I WANTED MORE. BUT I had no idea where I was going next.

I had always loved slang, collecting it as the energy of language—and of the nation. It keeps your ear to the ground—and to the groundlings, on whose side I most wanted to be.

We were coining slang very fast now, hacking it out with the coughs and cheapened body odors of the television ads, or buying it up bright and carbon-streaked as the goods at a firesale—wonderful mobile images whose jokes or poignancies were dead in a month. For our reactions to such language ran the same quick course as it did, from natural to fashionable, from honest to false.

There was a phrase of the day—did it come from Harlem streetcorner or Hollywood press-agent, out of “real” jive-ass music, or from the curly boys at the recording studios?—“Let it all hang out.”

Such a phrase means what you make it, depending also on what you are. We coin ourselves from day to day out of such phrases, which interlock enough to keep us going and understanding one another. So if I am feeling false-rural or mock-naive—or if on the other hand I am merely young enough to be nearer the slang—such a phrase may perhaps conjure up women at the washline of the ancient grievances, freed at last of their corsetry and proudly breastfeeding their babies in public places. Or men with bellies hanging easy over their beltlines, from all the good greeds of simple, open life. But if we are merely feeling jazzy, city-corrupt, for today, then the words, jumbling from the crowd, say “Stop the Mafia-style whispering, let down your hair and/or your pants, admit old sins, like maybe that you still say cullud quicker than black, stop being a closet-queen, roll the shirtsleeve from your junkie-arm—be anything you weren’t allowed to be yesterday, even if it’s bad news or badmouth taste, which it is bound to be, for all honesty is really shame.” Shake with “natural” music—even if unnaturally! And above all, loose the pajama string. On anything from the genitalia to literature and politics. For connections between the three are once more being made.

From as far back as Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It,” American popular-sexual slang has had its own brand of coyness, odd if one considers that most of such slang probably comes from the male side. Bottom of it all is the dinky phallus that the country has kept in the dark of the bedroom, or in the decent jockstraps of the locker-room, and has shyly immortalized best perhaps in its skyscrapers (with plenty of heavy money at their roots).

Some of this is what I was thinking. And that not all the modesty in the country was male.

Let it all hang out. Rather a fine phrase, that one.

So, gathering my own echoes together, I did.

Sex. Literature. American.

A mug’s idea of it, I always thought. Whenever I saw any two of those words paired together.

Sex was never just a topic, to me. Literature doesn’t move by topic; critics do. Our literature hadn’t been all-American since well before I was born. And my fellow American writers, who so often fought out their friendships in the magazines—or their judgments—had never been joined there by me.

For two and a half years, until that summer of 1968, I had scarcely read any of them. The novel I had been working on had become a meditation enclosing all I could handle of a sustained metaphorical world: I wanted no interruptions except from life. Increasingly, for the duration of each book, I had found myself doing this, perhaps ever since that first novel of 1961, after which I had been made to see (if I hadn’t seen it before, or not as parochially as the commentators demanded of one) that I too was writing about “America.”

Every writer is a loner in his own way. By circumstance, I had been a late and fairly innocent beginner at an age when others were professionals, belonging to no school except in the minds of those who fixed on those eight early stories in The New Yorker, by temperament alien to the nitpicking of the quarterlies, by sex a woman in a period when the short story was a great female province but the novel was felt to be male, by heritage European, American Southern, and a Jew. When it was complained that I couldn’t be trusted from book to book to hold my own “image,” I gratefully agreed. Yet I could see that all of them were as much American as anything else, and as much about America, as anything else. In this latest book, I had faced that in a way I hadn’t before. Or rather, the book had led me to this conclusion, one outside its own pages or purpose, because it was a chronicle of the past, done in terms of the hot present of the past, but not of the now—in a way I had never attempted before.

But now it was done. We were in summer, on island. I was a reader again. Each morning the postmistress handed me a bundle from the New York Society Library, and I returned her one. I groaned in empathy over every book. As for their “status,” that lay embalmed in the silurian light of the winter claques.

Then—for the record, while pausing in James Purdy’s Eustace Chisholm and the Works at a sentence—I happened to look into the eyes of a deer.

In June, those deer who all year have the run of that island come to the porch to stare. Behind them, their dark wood nibbles our scent. We have left the city of literature. Bringing with us our pathetic fallacy that nature is not watching us. They have left nothing. They bring the gloaming. So, under their eyes—there was now the doe, the fawn, and back in among the trees the stag—I closed the day’s book, on that sentence: “I could drink your come in goblets”—said “millionaire Reuben Masterson.”

Why a goblet, I thought irritably, why not a plain glass? Why does he have to be so fancy? Then I burst out laughing. “Oh, well”—I said to the vanishing scuts of the deer “these days there are millionaires everywhere.”

The idyll was over. The reading had become the meditation. For days I took notes on the flood of it. At first I seemed to be writing of Sex in American Literature, but as other sideshows advanced, I let them, and writing for myself, I named names. Sex, literature, America, I was seeing as sideshows in a circle. Male, female and otherwise, created He them. He was looking for His image. I went looking for mine.

Finished with my orgy of judgment, I made no rewrite, and hid the packet away as one does the minor madnesses. From time to time, hoping to understand what it was to me, I took it out again. I saw nothing in it but what any critic has—ego and empathy, prejudice and taste. Yet perhaps one slim advantage. The creative critic will sometimes do a showy interpretive dance around another man’s book, reworking it in rather the same hungry, possessive way in which certain Freudian biographers seem to want to relive the very life. Writers have small interest in such recreation.

Some of what I had said had not yet been remarked as far as I knew, or not in this way. Or not by a writer. A critic usually thinks he is objective. A writer always knows he is not. At any given moment he can tell you where his ego is. But the empathy wrung from him by the work of other writers tastes of his own sweat. And the balance between these is his brand of scholarship.

I saw too that such notes as these ought to be left in their original circularity. The silent jumps between sections seemed to me to make of themselves a kind of connective current, and the repetitions also. My contemporaries and I knew well enough what it is that “order” destroys.

Meanwhile, I trembled at what I had said of them. For whatever axes I had ground, in the end they ground me. And by now, I was on another book. An odd one, for me. Or odd in a new way.

But until well after its completion, I had no realisation of what the following pages, since transcribed, really are to it.

There are writers whose blessed perversion is not extra the universe which they “share” with “the rest of us,” but total. A writer like Firbank is not only eccentric to the marrowbone, though he may seem merely that, in the first freak delight of encounter. He takes us into the marrowbone. Where exists no “the rest of us,” but the same unity anyone feels when man can take us into his universe. Social and sexual distinctions do not weigh, except in laughter; the sociological or religious critic would be absurd here; delicacies and profundities create themselves according to the relationships in this world, astonishing and fresh as any art new to us is, but no more mixed and polyglot in the end than incontinently truthful art is anywhere.

A writer like Angus Wilson—who in political discussion with a stranger I have heard interject matter-of-factly “Well, I’m a homosexual, you see”—is as an observer and recorder so thoroughly upheld by a particular tradition—here the whole background of the British “class” novel, that his satire is impersonally directed outward, no more homosexual or less heterosexual than a mythical anybody’s; homosexuals in his gallery get the same shrift as everybody, and if the compassion, when it comes, is a bit directed also, that too is British to the core.

Is an American like Albee less lucky for not being centered in such a tradition, or more? He gives no affirmation to any sex, but has used the heterosexual clichés to bitter advantage. When it is complained that he is not only constrained but compelled to do his work in these terms, even to obscure or hide it there, what is really being asked of him? Is he being asked to declare a sexual bias—which is a personal affair, and to couch his work strictly in terms of whatever it is—which is an artistic one? Or is he being asked to affirm—which is a national affair as well? It seems to me, that like the rest of us, he suffers from his Americanism on all these scores, and where he can, also makes very good use of it.

By contrast, Tennessee Williams seems to me more simply a writer of a kind, much gifted with feeling, whose personal vision, whatever its sex, sometimes transcends into poetry and sometimes not—in which case it does become ridiculous. The absurdities do become sexually divisible along a line that one can after a while predict—the girls gone dippy or bitter over homo husbands thrust on their innocence, the bull-like uncles and butch husbands, and with increasingly baby-blue religiosity, the young men always assumpting toward heaven in gilt-gesso featherbeds. If Williams’ work, always heavy on the symbol and the Freudianism, now seems old fashioned, that is why—and really most why the adoration of boy-muscle seems outmoded too. Theater treatment of homosexuality has meanwhile become more liberal. But I never feel that Williams is writing of the homosexual world. From Streetcar on, I have felt that he is writing of “the world” in the heterosexual terms in which it couches itself to him. Sometimes he gives us poetic moments, a kind of intensity-to-the-left-of-feeling—rather like a radical poet in a roomful of Republican ones, certain of whose sensitivities he shares. But I have never-seen a play of his which I didn’t feel was akimbo emotionally, or that stayed with me after-theater, to be returned to—as the major intensities anywhere do. He has always made me feel that he has got “our” world squeegee, and is stuck with it. The worst of this being that the “our world” he brings out in me is a false one too. Oftenly too narrowly heterosexual by far.

I think that the heterosexual artist himself rarely sees the “breeding” world—which is basically as far as I care to define the difference—as narrowly as the consciously or secretly homosexual must. Basically, these must deny the breeding world all its implications of feeling or worth. All their satire will proportion itself toward that, and all their self-exaltation away from it. As for that part of life—death, war, taxes, money in general, and even birth—which is only peripherally sexual, or asexual, or a no-man’s-land mixture of the comedie humaine—they are forced by circumstance to deny that it exists nonsexually, or to castrate themselves from it; they must take a sexual stance on everything. By its nature often an hysteric one. For the world do breed—and is not altogether to be talked out of it.

