The Lonely City (9 page)

Who’s talking? Drella, Taxi, Lucky, Rotten, the Duchess, DoDo, the Sugar Plum Fairy, Billy Name, a parade of cryptic, unstable nicknames and noms de plume. Do you understand or don’t you? Are you in or out? Like any game, it’s all about belonging. ‘The
only way to talk is to talk in games, it’s just fabulous,’ Ondine says and Edie Sedgwick, disguised as Taxi, replies: ‘Ondine has games that no one understands.’

People who can’t keep up, who slow the flow, are cast literally to the margins. In one of the most disturbing sequences, Taxi and Ondine are joined by a French actress, whose repeatedly ignored interjections are placed on the far side of the page, away from the main stream of conversation, the text shrunken to denote the tiny tininess of an ignored voice, caught in the echo chamber of exclusion. Elsewhere, the talk is of who deserves to stay inside the charmed circle of the Factory. Elaborate rules are drawn up, protocols of expulsion developed. Society as centrifugal force, separating the elements, policing division.

But speaking, participating, is almost as terrifying as being ignored. Warhol takes the desire for attention – to be looked at and listened to – and sharpens it into an instrument of torture. ‘I’m making love to the tape recorder,’ Ondine says towards the end of his marathon of speech, but from the very beginning he also keeps begging to stop, asking over and over how many more hours he has to fill. In the john: ‘No, oh Della, please, I, I, my . . .’ In the bathtub: ‘may I ask you in all fairness – this is no private . . .’ At Rotten Rita’s apartment: ‘Don’t you hate me Drella, by this time? You must be so disgusted with putting that thing in my face . . . Please shut it off, I’m so horrifying.’

Putting that thing in my face:
there’s certainly something sexual about Warhol’s behaviour: stripping Ondine down, encouraging him to ejaculate a torrent, to spill his secrets, to dish the dirt. What he wants is words – words to fill or kill time, take up empty space,
expose the gaps between people, reveal wounds and hurts. He says very little himself beyond a reticent, repetitive litany of
Oh
,
Oh really? What?
(In 1981, by which time he’d become considerably more fluent, even chatty, one of his first superstars called him on the phone. He immediately fell back into the old stuttering speech, telling his diary: ‘The dialogue was straight from the sixties.’)

Towards the end of the book, Ondine escapes for a while and Drella is left with the Sugar Plum Fairy, Joe Campbell, the actorcum-rent boy who starred with Paul America in his movie
My Hustler
in 1965. Slender, dark and quick-witted, a former boyfriend of Harvey Milk, Campbell was astonishingly skilled at making even the most reluctant people open up. He turns the tables on Warhol, submitting him to the same kind of scrutiny he forced on others. First he examines his body, describing him sweetly as
soft,
not fat. ‘How old are you?’ he asks. A long pause. ‘Very great silence.’ ‘Yeah, uh talk about Ondine.’ ‘Nah, why do you avoid this problem?’ Warhol repeatedly tries to turn the flow of the conversation. For a minute or two, Joe plays along, and then he returns to the attack.

SPF—Why do you avoid yourself? Huh?

SPF—Why do you avoid yourself? What?

SPF—I mean you almost refuse your own existence. You know- Uh—it’s just easier SPF—No I mean I
like,
I like to know you
(talking very quietly)
I always think of you as being hurt. Well, I’ve been hurt so often I don’t even care anymore. SPF—Oh sure you care. Well uh, I don’t get hurt anymore
. . . SPF—I mean, it’s very nice to feel. You know. Uh-no, I don’t really think so. It’s too sad to do (opera) And I’m always, uh, afraid to feel happy because then uh . . . just never last . . . SPF—Do you ever, do you ever do things by yourself? Uh no, I can’t do things by myself.

Talking so much you horrify yourself and those around you; talking so little that you almost refuse your own existence:
a
demonstrates that speech is by no means a straightforward route to connection. If loneliness is to be defined as a desire for intimacy, then included within that is the need to express oneself and to be heard, to share thoughts, experiences and feelings. Intimacy can’t exist if the participants aren’t willing to make themselves known, to be revealed. But gauging the levels is tricky. Either you don’t communicate enough and remain concealed from other people, or you risk rejection by exposing too much altogether: the minor and major hurts, the tedious obsessions, the abscesses and cataracts of need and shame and longing. My own decision had been to clam up, though sometimes I longed to grab someone’s arm and blurt the whole thing out, to pull an Ondine, to open everything for inspection.

