BOOKS BOUGHT:
 Ten Thousand Saints—Eleanor Henderson
Elia Kazan—Richard Schickel
Monogamy—Adam Phillips
Your Voice in My Head—Emma Forrest
Young Stalin—Simon Sebag Montefiore
The Sex Diaries: Why Women Go Off Sex and Other Bedroom Battles—Bettina Arndt
Epitaph of a Small Winner—Machado de Assis
Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and the Marriage of the Century—Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger |
BOOKS READ:
Out Stealing Horses—Per Petterson
Ten Thousand Saints—Eleanor Henderson
Elia Kazan—Richard Schickel
Mating in Captivity: Sex, Lies, and Domestic Bliss—Esther Perel |
I know that you are younger than me, because more or less everyone is, nowadays. I am presuming, too, that if you have turned to this page of the Believer then you have an interest in books, and that if you read any of the rest of the magazine, then you are likely to have a deep passion for other forms of art. It is not too much of a stretch, then, to deduce from this information that your sexual relationships are complicated, morally dubious, and almost certainly unsavory, and I say that with as much neutrality as I can muster. So before I write about Mating in Captivity, Esther Perel’s book about monogamous sex, I suppose I should clarify a couple of points for you.
Firstly: monogamy is this thing where you sleep with only one person. And I’m not talking about only one person during the whole length of Bonnaroo, or an art-film screening, or a poetry “happening,” or whatever. Sometimes the commitment might last weeks, months even. (Married readers: in next month’s column, I may introduce some more information, although I suspect they’re some years away from being able to handle the dismal truth.) Esther Perel has cleverly recognized that a tiny minority of monogamists can occasionally feel a twinge of inexplicable and indefinable dissatisfaction with their chosen path—nothing significant, and certainly nothing that leads them to rethink their decision (monogamous relationships almost never fail, unless either partner is still sexually active)—and she has written a book that might help them through this tricky time. It’s a niche market, obviously, the sexual equivalent of a guide for people whose pets have an alcohol-abuse problem. It’s great that someone has done it, but it’s not for everyone.
Secondly, I should also explain that I read this book for professional reasons, and professional reasons alone: I’m trying to write something about monogamy, god help me. I know that sounds dubious, but maybe you will believe me if I confess that my own marital problems lie beyond the reach of any self-help book available in a bookstore, or even on Amazon. They also lie beyond the reach of pills and tears, but perhaps I have said too much.
Mating in Captivity is a very wise book—I was going to say “surprisingly wise,” because I have hitherto maintained the lit-snob assumption that nonfiction books that purport to improve your unhappy marriage or your failing career or your sickly spiritual well-being will actually do no such thing. (As we know around these parts, only Great Literature can save your soul, which is why all English professors are morally unimpeachable human beings, completely free from vanity, envy, sloth, lust, and so on.) Perel is very good on how the space between couples in which eroticism thrives, a space we are desperate to fill in the early days of a relationship, can be shrunk by domesticity and knowledge; there is a pragmatic understanding in her writing that is entirely winning and sympathetic.
She also has interesting things to say about the contemporary insistence that all intimacy is verbal intimacy, a cultural diktat that confuses and intimidates the kind of male whose inability to talk is then misinterpreted as an inability to commit, or a macho fear of weakness. Perel tells the rather sweet story of Eddie and Noriko, who literally couldn’t communicate because they didn’t speak the same language; Eddie had been ditched by scores of women who were impatient with his apparent unwillingness to bare his soul. “I really think that not being able to talk made this whole thing possible,” Eddie tells Perel, twelve years into his marriage. “For once, there was no pressure on me to share. And so Noriko and I had to show how much we liked each other in other ways. We cooked for each other a lot, gave each other baths… It’s not like we didn’t communicate; we just didn’t talk.” more baths, less talking… If you’re a woman who is currently and unhappily single, you could do a lot worse than put that slogan on a banner and march up and down your street.
“Some of America’s best features—the belief in democracy, equality, consensus-building, compromise, fairness, and mutual tolerance—can, when carried too punctiliously into the bedroom, result in very boring sex,” Perel says in a chapter entitled Democracy Versus Hot Sex. At the time of writing, Michele Bachmann has just announced her candidacy for the presidency, and another assumption I have made about you is that very few of you vote Republican. I don’t think Esther Perel is encouraging you to do so, although if the unthinkable happens and Bachmann wins, there may well be some consolations, from the sound of it. (None of this applies to the British, of course, who live in a class-ridden monarchy, and as a consequence have hot sex every single day of their lives.)
My only complaint about this engaging and thoughtful book is that its author uses the word vanilla pejoratively too often, as a synonym for bland, dull, safe. This usage, I think, must stem from vanilla ice cream, which, typically, tastes of nothing and is certainly the unthinkable option if you’re in an ice-cream establishment that offers scores of varieties. The flavor of the vanilla pod itself, however, is sophisticated, seductive, subtle. Have you tried the Body Shop Vanilla Shower Gel? I don’t want to write advertising copy for multinational companies—not for free, anyway—but Body Shop Vanilla, it seems to me, is much more suggestive of deviance and light bondage than it is of the missionary position. And, guys, if you use that, could you credit the Believer? And also chuck them a few quid? Thanks.
I bought a couple of the books on the lists above after coming across a top-five that Woody Allen put together for the Guardian. I had never heard of Machado de Assis, and I probably wouldn’t have thought of reading a biography of Elia Kazan had it not been for Allen’s recommendation, but Richard Schickel’s book chimed with the mood created by Ball of Fire, Stefan Kanfer’s terrifically entertaining book about Lucille Ball, which I read recently.