At present. As food and good rivers grow scarcer, maybe sexual difference, already on its way to optional, may sink the whole frame of reference we now know, in a puree of pills. (Even now, what is a “heterosexual” writer—a man who copulates with women strictly non-anally, if not in the missionary position? Is a woman writer, after a certain mild point of subject and aura, dubiously heterosexual altogether?) Meanwhile, if the English-speaking world, and American literature in particular, has undergone a sexual revolution in the last fifty years, then it is the homosexuals who are its latest suffragettes.

Like all writers, their position toward society—intellectually, emotionally, influentially—starts from their place in it as people. And is altogether different from the suffragettes who preceded them. Women, however kept to the back stairs in the pantheons of art, are admissible to society as people, if only so far. The homosexual, as a person forced into underground alienations or flashily outsize compensating reactions, can feel closer to the categorized—to the black and the Jew. Art, however, has always accepted him as a fully participating member of at least the world of art. Where the women writers, still somewhat relegated to their end of art’s living room, must earn their way across it much as in that kind of segregated American provincial society (and with the same mixed results), the male homosexual writer’s place in the pantheon—and in the host of earthly connections which arise from that privilege—is still with the gentlemen. He may or may not also have additional “homintern” access to spheres of sympathy and influence. The female homo writer, even if a type bold enough to assert its place with the men, also instinctively tends to align herself with that “homintern,” thereby acquiring a coterie to face the world with, much as Southern women writers, linking themselves to the Southern Agrarians, or linked by the critics to that renaissance, were enabled both to escape the stigma of female, and to achieve the connections.

One pays for any connection, of course—is the usual moral tone taken. One pays in a narrowing of sympathies, in exchange for sympathy, and in a loss of autonomies important to artists—in exchange for not being literarily alone. So be it—if it is also admitted that all writers in America, and the heterosexuals as much as any, suffer from their connection with a society which in the most rigidly gross way arrogates what shall be considered male or female in people, taking no note that the antipathies which it has manufactured for itself: soft-hard, virile-weak, delicate-strong, sheltered-experienced, etc., etc., are elsewhere much more loosely defined—as in Europe even of the nineteenth century, or are partially blended or altogether reversed—as historically in Asiatic and Muslim countries everywhere. (What would be said of a flower-arranging American who spent his days in exclusively male cafés, or walking hand in hand with a male friend, meanwhile expecting his wife and her female relatives to run the family business and practical relationships? Or of a country where the practice of medicine and dentistry is more for the female, and a poet can therefore tell me “I am free to write of course, and have this beautiful house, since my wife is one of the best dentists in Manila”?) That so-allotted sex characteristics vary wildly with geography is still a matter of merely anthropological or travel interest even to the educated here—rarely entering their thoughts about themselves. And the democratic fear of acknowledging that money makes us different really, shuts off even the artist from freely admitting in his work that where you dig your ditch or your dough has more to do with some so-called feminine-masculine divisions of personality than human nature does—or than personality does. American society, certain portions of it, can take up sexual “looseness” for fun or freedom’s sake. Or it can learn to let fathers change diapers, for dear psychology’s sake. Or it can admit that there’s a little feminine in the best of us, and a little heterosexual in the worst of us. What it fights to the death, even on the highest intellectual levels—literary critics, say, or really male novelists—is any admission that those ingrainedly fem.-masc. activities or movements of the reason, which our lifestyle apportions as such and takes for granted—are actually “so-called.”

What these binding divisions of sexual characteristic have done to American writers goes deeper than what is in their books—because it apprehends it. Deeper even than the dreary round of fictional orgasm or bedsheet romanticism, or the use of sex as the sole revelation. (Or the near ruination of pornography—ordinarily one of life’s more aristocratic or subtly private adornments—by practicing it on a dull mass-scale.) Whatever the physicality in question, or the mind, a cloud of these stipulations obscures them. Sometimes, writers have been the greater for not knowing that nothing is new under the sun—in youth, a writer might otherwise never begin at all. But none ever draws strength from keeping to concerns defined as proper to what he or she is—except the negative strength of doing the opposite. Which turns some into narrower polemicists than their talents call for, or into stunted followers of the very opposite. But by and large, American writers have kept to being men, women, or homosexuals, as the case may be, very much in terms of what the times have told them that they are. In fact, doing what one is told, in this area, seems perhaps the primary secondary sexual characteristic of all Americans.

We already know how doing what society expects of the male, or overdoing it, works with those male writers who get sucked into the virility callisthenic. These are the writers, some still extant, who are doomed to hunt deer in Brooklyn, or fish for cunt in the Caribbean, or to make the cock itself their Chanticleer—all with the penis-envy of men infinitely grateful because they have got one. All because, we say, they early got hung up on Hemingway’s jockstrap. What we forget is that, prior to this, something in the society hung up him. Behind him at home was the conviction that artists were sissy (and drink and the shotgun were dashing), ahead of him even a Europe in which Freud was prying into the neuroses of art, and Mann was perpetrating his own guilty notion that art was neurosis—wasn’t any artist deserting life by not “living” it? Was art life? A man’s life?

Women writers in America have acted expectedly also. In the nineteenth century, women here, when not poets either hidden like Dickinson or album like Hemans and Ingelow, were journalists, to either the philosophical passions of the hour, like Margaret Fuller, or to the political ones, like Harriet Beecher Stowe. All the rest were ladies, in a three-named tradition that was to survive well past the age of Adela Rogers St. John—and never quite die. None were novelists with the breadth of experience or daring of the European Georges, or even with the formidable pomp of Mrs. Humphrey Ward. As women passed through the period of the expansion of women’s rights, they might be expected to take the right to be an artist as one of these: many did, and have, and do. But the freedom to be an artist is not granted like a vote—it is made. And women continued to make it, most of them, in terms of the sexual image allowed. In the early 1900s, before sexual taboos were broken—by men writers always remember, but not by Americans—the gap between what either sex could say of experience was narrower. When so much of life had to be left out of art, there was naturally less surprise or threat in the idea that the powers of women artists might be up to it. For a while, the image allowed them was actually less separate, more equal, than it has ever been since.

Cast back. To Wharton and Glasgow, and Cather. The first two, as women of means and position, were part of a society which, with its confined sexual mores, was the world of Howell and James as well. Lucky or not for all of them, the shades of sexual difference in terms of subject and language, were not as severe as for women of Twain’s day—and far less violent than in the days to come, when the major division was that women didn’t go to war, to sea, or to any of the “virile” professions. If Wharton wrote restrictedly of war, so did many of the men; in Ethan Frome she did try “the poor,” attempting a break from the social world rather than the sexual one. She wrote no Golden Bowl, but she did write a House of Mirth; though as a writer she always went for the circumstantial intensity over the psychological one, the sexual ground treated was much the same. Glasgow’s sexual boundaries were smaller and the experiential ones also—she went to the history and nostalgia of a tapestry past. But neither the experience expected of a writer, nor the language, had yet so exploded over here that Cabell couldn’t say of a book by Glasgow that it was so much like James it could have been written by Mrs. Wharton.

Cather was saved by “the land.” It allowed her to speak from a major vision, and for that, even from a woman, to be acceptable—more acceptable than it is now. As to sexual material per se, A Lost Lady is no more delicate than much writing of the era, and My Mortal Enemy a psychological masterpiece of great power, done without any of the overt sex which would have spoiled it (Fitzgerald was to do the same). Though small in scale, these two short works were still tied to the pioneer experience, or to the provincial one. The larger novels seem to be thinned less by reticence than by a blurred or cramped knowledge of how people are—thin in proportion to wherever “the land” is no longer artistically enough. As that vision recedes, a writer of less authority begins to appear. But as woman of her time, her consciousness that she could speak for the country, and for its cosmos, gave her the confidence to write “like a man.” To the country, she would be no more unfeminine than some of their pioneer grandmothers. And her male colleagues, whether from city, town, or open boat, still were allowed a dignity sufficient to them—as “men of letters.” The society had not yet placed them in the bind where they must defend their part of life or literature as the important whole.

But these days, art takes more responsibility for what is said of it, and has more influence. If, once past the basic physical facts, society is what makes children “manly” or “womanly,” “black” or “white,” “Jewish” or “Christian,” artists too are molded by the times in their very expression of these, often reporting back to the society in terms of what it has made of them. Academy-culture is merely popular culture early aware of itself; these days the roads between are very quick. American society at present is provincially cowed by the artist in general and the successful one in particular—this meaning one who makes either money or news. If he blows the horn loud enough, society will now accept what it has made of him (occasionally even of her)—and looks to him to tell it what art is.

The male hetero writer no longer has to apologize to America for being unmanly. But he still may have to overcompensate for it, to himself. New elements have long since crept into the lifestyle, and into that yearly Christmas package, the American ethos. The jokes are not on the equality of women, but of the sexes; women are getting equaller all the time. Teachers, mothers, dominant purchasing power and stockholders, overbearing even in the life-expectancy statistics—there’s no end to it. The Freudians have told them and told them that they have nothing to waggle in front of them. But they seem to have got used to it, in favor of a better ’ole. He doesn’t want to hate them for it—that would be homosexual. So he approaches the subject of women in art very cannily—on the highest plane possible. And the most objective. Let them remember that they can never make major art. Not without cocks. And cunt is a pejorative.

Major art is about the activities of men—that’s why so much of it is about women. But not by them. For major art includes where women can’t go, or shouldn’t or never have. There are no places where men can’t go or haven’t been. Childbed is not a place or an event; it is merely what women do. Major art is never about the activities of women. Except when by men. Women are household artists; Austen’s art is a travelogue between houses. Dickinson hid in one all her life, Emily Bronte too. Colette had to be locked into one, before she would write. George Eliot had to be persona non at some of the best London ones, before she could write a study of marriage like Middlemarch—and change her name. Let’s face it, dear ladies—a house is not a cosmic home. Notice too, that the women who do write scarcely ever have guts enough for the full, real life of a woman—of all the women writers so far mentioned, plus the recent generation of Porter, Stafford, Welty, McCullers, O’Connor—only Colette had a child. And she was AC-DC—talented women usually are. That extra chromosome coming out in them. In the wrong way. Art is really wrong for women. How otherwise could it be so right for the men? And Marianne Moore?—she never went to war.

