Seducing the Demon (3 page)

The labels “right” and “left” are inadequate to explain what people care about, I think. They have become new means of censorship and obfuscation. We shut out truth by saying “right” and “left.” Nobody really thinks of herself as right or left. She thinks of herself as a person with complex views.

I finished my speech to cheers and “bravas” as well as hisses and boos. Good, I thought to myself, if I’m getting this reaction, I must be doing something right.

I spent the afternoon meeting the English Department and attending their special small ceremony and celebrating the graduates and faculty at the home of the president of CSI. Most of the students and faculty I met were energized by my speech. They were glad it had not been standard-issue platitudes.

The next day the local papers reported that I was both cheered and booed—but stressed the booing. It was as if I’d been set up. My web site contained both reactions—“you commie, kike bitch” and “thank God you told the truth.”

My books had always gotten both hate mail and huzzas. I was used to it. What use is a writer if she doesn’t rile people up? What use is a teacher if he isn’t made to drink hemlock in the end? In the olden days they threw writers into oubliettes and eventually condemned them to death. Witches—any women who questioned the status quo—were burned at the stake. How could I complain about a few boos? Boos were honors. They meant I was questioning authority, speaking truth to power. They meant I was trying to tell the truth—my quixotic calling.

So here I am, writing for my life: telling how I published two well-received volumes of poetry in my twenties and then went all to hell with a scandalous first novel that I didn’t even think was scandalous when I was writing it.

Telling how “that book” went on and on and on so it almost obliterated everything else I did; how I became a mother (once), a stepmother (once), a grandmother (twice so far) and a wife (four times) and still went on trying to tell the truth as I saw it. I’m not planning to cover up all my stumbles along the way nor my many mistakes nor all the times I made an absolute fool of myself.

Writing a book in your twenties that becomes a worldwide phenomenon hardly prepares you for the silence and despair of a writer’s life. My life was not typical. But no writer’s life is typical. By its very nature, writing is unique to every writer. Practicing writing is like practicing freedom. You are always on your way, never there. People are constantly asking, “How did you do it?” After a while you start to ask yourself. This book is an attempt to answer that question—regrets, mistakes, divorces, lawsuits and all.

PABLO NERUDA

I
saac Bashevis Singer wrote a wonderful story called “Taibele and Her Demon.” In it, a man pretending to be a demon visits by night a pretty young woman whose children have died and whose husband has walked out in utter despair.

At first the demon terrifies her with his ugliness, but then she falls in love with him—as much for his vivid stories of hell and heaven as for his demonic lovemaking. She completely forgets that he’s ugly and becomes more and more attached to him—even though after a while she can see his human failings. Yes, this demon “perspired, sneezed, hiccupped, yawned.” Yes, “sometimes his breath smelled of onion, sometimes of garlic.... His body felt like the body of her husband, bony and hairy, with an Adam’s apple and a navel.... His feet were not goose feet, but human with nails and frost blisters.

“Once Taibele asked him the meaning of these things, and Hurmizah [the demon’s assumed name] explained: ‘When one of us consorts with a human female, he assumes the shape of a man. Otherwise she would die of fright.’

“Yes, Taibele got used to him and loved him. She was no longer terrified of him and his impish antics.”

Perhaps she suspected he was really a man, but not wanting to know it, she refused to. Singer’s story is a kind of reverse Scheherazade: the woman falls in love with the teller of tales and welcomes his lovemaking no matter what his looks. But it is more than that. It’s a fable of disguise between a woman and a man, who both need the disguise to give each other permission to love each other. She needs to believe he is a demon so that she thinks she has no choice but to submit to him. He needs to be convinced that she believes him in order to keep up the elaborate fantasy that turns her on. Many marriages are based on less.

The story of Taibele has always seemed to me the perfect metaphor for my life as a writer.

The job of the writer is to seduce the demons of creativity and make up stories. Often you go to bed with a man who claims to be a demon and later you find out he’s just an everyday slob. By then he may have inspired a novel. The novel remains though the demon has departed.

I wrote to my friend Ken Follett about the metaphorical resonance I found in the Singer story. He read the story. Then, he asked me in an e-mail:

“Do you really see yourself as a woman who slept with someone who claimed to be the Devil, but then turned out to be an ordinary slob?”

He answered his own question:

“Let me guess. You’re going to reply: ‘Yes—every damn time.’ ”

“But once, the demon was not unmasked.”

“When was that?” my friend asked.

“I will tell you by and by.”

Taibele doesn’t want to acknowledge that her lover is merely human. She needs the belief in demons to complete her sexual life. She needs to believe in demons because otherwise she’d be betraying her wandering husband. And she is not that kind of girl.

The best stories don’t have one metaphor but are layered with many. Isaac Bashevis Singer was too thoughtful a writer to give us a single metaphor. He gives us so many that the tale resonates endlessly—the definition of a great story.

So who is
my
demon?

He is wild, uncivilized and lives entirely in the moment. He makes up stories and acts them out. He is never polite. He didn’t go to college and certainly did not get an MFA at Iowa. He doesn’t know which fork to use. He never heard about the Ten Commandments—and certainly not the one about adultery. He has hairy feet and very likely a tail.

Let’s see if you can tell when the demon appears. It shouldn’t be hard. He casts a jagged shadow. And he leaves a wet spot on the sheet.

Of course, for male writers he is a she. She becomes whatever physical type the writer favors, since men care so much more about appearance than women do. Does he like big tits with rosy nipples? She has them. Does he like steatopygous asses? She has one that resembles twin planets. Does he like blue eyes? She has them. Brown? They’ve just changed color. Is he a chubby chaser? She’s chubby too. Is he a modelizer (ugh—what a stupid word)? Then she’s skinny. At six-foot-four with slanty Slavic cheekbones, green eyes with neon yellow pupils, she weighs in at ninety-nine pounds. In life, she reminds you of Auschwitz. In bed, she feels like a bicycle. But in photos she looks like a goddess.