It’s here that Warhol’s recording devices take on their magical, transformative aspect. Plenty of people have over the years felt the need to portray him as damaged and manipulative, needling confession out of the vulnerable and drug-addicted as a way of filling gaping holes in the fabric of his own being. But that isn’t the whole story. His work around speech might be better understood
as a collaboration, a symbiotic exchange between the citizens of too much and not enough, between excess and paucity, expulsion and retention. After all, it’s just as painful, just as isolating, to talk into a vacuum as it is to be stoppered in the first place. For the logorrheic, the compulsively communicative, Warhol was the ideal audience, the neutral dream listener as well as the bully with what Ondine called his ‘Prussian tactics’.

This is what the filmmaker Jonas Mekas thought was really driving the Factory’s grand project of exhibition and exposure. He figured people participated because of Warhol’s knack for paying non-judgemental attention to those who were otherwise rejected or ignored.

Andy was the chief psychiatrist. It’s the typical psychiatrist’s situation: on the couch, you begin to be totally yourself, hide nothing, this person won’t react, just listen to you. Andy was such an open psychiatrist with all those sad, confused people. They used to come and feel at home. There was this person who never disapproved of them – ‘Nice, nice, good, oh, beautiful.’ They felt very much received, accepted. I have no doubt it helped some not to commit suicide – some committed . . . Also they felt that when Andy put them in front of the camera, they could do and be themselves, thinking that this is what they can contribute, now I’m doing my thing.

The critic Lynne Tillman also felt that the exchange went both ways. In her essay on
a,
‘The Last Words are Andy Warhol’, she
weighs the charge of manipulation against the notion that Warhol offered insecure and unhappy people ‘something – work or a feeling of significance for that moment or a way to fill time. The tape recorder is on. You are being recorded. Your voice is being heard, and this is history.’

It wasn’t just a question of contribution, though. If all of Warhol’s work,
a
included, is antagonistic to received notions of value, if it participates in a tearing down of sentiment and seriousness, it is at the same time engaged in a project of building up, of giving status and attention to the deviant and neglected, to the aspects of culture that have become invisible, either because they lurk in shadows or because they’ve drifted into the blind spot of excessive familiarity.

While
a
is at pains to show that a heartfelt confession has no more intrinsic value than a conversation about 20 milligram bi-phetamine or mouldy Coca-Cola, it simultaneously testifies to the importance, the beauty even, of what people actually say and how they say it: the great jumbled inconsequential endlessly unfinished business of ordinary existence. This is what Warhol liked, and this is what he valued too, a fact attested to by
a
’s closing line, in which Billy Name, summing up the whole chaotic expulsive endeavour, cries ‘Out of the garbage, into The Book’ – the vessel, that is, by which the transient and trashy will be sanctified and preserved.

*

Of course, all this is assuming that your words are wanted in the first place. In the spring of 1967, the final year of
a’s
taping, a
woman came to see Andy about a play she’d written. He took the meeting, intrigued by the title,
Up Your Ass,
but then got cold feet, worried about the potentially pornographic contents. He thought the woman might be an undercover cop, trying to entrap him. On the contrary, she was as far from the system as it is possible to be, an outlier and anomaly even amidst the flamboyant freak-show of the Factory.

Like Warhol, Valerie Solanas, the woman who once shot him, has been eaten by history, reduced to a single act. The crazy woman, the failed assassin, too angry and unhinged to be worthy of attention. And yet what she had to say is brilliant and prescient as well as brutal and psychotic. The story of her relationship with Andy is all about words – about how much they’re valued and what happens if they aren’t. In her controversial book, the
SCUM Manifesto,
she considers the problems of isolation not in emotional terms, but structurally, as a social problem that particularly affects women. And yet Solanas’s attempt to make contact and build solidarity by way of language ended in tragedy, amplifying rather than relieving the sense of isolation that she and Warhol shared.