To which those critics who model themselves on the male hetero writers of the day (and perhaps once wanted to be one) add, “And look at their style!” Critics of this type always know what major art is—and wish to discuss only major artists. (That’s how they know they’re major critics.) And a major artist writes only in a “masculine” style. Which uses short words—like Faulkner. Whose sentences don’t inch forward oh little iambs, but are rough and clumsy—like Hemingway. What the masculine style of major art must never be is jeweled—beg pardon, lapidary. A jeweled fancy is always feminine. Like Shakespeare. And Melville. And Sir Thomas Browne.

Most symptomatic of all, when I say any of this, I must joke as I have, though a riffle through the reviews of any modern female writer, major or minor, would give me all the citations needed, all of the most serious intent. The bind here is extraordinarily interesting—if only to women and anthropologists: Women who complain of injustices done to them as women are in reality not angry at the different or inequitous treatment of women, but at the difference between men and women—which of course is ineradicable. The subject of female injustice is therefore innately ridiculous. Women who act as a group on any subject are also innately so—evert to women. They are being personal. Men, men writers for instance, never allege injustice on the grounds of being men—even the homosexuals. They pick something sociological, something sensible—like being black, or Ba-hai, or poor. Men are impersonal. That’s why they can afford to act sociologically. Women can really only act sexually—that’s why they are the same everywhere. Women are not sociological creatures—that’s why they are funny in groups. That’s why men take any rise in their status or opportunities not as a sociological threat, but as a sexual one.

For a woman, a woman writer for instance, never merely wants her work to be treated equally with her peers of any sex (with a due allowance for the sexual bias of all), allowing her then to be a writer who is a woman. She wants to be a male writer. In her body, she has the mind of a man—and she wants a you-know-what to go with it. And don’t let her tell you that they order these things differently in France. All that means is she wants a French one.

So does the tangle, sent up by the society and implemented by the male artists themselves, gather around the woman of good mind until she half believes it—or more. Women writers in America, by the evidence, are often made to believe it totally. Partly because of the real present differences between male and female in their attitudes toward the public world. As artists, women can learn pomp, but from a long history of humility generally, they begin with less of it.

As they still do in science to a degree, and of course very largely in politics and government. In a democratic country, where women cannot expect to be queens and have never been presidents, how could this be otherwise? England has a minister of culture, but if Americans were to create such a cabinet post, it would probably still be better for “culture” for the post to be filled by a man.

As artists, women can also be made to feel that the honesty of their work is impugned by their effect as women—particularly if it’s a good one; dare they have beauty, style or the vanities approved as womanly, or must they bloomerize? Historically and now, both men and women have dressed to show the fashion of their convictions; after which women usually get the credit for the fashion, and men for the convictions. The ringlets of George Eliot, say, were affectation, the beard of Walt Whitman sincere. So, just as men have worried whether art in a man isn’t affectation, women wonder whether their effect as women can coincide with art.

In reaction, some literary women become scholars, or Xantippes of the quarterlies, or salonnistes. Or males. Or use their profession to fend off the female experience. “Hortense, did you want yo chi’drun?” Carson McCullers once said to me. “Ah didden. Ah always felt they would innafere with my woik.” Honest to the nth, we are. We lack the pomp to be sure that when we spread our breast to the world as ourselves, a major eagle will come and peck at it. We have been taught to lack it: that a man’s role is to hunt experience, a woman’s to let it come upon her—and that this makes all female experience less exciting document.

Women are constitutionally immersed in and interested in the minutiae of daily living; so are artists and writers; a great deal of Dickens, Balzac, and Tolstoi takes place in the Dutch interiors of life. But in women artists this is called domesticity—of subject—and women artists themselves fail to see scope there, or give it. They fear the lady-writer in themselves. For what society says to the American male writer, via his sex, is Watch Out—maybe you shouldn’t. What he says in turn to the woman writer is Hump It—you can’t.

Not anything important. You are the little jewelers. Of little experiences. Once, when a renowned poet and a writer who had just written her first book were guests at the same house, the poet one morning reported to their host that he had stayed up all night reading it—he was an old man, and slept little. “Very fine,” he repeated several times over. “Very feminine of course! But still—very fine.”

For a long time, this puzzled her. Some of her stories were autobiographical, as with any young writer, but some were about men, some were about “the society,” one was indeed the very essence of the woman’s side of an affair and as feminine as she could make it—in just the way that a male writer, on love, might be male. None of the stories were more miniature than most short ones are, nor had even the reviewers called them lady-work; the title story, as it happened, was political. Whereas the body of the poet’s work was very autobiographical and very delicate—and included some famous miniatures. Perhaps all this worked differently for poetry. Later, she thought not. Even at eighty, a male American artist daren’t be a miniaturist. He has his cock to think of. Which is always very large.

So, very naturally, we come back to the queers, who are now in the process of telling us, in their own way, what all this has to do with America. Or showing us. Not the writers themselves (who for all we know may be as hetero American as a Legion commander after church, in bed with his wife—and a floozie). Their books. I say “queer” because the word at least says what it means, where the homo-hetero language, once straight biological, now belongs to the psychologists—and all psychological language implies redemption to a norm. Queer literature, in its own way is now preaching redemption for the American norm. Not only for sex. For all American life.

So is everyone else of course. But not sexually. Why, the sexual revolution was won some forty-fifty years ago, wasn’t it?—with Freud and Joyce and Gide and Proust and Havelock Ellis and de Montherlaht, and D. H. Lawrence and Bertrand Russell and all those freelove people—and Freud. And lots of Americans?

I myself have certainly never scanned back over the so-called “pantheon of American writers” in terms of their sexuality before—first off because I am an enemy of any who look at literature topically, second because anything monosexual to me is a bore. But one glance, and one realizes that whoever made the revolution, American writers didn’t. And at one glance, the whole “hoorah for bed and basic language”—which has been mainly American—becomes clear. We came in late. And on the hoorah score, mostly with secondary or second-rate writers. Among our good ones—it was quite possible to read both The Sun Also Rises and Sanctuary (and especially if reading it before the deluge had made expectations clearer) with at first some wonder over the guy’s lack in the former, and over who was doing precisely what with the corncob, in the latter. (Nor is it certain that on the part of Hemingway and Faulkner this was all merely artistic restraint.) Meanwhile, only gradually did Americans readers learn to lean over the bed, unpartisanly cheering. Over what the 1950s would tell them at once. And the ’60s? With pictures. We develop slow.

Take a further look. Only the. heterosexual revolution was “won” by whomever, in those days. Gide made his living out of his neatly Calvinist self-torture, straddling the bisexual see-saw. And Proust made his Albertine a girl. Colette did as she pleased, but revolutions are not won by those not interested in them. Except for Cheri, her work was narrowly known here (mainly through the fashion magazines and a later movie made on the least of her works, Gigi), and was altogether out of line for critics like Wilson in his Marxist period, or for the later historicity of Kazin and Howe. (Plus all those subemendators who were out for “American Studies” buffalo—and picked their comparative literature along related lines.) Trilling might have done her, in his Forster period—if of course we could be sure that he “knew about” Forster. (When I lived in England, in the ’50s, I was regularly taken aside by writers or dons, and hilariously asked, with covert or plain reference to the novels Forster was rumored to keep locked up at Kings—“Does Mr. Trilling know?”) Certainly the New-Critic commentary which took Howards End to its heart in the forties paid no mind to the diaphanous sexual qualities in The Longest Journey or A Room with a View, in their ardor at discovering a book in which sex too was treated entirely as a matter of social class. Meanwhile Wilson kept any trenchant sexual comment of his own to his fiction: I Thought of Daisy and Hecate County. It looks better there generally, I agree.

American criticism in any case spent scant time on queerishness, maybe because, according to the style of its segregations (and of the review journals) Catholics tended to write on Catholics, women on women, etc.—and it mightn’t have looked right. The college critics and litry journals would treat even a great queer like Gide more for the style of the revelation than for the revelation—recording perhaps how the tradition of Si le grain ne meurt opens its heart in the manner of Rousseau—but letting the matter go. The “other” side of Gide (say that side of The Counterfeiters, or The Immoralist, Lafcadio, et al.) which had nothing to do with litry methodology, had to wait for the younger crowd—and for the paperback. (As much queer writing has.)

As for pornography and perhaps the Marquis de Sade—he became a philosophe, entirely. And therefore a man for the avant-garde-academic curriculum. In the sixties, pornography-not-per-se would be taken up by just that university crowd, in their forties say, post-social-conscious and even post-Freudian—for whom sex was now the respectability. (College departments and newspaper staffs will recognize some of them, as the men who got drunk once or twice a year with Mailer on the symposium or party circuit, and afterwards wrote articles saying “Norman said to me—”) And as with all such respectabilities, the subject matter was not merely newly decent, but new—to the respectable. They had discovered it.

For such as these, who had perhaps read Frank Harris in their youth rather than Mlle de Maupin, and whose idea of homosexual critique is still Fiedler’s little divertimento with Huck Finn, pornography is still by and large “square.” A beast with two backs—but the pudenda don’t match. And queers are taken care of more or less manly-classic style, in terms of the old question turned answer: “What they do.” In the “male” novels of the era, any lucky Pierre still gets where he gets by accident. Either by way of adolescence, or merely in the happy melée of the accident school of writing, whose later name, black comedy, was actually a loose term for a number of old genres. (Sometimes nothing but a professor poking the eighteenth-century ash-heaps for some old Humphrey Clinkers. And sometimes pornography, looking under the bed for art. Which it found there, sitting in its own middle-aged white skin, reading Lolita. In the early Paris edition.)

But meanwhile the younger people, and the old Dostoevski-lovers, and the good Bronx social workers and the beautiful boys flocked East to find out what they were—and all the other elements which make up off-Broadway theater audiences—had long since been reading or seeing Genet. Once more, in that long inheritance which, only yesterday it seemed had brought Sartre to the intellectual Jews and Celine to Kerouac, American literature was being seeded from abroad—and this time the dramatists were the most accessible.

