A Voice From Old New York: A Memoir of My Youth Page 8

  13. A Hang-up

  IN MY YOUNGER years I was subject to a severe emotional hang-up that had a purely negative effect on my personality. The problem was not immediately apparent to friends or family. Not surprising, as the concern was a strong tendency to reject indignantly any sexual approach to myself made by either girl or boy. It was as if I were actually defending myself from a blow.

  With boys this was confined to an occasional nightly visit to my cubicle at boarding school where my angry refusal was quickly accepted, for those caught were liable to expulsion, and who wanted an unwilling partner, anyway? Later on, in college, such invitations ceased, because those so inclined had learned to recognize each other or make discreet inquiries. Only a very handsome male was propositioned without some checking, and I was not that.

  The girls of my age and world were on the whole much less bold than today and did not expect to be pawed on an early date, or even a later one, with the result that I had many close friends of both sexes and remained, until cured by a brilliant psychiatrist, an unsuspected virgin. For I never mentioned my problem to a soul until I sought medical help. I was too deeply ashamed of it.

  I knew, of course, that something was wrong. I was acutely aware that it was not normal to dislike occasions in locker rooms where men were stripped and eyed each other. Of course, there were no such occasions where we were exposed to nude women. Except one. My mother loved picnics, and on a fine summer day in Maine when my family, parents, brothers, and sister were enjoying one by a lonely lake, Mother suggested that we all take a dip. "But we didn't bring our bathing suits," I pointed out.

  "Oh, that doesn't matter," she replied. "There's just us here. Let's be natural and not artificial."

  The others agreed and started to strip. When it was seen that I was not complying I was urged not to be stuffy, and my older brother genially took a tug at my shirt. And then I flipped and gave way to a fit of wild hate. I don't even remember what happened but the family recognized with shock and dismay that they had better let me alone.

  Well, what was it? It was obvious that I was defending something with my life. The brilliant psychiatrist decided that something had happened to me at age two, something of course of which I was now totally unaware. He wanted to talk to my mother, and she, always open-minded, agreed. She then told him something that had much worried her. I, at two, had shared a bedroom with my sister who was just under four. Because she masturbated, as most children do, and there were still doctors at that time who deemed this bad for a child's health, let alone the child's morals, Mother consulted a famous relative, a noted and noble-minded surgeon who was not, however, versed in psychiatry.

  He prescribed that my poor sister be swathed in a thick species of diaper so that she could not touch her private parts. Mother was dubious about this, but the putting on and the taking off of this blanket led to my sensing when it came off that my sister was missing something that I had. Would it be my turn next? Here, according to the psychiatrist, was the source of my feelings and caution.

  This fear of castration could now be treated and gradually eliminated, and I was duly returned to normalcy. But it took a while. How many lives have been ruined by people's identification of sex with sin! Or by other people's attitudes about what constitutes proper love or sex. My friend Jack Woods comes to mind.

  In Clare Boothe Luce's play The Women, the pretty manicurist who is engaged in stealing the heroine's husband shows little sympathy for the woman she is robbing because the latter, anyway, has "all the important things." By this she presumably means the family and the social position, things of far greater value to the poor manicurist than the stupid male who has fallen for her charm.

  The people who have social position are inclined, at least articulately, to downgrade it and consider as simply vulgar those who too obviously seek it. Oscar Wilde put it well when he said "to be in society is simply a bore. To be out of it is simply a tragedy." But one can still sympathize with those who feel the lack of an assured position in society. The secure person can enter a room of strangers with the confidence that he is just as good as any of them, no matter what title they may devise to describe themselves, and be simply amused by any who deem themselves superior to him. If they exceed him in rank, legally, militarily, or however, that is because the political system calls for ranks and not because one person is entitled to look down on another. In any orderly society, rank has its function.

  I sometimes think that the desire for what one doesn't have is what makes the world go round. I think the greatness of Theodore Dreiser's understanding of the human psyche is demonstrated in his ability to make his reader not only comprehend but actually feel the passionate craving that another human being may have for things about which the reader may have nothing but indifference or even scorn. Sister Carrie's attraction to the cheap baubles in the window of a variety store become as real to us as Clyde Griffith's yearning to join the tacky society that occupies the lakeside summer cottages of his small town. It is the not having, the not belonging that becomes all. Ernest Hemingway is supposed to have said of John O'Hara that when he died, he'd go to Yale.

  Jack Woods, with whom I roomed for two years at Yale, would have understood that. He was neither handsome nor athletic, and he had neither money nor social position. He was the only child of an obscure New Jersey businessman, a suicide, and his dreary Catholic widow. But he had little doubt that his brilliant mind would bring him what he wanted, and it did. When he needed money he would check cash prizes in competitions, enter them, and win. He got high grades without seeming to care for cards.

  But what he desired was to mingle with the socially elite and be a guest at the most glittering New York debutante parties. He was a devout epicurean; he told me once that the one thing in life he could not bear was to hear that someone was having a better time than he was.