The early life of Valerie Solanas is just as you might expect, only more so. A disordered childhood, parcelled between relatives. Sharp as a knife, so sharp you’ll cut yourself, a sarcastic, rebellious girl. Abused by her bartender father, sexually active from a young age, first child at fifteen, raised as her sister, second child at sixteen, adopted by friends of the father, a sailor lately back from the Korean War. An out lesbian at school, where she was bullied, then a psychology major at the University of Maryland, where she wrote witty, caustic, proto-feminist columns for the student paper.

What was she like back then? Angry, sometimes physically aggressive, very poor, determined, isolated, radicalised by the circumstances of her own life – the suffocating expectations, the limited options, the galling hypocrisies and ruthless double standards. Unlike Warhol, who combated his exclusion passively, Solanas wanted active change, to smash things up rather than redecorate and rearrange.

After an abortive stint at grad school, she dropped out of the educational system entirely, hitchhiking around the country. She started writing
Up Your Ass
in 1960 and the next year moved to New York, where she drifted between boarding houses and welfare hotels. I have said that both Hopper and Warhol were poor, but Solanas existed in a marginal world that neither of them ever experienced: panhandling, turning tricks, waiting tables; never resting, never taking her eyes off the ball.

In the mid-1960s she started work on what would become the
SCUM Manifesto.
The word
scum
appealed to her. Scum: extraneous matter or impurities; a low, vile or worthless person or group of people. Like Warhol, she was attracted by the excessive and neglected, the rubbished and rubbishy. Both liked turning things upside-down; both were inverts, imaginative upenders of what the culture held dear. As for the SCUM of the manifesto, Solanas’s definition describes just the sort of women Warhol liked, at least from the other side of a camera: ‘dominant, secure, self-confident, nasty, violent, selfish, independent, proud, thrill-seeking, free-wheeling, arrogant females, who consider themselves fit to rule the universe, who have free-wheeled to the limits of this “society” and are ready to wheel on to something far beyond what it has to offer’.

The
Manifesto
breaks down what’s wrong with patriarchy – which is to say, using Solanas’s own language, what’s wrong with men. It proposes violent solutions, perhaps along the satiric lines of Swift’s
A Modest Proposal,
which suggested that Ireland’s poor might sell their children as food for the rich, though perhaps not. It’s insane and appalling, also insightful and weirdly joyful. It calls in the very first sentence for the overthrow of the government, the elimination of the money system, the institution of complete automation (Valerie shared Warhol’s prescience when it came to the liberating or pseudo-liberating qualities of machines) and the destruction of the male sex. Over the next forty-five pages, it slams through the ways in which men are responsible for violence, work, boredom, prejudice, moral systems, isolation, government and war, even death.

Still shockingly violent now, the manifesto was so far in advance of its times politically as to be almost unreadably strange, written in an alien language, a language that is palpably buckling and rupturing, exploding out of silence, splattering itself on to the page. When Solanas wrote
SCUM,
second-wave feminism had barely begun. Betty Friedan’s reasoned and reasonable
The Feminine Mystique
was published in 1963. In 1964, the Civil Rights Act barred employment discrimination with regard to race and gender; in addition, the first woman’s shelter opened. But a nascent acknowledgement that the lot of women included violence and financial exploitation was still a world away from the systemic, furious, radical upheaval that Solanas was proposing. ‘SCUM,’ she wrote, ‘is against the entire system, the very idea of law and government. SCUM is out to destroy the system, not attain certain rights within it.’

It’s not an easy position to inhabit, that of the outlier, the iconoclast. ‘Valerie Solanas was a loner,’ writes Avital Ronell in her introduction to
SCUM.
‘She had no followers. She arrived too late or too early on every scene.’ And Ronell is not the only one to see the manifesto as a text that both arises from and exists in isolation. According to Mary Harron, the writer and director of the biopic
I Shot Andy Warhol:
‘It is a product of a gifted mind working in isolation, with no contact with but also no allegiance to academic structures – isolated and therefore owing nothing to anyone.’ As for Breanne Fahs, who wrote the wonderfully restorative biography of Solanas published by the Feminist Press in 2014:
‘SCUM Manifesto
was witty, intelligent, and violent, sure, but it was also lonely. Isolation followed Valerie, however much she recruited and connected, attacked and provoked.’