Set This House on Fire (25 page)

“Like what?”

“Well, in painting, abstract expressionism. And in music, jazz. There’s a tremendous freedom and vitality in both of them, a fantastic throwing-off of restraint and the dreadful constipating formalism and all the traditional crap that’s been such a hindrance to art. So—well, I’ll admit it’s a dim hope, but if these two ever get really going, we might have that renaissance and of course, as history has shown, all the rest of the arts will start booming, too. Do you see what I mean?”

“Well, I know nothing about painting, Mason,” I said. “But as for music, I think some of that early Dixieland is quite marvelous, and Bessie Smith, but after all—”

“After all, what?”

Since I like to express myself exactly, I grope, lose time and ground, and eventually lose out in most discussions.

“After all,” he put in, “there is always J. S. Bach. Isn’t that what you were going to say?”

“More or less, Mason,” I replied. “Though somewhat more elaborately.”

“De gustibus,
Peter,” he said amiably. “I’ll let you keep your corpse if you let me keep my sexy dollbaby, all alive and singing.”

“De gustibus,
Mason,” I said.

“Once a square always a square. But everybody has to have a complement. I think it’s because you’re so square that I love you.” And things like this he would say with such a sweet smile, with such true and honest affection, that there would dissipate as if into the air about him all that, seconds before, I had considered offensive, pretentious, and banal.

We had several weighty discussions that week, about art and related matters. Though college may have rejected him—or he it—he seemed on his own to have read everything, to have absorbed most of it, and he wore his really rather amazing erudition flashily and blatantly, like a man outfitted for a costume ball. If it would please you to know the antique origins of Rosicrucianism; the existence of the Kuria Muria Islands, guano atolls off the coast of Aden; the difference between absolute and apparent magnitudes in the measurement of stars; the origin of female circumcision among the tribes of the Kalahari; of the influence of Ranulf de Glanvill upon law ("You mean you studied law, Peter, and never heard of Glanvill?”); of the high tolerance of sexual perversion, and the modes employed, among the Huron Indians; the difference between fibromyoma and chondroma in the classification of benign tumors; the reasons for German scholarship assigning undue influence of Thomas Kyd upon Shakespeare; the Roman use of the mechanical dildo—Mason could fill you in about all these matters, richly and eloquently, these and a thousand more. Most curiously, too—perhaps though only because, a child of my time, I am a sucker for facts—Mason almost never bored me with his knowledge; he made fanciful play with these useless items, setting them loose in the midst of some joke or story in the way that a magician brings forth from his sleeve rabbits, roses, startling doves. Once more would arise his Yugoslavian experience, which he never tired of telling and which I never minded hearing, if only because new insights, new characters kept intruding—the jovial mayor of the town, an Italian deserter (the victim of epilepsy, and given to murderous rampages through the night), the S.S. commandant who had paid a frightening visit to the villa one day—and from this substructure now arose the most dazzling edifice of fact, history, lore, and legend. “Of course old Plaja was really a full-blooded Dalmatian,” he would tell me. “Which is to say that he had a warrior’s heart. You see, his ancestors had all fought against the Venetians in the Middle Ages when a real scoundrel of a king they had, Ladislas of Naples, sold out to Venice for a hundred thousand ducats, I think it was. A fantastic gory period! Let me tell you …” And off he would go. And somehow, during the telling, I would learn that the chief enemy of the common orchard plum is the curculio, a repulsive small beetle; that the codpiece was proscribed by Pope Sixtus V as a universal threat to chastity; and that the word “falcon” derives from the Latin
falx,
meaning sickle and describing the bird’s curved talons. A striking fact about Mason is that, despising the past as he did, he yet knew so much about it.