The picture is still near enough to see how mixed it was. Certainly the idea of politics blending with sex, as in The Balcony—of sexual force and allegory used to flay the moral vision, the moral-political vision—was new for Americans. And exciting intellectually—or exciting in those parts they had always taken to be intellectual. Genet as thief and anti-hero was nothing new; even the avant-garde’s anathema, The New Yorker, had had Cheever’s story of suburbia gone thief. What completed Genet’s respectability here was The Blacks, which those Americans who saw it took to their hearts as the post-war Germans had taken The Diary of Anne Frank.

Guilt, in no matter what sexual expression, was the point—and certainly not sexual guilt per se, by now old hat in any form. Tangentially, black-white and queer-square antitheses were to shift into all sorts of new alignments and crossings-over, from new political alliances, to newly chic mixed couples: white girls with black men, bright white queers with passive black partners, or notably among Southerners, the reverse. James Baldwin, whose first novel Giovanni’s Room had been cast in the old Gide pattern of sex severely (and romantically) apart from other life elements, indeed a “white” novel in every way, was to shift drastically in his second, mixing up sex, Whitmanesque brotherhood brought to bed, violence-vengeance, and all the old asseverations of extra “Negro vitality” (sexuality) got from the whites—in all of which the Esquire magazine squares now joined in. Sex was now how you expressed your other guilts.

Meanwhile: Godot—gone from Broadway into the universities (where I saw it in Iowa, in 1958), followed by the other Beckett plays, and to a smaller audience, the novels. … And altogether—in spite of Irish quirkery and French logic—an asexual art, surely an art whose device and delight was to show how nearly it and man could be, or were, solipsist. Absolute personality, on a pin in a void, watched its own neutral despairs, with a faintly giggly cosmic hope. Maybe even theater art then, much less the novel, didn’t have to be sexual? Or human beings didn’t, or not as much as had been thought—what was this hollowly taped cosmological echo-of-a-breath saying in its writer-translator English?

And don’t forget the English—not that we’ve been allowed to. Any change in the class-structure tosses up art with it—witness us Americans ourselves, at least in our beginnings. That change took the English once more by the throat—in the spoken word. And from theater-stall to the lumpkins of country or town, the sexual attitude is much the same. What Pinter is saying about sex is as obscure as the rest of him, except for one surety; he’s not saying it separately, that is, apart from the rest of what bothers the human hegemony—and not differently for women and men. His whole metaphor is to realign the old emotional proportions of things. In that metaphor, individualized sex seems to be going out. Which also seemed to be much the tone of whatever else was being said there in the kitsch of that time, from the Sassoon haircuts of the girls to the Carnaby Street modsters, and even the Beatles’ trail of bobby-soxers, whose yowl came straight from still undifferentiated sex, a mass sex in which the other girls around one are part of it too. The line between this and the old upper-class sexuality—hockey-girls and Oxford dramatic societies—is not far.

Returning to the theater proper—it’s noticeable that Frank Marcus’ Sister George, technically a quite ordinary comedy in the old style, at times almost music-hall (and not at all that serious-play-which-fell-short-of-itself which, because of its sexual material, Walter Kerr in solemnly called it) was remarkable not only for the frank tongue of its Lesbians, but for its flat-tongued pursuit of people as people, in a notable lack of tea-and-sympathy guilt wringing its hands in the wings over the pity or evil of it all. Charles Dyer’s The Staircase, of perhaps more serious intent, or less televisionery method, did much the same for a pair of queers. Osborne’s A Patriot For Me, did go at it in the old grand style, tracing a Prussian Officer’s slow self-revelation of homo sexuality—here that word suited—while the audience went raving bored with unsurprise, but then topping it with a drag-ball scene, extremely funny—and entirely in the “square” mode. (As over here, Warhol’s Chelsea Girls, a window-dresser’s idea of a documentary, was entirely not.) In all the English muddle, it was idly funny that one could see Sister George in the West End, but for the old-fashioned Patriot had to join a club—it’s guilt that’s private in the end, according to Lord Chamberlains.

So, as might be expected of the English, they have finally been the first to redefine the third sex’s legal rights in their nation, openly linking sex and law, and politics—precisely as they had for women, once. The key to English emotion is perhaps not sexuality anyway, but sympathy. Character in the end takes preference over difference. In their literature, presently their drama, the language itself, backed by an hereditary eighteenth-century dryness and Congrevian sharpness, leads them into attitudes which show once again how European they are—while we are still mired in counter-Victorian.

And so—around the rim of the circle, the new suffragettes arrive. If irreverent or anti-social sex is now a vehicle for protests other than the sexual—who better can express to the extreme their horror of all a society’s norms than those who will have nothing to do with it? They don’t have to join that bandwagon; they are already there. (For among the repudiations of society which are possible to humans, surely a refusal to have its children, therefore its future, must be a basic one.)

Meanwhile, since nothing in art or life stands still, the stance of homosexual repudiation has shifted also, away from the old-fashioned guilt and alienation, and toward social protest, their own stylized version of it—often still peculiarly square. Like the women in this country, homosexual men aren’t allowed to go to war. But in the arts, war in the samurai sense is no longer possible (fashionable) as a direct and serious subject: the basically jingoistic “manliness” of the huntin’ and fishin’ set is artistically dead, at least for a while. (Even the commercial historical novelists don’t celebrate the nation any more, instead bending their nostalgias toward how it went wrong, and may yet go right of course, or else deserting us altogether for the far Peloponnese.) More important, the nation itself has the horrors less over sex-in-any-form than over drugs—for which sex is subordinate—and over the newest bogey, violence-at-home. Sex isn’t everything anymore.

Those homosexuals, and those artists, for whom it still is, may soon find themselves ranged with the middle class. In the most recent bohemias, where once the “beats” were an active protest still mainly artistic, the later hippies were a passive one, focused on a mandala-blur of protest, the weakest ray of which was sexual. Either has produced artists only in terms of those who, like Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, cling to some above-the-drug-reality—to berate or to engage. If Ginsberg already seems establishment to the rank-and-file of the young bohemia or the merely young, it is not only because of age and a verse-line like Walt Whitman’s; it is because he still has a reality to berate—“ours.” And if Burroughs doesn’t yet seem derrière-garde to them, it is because, under the drugs and the inverted sexuality, and most profoundly, under the spiky shape of his art, he hides from them—not from himself—that he too is engaged with it. Past forty, these two, past any number of things; still, in their own fashion, Cynara baby—they too celebrate life.

All influences of course, influence each other. Looking superficially backward over the novels of the ’40s and on, for examples of homosexuality as subject, we turn up Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar, an elegant Cook’s tour of the queer world drawing-room style, as I remember it, and Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms, a coming of age and to an identity, one which however counts for less in the book, and less for us, than the plangent imagery and inimitably freakish youthful art. On to The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, and alas, to ridicule. No matter who is sexually envying what, the menopause, when circumlocuted in the hushed, veiled tone of Bulwer, Lytton on the mysterious East—is funny. This novel’s elevated tone toward it reminds me of a host whom I once heard excuse his wife to her arriving guests because “It’s her time of the moon.” Equally, “Mrs.” Stone’s excitement, when she sees the Italian boy pee against the wall, is not really female-sexual as intended, but has all sorts of swelling montages to the left of it. We laugh at any art that risks intensity, if it is imprecise. Here, “society” is ruthlessly seconded by our own knowledge of human nature.

A good deal of queer literature has this kind of cross-wiring intentionally—becoming a kind of roman-à-clef of the emotions inverted, from which the reader, potentially queer or in the know, is to get his titillation. Unintentionally, queer writing for queers has the same effect that any writing has when it is intended for one sex, the nearest analogy being the “kitchenmaid” novels of Queen Victoria’s day—any sex can be “Victorian.”

John Rechy’s sentimentality is borrowed from elsewhere. The tone is tender expose, plus special pleading—oh the agony that is here, sister! There is an attempt to make the drag world a microcosm for us all—which should be possible. (As, in a way, Genet’s Madonna of the Flowers speaks for cunts.) But Rechy the writer adopts the contortions of his own exhibitionists. What it reminds most of is Nelson Algren—a sentimentality which is butch. Even so, we are now approaching the world of social protest for everybody—done on queer terms. In the work of Purdy, it is reached. (In Cold Blood, aside from its marked resemblance to The Fifty-Minute Hour and similar documentary, may suggest itself as deriving from homosexual sub-sympathy with its protagonists, but surely in its method, from social-workery through the waving Kansas wheat of its lyrical breezes, it is managed on cannily square terms.)

Purdy’s work has always veered interestingly, beginning, in the shorter stories of Color of Darkness, with those gothic depths of childhood where so many good writers start, but in the longer 63 Dream Palace giving us another kind of lushly invertebrate, Frenchified fancy, as do Alfred Chester’s early tales. Comparing Purdy’s Malcolm with Chester’s earlier novel Jamie is My Heart’s Desire, perhaps that same literary derivation comes out in the kind of prettification that overtakes the one, and the uglification that somewhat conventionalizes the other—for where Purdy by now is playfully shocking, in that fancy undersense of the word which Schiaparelli once gave to “shocking” pink, Chester chooses grotesquerie in the relentlessly gris style of Genet; always consciously underground, a world of subways.

In Purdy, one may see some Firbankery too. Malcolm’s allegory is, however, middle class. And with him, Purdy begins his own succession of those painfully golden male innocents, half Pamela and half Jesus-boy, who are so often the symbolically pure heroines of the most sophisticated homosexual. Against these, his novel The Nephew is the real shocker; its writer hasn’t forgotten that he is from Southern Illinois, and now any literary tradition invoked comes twining from the haunted porches of the Middlewest, from Wescott’s The Grandmothers, Ruth Suckow, Sherwood Anderson. Not yet from Dreiser, that determined face already turned to the urban and to the casebook sociological—a great digression which Purdy, like so many others, will finally join.

