Interestingly, Freud was just such a magpie in the way he collected little objects. His house and study were crammed with pots and statues and artifacts, most of them Egyptian, Greek, and Roman. He never wrote about them, but undoubtedly they stimulated him, for his work is full of classical allusions and historical detail. It's a pity that Freud's house was never burgled, because I would have loved to read his analysis of his own emotions as the victim of a theft of his treasured things.
I aspire, where material possessions are concerned, to the Buddhist condition of non-attachment. That is my ideal. I am not so acquisitive that I am possessed by these objects, though I do feel dependent on them at times. I think one must practice ridding oneself of them, but that requires concentration and great mental poise—I want to learn how to give them away; it must be my confident decision. I don't want them torn out of my hands. Obviously, the happiest person is that Buddhist who truly sees that such objects are illusion, and who owns nothing—all these possessions are in his or her memory.
The act of writing—artistic creation—dependent on memory, is itself a mnemonic device. And what is strangest of all is that drawing on memory—say, writing a novel—I am giving voice to one set of memories while creating a structure for remembering the circumstances of writing that book. Looking at almost anything I have written, I can remember the room, the weather, my frame of mind, the state of the world, or whatever, while I was working on that piece of writing. For a reader or critic this can be deceptive. For example, it was in Dorset, in the west of England, that I described the hot, cloudy tropics in Saint Jack, and in Charlottesville, Virginia, that I wrote about Dorset in The Black House. I look at The Mosquito Coast and see south London, and I glance at Jungle Lovers and hear the cooing voice of the Chinese amah feeding my children in our Singapore house.
My books mean as much to me for what they are, for their narrative, as for those personal scenes and circumstances that they have the power to evoke. Often, the memory of writing the book overshadows the work itself. This aspect of writing has not been explored or analyzed, and yet most novelists, when asked to introduce a particular work, reminisce at some point about the surroundings of their creation—the house, the family, the weather, the writing room. It is almost a conventional digression in any introduction. I can truthfully say that nearly everything I have written carries with it the circumstances of its creation. Picture Palace happened to be my twelfth work of fiction, but the title might have served for any of them.
Such books are in the widest sense histories—of my world and myself. In spite of my conscientious work, they are probably full of inaccuracies, but they are as true as I could make them. I lost patience with the Waste-Landers and the purveyors of whimsy, the people who used language for its own sake, its own sound. "It's like farting 'Annie Laurie' through a keyhole," as Gully Jimson says in The Horse's Mouth. "It's clever, but is it worth the trouble?" The opposite of play, Freud said, is not seriousness but reality.
The political implications of this ought to be obvious. Having lived through the fifties and sixties, and having heard all the canting conservatives, I am well aware of our national tendency toward revisionism. If the sixties was a time of disruption and unruliness by students and others, it was because they faced an almost overwhelming, and much more vocal, number of people who were saying, "Bomb Peking ... Bomb Hanoi ... Mine Haiphong Harbor ... Give white South Africa a chance." The Vietnam revisionists are legion, and the issue has been flogged to death. But to take a more recent example of revisionism, I was amused by the reception that Nelson Mandela was accorded when he was released after twenty-six years in a South African prison. I remember when he had received his life sentence—I had copied his courtroom speech in his own defense into my notebook. I remember reading this eloquent affirmation of human rights to a friend, who dismissed it, actually laughed, saying, "He's dreaming." Every industrialized country continued to trade with South Africa, and the apartheid regime officially declared the Japanese as white—and Japan gladly accepted the reclassification in its eagerness to trade. Mandela's reputation grew because a few people clearly remembered him, and because Mandela had the good luck to survive—he was one of those South African prisoners who were not tortured to death. Mandela's greatest achievement was that he himself was loyal to his memory. Hitler said, "Who remembers the Armenians?"—referring to their massacre by the Turks earlier in the century—when he was challenged in his decision to exterminate the Jews. It was only recently that Americans remembered who the Palestinians are, when we were forcefully reminded by the Intifada.
Memory can be a burden, and can seem a bore. In Sinclair Lewis's novel of the future, It Can't Happen Here, one of the hero's perorations about remembering sounds tedious to his listeners until America falls apart under a fascist dictatorship. Most Yankees who travel to the South are struck—I certainly have been—by the southerner's memory for details of a war the rest of us have mostly forgotten. Faulkner makes the point in Absalom, Absalom!: the southerner lives in a state of constant remembrance of the past. This is generally true, though the lamentation for the Old South does not always embrace the memory of slaveholding or the sort of apartheid, the Whites-Only signs, that I saw myself on a visit to Virginia when I was ten. The Civil War was fought in the South, but I also think that the humiliation of defeat is more memorable than the euphoria of victory, and emphatically, the winners have the most authority when they publish their version of history.
That is why it is often better to look at the past, or at the reality around us, through the window of fiction. A nation's literature is a truer repository of thought and experience, or reality and time, than the fickle and forgettable words of politicians. Anyone who wishes to be strong needs only to remember. Memory is power. I said earlier that in choosing to be a writer I felt that I was on the right road, but a narrow and lonely one. I remember most of the way, and now I see that it has been the long road home.
