Mind of an Outlaw (5 page)

About this time I received a free copy of
One
which was sent out by the editors to a great many writers. I remember looking at the magazine with some interest and some amusement. Parts of it impressed me unfavorably. I thought the quality of writing generally poor (most people I’ve talked to agree that it has since improved), and I questioned the wisdom of accepting suggestive ads in a purportedly serious magazine. (Indeed, I still feel this way no matter what the problems of revenue might be.) But there was a certain militancy and honesty to the editorial tone, and while I was not sympathetic, I think I can say that for the first time in my life I was not unsympathetic. Most important of all, my curiosity was piqued. A few weeks later I asked my painter friend if I could borrow his copy of Donald Webster Cory’s
The Homosexual in America
.

Reading it was an important experience. Mr. Cory strikes me as being a modest man, and I think he would be the first to admit that while his book is very good, closely reasoned, quietly argued, it is hardly a great book. Nonetheless, I can think of few books which cut so radically at my prejudices and altered my ideas so profoundly. I resisted it, I argued its points as I read, I was often annoyed, but what I could not overcome was my growing depression that I had been acting as a bigot in this matter, and “bigot” was one word I did not enjoy applying to myself. With that came the realization I had been closing myself off from understanding a very large part of life. This thought is always disturbing to a writer. A writer has his talent, and for all one knows, he is born with it, but whether his talent develops is to some degree responsive
to his use of it. He can grow as a person or he can shrink, and by this I don’t intend any facile parallels between moral and artistic growth. The writer can become a bigger hoodlum if need be, but his alertness, his curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish. The fatal thing is to shrink, to be interested in less, sympathetic to less, desiccating to the point where life itself loses its flavor, and one’s passion for human understanding changes to weariness and distaste.

So, as I read Mr. Cory’s book, I found myself thinking in effect,
My God, homosexuals are people too
. Undoubtedly, this will seem incredibly naïve to the homosexual readers of
One
who have been all too painfully aware that they are indeed people, but prejudice is wed to naïveté, and even the sloughing of prejudice, particularly when it is abrupt, partakes of the naïve. I have not tried to conceal that note. As I reread this article I find its tone ingenuous, but there is no point in trying to alter it. One does not become sophisticated overnight about a subject one has closed from oneself.

At any rate I began to face up to my homosexual bias. I had been a libertarian socialist for some years, and implicit in all my beliefs had been the idea that society must allow every individual his own road to discovering himself. Libertarian socialism (the first word is as important as the second) implies inevitably that one have respect for the varieties of human experience. Very basic to everything I had thought was that sexual relations, above everything else, demand their liberty, even if such liberty should amount to no more than compulsion or necessity. For, in the reverse, history has certainly offered enough examples of the link between sexual repression and political repression. (A fascinating thesis on this subject is
The Sexual Revolution
by Wilhelm Reich.) I suppose I can say that for the first time I understood homosexual persecution to be a political act and a reactionary act, and I was properly ashamed of myself.

On the positive side, I found over the next few months that a great deal was opening to me—to put it briefly, even crudely, I felt that I understood more about people, more about life. My life-view had been shocked and the lights and shadows were
being shifted, which is equal to saying that I was learning a great deal. At a perhaps embarrassingly personal level, I discovered another benefit. There is probably no sensitive heterosexual alive who is not preoccupied at one time or another with his latent homosexuality, and while I had no conscious homosexual desires, I had wondered more than once if really there were not something suspicious in my intense dislike of homosexuals. How pleasant to discover that once one can accept homosexuals as real friends, the tension is gone with the acceptance. I found that I was no longer concerned with latent homosexuality. It seemed vastly less important, and paradoxically enabled me to realize that I am actually quite heterosexual. Close friendships with homosexuals had become possible without sexual desire or even sexual nuance—at least no more sexual nuance than is present in all human relations.

However, I had a peculiar problem at this time. I was on the way to finishing
The Deer Park
, my third novel. There was a minor character in it named Teddy Pope who is a movie star and a homosexual. Through the first and second drafts he had existed as a stereotype, a figure of fun; he was ludicrously affected and therefore ridiculous. One of the reasons I resisted Mr. Cory’s book so much is that I was beginning to feel uneasy with the characterization I had drawn. In life there are any number of ridiculous people, but at bottom I was saying that Teddy Pope was ridiculous because he was homosexual. I found myself dissatisfied with the characterization even before I read
The Homosexual in America
, it had already struck me as being compounded too entirely of malice, but I think I would probably have left it that way. After Mr. Cory’s book, it had become impossible. I no longer believed in Teddy Pope as I had drawn him.

Yet a novel which is almost finished is very difficult to alter. If it is at all a good book, the proportions, the meanings, and the interrelations of the characters have become integrated, and one does not violate them without injuring one’s work. Moreover, I have developed an antipathy to using one’s novels as direct expressions of one’s latest ideas. I therefore had no desire to
change Teddy Pope into a fine virtuous character. That would be as false, and as close to propaganda, as to keep him the way he was. Also, while a minor character, he had an important relation to the story, and it was obvious that he could not be transformed too radically without recasting much of the novel. My decision, with which I am not altogether happy, was to keep Teddy Pope more or less intact, but to try to add dimension to him. Perhaps I have succeeded. He will never be a character many readers admire, but it is possible that they will have feeling for him. At least he is no longer a simple object of ridicule, nor the butt of my malice, and I believe
The Deer Park
is a better book for the change. My hope is that some readers may possibly be stimulated to envisage the gamut of homosexual personality as parallel to the gamut of heterosexual personality even if Teddy Pope is a character from the lower half of the spectrum. However, I think it is more probable that the majority of homosexual readers who may get around to reading
The Deer Park
when it is published will be dissatisfied with him. I can only say that I am hardly satisfied myself. But this time, at least, I have discovered the edges of the rich theme of homosexuality rather than the easy symbolic equation of it to evil. And to that extent I feel richer and more confident as a writer. What I have come to realize is that much of my homosexual prejudice was a servant to my aesthetic needs. In the variety and contradiction of American life, the difficulty of finding a character who can serve as one’s protagonist is matched only by the difficulty of finding one’s villain, and so long as I was able to preserve my prejudices, my literary villains were at hand. Now, the problem will be more difficult, but I suspect it may be rewarding too, for deep down I was never very happy nor proud of myself at whipping homosexual straw boys.