When a writer returns to his origin, or stays there, he is never a lone example; rather, he is alone with literature. But after The Nephew, most of Purdy’s work has the emigré tenseness of the early denizens of Greenwich Village—of those who had had to come to urbs, urbis, but never grew too sophisticated to forget what they had left.

The eastward-to-Europe drive of writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald was met by some ethnic surprises on the eastern shore of their own country, as “American” literature finally lost its New England character and became the literature of New York. Antiposed by a powerful wave from the South.

In this pinch, the literature of the Middlewest began to be identified with “farm” literature, with “growth of the soil” stereotypes like Hamsun and early August Derleth—actually a stage which it had long since passed through. (As, in the ’60s, the work of Lois Hudson, Curtis Harnack, William Gass, would show.) It remained chic enough to come from the Middlewest—as dozens of well-known journalists were doing—but impossible to write about it. In a curious about-face—and against all the industrial socio-economic facts, as well as the hordes of flat-tongued middlewesterners in all the Departments of English in the colleges—the center of the country as literary subject matter sank either under the smalltown stereotype Sinclair Lewis had made of it, or under the label “regional.”

The South of course had never allowed itself to become merely that; any writer who came from there spoke from a proven civil agony against which a merely sexual revolution would have looked small. And in prose, after Faulkner, its outstanding writers were women—Porter, Welty, O’Connor—who again had other things to win. In all this, we curiously tend to forget, because New York is the center of literary activity, that the literature of “the city” can be as regional as anything which comes from the farm. As practiced in some quarterly reviews, it was to be so.

The Jews of course were to be our next mainline local-colorists—though never named so. (Or not perhaps after the era of Samuel Ornitz, A. Singer, and Israel Zangwill.) In the quarterlies of the ’40s and ’50s, the Jewish urban childhood became “the farm”; the gutter-ghetto and peddler-pavement became the new “soil.” So tenacious was the image of “the city” as taken to be that of all literature—and so largely urban both the Jew and his reader each to all intents a “New York Jew,” wherever he came from—that they too escaped the label “parochial.” Also, like the Irishman and the Southerner, the Jew can be broadly funny—as those writer-heirs of Transcendentalism, or of more generally white-American-Protestant sociologies, so often could not—and the country-at-large had long loved his vaudeville. Finally, under Hitler, the Jew became our Everyman—as the black is becoming now.

Actually, of course, there were to be hierarchies among Jews-as-writers, as among Jews anywhere. For which read—difference. Aside from I. B. Singer—a beautiful throwback to a classic distance preserved, and Bernard Malamud, whose work, heir in part to a less rabbinical side of the folklore, is also a complex of American “academic” strains—most of the others are heirs to Bellow, linguistically the most gifted, who also from the first had the prescience to write with European politico-philosophical scope—not as a Jewish writer, but as a writer who is a Jew. Wryly verbal, this group’s contribution to the many genres of black humor was to be mostly via language and metaphor (as a vaudevillian’s is), using that poetic argot which is as much Russian, Polish and even post-First World War German as it is Jewish—the bitter, broadly peasant argot of European Untermensch anywhere. Plus all those changes that arise when the practitioner is both American and on the way to being economically comfortable.

But sexual revolutionists they weren’t, as it is often said Jews seldom are. Freud himself saw the importance of Christian sexual guilt to the Judeo-Christian ethic, all the more plainly from the Judaic side. In writing of sex, the younger writers like Heller, Friedman, Roth, and the older Golds, Herbert, and Ivan, use all the freedoms and attitudes that a much prior revolution has provided, from the flower-decked pubis á la Lady Chatterley, or from the chamberpot humors of any folklore, or from psychiatry—or from whatever the virility disease which Norman Mailer, early on writing as the middle-class Harvard boy he couldn’t bear to be, first caught from Papa H.

Mailer’s own cancer metaphor was to be far more original, when applied to America’s sense of itself—as well as closer generically to his own modern-middle Jewish fears. He had a litry interest in queers. Coupled with his avowed cult of women in her basic functions only, and his use of “writing like a woman” as a sneer against male rivals, some said that he protested too much, and took this as a sign of something latent. If so, it was not in the sex—which was monumentally old hat—but in the ego, which at its worst, but at its artistic best also, pushed against proscribed boundaries and greedily seemed to want to be what it saw. Mailer’s view of women is essentially suburban Talmudic. As a Jewish Don Juan, he always laboriously marries them.

He empathies toward homosexuals, however, exactly as he does to blacks—and from his canny power-sense that they are going to be of new importance to literature. They are those aliens which birth hasn’t sufficiently allowed him to be. Has anyone noticed, for instance, how Why Are We In Vietnam imitated Burroughs? The gag is great—analyze American aggression via Texas sexuality and the whole Southern stereotype (to be seen any day in televised field interviews in Vietnam) of sexy war. It’s a typically sharp Mailer choice, in which he may at first appear to be as usual—imitating himself. But the use of violently linguistic sexuality as propaganda in this seriocomic, demonic way, is pure Naked Lunch. (Whose author, Mailer has said, may be a genius.)

Yet in Naked Lunch, the note of anguished power is authentic; Mailer is energy trying to be anguish. Burrough’s ultra-high-pitched language works through confusions and exaggerations to a terrifying assemblage in whose hell we must believe. Mailer’s language is as clear as gag-style always is, the tone assumed being that of the “best” gutter lingo, peppily poeticized—does anyone really bother to refer to a woman’s asshole as her “dirt track”? (Or sometimes an oddly dainty jocundity: “elegant as an oyster with powder on its tail.”) Although Mailer too, tries to command the blind force of that every-which-way physicality which Purdy and Burroughs have—which masticates as it fornicates as it masturbates, all in a delightfully polymorphous mudslinging at the target—what emerges is only fecal pie. As a friend said of it, reading it is like eating crap. (If so, very Jewish in its alimentary concentration. Kosher crap.) What we really see is “the writer” going at his “subject” with cannibalistic empathy, and that fake-Southern talk-talk which is one of his oldest charades—most of it unreadable not because it is dirty but because it is old-man-dirty and other-generational, a gritty banjo-uke getting up the last of the poontang blues.

Where Naked Lunch is a cry, Mailer is all elocution, the spiritual difference being that try as he may, he is not sufficiently underdog to anything; born to be linguistically on top of everything except death, all his other humiliations always sound just a little arriviste. His achievement is peculiarly elsewhere, and never where he would want it to be—in the sexual, emotional sphere. He cannot create the presence of common life, in literature. What he can do is no mean thing, but quite inverse to that. What one feels in each successive book, even this one, is the presence of literature, in common life.

Sexually, only Malamud and Singer write out of “orthodox” Jewishness—by which I mean from feelings born of the Jewish law. On the rest, including Mailer, an appropriately funny destiny has converged. When they try to make sex their “main thing” they can’t—and for good or bad art, that’s Jewish enough. But there’s worse to come. Sexually, they write exactly like Christians.

All of them pure white American Sex One.

And now, what of writers Sex Two and Sex Three?

One of the advantages of the writer as alien—of the disinherited, disenfranchised or dispossessed—is that whether or not they themselves are great, they can write from some nearness to the open-ended world to which all serious artists aspire. They write from an intellectual and emotional diaspora, from a past which transcends the nostalgias of childhood, and toward a future which apprehends something better than they have. Satire—the worm’s eye turning—comes to them naturally, as it does to those without full passport privileges, or else they have the kind of neutral perspective that attaches to small borderland nations. At the same time, they have the furious energy of the repressed.

Women, as comparative newcomers to civil rights (some of which, like full employment in the professions and equal participation in scientifico-military researches, are still in limbo) and as artists still shrinking back against their own meager history in the arts, have easy access to minority feelings—not the least of which is their own superiority in numbers, wherever it is used to make them feel extra, rather than universal. Homosexuals, if they stick to their last, are in an even purer and sadder case; they are forever barred from reproducing themselves.

Both they and the women have certain advantages. Freed of that birth-envy (envy of the physical capability of birth) which sends so many unfortunate American men, writers among them, into parabolas of virility-thinking and war, they can transmute their energies all the quicker into envy-for-a-cause, envy-for-a-cross, or merely envy of the square-peg in the square-hole. It may be of course that all the sexes have had their envies misnamed or misapplied. For, among the phallus-worshippers, even the inverts run second to ordinary men themselves. Organ envy is a natural fantasy of the “haves,” who conveniently can also then visualize the “have-nots” as wanting what they cannot possibly give.

In minorities, however, envy attaches most and first to what they are not allowed to do or be—especially when they can see there is no solid reason for it; except perhaps in the case of eunuchs, or a few Lesbians, a sexual “have-not” doesn’t really want the organ, but the role. And the social privileges. Women do not suffer from penis envy, but from a lack of allowable birth-pride. Meanwhile, they and the queers can use all these advantages to make close little parochial worlds to live in and write about—as the Jews have classically done. Except that they don’t have to emigrate or be martyred first. They don’t have to move an inch. Like the blacks, they can get it all at home.

So far, women have done less from outrage at being Sex Two, than might have been expected in the verbal arts. Unless raised to the level of great satire, outrage at what one is may be a dead end, in a woman giving rise to that henhuffing of the feathers, suffragette in the worst sense, and anticipating the worst—a desire to write “like a man.” (Vide a passage I recall from a “female” novel of some years back, in which the mind of a male character said “crud” to itself every ten paces—creating a page on which the word stood out like button-tufts on a French pouf.) Woman’s passivity may work out to be of more use to her; if the shape of human physical equipment is of as much importance as men have said it is, then it may be that those ovoid inner conformations of which a woman is always kept aware by her oval outer ones, may push her sanely centerwards—for what she has is not a “tool” or a “weapon” but a confluence much more resembling the omphalos. (In the plastic arts one sometimes sees clear variants on this consciousness; once Edward Dahlberg had called Georgia O’Keefe “the vulva-artist” it is difficult not to see that, and the sculptress Lee Bontecou seems preoccupied with frighteningly saw-toothed holes, suggestively vaginal.) The oestral tide—that grandiose attachment to the stars which civilized women have learned to deplore—may be a basic tidal sanity which men are powerless to denigrate, but keeps women where they are. Even Lesbians generally menstruate. Their half of the birth-machine—which they may not want—is in a child-bearing woman considered merely unnecessary to tout. (Particularly by the male half, which must gaze at nine months of it.) Which makes for earthmother serenity in their sex, but less chance of art?

