Palm Sunday (35 page)

Another story of which Americans never seem to tire is about a person who becomes happier upon finding something he or she likes a lot. The person loses whatever it is, and then gets it back forever. As a graph, it looks like this:

An American Indian creation myth, in which a god of some sort gives the people the sun and then the moon and then the bow and arrow and then the corn and so on, is essentially a staircase, a tale of accumulation:

Almost all creation myths are staircases like that. Our own creation myth, taken from the Old Testament, is unique, so far as I could discover, in looking like this:

The sudden drop in fortune, of course, is the ejection of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.

Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” in which an already hopelessly unhappy man turns into a cockroach, looks like this:

But could my graphs, when all was said and done, be useful as anything more than little visual comedies, cartoons of a sort? The University of Chicago asked me that, and I had to ask myself that, and I say again what I said at the beginning: that the graphs were at least as suggestive as pots or spearheads.

But then I had another look at a graph I had drawn of Western civilization’s most enthusiastically received story, which is “Cinderella.” At this very moment, a thousand writers must be telling that story again in one form or another. This very book is a Cinderella story of a kind.

I confessed that I was daunted by the graph of “Cinderella,” and was tempted to leave it out of my thesis, since it seemed to prove that I was full of shit. It seemed too complicated and arbitrary to be a representative artifact— lacked the simple grace of a pot or a spearhead. Have a look:

The steps, you see, are all the presents the fairy godmother gave to Cinderella, the ball gown, the slippers, the carriage, and so on. The sudden drop is the stroke of midnight at the ball. Cinderella is in rags again. All the presents have been repossessed. But then the prince finds her and marries her, and she is infinitely happy ever after. She gets all the stuff back, and
then
some. A lot of people think the story is trash, and, on graph paper, it certainly looks like trash.

But then I said to myself, Wait a minute—those steps at the beginning look like the creation myth of virtually every society on earth. And then I saw that the stroke of midnight looked exactly like the unique creation myth in the Old Testament. And then I saw that the rise to bliss at the end was identical with the expectation of redemption as expressed in primitive Christianity.

The tales were identical.

I was thrilled to discover that years ago, and I am just as thrilled today. The apathy of the University of Chicago is repulsive to me.

They can take a flying fuck at the moooooooooooooooon.

•   •   •

And, my goodness, haven’t we come far a field from the stated subject of this chapter, which is the sexual revolution? I have spoken elsewhere of how neophyte writers, and even some old poops in the field, will veer away from subjects which alarm them. Just look how far I myself have veered away from the subject of sex. There is little that is genuinely sexual in telling a great university to take a flying fuck at the moooooooooooooooon.

Am I too much of a sissy to discuss anal intercourse, aphrodisiacs, armpits, bidets, birth control, bisexuality, bondage, buttocks, chastity belts, circumcision, clitorises, condoms, dildoes, discipline, ejaculation, feathers, femoral intercourse, fetishes, foursomes, frigidity, genitals, hair, hair-trigger
trouble, impotence, karezza, kisses, and so on? I have lifted this list from the index of
The Joy of Sex: A Gourmet Guide to Love Making
(illustrated), edited by Alex Comfort, M.B., Ph.D. (Crown, 1972). Actually, I feel quite free to discuss any and all of those matters, and even to laugh some while doing so.

What isn’t congenial is an admission that I have been forced to be celibate for long periods of time. I search the index of
The Joy of Sex
in vain for “celibacy,” which happens to be the most common human sexual adventure, and which could be illustrated nicely by a page as white as a snowdrift.

To take an example: I was a private in the United States Army (actually the Army of the United States, since I was a volunteer) for three years. I was one warrior ant in an enormous colony of identical ants, imprisoned in rural areas, and sent finally to an all-male battlefield in a foreign country. How many women eager to fuck me do you suppose I encountered in three long years? I could ask the same question about months and months in my civilian life, and get the same answer: to all practical purposes, none.

I was talking one time to my friend Robert Penn Warren, a lusty old gentleman and a great poet and novelist, and I asked him about another majestic literary figure, dead, who had been an acquaintance of his. Mr. Warren is seventeen years older than I am. He was born in Guthrie, Kentucky, in 1905. He drew in words an enchantingly Edwardian caricature of the man I had asked about, and he concluded it with a statement which was in no wise a joke. It was meant to have clinical significance. A person versed in psychology and medicine, he seemed to say, would be able to extrapolate an entire syndrome from this one small clue. This was the clue: “He was a masturbator, of course.”

This ended the conversation. I did not protest. I was grateful, though, to remember something far more casual about masturbation which had been said to me with all possible
cheerfulness by my friend Milos Forman, the motion picture director.

“You know what I like about masturbation?” he asked me.

“What is it you like about it, Milos?” I said.

“You don’t have to talk afterward,” he replied.

•   •   •

I peruse what is at this moment the number one nonfiction best seller in America, written by Gay Talese,
Thy Neighbor’s Wife
. It is meant to be a quite universal analysis of the current sexual revolution. According to Tálese, women are becoming more hospitable and casual, less discriminating with respect to sexual contacts. I oversimplify but do not entirely misrepresent that supposed revolution if I describe it this way: Whereas an ideal woman in olden times might have given a dusty male wayfarer on the road of life a piece of pie—a modern woman may now give him a hand job or a blow job as well.

I am sorry, but that is how I read it.

I do not wish to mock the book, even having said that, for it is to me a secretly deep history of a generation of middle-class American males, my own, which was taught by parents and athletic coaches and scoutmasters and military chaplains and quack doctors and so on to be deeply ashamed of masturbation and wet dreams.

And the hidden plea in the book is one which first appeared in my eyes when I was fourteen, say, and which has not vanished entirely to this day. It is part of the mystery of me. The plea is addressed by old-fashioned males forever full of jism to any pretty human female, on the street, in a magazine, in a movie—anywhere. The plea is this: “Please, pretty lady, don’t make me play with my private parts again.”

S
O HERE I SIT
on the fourth floor of a town house on the East Side of New York City, the Capital of the World, with a report card on the past thirty years of my life—signed by myself and tacked to the wall. I look at all those grades, some high, some low, and I think that I am like the compulsive gambler who borrowed so much money from me and who could not pay me back: I could not help myself.

I have spoken elsewhere of the mentor I had at the University of Chicago, who was so brilliant, who could not find anyone to publish his most audacious work, and who committed suicide. I have not proved how brilliant he was. As I set out to do so now with an example, I am hesitant, not only because I have his reputation in my hands for a moment, but because all the good things he said which I remember were so simple and clear. It has been my experience with literary critics and academics in this country that clarity looks a lot like laziness and ignorance and childishness and cheapness to them. Any idea which can be grasped immediately is for them, by definition, something they knew all the time.

So it is with literary experimentation, too. If a literary experiment works like a dream, is easy to read and enjoy, the
experimenter is a hack. The only way to get full credit as a fearless experimenter is to fail and fail.

•   •   •

A music critic once regaled a party I attended with a list of composers of serious music in the past. Nobody had heard of any of them, and the critic told us that they were all regarded in their own time as being the greatest composers alive. These were contemporaries of Beethoven and Brahms and Wagner and so on, composers for full orchestras in the Romantic mode.

We asked him why they weren’t admired today. He had made it his business to hear as much of their work as he could, and he had this to say: “It was all gesture.” By this he meant that musical promise after musical promise of great themes to come were made, and were not kept. The composers were honored in their own time for the gorgeousness of the promises they made but could not keep. They perhaps made promises which not even an archangel could keep.