The Object of Desire
I REMEMBER the hot day by the lake, and the half-finished summer house, its rough-cut timbers still holding the tang of the saw blade, and the wooden floor, and my friend's barefoot mother standing in her shorts and bra. I was so small I saw her long legs rising into her loose shorts. Damp wisps of hair framed her face, which was bright with a blush in the day's heat, and she was playing Hawaiian music on a flat guitar. Never mind the music. I was almost asthmatic with lust.
"I haven't played this for such a long time," she said.
She was smiling. Her hands lowered to play the instrument left the cones of her bra exposed, and all her concentration was on her playing. She was a lovely woman and must have been in her early thirties, and although she had yellowy Latin skin, her eyes were pale blue.
My mouth was gummed shut in panic and pleasure. I was nine or ten. I had returned to the house for something and saw her. There were just the two of us in the house, and I sensed that I was part of something that was somewhat illicit—my very desire was a proof of it.
My friend had a habit of complaining about his mother. Each time he did, I thought, You fool.
In the pistol imagery I associate with desire, I know the hammer was cocked on my libido that day. It was so sudden it left me breathless, and ever after, when I have run across that sequence of imagery, I have been helpless.
How can I speak for all men? But it seems to me that many men fix on their object of desire at a place that is deep in the recesses of childhood; their libidos are coded at an early age. It is the childish aspect of lust that is for most men the hardest to admit or come to terms with. It is the childishness that all prostitutes and role players know. Locate that imagery in a man's libido and he is yours. Being away from home, at my friend's summer house, was all part of the thrill. Being away is almost in itself a thrill—freedom, different rules, away from the strictness of parents. Is it any wonder I have spent forty years wandering?
That experience of the strange, the unusual, the forbidden, had been insp
ired by other sensual episodes at home.
Another woman, an unmarried college friend of my mother's, used to visit two or three times a year. She was attractive, Irish, pale skin, dark hair, and very kind and attentive. She talked to my mother, smoked and drank coffee, and then she left.
But not quite. Her cigarette butts, never more than three or four, remained in the ashtray, and smoke lingered in the air, pleasantly pungent and mingled with the odor of her perfume. All of this aroused me. No one smoked in my family; the perfume was distinct. And the keenest thrill of all was seeing lipstick on the cigarettes, not a solid color but the fine lines of her puckered lips imprinted in crimson on the paper, and sometimes on the rim of the coffee cup.
Lipstick, cigarette smoke, and perfume are all mingled in my mind as aphrodisiacs.
Like most men, I find myself staring at strange women, at the way they are dressed, and try to account for the fact that I am aroused. I grew up in the forties and fifties, and my experience of sexual subtlety and obliqueness was created by repression. Inevitably the woman who is the object of my desire is wearing a sort of slinky dress, with cleavage and high heels, an image of which Marilyn Monroe is the apotheosis: the fifties. That is the era when I began creatively noticing women. The key was cut all those years ago, and though it is a bit nicked and blunted now from constant use, it still unlocks my libido.
The human sexual imagination may be circumscribed by the instinctive urge to create a master race or ensure the survival of the fittest, but it also is—intensely—about recovering the onset of sexuality, locking on to a desirable image. It is about seeking joy. Most of all, it is the recognition of a love object.
Once, in Hollywood, I marveled at a particular actress's amplitudes—Thomas Hardy uses that nice word. "It's all wire," a producer friend said. I did not know that breasts could be plumped and supported with wire, like roses on a trellis arch. Eroticism is often contained in the secret of our not knowing—in our speculation. A dress is what it is, but it has other functions: what it hides, what it reveals. Nevertheless, it is almost universally the case that a man looks at the woman's face first, and then what he can discern of her body through her clothes, and last of all, almost as an afterthought, looks at her clothes, except when they seem familiar and address (in a sweet voice) something in his past.
Men focus on their object of desire at a place that is deep in the recesses of childhood. I cannot speak for women, but most men's libidos are fixed at an early age. Speaking for myself, I can recall the first flicker of sexuality, the sense of something important happening in my body, a chemical reaction producing heat. It was that summer day at my friend's house in the country, by the lake, the sight of his mother in her white bra and shorts, barefoot.
We are the only animals that blush—or need to, Mark Twain said in disparagement—but I think that remark is a tremendous compliment to the human imagination. Shame is a complex reaction, and what causes it is even more complicated. Far from being the only animals that blush, we are the only creatures to contrive a satisfying sexual act exclusively from toe sucking, sodomy, bondage, being a whipper or whippee of the object of desire. The intense non-tactile voyeuristic contemplation of another person is sexually fulfilling for some lovers.
Our behavior is determined to a great extent by the kind of responses we have learned, the libidinal trigger, which varies from person to person. It is not the same as the stimulus-response of an ape female habitually exhibiting her rump to a potential mate. This usually works on ape males, but the human response, easily desensitized, needing variation, would eventually be: There she goes again.