That’s a suffragette idea, and like another idea often projected on women artists—that in a kind of compensatory barrenness they must sacrifice to the Muse any creation of their bodies—is partly male. (For male depletion, and a plaintive study of the married writer who “leaves it in the bedroom”—see Moravia.) Neither men nor women seem to think that sexual activity depletes the woman artist, (or I have never heard it propounded.) A suffragette idea is one in which a woman changes her real conception of herself in order to counterattack the male idea of it. Writers expect to deal with the world as writers. A woman who is a writer may find that the literary world expects to deal with her as a female. (After death, she may be taken into the pantheon, but in America not usually before.)

On the fictional work of Mary McCarthy, it was for years the critical fashion to say that it (she) “lacked compassion,” a phrase I used to think revealed a lack of knowledge of what satire was—until I caught onto the fact that it was never used on male satirists. What I saw, maybe as a woman, was that Miss McCarthy, (how hard it still is to leave out the “Miss”!) though in command of extraordinary powers of mind, and a sentence like a lance, often bent it on subjects smaller than need be. (A man would have had more “pomp”?) Later, her novels would be given the attention they deserved as satire, but very much because she had won her spurs as critic and journalist. And now had more pomp. In The Group, it was still the historical minutiae which were fascinating—an age disinterred in its artifacts of advert living and advert meditation—by a memory as careful with that dust as an archeologist.

Whatever, no one could deny that she had a major energy, which exerted itself with a European range, always refusing that crutch of the “one image” (in the sense that galleries currently exact it from painters) which can give a minor air to any artist’s work, even while it be a source of the deepest parochial strength. F. O’Connor had the Catholic faith, Welty the South and the Southern one; Miss Porter was its self-proclaimed classic storyteller, at best with the objectivity of the diseuse, always in danger of a balladeering coyness—and of the set piece. Alone among them, McCarthy wrote of sex apart from love, as a Frenchwoman might, or as American males tried to—copying not the manner but the privilege. Porter wrote of “love” either in the Habaneras of the peons or with fairy-tale cool. It was never Welty’s subject. In O’Connor, a sexuality not really Catholic at all extruded its allegories from within the snake-dark of the Baptist basilica.

A man might see a spinsterish limitation in all of them, nothing to do with marriage, but much as if one midwife word might shatter the glassy page. (And a woman is tempted to.) Only McCullers, more naively honest than any of them, more lyrically endowed than any, and with an asexual mobility which could seem both childish and adult, wrote of “love” as undifferentiated sex. Whether or not her vague or weak sexual orientation made her sound the more “universal,” she had the ego to write large. Where McCarthy prefigured a time, (really already well on the way) when the lines between pure fiction and pure journal, either public or private, would drop, McCullers used sexual love, “unnatural” or not, naturally—that is, in the nature of art—but bothering so little with the customary alignments of the day, that the day could do nothing but call her an original.

The psychic history of women artists since their so-called civil or psychological emancipation should one day be a book itself—by that time hopefully to be written in terms of its significance to the society itself—and always remembering that the history of art is nothing except as it attaches first to individuals. Meanwhile, watching the recent women of American writing, recalling the work of others like Stafford and Boyle (at least one of whose short novels is Laurentian) one seems to see a whole generation of marvelously endowed women, not holding their breath—which contrarily pours forth in a unity of language and sensibility that can arrive of itself at the small masterpiece—but holding still. In one way or another.

One might think that as heirs of so recent a civil victory as the vote, they might have taken up their political responsibilities, not literally maybe, but in terms of the energy with which it was fought for. But like American women in general, they have not much done this—Hellman in the theater, Rukeyser in poetry—but in fiction little to compare with the roaming conscience of the men. Physically, they were kept from the wars, for one thing, and this had its effect on them; they accepted the image given them, and forgot that experience-of-itself is not art, or can be countered by other experience. Saved from the virility disease of the men writers, they abjured those excesses of the language and of the ridiculous which went with it. Prose, in its many relationships—to poetry sometimes, but to the peasantry too, or to the locutions of a blended middle society—in their hands seemed to attain its true directional force. And became their forte.

Meanwhile, publication was no problem but sometimes might be a gift horse; avoiding the slick like any artist, they would still find the high-fashion mags (then foraging the arts for art-chic) more tenderly open to them, always eager to encourage their talent for minutiae—and to print whatever they wrote “about women.” Some, like Djuna Barnes and Anais Nin, seemed to “come from abroad” even when they were here, always expatriate, not from the country but from the image it cast upon them. Others faded, still writing, in the magazines of taste, which were always in the market for any “fine” writer who could write of reality objectively (that is, from a recording sensibility but not a judging one) and would never get in a fight about saying “fuck.”

But it was not “style” which made them mandarin. Reading much fiction by American women of the ’40s and ’50s (and of the men who imitated them, particularly in the “little” reviews), one can’t help but be struck by the droning of the sensibility, on and on. (Most writers dispense with their own past work by dropping it out of their consciousness as a means of getting on to the next—and I am one of these—but on occasion when I have had to refer to certain stories, it is that tone against which my eye screws up, finding it unreadable.) One of the great “tones” of literature, of course—the sensibility—and perhaps common to most writing, but when pursued en masse like this, one wonders why. (And why it is a sensibility which seems to be standing still—en masse.) Partly it derives of course from the general nineteenth-century upswing of the individual. But a still later part of modern sensibility-writing comes out of the Zolaesque realism which was to treat even the individual as an object “found” in space. And for some women artists of the time, this has been ideal.

They are not going to be trapped into speaking for women only, or for any division of women—and in this, like any artist who avoids category, they are right. They are going to be objective, with a coolth the men can’t manage, maybe—and long after the men in many instances have given coolth up. (Negro sociologists of the era, who hid their blackness under that everyman language, are the same.) Fleeing above all from the image that the society projects upon women artists, such a writer is not going to write, even in the deeper sense, as a woman—i.e., from her own preferential experience. She knows her own capacity, for the universal, and will not have it contaminated with the particular—if the particularity is feminine.

Looking abroad, she can see what has happened, even in Europe, to women who do: de Beauvoir, tied in the inimitable French way to the coattails of a man. Lessing to the coattails of psychiatry, and the vaginal reflex. She herself has had her mental hysterectomy early, and avoided that. She is going to be a pure artist, i.e., a sexless one. (And since male writers of the time, like Hemingway and Faulkner, abjured criticism, leaving the impure or second-rate to practise it, she too will thus cut herself off from that philistine power.) In art, she will speak for anything but the literal female experience or female part in experience; she will not use any of her sexual power at all (much less in the extravagant manner of some men); she will be the angel-artist, with celestially muted lower parts.

Reading back among those wondrously endowed women of roughly the second quarter of the century, one glimpsed how they had perhaps helped to eunuch themselves. Powerfully gifted in eye, ear, and hand, they had self-willedly kept themselves artistically dead from the waist down. Thinking themselves to be countering that image which the society and the male artists had projected upon them, they had in their way really accepted it. And in wherever it was complained that their work remained beautifully “minor” or “mandarin,” this may have come not from their womanhood, but from their lack of it. They had accepted their envy after all. Or had belittled their experience, or hunted it in male terms. To say this is however an understanding of their art, not a belittling. Art is a series of limitings; half of any work is the leaving-out. One of the great elements of form is the presence of the absence of something. From age to age, from writer to writer, this changes.

In Nabokov’s work, for instance, the critique of literature was once more allowed to take place in the body of the work itself, as in ancient days it sometimes had. Long since, in America, critics and journalists had reserved critique for themselves, allotting novelists et al. only either the direct dramatic effect in which meaning must remain implicit, or the tensile powers of an ambiguity in which meaning could be trapped. (In neither case must it be stated—in the ’50s, my friend Ken Stuart once said he’d heard a rumor that The New Yorker intended publishing all the endings of its stories in a supplementary volume.) In “pure” art of the era, formal resolutions were gauche, and “moral” observations of any kind, declassé. As editorial parlance had it, “author comment” was out. And in the curious misapplications of that policy, anything in a novel or a story which could not be made to seem the comment of the persona themselves, was “author.” Ideally also, persona should make their comments as part of the “action”—as coming from characters so unaware, or so far immersed in life, that they could never make an intellectual or meditative comment upon it. That would spoil the “pure” effect. (Vide the work of O’Hara.)

Life-in-the-raw, as these literati saw it, could not be meditative too. (In itself, what a litry conception!) The voluminous, ramshackle world-of-comment of the Russian nineteenth-century novel, was momentarily over. Subtly too the reader was downgraded, or divided, into those who read for art’s sake, and those who read for critique divorced as much as possible from an art to which it was very possibly superior—since it made the moral judgments. The literary artist, himself in flight from either church-pamphleteering or happy-ending art, found himself ruled out from direct statement. (As well as somehow politically committed to popularist readers—when a “review” intellectual asked me “Who do you write for?”, my answer, that I visualized a reader sentient and intelligent enough for anything—was taken to be arrogance.) Concurrently, pure prose artists, “imaginative” ones, did not “write” criticism (which high as it was on the litry value-scale, was too low for them), meaning they couldn’t expect to have all the art and the power too, or to be on both sides of the fence—as James and Flaubert, Tolstoi and Turgenev had been. As writers, somewhere in their mutterings, always are.