Now, in my smudged and tear-stained book of memories there are still mounted two photographs. In the first of these (I am trying to remember at what party it was taken) my own white hand is visible, fishbelly-pale in the glare of the flashbulb. Carole is there, too, looking quite dazed and voluptuous, her lips moistly reflecting the light as she bends down her face to give Mason what I’m now sure must have become, half a second later, a kiss on the back of his well-barbered head. What is it that disturbs me so about this picture—and in a way that has nothing to do with what Mason or Carole were doing at all? It is Mason himself who dominates the picture. In profile, he is talking to an invisible someone; he is unaware of the lips, the wet bud of a tongue hovering at the nape of his neck, and at that moment, poised in that split instant of time before the mouth descends, his face wears an expression of total dejection. It is an odd look, one Mason rarely wore—of heaviness, of weariness, and disgust with life (who could he be talking to? it does not matter)—and I have pondered that picture many times, always touched a bit by this fleeting sorrow of his, which I so seldom saw in life. Was he as unhappy during that time as this picture tells me he was? Right now I cannot say. Certainly there is not a speck of sadness in this other picture of Mason. Here we are on his Village rooftop—there I am again, and there is Mason, and not Carole this time, but Celia. It is noontime of a spring day; this you can tell from the light, and from the blooming flowerboxes and trees on the penthouse roofs of the buildings behind, and by the cool spring dress Celia is wearing. As from all fading snapshots, longing and nostalgia emanate from this one: they are in the amateurish tilt of the picture and its yellowing hue and in the sense of springs gone forever, old shoe styles and hair-dos, rooftops that no longer exist (Mason’s house was torn down not long ago), in that knowledge which is perhaps the camera’s single most poignant gift, of time past and irretrievable. Celia, appearing in retrospect now even more lovely than I remember her in the flesh, has her face and eyes upturned toward Mason, very close to his own, seeming ready to give him a roguish nibble on the cheek with her perfect white teeth. Mason inclines his head down toward her; he is ready to bite her back, but most playfully and joyfully, and his face is suffused with exuberance, with merriment and happiness. As for myself, I am standing somewhat aside, contemplating whoever it was that snapped the picture, and my expression can best be described as glum. And behind us all a flock of pigeons, slatecolored blurs, rove heavenward above the water towers, lending to the whole moment of bygone time a feeling of feathery movement, of space and life… .

I must say that Mason really took over my hours, night and day, during that brief period. I had quit my job preparatory to going to Europe and, having nothing to do, I found it was fun to tag along with Mason; he never ran out of steam, there was always something new to do, somewhere new to go, and he always picked up the check. I protested this (I really did) but he had a smooth way to make me rise above my own secret humiliation. “Look, dollbaby,” he would say, “those French girls you’re going to have soon don’t come cheap. Save your money.” And then he would pause. “May I be frank about something?” he would continue. “I’m a rich boy and I know it, and I like to spend dough on people I love. Good God, let’s don’t let Justin’s ill-gotten loot go to waste. Now give me back that tab!” Then, pulling out his wallet, he would say: “In a crummy democracy you have to go through the damndest
contortions
if you’re rich, pretending you haven’t got a nickel to your name.”

I relented, with a sort of hoarse catch in my voice. It was a cozy situation to find oneself in—for a short term, anyway. More than once I wondered whether—if I had not already planned to go abroad—it might not be possible to remain under Mason’s aegis for the rest of my days, and the thought gave me a shiver. Because if I suspected that there was lust for a kind of ownership in these big gestures of Mason’s, I also realized with some shame that my willingness to be owned was stronger than I ever wanted to admit. But who could blame me? Each night (and there were at least five of them) brought me a different girl. And they were all brainless, beautiful, and willing. What a treat to be in the hands of such a casual, big-hearted procurer! I mean it. I have never had so much consecutive sex, and of such variety, in all my life. And I was indebted to Mason for it. I had become the crown prince among his freeloaders. And I knew I was
in
when he showed me his collection of erotica.

When I first saw the collection, I could manage only a long, deep-felt whistle. “Where’d you get all this stuff, Mason?” I asked.

“Friend of mine died of a brain tumor a couple of years ago. It was his bequest to me. Let me give you some more ice there. He gave me the core of the collection, that is,” he went on, “most of those books over to the right there. I got interested and added the rest a little bit at a time. What it adds up to, really, is an investment. You know there’s a big market for good stuff like this. It’s almost as solid as the art market and a hell of a lot more stable than gold or stamps.”