  That he used me unsparingly in his successful social club showed his cleverness. The leaders of the class were not at first available to him, but I was, and I knew them all. And it was easy for me in New York to take him as my houseguest to almost any debutante party. Why did I allow myself to be so used? Because Jack never made any secret of what he was up to, and his company was invariably delightful. He always, so to speak, paid his way, and I think he was as fond of me as he was of anyone, which was not much.

  Besides, he read the stories I had begun to work on—we were both on the Yale Lz'i—and I believed him the most acute of critics. When he said of one tale of mine, "For the first time you've been boring," I was overjoyed, for it implied that at other times I had not been.

  Did he have any morals? In sex I don't know; that was a subject he didn't often discuss. But he certainly showed a bad side when he entered into a successful plot with his father's mistress to cover up the evidence of the paternal suicide so that they might collect and share the small life insurance policy. When I reproached him with this and told him it was a crime, he burst into tears and said it was all very well for me to talk that way with a rich father, etc., etc.

  "It's still a crime," I insisted.

  He blubbered but kept the money.

  Jack's attempts at fiction, which appeared in Yale Lit, showed a good deal of wit and were decidedly clever, perhaps a bit too self-consciously so. He might well have become an established writer; he was too smart to have failed to correct his errors. What he really lacked was a warm heart; he might have become a Ronald Firbank or a lesser Evelyn Waugh. But on graduation he chose what may have been the field of his greatest aptitude: reporting. I saw less of him now for I was at law school in Virginia. He went to work for the New York Herald Tribune, where his pieces soon attracted the notice of its great owner, Mrs. Ogden Reid herself. She had decided to send him abroad as a war reporter when he suddenly ended it all by committing suicide.

  Why? He had been staying with me at my parents' apartment, and we had both been ushers at a classmate's wedding on the afternoon of the day he did it. We had separated after the reception, an
d he had gone to several parties, ending up in the apartment of Stewart Alsop, brother of Joe. Jack was sitting on a window seat by a wide-open window (it was a hot June night), rocking himself precariously back and forth until he fell suddenly out the window to his death.

  He had been drinking heavily and seemed in high, even wild, spirits. It could have been an accident, had it not been for the letter that he left for me at the family's apartment explaining that he fully intended to end his life that night because of the agony of finding himself simultaneously in love with a man and a woman.

  I knew both the persons involved; they were attractive and excellent individuals, good friends of Jack's, but quite unaware of the passion he concealed. He liked to have dates with society girls, but they were never serious, and he showed no sign of being gay. If his emotional situation was as he described it, it is probable that his feeling for the man was greater, for marriage to the girl (always a possibility) would have been regarded generally as an excellent thing for him, and in 1941 homosexuality was still in the closet. It had to be strong to grip the feelings of a man who desired public respect.

  Kill oneself over a sexual infatuation? With a future like Jack's? Well, people do. The great Ms. Reid summoned me to explain it to her, and I couldn't. Jack was forever an example of how well one can know a person without knowing him at all. The horror of World War II might have broken up his self-obsession and sharpened the genius of his powers of observation. But wars are better at killing people than changing them.

  In my early years I don't recall homosexuality, or any sexual irregularity for that matter, being discussed by the "grownups" in the family or their friends. No doubt it was to keep a distasteful subject from children's ears, but I imagine that there were a good many closets to which the subject had been relegated. People generally knew what was meant when a woman was described as "horsey" or a man as "effeminate." But it was certainly true that an enormous social stigma was attached to any open demonstration of "undue" affection for a member of one's own sex, and a reputation in that respect meant an automatic exclusion from any men's social group. Women were considerably more tolerant and more changeable: lesbians often ceased to be lesbians. On the other hand, if the "vice" were successfully closeted—and this was not difficult—society was not inclined to pry. As in so many things appearance was everything. Indeed, in the sweller circles prying was considered actually bad manners.

  At Yale, homosexuality was tolerated but discountenanced. It would almost surely have disqualified a man for a senior society or even a fraternity, but he was not condemned. I remember when I was befriended by the son of a world famous automaker, and my father simply mentioned to me that he had a police record for solicitation, that I dropped his acquaintance like the proverbial hotcake. There were enough hurdles in life without that one.

  During the war I had a sordid experience with the dreadful captain of the LST in the Atlantic of whom I shall have more to say. Everyone in the navy knows that when a vessel has been enough months at sea without access to women that some curious things go on in the crew. A sensible officer doesn't see anything. But my crazy captain was shocked, despite a life in the navy, and forced me to make a ridiculous investigation. More than half the crew had been engaged in what most people would call homosexual activity, but if you told them that they would react with violent indignation and insist their manhood had been insulted. They hated gays!

  Certainly, in those early years when I apprehended a mysterious physical hurt from any sexual urges cast in my direction I must have included romantic love as a door far better left unopened. Indeed, I came to regard love stories as tragedies. But I was never such a fool as to think my views shared. I was quite aware that most people were highly enthusiastic about love, and the more intense it was the more desirable. Great passions, even when they brought destruction in their path, were deemed the most desirable of all, at least to readers or theatre-goers. Somehow or other great passion became associated to me with great character, and the leading male of a romance was apt to seem to me a hero. By great character, I should immediately add, I do not mean goodness. It was not at all necessary that he should be good.