All this was to change in a world not only troubled, but media-aware, and rawly or not—meditative. With science morally discredited, God in trouble too, the artists were looked up to by a materialistic world as interpreters from the one remaining medium which had no axe to grind. (Whether it did so or not.) And some writers of course had never abjured statement. Choice of subject is indeed a form of statement. On literature. Pale Fire moreover took in all the antic semantic of some critique, made shifts between poetry and prose (Nigel Dennis, in Cards of Identity had already included a poetry sequence very similarly), and made it plain that any of its critique of literature belonged there, being in its turn a critique of life. Pure critics would praise it, not yet seeing what prerogatives had been snatched from them—and some writers would not see what rights had been returned to them.

Lolita, wherein sex, however lepidopterously inspired, could be seen as a put-on directed at a sicklily material American gas-station civilisation, was a bonus for everybody. It was hilarious, and done in that nihil, non-person style of character, that rolling-stone rhythm of action, which was being called black comedy—nobody’s yet defined white. Above all, it was sex with intellect—which the quarterly-review porns hadn’t been able to make hilarious. Only by the way, it was a lovely work of art. In which the statement—in spite of all the scathing minutiae—was not strictly direct, the ambiguities pointing like a porcupine’s quills. Heterosex—America’s youthful version of it and denial of perversion in that, was somewhere being laughed at—or if sex with a barely nubile girl was perversion (Islam would not say so) then how natural! Alignments were being changed or crossed, both in the “subject” and the use of it. Sex was once more being used as a critique of life, both from within the core of the work and peripherally, at a point where the work of art itself was also the critical commentary (often of itself). Sex was the metaphor and the moral weapon—but the moral judgments made were never about the sex itself.

Those were as absent as in any scientific account of the stages of the butterfly.

Meanwhile, coming up again from the left: Sex Three.

There is no purely homosexual literature—once it becomes literature. Any more than a novel of note is ever “about” something, on one subject, or in any sense an investigative circling of the fields of fact. (In the way that a helpful reviewer tabbed Cozzens’s Guard of Honor as “the best novel about the Air Force.”) Values, the minute spoken of, derive from others—femaleness is never paid so much literal definition as at a drag ball. And the more a work of art spreads and runs into itself, like a sphere or a double helix or a polyfaceted net, the better it is. But one may see sexual focus, or proclivity, or wavering. Or the mirror-writing which would sink all sex in a vague sea of love or hate. We can never avoid seeing the selfness of a writer—what he thinks it is, and what he uses it for. Or what he sees as the objects of his hate, and uses it against. Sex in D. H. Lawrence is a hatred against, once one sees it outside the rosy penumbra of what it is for. It has sublimated—i.e., made the turn upward or outward from self-hate—to a propounded social usefulness. Just so, the Gidean self-hatred double-turns at the world which denies it, (as heterosexual guilt did after Freud). We begin to have books in which the dominant meetings and partings of people flow toward the homosexual ideal as clearly as old-fashioned love stories once flowed toward marriage. Where the old Yin and Yang sexual oppositions are as clearly no longer dominant—or are repellent or ridiculous. (Or old hat—and non-chic.) Or where the queer is no longer a member of a thieves’ carnival, or an underworld. Or where, like everybody else nowadays, he becomes middle class, with as much right to make social criticism as anybody, and like all minorities, with a sharp tongue and eye for it.

In the Burroughs’ world of Nova Express, the sex that is natural is homosex, but the battles between good and bad, paranoid-real and sane-real, still take place in a romantic no-man’s-land of the spirit, countered by terrible physical honesties, always presided over by the cloud-cuckoo metaphor of the drug. The struggle is a spiritual one, in language which is mystical, or even built upon a theology which is traceable from book to book, and the end impression is of a struggle unabashedly toward some ideal which is “loved.” Sex falls back, secondary, before the daemon of the drug. Lyrism, Byronic grandiosities, stagey asides, all have a place in this grim arena—and a humor like the chuckle of a prompter from below. It is proper. This is the cops-and-robbers posturing of the soul. Whose very existence admitted, whose Utopia promised, dignifies all. Society in recognizable terms scarcely enters.

Purdy’s world and its malevolencies are altogether more concrete. They are staged in the mess men and women have made of the social world, by a writer who at first seems tough-minded in all directions. The manner is a mixture: Congreve without epigram, a Restoration esprit with a fondness for typifying, mock-naming, and high-jinks in high places, and a rodomontade which stalks (goblets!), but also has a nose for the absurdities of the lower middle, and, a special sarcastical talent for describing the city strata as seen through the shrewd, traveled eyes of once-beglamored Southern Illinois.

The game here is not grandeur, but the world coccu in which nobody’s redemption is urged. Specifically the “American” world—but as target of an objectivity which could go anywhere. Clearly the author’s objectivity is not the usual “ours,” but it is well defined. Is he really crying a pox on all our houses, his aim to cleanse the world of its constitutional horrors and cants? Or is his satire sprung from something far more parochial—the distaste of men who bug, for men and women who breed? Who’s getting coccu here? And how?

Certainly the sexual symbology “we” are used to has changed, and the social structure with it. Here are no families based even in the beginning on the breeding purpose; we are in some outland of Babitry, of which the people here are the detritus. Couples are composed not of the two “straight” sexes which have classically set themselves up as the center of things, but of all the oddments of the comedie humaine: men live with grandmothers who are rich, and bring their men home to mother; wives are elderly with income, with itinerant spouses from the heartland and not hip yet; or are Griseldas too farcically enslaved to give their husbands the status of sadist or pimp. Men living with wives slide off expectedly toward other men, as toward a norm. Cabot Wright sets about raping five hundred women, in a gagstyle romp aimed at American heterosex—a one-man gang-bang in reverse.

Sadism is humorous, but some of its sallies—like Maureen’s bloody abortion, effected commedia dell’arte style by the black C. Clark Peebles, are more innately humorous than others—more so than say, the infinitely extended torture of the captain by the sergeant, which may or may not be a burlicue of James Jones. A different flavor hangs over the two; Maureen’s scene is the funniness of the birth-process deranged; the long incident between the men has the emotional timbre peculiar to torture, and to that old Kafka-Gide staple, the gratuitous act. The sergeant, throughout all, is true to his back-home love, Amos. Amos is a virgin, a sleepwalker, a Greek and Latin scholar whose simplicity, near birdbrain, has an undeniable something; people wash his feet—he is a catalyst. Is he Jesus, or merely that pure golden boy, our heroine? Or “any man’s son,” the ideational fantasy of all male marriages which will not settle for poodles? Women are a bad show in general, but like Maureen (a knockout portrait of a knocked-up type) can be likeable if they belong to the bad show of things—and if they are the butt and admit it.

But what is most arresting is the continuously off-key sexuality. Off-key, not merely in relation to the dominant symbols in the “major” sexuality of the world, but to any. The body processes all seem to run together: Mrs. Masterson’s coronary, Maureen’s abortion, Cabot Wright’s hot flushes, all bear a less particularised sense of these than they do of some intimacy they share with each other; they are what the body does when it has no fixed image of its parts, or when it will not allow its parts to have separated ones; blood comes from any aperture, and every part of the body is one; even the sadism is not violence but violent effort—a straining to be. Clearly we are participating in what is beyond customary sexuality of any kind, or maybe prior to it. And when the fucking stops (if it has been that) certainly nowhere does it much matter who fucks who. (Or marries who, or lives with who—socially we are beyond that.) Here is no mere homosexual code-writing, no Roman Spring in which a middle-aged woman may really be a menopausal man. The scrimmage is everywhere. And it is not of the appetite.

In Albee’s Tiny Alice there is a moment when an image fails of the horror it asks, because it does not touch the predominate response: When the Cardinal reminds the Lawyer that his school nickname was Hyena, “Did we not discover about the hyena … that failing all other food it would dine on offal … and that it devours the wounded and the dead. We found that the most shocking: the dead. But we were young. And what horrified us most … was that to devour its dead, scavenged prey, it would often chew into it THROUGH THE ANUS???” (after which the script reads: Both silent, breathing a little hard). Lawyer (finally; softly: “Bastard.”)

The capital letters are not mine. They would not be “ours” in general, I think. In the raw world of the “tochus,” the “bum,” the “backside,” the “asshole,” the anus is a somewhat mock-erogenous zone (being a less used one) not as all-important to straight sex as it is to buggery. Since the anus is for offal, the hyena’s aim, to “us,” might seem more accurate than not. Whatever, if horror was intended, it failed; muff horror and you may get laughter, as occurred the night I saw the play. Whatever the Cardinal’s insinuation, it belonged like the play’s wisecracks, to a world of the “in”; straights in the audience of theater or books may well understand homosexual symbol while quite unable to honor it with emotion. (If that hyena had gone THROUGH THE COCK or THROUGH THE VAGINA, it might have been different—but that would be in another country, another play.) In A Delicate Balance, when Agnes accuses her husband: “We could have had another son: we could have tried. But no … those months—or was it a year—? … I think it was a year, when you spilled yourself on my belly, sir?”—the audience does shock, not only at what is not usually said in the middle-class theater, but somehow also at the over-elaborate phrasing, something in it not female to male. As in Agnes’s rejection of her daughter’s confidences, wondering if she herself would be better off as a man: “I shall try to hear you out, but if I feel myself changing in the middle of your … rant, you will have to forgive my male prerogative, if I become uncomfortable, look at my watch or jiggle the change in my pocket …”—where the shock is both at the terms of such a refusal, between mother and daughter—and at a transliteration of the sexes which seems not to lie in the “transferred heads” (and tails) of human imaginative desire, but to be author-enforced, according to some code he is following.

Shock is valuable in the theater, and in literature—but scale is important to it, subjectivity changes it and repetition dulls it—if it cannot attain to poetry. Much present-day drama moves in terms of the simple actions under or against the accepted symbols of things, or as in Pinter, in showing the actual simplicities of the symbols by which people move. Albee’s strength comes, a lot of it, from these fresh alignments, coolly shocking to us not because they are sexual, but because they are off-base.

