drawn from Salamanca’s experience living in the state and working in Chestnut Lodge. A young ex-GI, Vincent Bruce, goes to work there and meets Lilith Arthur, a beautiful young patient diagnosed as schizophrenic. Lilith is an enchantress who bewitches people into her world. Her mad dreams captivate the romantic Vincent. He begins a journey into madness himself—a journey which he records in his diary. An illicit affair develops. Since it is forbidden for staff to be intimate with patients, cunning and secrecy enter the picture, leading to a most tragic ending.
The story is narrated by Vincent, looking back on his youth from a more sober middle age, as he seeks to atone for the suffering his recklessness engendered. On one level, the story is about insanity as it is conventionally understood. On a deeper level, the story is about the nature of the psyche and the limits of human consciousness. In the course of portraying the romance, Salamanca examines profound questions about the nature of human existence and the workings of the mind. And he does so with some of the most breathtaking prose in all literature.
Salamanca’s fantastic female originated in Semitic mythology. In Hebrew, Lilith means “belonging to the night.” As a character in Talmudic literature, Lilith is regarded as Adam’s first wife, before God created Eve. Lilith, however, refused to be subject to Adam or yield to him; she wanted equality, which she did not get. So she ran away from Adam and from Eden, and became a demon. In Hebrew folklore today she is usually considered an evil supernatural creature who haunts the night seeking to slay newborn infants because of her jealousy of Eve, mother of mankind, who replaced her in the affection of Adam and thus robbed her of the joys of motherhood. In fact, in some Jewish households, a
mezuzah
(a parchment containing a magical incantation) is hung over a door to scare away evil—such as Lilith is popularly thought to be. The modern word
lullaby
comes from the Old English phrase “Lilith avaunt,” meaning “Lilith, be gone” or “Lilith, go away.” Thus, metaphysically speaking, a lullaby is a magical incantation to protect a child at night. But there is a counter tradition in Hebrew mythology which says that when Lilith comes to a baby’s crib, she really desires to press the baby to her heart, not to harm it but to hug it because her maternal instinct is still strong but unrequited. And if a child smiles during the night of the Sabbath, says a Talmudic passage, it is a sign that Lilith has kissed it in its sleep or is playing with it.
Vincent is named after St. Vincent de Paul, a 16th century French monk and the patron saint of the poor because he established various charitable organizations to help alleviate their suffering. His work continues today through the Sisters of Charity, Brothers of Charity and the Society of St. Vincent de Paul.
Lilith Arthur and Vincent Bruce are two of the most vividly portrayed, memorable characters in literature. Salamanca brings them to life in both a physical dimension—as human beings—and a metaphysical dimension—as personifications of spiritual attitudes. As their characterization is developed, Lilith and Vincent take on meanings beyond the realm of personality and display increasing correspondence with the major oppositions of history. Appropriate to Salamanca’s vision, in their ultimate sense Lilith and Vincent represent the dualities of the world: day and night, body and spirit, finite and infinite, self and other, time and eternity, divine and demonic, life and death.
Although Salamanca treats social issues, politics and religion in
Lilith
, his ultimate concern is beyond them. Salamanca is vitally interested in the problem of man’s humanity: understanding the impulse which underlies both the creation of culture and the flight from culture into madness. He calls that impulse “the hunger for perfection” and it is significant that these are the words with which Vincent ends his narrative.
“Among the people I most admire,” Salamanca told
Contemporary Authors
, “are the mad. I found among them some of the most interesting, inspiring and delightful, provocative and productive people that I’ve ever met—Lilith being chief amongst them, or a sort of compendium of types who resulted in Lilith. But that kind of schizophrenia is very common and I would think that not more than two or three percent are even institutionalized. I think they are among the most influential and vital and powerful people in the world.” He went on to name Spinoza, Swift, Blake and Savonarola as people whom he considered schizophrenic or schizoid.
He also noted in the same autobiographical essay that one of the most remarkable and gifted people he ever knew was a patient at Chestnut Lodge named Joanne Goldenburg. “I never thought she was crazy; she seemed far more sane to me than most of us who lived outside the [hospital], as her subsequent career has dramatically demonstrated.” After she was discharged, she wrote a novel under the pen name Hannah Green; the book was entitled
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden
. Goldenburg inspired
Lilith
, Salamanca said, “based to some degree on my friendship with her and my awe of her intellectual and creative powers.”
Lilith
is a portrait of unrepressed life in self-imposed exile from the source of repression, culture. Salamanca’s examination of the hunger for perfection and his delineation of its dynamics in the two modes of life—represented by Vincent (repression) and Lilith (freedom from repression)—is an achievement which shows he has one of our era’s most discerning minds.
In the very center or “heart” of
Lilith
is a quotation from the eminent Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung which provides the artistic and philosophic rationale of the book:
How can I be substantial if I fail to cast a shadow? I must have a dark side if I am to be whole . . . psychology has profited greatly from Freud’s pioneer work; it has learned that human nature has also a black side, and that not man alone possesses this side, but his works, his institutions and his convictions as well. Even our purest and holiest beliefs can be traced to their crudest origins. It is painful—there is no denying it—to interpret radiant things from the shadow side, and thus in a measure reduce them to their origins in dreary filth. But it seems to me to be an imperfection in things of beauty, and a weakness in man, if an explanation from the shadow-side has a destructive effect. The horror which we feel for Freudian interpretations is entirely due to our own barbaric or childish naiveté, which believes that there can be heights without corresponding depths, and which blinds us to the really “final” truth that, when carried to the extreme, opposites meet.
Polarity characterizes Salamanca’s world view. The quotation from Jung is a succinct statement of Salamanca’s vision of life. That vision is a unity of opposites and the technique of his art is appropriate to that vision. Polarity is a mode of existence having positive and negative qualities, yet ultimately depending upon the continuation of a harmonious balance of both. From the standpoint of polarity, explicit dualities can be seen to have an implicit unity since one cannot exist without the other.
Salamanca’s vision of life transcends the dualisms of this world. Although Lilith and Vincent represent the poles of the world, Salamanca has attained a consciousness and perspective wherein the poles are seen to be in equilibrium within a stable field, forming a harmonious pattern that is a composite of what a less heightened awareness sees only as opposite. Like the black and white halves of a tai chi symbol, where each flows into the other and each contains a drop of the other at its center, Lilith’s world and Vincent’s world exist in mutual dependence. Her marvelous land of beauty is meaningless (and would not exist) unless seen in relation to the dark side of everyday life. Recalling Jung, “I must have a dark side if I am to be whole . . .”
Viewed superficially, life as Salamanca presents it is antinomous. The world appears founded upon irreconcilable dualisms. Experience seems nothing but ambiguity, indeterminacy and contradiction. However, this twofold state of being—attraction and repulsion, positive and negative, male and female—is seen by Salamanca to be merely an illusion, an appearance. He uses that conflict between surface appearance and deeper reality to involve the reader in his story. A constant tension runs through the book caused by antinomies and oppositions, yet there is also a strange fusion of things which are alien. The psychological elements of a vision of duality are made into technical effects by Salamanca as he constructs his work of art. Conflict, antagonism and uncertainty are used to show that popular assumptions are not always to be trusted. In the world of
Lilith
, things exhibit a disturbing ambivalence. Divine and demonic qualities exist together. Irony and paradox pervade the book. One loses his firm grasp of existence based on “common sense” and is left wondering, “What is reality?”