  Joseph Wood Krutch, a deep admirer of the dramas of Eugene O'Neill, wrote "that human beings are great and terrible creatures when they are in the grip of great passions." But is this really true of the Mannons in O'Neill's greatest and most terrible drama, Mourning Becomes Electra? Christine Mannon poisons her husband so clumsily that her daughter catches her, and her son Orin simply goes to pieces after killing her lover. Are these spectacles really at once "horrible and cleansing"?

  It seems to me that Racine is closer to what came to be my concept of tragedy than even Shakespeare. He was deeply bathed in Jansenist religiosity, similar to our Puritanism, and repellent though this may be to many of us, it avoids all sentimentality on the subject of sin. Sin is never in Racine "magnificent." It is a loathsome, disfiguring, and humiliating disease that is nonetheless shameful for being inflicted on the sufferer by a capricious god for no fault of his own.

  14. I Begin to Write

  I HAD WRITTEN short stories for the school magazine when I was at Groton and had begun to take a serious interest in reading the great English novelists of the nineteenth century. This was much encouraged by a wise teacher of English at Groton, Louis Zahner, who had the wisdom to teach the boys the actual pleasure of literature. I needed this badly because I was inclined to regard both the reading and writing of fiction as primarily a way of balancing my failure to achieve anything like what schoolboys regard as real success. This was justified to my immature way of thinking when my grade of 100 percent in the English college board entrance examination was celebrated by the school by declaring a holiday. I imagined I was really getting somewhere.

  A French course that I took under Professor Joseph Seronde in my sophomore year at Yale changed my life. He taught nineteenth-century French fiction and drama, and I found myself electrified (there is no better word) by Madame Bovary and Le Rouge et Le Noir. But it was by no means only by such famous classics that I was thrilled. I was no less excited by such lesser works as Daudet's Fromont Jeune et Risler Ainé, by Hervieu's Peints par Eux-mêmes, and by Dumas fils's Les Idées de Madame Aubray. Indeed, there was not a single novel or play assigned in the course that did not bring me absolute delight, and delight was something that I had not previously expected from literature. I knew now that the novel form was going to play a significant role in my life, though just how I had only a dim idea.

  In the meanwhile, why not write one? I had plenty of time at Yale; preparation for the courses was not hard, and even if I kept an evening free for the movie with friends (Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, and Clark Gable seemed to dominate our lives), the afternoons were utterly unoccupied. The Linonia and Brothers Reading Room of the Sterling Library offered comfortable alcoves where one was never interrupted, and I started work on a novel that was partially inspired by Madame Bovary.

  My heroine, whom I called Audrey Emerson, was to be endowed with half of every human quality; she would be half ambitious, half erotic, half intellectual, half honest, half unscrupulous, and so forth. By never being a total anything, she would wreak havoc in the lives of others. She would be born the discontented member of a lower-middle-class family that had once been upper. Her particular prey would be an idle, impecunious, but popular extra man in the highest New York society called Beverly Stregelinus, a name supposedly suggestive of a certain silliness in his nature. Beverly was a bit of an ass, but I tried to endow him with a soul.

  The book came swiftly; a few months completed it. I felt an intensity of happiness in writing it that may have been equaled in later days but was never exceeded. I am aware that joy has not always been associated with the creative process, and the reading public often likes to think of its authors as suffering as they compose. Indeed some may, but I still suspect that Shakespeare went to a bar and had several jovial drinks after leaving King Lear in the storm and Desd
emona with Othello's pillow on her face. I had my manuscript typed and sent it to Scribner's.

  My novel was rejected but with an appreciative letter urging me to send them my next book. At twenty I should have been delighted. But no, I was grabbed by the folly of youth and decided in a fit of depression that I must give up all idea of ever becoming a writer and immediately drown myself in the study of law in any creditable law school that would accept me now, on the basis of three years at college. The University of Virginia Law School was one such, and I applied and was accepted. My poor father who paid for everything uncomplainingly urged me to at least finish at Yale. But, backed by Mother, I insisted and the following fall found me duly enrolled in Virginia Law, from which I graduated in 1941.

  I took a private oath that I would write no more, certainly never while law school was in session, and the latter part I kept, but in the two summers of my law school years I wrote another novel that I destroyed. I threw it in the garbage pail and later, too late, tried to retrieve it. As I remember it, it was no loss to letters. I did not write again until the last year of the war when my ship was undergoing extensive repairs in port, and then I wrote the novel that was ultimately published as The Indifferent Children.

  It is now time to describe the role that my skeptical mother, Priscilla, played in my writing career. She had thoroughly approved of my leaving Yale for law school. A woman with a firm sense of the necessity of one's filling one's proper role, she had always been obsessed with the notion that hers—assigned, I believe, by incomprehensible gods—was the maternal one, though it was the role for which she was least qualified. Instead of leaving her children blessedly alone she interfered reluctantly and unsuccessfully in their lives.