Kazan, as you may or may not know, was the brilliant director of On the Waterfront and A Streetcar Named Desire. But he is now remembered almost as clearly because he chose to testify against former colleagues in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC)—in 1952. Schickel begins his book, electrifyingly and provocatively, by coming out swinging on Kazan’s behalf. I had never come across anyone attempting to do this before, and as a consequence I had always presumed that those who named names could safely be written off; god knows there are few enough examples of moral choices that are straightforwardly good or bad, and I had always valued the decision of Kazan and others as one of those that one didn’t have to think about: they were wrong, full stop, and we are thus free to condemn them as viciously and as cheerfully as we want.
Yes, well. It turns out that it wasn’t quite like that. Schickel’s arguments are complicated and detailed, and I don’t have the space to do them justice here, but then, complication and detail are precisely what have been lacking ever since the 1950s. Schickel describes the campaign against Kazan as “a typical Stalinist tactic—seize the high, easy-to-understand moral ground, then try to crush nuanced opposition to that position through simplifying sloganeering.” I suspect that I’m not the only one who liked the look of that easy-to-understand moral ground, and there is a part of me that is actually irritated to discover that it’s not as comfortable as it appeared. Schickel’s jabs at the kidney—if that is where our fuzzy sense of morality is stored—are telling and sharp: naming names would have been fine if the names named had belonged to the Ku Klux Klan or the Nazi Party; there were lots of other, more-democratic leftist organizations that liberals could have signed up for; there were public protests against the Gulags as early as 1931, and there was really no excuse for those who defended Stalin in the 1950s; much of the outrage directed against Kazan was entirely synthetic. Rod Steiger, who appeared in On the Waterfront and was loudly and angrily opposed to the idea of Kazan receiving an honorary Oscar in 1999, told a reporter from Time that Kazan “was our father and he fucked us”; Schickel points out that the fucking was done well over a year before On the Waterfront started shooting—in other words, Steiger’s moral objections came to the surface painfully slowly, and well after one of the most celebrated performances of his film career was safely in the can.
It was Dalton Trumbo, one of the writers blacklisted as a result of HUAC, who ended up making the best case for Kazan. The kind of person who testified, he said, was “a man who has left the CP to avoid constant attempts to meddle with the ideological content of his writing… a person whose disagreement with the CP had turned to forthright hostility and who, when the crunch came, saw no reason to sacrifice his career in defence of the rights of people he now hated…” All I want is one simple article of faith that is even less complicated than it looks. Is that too much to ask?
There is a lot more to Kazan than all this, of course. He directed the first production of Death of a Salesman, as well as the stage version of A Streetcar Named Desire, worked with Arthur Miller on several other occasions, slept with Monroe and Vivien Leigh, made East of Eden, and wrote a novel that sold four million copies in the U.S.—Kazan had a pretty impressive twentieth century. I wish Schickel’s book had been just that little bit more gossipy, not just because gossip is fun, but because Kazan’s relentless womanizing, it seems to me, needed some kind of explanation or context. Schickel’s refusal to discuss Kazan’s domestic arrangements seems indulgent, rather than high-minded; Kazan is given a guys-will-be-guys (or, perhaps, great-artists-will-be-great-artists) free pass that I don’t think anyone ever really earns. From the index: “Kazan, Molly Day Thacher (first wife) husband’s affairs and, 94–95, 388–89, 404.” They were married for thirty years.
Philip Roth was recently quoted as saying that he doesn’t read fiction anymore. “I wised up,” he told an interviewer in the Financial Times. We all have moments like this: I have vowed, at various points, never to read any more novels, and books about sport, and thrillers where kids get murdered, and music biographies; but none of these decisions ever holds for very long. Moods change, tastes re-assert themselves, and a great book always shakes off its genre and its subject matter anyway, although I fear that the desire to read about the dismemberment of children and young women may have left me forever. I’m not sure wisdom has much to do with any of this, and I’d hate for Roth’s words to be given extra weight just because of his age, his accomplishments, and the veneration he inspires. I don’t know if it’s ever very wise to give up on Dickens. In my experience, a sudden panic about my own ignorance is followed firstly by the desperate desire to read nonfiction, and then, usually very swiftly, by a realization that any nonfiction reading I do is going to be hopelessly inadequate and partial. If I knew I was going to die next week, then I’d definitely be keen to read up on facts about the afterlife; in the absence of any really authoritative books on this subject, however (no recommendations, please), then I think I’d rather read great fiction, something that shoots for and maybe even hits the moon, than a history of the House of Bourbon.
It is, perhaps, a little unfair to ask Eleanor Henderson to provide a philosophical justification for an entire art form, especially as Ten Thousand Saints is her first novel, but she does a pretty good job anyway. She moves in extraordinarily close to her young protagonists, participants in the New York straight-edge punk scene of the 1980s, and in doing so taught me a lot of things I didn’t know. (Straight-edge was never much of a thing in England, where sobriety is seen as a moral failing by all ages and tribes.) The big draw here, though, is Henderson’s writing, which is warm, engaged, and precise; I don’t think I have ever come across a gritty urban novel that is as uninterested in finding a prose style to complement its subject. That’s a good thing, by the way. Ten Thousand Saints is the offspring of Lester Bangs and Anne Tyler, and who wouldn’t want to read that baby?
Per Petterson’s beautiful, truthful Out Stealing Horses seems to me a pretty good example of the sort of thing that nonfiction can never accomplish. It’s about aging and childhood, memory and family, and it has things to say on these subjects. That Petterson can accomplish this while providing an ornate, time-shifting narrative that includes—spoiler alert and hopeless volte-face, all at the same time—dead children seems to me the reason why we should never stop reading novels, however old and wise we are.