And they are not of the appetite. Rather, they are the comedy-of-error tricks, or incomplete tragedies of those who, for all their apertures, have no outlet in generation. Yet are not “impotent.”

As heirs of Freud, we are used to seeing sexual impotence as a theme of life, in our friends, our books and in ourselves, in those husbands and lovers, who are the heroes second-class of a Laurentianism in reverse, in those spinsters whose bed is ice. And we are familiar with the “larger” litry themes that maybe come of it, anything from what “the rat-race” does ta ya, to the Identity Hunts of those who “cannot love.” (Barren women are rather duller, dramaturgically speaking. Except in those biblical milieus where primogeniture is still of the first importance; we tend to see them as victims of the cell rather than the fates, who merely need to go to a good gynecologist.) In a society under protest homosexuals need not feel as alienated as once. They can refuse to have the “children” of its’ ideas. Leaving the sexual refusal with its attendant Freudian dramas, far behind. All those little boys who can’t get born out of the spilled seed of the fathers, or who are revealed never to have existed except in the minds of their mothers, all those innocents dying on the milk-train of other peoples’ charity, are psychodramas going over the old personal revelations—with here and there a hint of the world’s disjointedness. In recent Purdy, it’s a clean sweep into the non-sex of satire, or the “a pox on all of it” of social protest—a somersault over everything, into an impersonality that shock-deadens, fizzes out, sniggering all the way, into down-at-heel hatreds, crudely Gothic humors, rudely interrupted by prissy echoes of the once liveable world. Sex as hostility, as humoresque, is here only the beginning of it. It would be futile to ask of the people in these books that they be more than cardboard, or their blood more than the plasma of the world’s generally laughable sores. Or to ask the style of expression—“amid the industrial world”—that it not waver as “fitfully” as the jewel on the finger of its millionaire. Waver it does; this pen feels less for the word than for the situation, and has no other focus for which it so much cares; it will hunt the ridiculous anywhere. (With, in Malcolm; perhaps the last gasp of a gravely Americanized Firbankery, fallen short of those silver flashes from the adorable to the ineffable, but with the same mordant method: giggle-pastiche.) The seriousness is in the intelligence—and feeling is anthropophagous. (Compare it with Bellow, in which intellect and feeling bleed together.)

Is this “white” comedy? One reels out of these books with the inner ear disturbed—not sure what has been intentional. With a sense that some of the failure may be in ourselves. We are still new to the non-directed. We would prefer though to be able to trust this intelligence more not to demean itself as it sometimes does—either by loving its personae too much, or too often the same ones. The barrenness of the world, as theme, is dignity enough. When a little special sex creeps in, or its propaganda, the satire turns silly. For the modest proposal of this satire at its grim-slim base is that all of us are eatable, from the anus if need be. When that intent falters, then what comes—in goblet or glass—is farce curdled by serious intentions. Non-ridiculousness won’t do, in this exhausted air. Where it fails is when it inadvertently reminds us that all is not barren, and all is not ridiculous.

So, as in the old movie, we have circled la ronde—except that one doesn’t exit the sideshows of art merely like any good pair taking childie away from the freaks of Eighth Avenue, back to the redempted norm of Queens. The literary thicket is thank God the same; no girl scout exits as entered, only an hour older, with everybody found. Or with a fistful of conclusions for the next troupe’s safe conduct.

Do we live in an age of artistic license? I think so. I hope so. I find it exhilarating. One has only to look at the movies, the films, the ceenaymah—which are always so helpfully the déjà vu of the arts. Okay—of all the other arts. Literary people resent the lens because it is always so much their shadow, always dressing up in their last year’s thoughts and saying “Look what I found!” We should be happier to see change so neatly documented. And at such a pace. Drag documentaries, pussy galore—and they only discovered heterosexuality last year!

At the moment, it may be that the really lively use of sex-as-theme and sex-as-comment is on the stage side of literature. Where an Indira Gandhi’s Daring Device—whose variously whirling copulations included a Marie Montez in drag, a satyriac with a yardlong penis and a bedstyle choral ballet—made sufficiently rousing comment on India’s food-birthrate lockstep to draw protest from that government. Where the “chicken-in-the-basket” routine in John Guare’s spoof on the American commuter, Muzeeka, could draw praise from the New Yorker—if only in paraphrase. And where, in Futz, a piglet-incest tale very reminiscent of an old one of Coppard’s, the La Mama troupe demonstrated, as Stanislavsky often had, that “method” in itself might be a kind of literature.

In the academic “serious” American novel—which often means as written by humorous professors—the black-comedy sex-routines are at the moment still drearily grinding and bumping in a kind of ritual macadamese. (See Barth, where the goings-on might be called university-perverse.) The “popular” novel, carrying cash between its legs instead of metaphor, is often funnier. Abstract expressionism is never “over” in any art, but as the dominance in literature of the moment, it has had its day; as practiced, it is already second-rate. Man, whelmed by wars, by an astrological perspective almost too vast for him to carry, has periods when he cannot see himself as important enough to bother with—and great human perspectives come of this. But the figure willy-nilly always re-emerges again. In literature of the past, this has meant “character.” But fixed character, as novels have known it, is now historical, no more possible than old melody is to music. What is authentic in environmental reality, and what is pastiche there, changes constantly. We are in one of the great eras of confusion partly because everything in the environment itself makes us daily more aware of that. McLuhan’s acceptance of this was a paraphrase of what every tabloid-reader and televiewer, every purchaser of Tide and Time already knew in his bones.

The arts had long since phrased it. Since their impulse is always to spy out the organized in the confused, the philosophy in the flux of the now, they will undoubtedly once again rephrase the human figure—along with the society which will also. I should be surprised if Sexes One Two Three ever totally disappear from it—except of course under the dignified pressure of the millennia. But in this country and century, their present frameworks and boundaries well may—under the assault of more than art, more than literature. Sexual themes find their best proportion whenever other concerns overtake them.

Literature itself takes strength from its own catholicity. (How many times in recent years has the pictorial been predicted as its killer—yet it is merely the magazine that dies, not the Word.) In the end, it has no trouble taking anything into it. Or expelling anything. In practice, female writers may take their sensibility out of mothballs, homosexuals may broaden their spectrum past hatred, and males may narrow their fear of being otherwise; all the sexes may begin writing like each other, as with the journalists. (Not that I would necessarily fancy it.) Sexual demagoguery and cannibalism may pass into such bland ententes that their era may even be regretted. Or will sexual emphases shift altogether, as we pass out of the white ages into the era of blackthink? I doubt it. Sexual blackthink so far seems to be conventionalised right out of the departments of whitethink; only the language is more interesting. In Cleaver, the sex is tired, or the same; in Fanon the medical approach is. The originality of the black man seems to lie in his blackness; as with anyone, their best essence lies in what they humanly are.

In American society, that meretricious sexual image which it had made out of the pioneer platitudes, and which was to be direct ancestor of the maw-and-paw, covered-wagon sexuality of a Hemingway, is now more and more identified with middle-age or beyond; the young are no longer that provincial anywhere. Their hetero image is certainly changing, well beyond the mere costumery. In the colleges, it is often fashionable for a girl to have had a little Lesbian experience and a male a little of the homosexual; it is chic to seek these as part of general experience. And in all the group therapies—the new touch-me disciplines, a vaguer, more diffuse sexuality is the likely result, if only as being more patriotic to everybody. Heterosexuality may not quickly disappear. But it could be the last suffragette.

What sex is art anyway? From art’s annals, what we most want from it is to be taken into the involute of life. In that, we are all ultimately—square. But from those annals also, the genius of art is that when in search of itself it is always, part of the time—transvestite.

In this country, there is always a possibility that the constant fund of Comstockery may again find its senators (or its President), and we shall all be happily censored into old fashioned rebellions again, but it is hard to visualize. Since the Learned Hand decision on Ulysses there has been no seriously successful overt censorship in the literary centers of the country, let the local folklores go on as they will. (What with the movies, it is still harder to see how they can.)

Censorship, or the lack of it, certainly shapes literature; one might even note—if only in a low voice and to well-wishers—that literature has been known to thrive under its restraints. But they must be open ones. In my own time, the most powerful censor I have lived under or near, has been political. A The Cancer Ward can come of that. Covert restrictions, such as women are under, can only cripple—in the arts or anywhere else. They can determine one’s scope. For a woman writer, in the place where it hurts most—by restricting her self-awareness of’ what her life possibilities really are. For it is one’s sense of one’s life possibilities that feeds imaginative work.

Yes, the literary establishment, back and front, is still as predominantly male as all the others, yet it has always seemed to me that writers of any sex are stupid to strive for that kind of power, in what for them can never be an a priori world. Because the power belongs in the book. To fight to the death for the right to say what I dare—yes—that is tonic, because it is basic. It is my kind of vote. To climb any of the more ordinary corridors of power in the literary world is to risk what any climber does—smallness of mind. It produces no Areopagitica. What would enlarge me as a writer is what would enlarge any woman, any man, anyone—the right to do and be, without scorn or sneer. The stretching of the flesh produces a stretching of the Word. In a world of astronauts, a Russian woman is born free to be one. In a world of presidents and premiers, the mesdames Ghandhi and Meir exist. That enlarges me, and all women everywhere. But I write in America.

If sex and politics now cross there, as they do, I take this as hopeful, as a sign of the country’s slow recognition that the components of life do cross, and that sex is rarely ever sex alone. When anything gets freed, a zest goes round the world. What is most evident is that the old dictionary distinction between “license” and “freedom” doesn’t do any more. As the Jew had come to know—and the blacks and the queers are now showing us, inside literature and out—“Freedom” is what you are given—and its iron hand often remains on your shoulder. “License” is what you take.

So I put away what I had written. Sometime later, I began a book. Once or twice, over a page, I startled myself with my own hooted laughter, something I had never done before. Sex, for me, had always had room in and around it for generous laughter. But my generation was not geared to see irony or fun in politics. I was finding the current blend of the two an irresistible burlesque.

The book was called Queenie. What I had written—I see now—was the preface to it.