It is a fact of life that what is regarded as human perversity is our most specific humanity. What separates us from animals is our individual weirdness. "Each of us is unique and special" is a common enough platitude, and is intended to acknowledge human individuality. Put another way, what makes us human is our capacity for deviant behavior.
I am perhaps prejudiced in thinking that men are much stranger than women. Men, no matter which ones, look at women and begin to solve the sexual equation, which goes something like this: Is she displaying sexual interest? and if so, is it directed at me? and—these facts having been established—am I interested?
Most of us men look at women and think: Yes or Maybe or No. Those are just questions as simple as blinking lights. Women know this, fashion designers know this, advertisers know this. The questions are not the determiners of the man's desire. One of the fundamental causes of crime is that where women are concerned, "no" is a sexual turn-on for men, a personal challenge. It perhaps originates as much in a dated female coquettishness as in male aggression. I am not making any judgment on this; maybe I am old-fashioned in believing that a woman saying "no" is the biggest turn-off in the world, and "yes" to me is an aphrodisiac. I have the weight of literature on my side, Molly Bloom at any rate: "yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes ... and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."
From the male point of view, the nature of women's fashion is all about indicating a general sexual mood, specifically a woman's willingness. (And when I say "male point of view," I mean my point of view.) Unlike the ape exhibiting her parts to a passing male, there is no single gesture or act, nor any single item of clothing, that expresses willingness. There are conventional clothes—variations of underwear—and there are various forms of nakedness. It is obvious that a woman who dresses up wants to be observed. Men, less subtle, more single-minded, cannot rid themselves of the notion that a woman who wants to be observed and desired also wants to be possessed.
Fashion itself—the enthusiasm for dressing up, no matter what clothes the woman is wearing—is a specific signal to a man. Women say to each other, You look fabulous! Men cannot say that without investing the exclamation in either coy or overt sexual innuendo, because men cannot separate fashion from sexual plumage. The reductio ad absurdum of this is the utter bluntness of the women in Orwell's novel 1984 who wear a red apron on the days they want to get laid. The majority of men would be delighted if instead of an expensive dress, women simply wore a little button on their lapel that read Yes.
Men, who are fairly stupid when it comes to women's clothes, are seldom interested in fashion for its own sake. But sometimes a style catches on, nearly always erotic—slips, bras, slit skirts, fur, feathers, whatever—and men go weak in the knees.
It goes almost without saying that women's fashion seizes a man's attention when it is motivated by eroticism. Because sexuality whips up the blood and hums so near to the surface in so many man-woman encounters, it is impossible for a man to consider what a woman is wearing without at the same time wondering what is underneath. This is not necessarily the imagining of a naked body, but perhaps of whatever lies next to her skin. Men of a certain age were stimulated by female sexual images before they became aware of the struts and buttresses and technical underpinnings.
Fashion that is completely new and unfamiliar, that does not echo an image from a man's sexually impressionable period, is doomed to failure from the man's point of view. For some men the image is sufficient to provide sexual fulfillment. This is also the reason men are more fetishistic than women. One of the more pathetic generalizations you can make about men is that some of them are perfectly happy nuzzling a woman's shoe. That women are rarely fetishists is yet another difference between the sexes and the manner in which their libidos are awakened.
The object of desire is the "Rosebud" we carry within our imagination. In each man there is a variant image, or some set of associations, comparable to the lipstick-smudged and perfumed cigarette, or the barefoot woman in a bra standing in total concentration; the image needs to be answered in the present. It is exquisite in its tiny way, and overwhelmingly significant.
At the Sharp End: Being in the Peace Cor
ps
MY RECORD was so bad (the FBI was sent to check up on you then) that I was first rejected by the Peace Corps as a poor risk and possible troublemaker, and was accepted as a volunteer only after a great deal of explaining and arguing. The alternative was Vietnam—this was 1963, and President Kennedy was still muddling dangerously along. I was sent to Nyasaland. And then a month before my two-year stint was over, I was "terminated"—kicked out—fined arbitrarily for three months' "unsatisfactory service," and given hell by Peace Corps officials in Washington. Of course they believed the truth—that I had been framed in an assassination plot against Dr. Hastings Banda, the President-for-Life ("Messiah," "Conquerer," and "Great Lion" were a few of his lesser titles). But the case against me looked bleak. I was debriefed. Airfare from central Africa to Washington was deducted from my earnings, and I ended up with two hundred dollars. Out I went. It was now 1965, and I still had the draft to contend with.
It was a mess, and for a long while afterward I hated the Peace Corps and laughed at its pious advertising campaign: "The toughest job you'll ever love." Ha! I hated the bureaucracy, the silliness, the patronizing attitudes, the jargon, the sanctimony. I remembered all the official freeloaders who came out from Washington on so-called inspection tours, and how they tried to ingratiate themselves. "You're doing wonderful work here ... It's a great little country," they said; but for most of them it was merely an African safari. They hadn't the slightest idea of what we were doing, and our revenge was to take them on long, bumpy rides through the bush. "Sensational," they said. They went away. We stayed. Most Peace Corps volunteers know that feeling: the smug visitor leaving in the Jeep and the dust flying up, and then the dust drifting slowly down and the silence taking hold.