The “core,” I discovered, was made up of such grizzled entries as
The Thousand Nights and a Night
(London, privately printed, 1921);
The Memoirs of Fanny Hill
(ditto, 1890); the complete works both in French and English of that “really incomparable genius, in his own way,” as Mason described him, the “divine” Marquis de Sade, including his masterpiece,
Justine,
and
Juliette,
and
Philosophie dans le boudoir
and
Les Crimes de l’amour
(Paris, end plates, illustrated, 1902); Apollinaire’s
Les Onze mille verges;
and half a dozen volumes, in English, of the Paris-printed bonbons for undernourished Anglo-Saxons. But after I finished thumbing through these elementary items there came a tidal wave of delights such as I had never dreamed existed: beautifully embellished works in Italian and French, some dating from the seventeenth century; Priapean celebrations of Roman fashions in love, circa
A.D.
79, as revealed by the friezes of Pompeii; delicate and ingenious drawings from Arabia, from India, from Java and Japan, on rice paper and scrolls; love among the Cubans and the Turkestani and the Persians; love even among the Scandinavians, where in a series of photographs a handsome and vigorous blond quartet from Stockholm, slippery-looking as herrings, fornicated amid an aura of gingerbread bedsteads,
smorgasbord
and
schnaps.
One Chinese entry—a kind of apotheosis of depravity, if Mason was to be believed—formed an exquisite round-robin of contortionist perversions, graven on a scroll which he swore up and down was made of human skin. Into this lascivious concourse I plunged giddily, and since hot erotica, like catnip, is meant to arouse, it did just that to me. At least, for a while. Throbbing, I examined the act of love as performed conventionally in New Orleans brothels, in echelon among the Monégasques, even octagonally—in an album of snapshots more chaotic than titillating—among a bedroom full of disheveled Greeks. A pair of Algerian priests made love to a skinny, spiritless nun, and the nun to the Mother Superior; a small volume of oddly fatalistic lithograph cartoons, done in England long before Waterloo, showed Bonaparte himself, massively virile, astride a series of squirming mistresses labeled
Italia, Germania,
and
Alas, Britannia!
The zoological section, featuring humans with brutes, or vice versa, I found less to my taste, as I did the huge and synoptic German
Lexikon
of sex which, explicit though it was in its illustrations, leaned grimly toward police-file photographs of torn and dismembered children and other victims of sexual infraction. In fact, of the arts of mankind, this entire mode of expression has, to all except perhaps the pubescent and the unbalanced, the least staying power of all, so that it was not long before I was betrayed by a certain repetitive-ness in what I had seen, and, numb—really numb—I turned to look at Mason, feeling terribly blue about the whole enterprise. “You mean this junk is really worth a lot of money?” I said.

“You’re damn right it is. That Chinese scroll alone I paid five hundred dollars for. Early Ch’ing dynasty. Here’s an interesting item.”

It was a large photograph, some decades old, of a strapping,. grinning, coal-black African in mettlesome coition with an ostrich. I gazed at it for a long time, bemused.

“Sex is the last frontier,” he was saying somewhere behind me. “In art as in life, Peter, sex is the only area left where men can find full expression of their individuality, full freedom. Where men can cast off the constrictions and conventions of society and regain their identity as humans. And I don’t mean any dreary, dry little middle-class grope and spasm, either. I mean the total exploration of sex, as Sade envisioned it, and which makes a library like this so important to the psyche, and so rewarding. It’s what you might call
le nouveau libertinage.
Because, you see, it was Sade’s revolutionary concept, his genius, to see man not as what he is
supposed
to be—an inhumanly noble creature whose nobility is a pseudo-nobility simply because he is hemmed in and made warped and sick in an impossible attempt to free himself of his animal nature—but as he
is,
and forever will be: a thinking biological complex which, whether rightly or wrongly, exists in a world of frustrating sexual fantasy, the bottling-up of which is the direct cause of at least half of the world’s anguish and misery. It’s a strange paradox, Peter, that Sade should become synonymous with all that is cruel and causes pain, when in reality he was the original psychoanalyst of the modern age, seeing more evil in the fruitless repression of sex, and more pain, too, than in what to him was the simple answer to that repression, and the panacea—release from the fantasy world, and the working out of sex on a functioning, active level. And again that doesn’t mean some tepid little convulsion in the dark. It means group interplay, for one thing—and there’s no one alive who hasn’t yearned at one time or another for community sex—and the free airing of bisexual impulses, among other things, and the final orgiastic purgation which has been a cleansing aspect of the human experience, at least among those humans who have been bold enough to break convention, since the dawn of recorded history. And it’s going to be the future major crisis in art. Because only when the sexual act is able to be portrayed in art—in prose and in painting, and on the stage (though I’ll admit that’s a problem)—then and only then will we have any kind of freedom. Because for one thing—”