A last remark. If the homosexual is ever to achieve real social equality and acceptance, he too will have to work the hard row of shedding his own prejudices. Driven into defiance, it is natural, if regrettable, that many homosexuals go to the direction of assuming that there is something intrinsically superior in homosexuality,
and carried far enough it is a viewpoint which is as stultifying, as ridiculous, and as antihuman as the heterosexual’s prejudice. Finally, heterosexuals are people too, and the hope of acceptance, tolerance, and sympathy must rest on this mutual appreciation.

TO SAY ANYTHING ABOUT
“artistic freedom” in a few pages is of course almost impossible. One has the doubtful choice of making a few private remarks or else listing a series of platitudes. If I choose the second procedure it is because the platitude for all its obvious disadvantages has nonetheless a particular advantage we are too likely to forget—in every cliché is buried a truth, and to contemplate a cliché, to explore it, to search for its paradoxes and attempt to resolve them is a most characteristic activity of thought, if indeed it is not thought itself, for in a very real sense every word in a language is a small cliché flattening the variety of experience it attempts to illumine. And some words are large clichés, meaningless to some, infinite to others; we need only think of “God,” “Life,” “Adventure,” “Color”—whichever word one chooses.

There is one further preface I must make. For years I have been alternately attracted to Marxism and anarchism, and in the tension between the two I suppose I have found the themes for my novels. So I do not write this credo with any idea of being a champion of America or the West. As a practical matter, and one can hardly scorn such an important practical matter, there is
more liberty to express unpopular, radical, “useless,” or dangerous ideas in the United States than there is in the Soviet Union or the “Eastern Democracies.” Nonetheless it is done at one’s disadvantage if not one’s outright danger, and the advertisers of America’s artistic liberties often neglect to mention that our unpopular ideas are invariably buried in tangential newspapers and magazines whose circulation is pitifully small. Still, this is better than total zero. Stalinism, in its churchly wisdom, has recognized for decades that nothing is more difficult to anticipate than the movement and growth of ideas; therefore it permits no expression beyond the most clearly defined limits.

There was a period some years ago when I was half attracted to Stalinism, and so I am not unfamiliar with the muscular appeal it offers many intellectuals. “Poor frustrated spindly thinker,” Stalinism is constantly saying, “when will you realize that your problems are not the problems of the world, and that all men must eat before one man can be privileged to think independently.” Like all absolute assertions it presents a part of the whole. For it is undeniable that there is shame as well as dignity to thought so long as only a few have leisure enough to search for it. The lie, however, and it is the organic contradiction of Stalinism that it cannot recognize this lie which has haunted it, confused it, and even created the insoluble tangles of its very economic inefficiency, has been the lie, the arrogance, of assuming that human development can proceed on a half-truth. The false humility of Stalinist self-criticism is always arrogance, for there is no arrogance like declaring that one’s past works and actions led people in bad directions. It assumes the ridiculous conceit that one’s present works are therefore good.

Out of this arrogance Stalinism has defined what the artist is, has allocated his specific work, has granted him a specific collective importance, and has denied him a private voice. Like most Western artists I have been tormented more than once by the nightmare of possessing a private voice. All too often one’s work seems meaningless, isolated, and one’s accomplishments pitiful. Yet it must never be forgotten that despair about the meaning of one’s work is more vital to the creative process than social approval.
To create, one must first destroy; to be capable of love one must be able to hate, and nothing dulls love and hatred into their pallid social equivalent so much as social approval. Only when the artist is ready to accept despair, isolation, contraction, and spiritual exile can he be able to find the expansive energies and the unrestrained enthusiasm which continue the essential dialectic of human progress. The genius of Marx was that he was a mystic as well as a rationalist, and the intellectual deterioration of Socialism, not to mention the mental petrifaction of Stalinism, comes from denying the mystical element in Marxism and championing the rational. In human history there is finally one umbilical conflict: it is man versus society. For society always consists of the search for the single understanding, the “One,” the rational judgment, the established value or the value to be established; the spectrum of society runs the unilinear gamut of those things admired absolutely to those things detested absolutely. Implicit in every social view is the concealed notion that society (which is One) is good, and man (who is multiple) is thereby bad, man who is mysterious and finally undefinable for he includes the expanding sum of all those things (people, thought, the Self, experience, the universe—one may extend the list indefinitely), all those things man must forever love-and-hate, hate-and-love. So, society, which is necessary to enable man to grow, is also the prison whose walls he must perpetually enlarge. The paradox of this relation—half wedding, half prison—is that without man there cannot be society, yet society must always seek to restrain man, and the total socialization of man is the social view that one man is good and another man is bad.