For a gay writer, he’s the perfect boy. He has idealized muscles like Michelangelo’s
David.
He may even be a lovely Bacchus or a Hermes with winged sandals.

He’s Greek, of course. The Greeks had the most beautiful boys. And they competed naked with their adorable cocks bound up in leather thongs so as not to swing. Oh what rapture to watch them run! Nobody was gay or straight then—only human.

 

 

I always knew I was a writer and that writing would define my life. How I knew this I can’t say, but when I was seven, I used to kiss the pictures of writers on the backs of books. If I had known what I now know of writers, would I have done that? Probably not. “Let me kiss the hand that wrote
Ulysses
,” some abject fan once asked James Joyce. “You don’t know where else it’s been,” he countered.

I knew I loved writers. I vividly remember being a child in the big room on Seventy-seventh Street (facing south over the water tanks of the Upper West Side and lighted by the moon and the General Motors sign). I shared that room with both my sisters. Coming in to kiss us goodnight, my mother saw me kissing the picture of Louisa May Alcott on the back of
Little Women
and observed ironically, “She’s dead.” Probably she was jealous that I loved someone other than her. My mother’s fierce, envious love left no room for other women mentors. But her throwaway comment made writing seem even more miraculous: the dead could still communicate. I adored writers because even from the grave they were able to take me away on magical voyages.

The books I treasured as a child—the Oz books, At
the Back of the North Wind, Gulliver’s Travels
—were all about such voyages. And not surprisingly, the form I revert to again and again is a picaresque in which a lucky naïf encounters all sorts of baddies but nevertheless makes it alive to the happy ending. I never plan this plot, but its template must be embedded in my unconscious. I write such books, I guess, because I cherished such stories when I was young. And I write always in the hopes of being transported to some enchanted place. I need the process of writing to keep from going mad.

Or perhaps it was all Oedipal—a way of seducing my father by becoming famous. Fame was a thing he prized. If I became famous, he would love me best of the three sisters. Perhaps it was as simple—and complex—as that.

If I were a child today, would I be equally in love with books? My daughter was a television watcher who came late to books but is now a convert. And my grandson is already book-obsessed. At not yet two, he shouts “Read! Read!” and hands me an unruly stack of books. Perhaps the reading addiction cannot be suppressed. I hope not. We live in a world so full of willful distractions that it seems unlikely that pursuits as solitary as writing and reading can survive. In airports, gyms, banks, diners, manicure parlors, TV news assaults you. On the telephone you are obliged to listen to music you would never choose. Cell-phone junkies (including me) tell you details of their dinners, dynastic complications and medical disorders you don’t want to know. All your senses scream for serenity.

Perhaps, paradoxically, that is why writing has never been so important—despite the fact that fewer and fewer people have time to read. Writing and reading enable you to reclaim the inside of your skull. They erase the slate scribbled with distractions. For me it is a kind of meditation. I am never so calm as after I have written. And the next morning I will feel the familiar anxiety and I will have to begin the process all over again.

Henry Miller used to say that he wrote fifty pages before he could hear the book’s “fetal heartbeat.” Ernest Hemingway (that great overrated icon) used to look out at the rooftops of Paris and say to himself, “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” “We make ourselves real by telling the truth,” the poet-monk-philosopher Thomas Merton says. And that, for me, is the secret of writing.

 

 

At some point in my odyssey from young poet/ graduate student to scandalous first novelist, I met a man. I was always meeting men in those days. He was an elderly publisher with a long track record of publishing books that were initially banned, like Nabokov’s Lolita and D. H. Lawrence’s
Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
He also published plenty of trash, as successful publishers must: books about UFOs, astrological predictions about the stock market and sexual how-tos.

Sexual how-tos never go out of style, but each age must invent its own. In my parents’ era, sex books hid under white coats and stethoscopes; their authors were doctors, like Eustace Chesser, M.D., the author of
Love Without Fear,
a book I found in Japan on a paperback rack at Hakone, a ski resort at the foot of Mount Fuji. The resort was in a tiny town and I stalked that book, afraid to buy yet afraid not to buy. Finally I did buy it and escaped from my parents and younger sister to read it in the thermal baths underneath the hotel where the guests swam nude, enjoying the Japanese lack of shame about nakedness.

In my generation of war babies, Alex Comfort,
philosophe extraordinaire
, took over the sex-advice specialty in
The Joy of Sex
and
More Joy.
(Once, in the late seventies, I was offered a truckload of greenbacks to write
The Joy of Woman,
but I demurred, thinking it would permanently typecast me as a sex writer. I turned down the filthy lucre and got typecast anyway.)

The early seventies were all about the clitoris. The clitoris was queen. It was impossible to escape the seventies without climbing over the clitoris. Apparently, for centuries men had been unable to find it. And women were pissed. Then Masters and Johnson came along, stuck a transparent electric dildo filled with transistors into various cunts, videoed them and discovered that the clitoris was definitely the place where female orgasms began. So Freud was wrong! There
were
no vaginal orgasms! The clitoris was the It girl of the era.

If you had missed Masters and Johnson in their white coats (de rigueur for sexologists), you could read Shere Hite. She had interviewed three thousand women and discovered that “most women can orgasm easily during clitoral or pubic area stimulation but only one third can orgasm easily from the actual act, i.e., penetration.” This was a big fuck-you to men, who apparently were so benighted they thought women could all come in thirty seconds from penetration by a hasty ejaculator.