In times of travail and confusion, when the beacon of faith dims and separating right from wrong poses a fearful challenge, I often find solace in a line from Al Capp: “Good is better than evil, because it’s nicer.”
This aphorism, which makes an end run around whole libraries full of ethical treatises, came from the mouth of Pansy Yokum, the doyenne of Dogpatch, Ky., and more important, the mother — or, rather, mammy — of a naive, bottomlessly good-hearted 19-year-old hillbilly called Li’l Abner. He, in turn, was the namesake of one of the 20th century’s three greatest comic strips. The other two, for my money, were George Herriman’s “Krazy Kat” and Chester Gould’s “Dick Tracy,” but “Li’l Abner” may have stood alone. “Krazy Kat” was cleverer, and “Dick Tracy” led to more chewed fingernails, but in “Li’l Abner” Capp mixed comedy and suspense in a daily cocktail that no one else has come close to duplicating.
We’ll get to Capp’s sense of humor soon enough, but I want to linger for a moment over his ability to intrigue readers. The mainstay of the adventure strip is a hero who gets tossed into predicaments we can scarcely imagine him scrambling out of — how in blazes will Dick Tracy escape from that pit in which he is caught beneath that boulder slipping inexorably down those earthen walls? Capp saw that a trap could be metaphysical, taxing our brains whether or not it strained the protagonist’s muscles.
In a memorable 1944 episode, a gypsy fortuneteller predicts that Li’l Abner will never leave a certain New York City tearoom. The gypsy has never been wrong, but the lad can hardly stay cooped up in that room for the rest of the strip’s life, so what’s going to give? After several days of teasing, Capp springs his surprise. The tearoom is destroyed by an explosion, so the gypsy was right — Li’l Abner didn’t leave the room, the room left him. Over time, watching the cartoonist set and then negotiate these snares became one of the strip’s chief pleasures.
That pleasure is still available because, a quarter-century after the end of its 43-year run, “Li’l Abner” is very much with us. Abner himself — bumpkin, hunk and Dogpatch’s most eligible bachelor — is still eluding the voluptuous Daisy Mae Scragg, whose self-effacing flame for him burns eternal (or at least until about midway through the saga, when the pair get “hopelessly, permanently married”). Moon Beam McSwine still lies down with hogs, Fearless Fosdick is still perforated with bullet holes, Lower Slobbovia remains the planet’s smelly armpit, Joe Bftsplk has yet to shake the rain cloud that squats over his hapless head, and what’s good for General Bullmoose is still good for the USA.
The handiest way to access this world is via the Web site where it’s posted, one day’s worth at a time, looking better than ever thanks to an on-screen resolution far superior to what you find in newspapers even today. About two-thirds of the “Abner” oeuvre came out in 27 volumes published by Kitchen Sink Press in the 1980s and ’90s; though out of print, these books are not hard to find in comics shops and used bookstores. And now two related episodes from the strip have been collected in a new book, “The Short Life and Happy Times of the Shmoo.”
The Shmoo, you may recall, was the species that had everything and couldn’t wait to give it away. It laid eggs, it gave milk, it provided meat — indeed, “it dropped dead, out of sheer joy, when anyone looked at it hungrily.” Plus, “the eyes [made] wonderful suspender buttons, and there [were] absolutely no bones.” Such a godsend was bound to infuriate capitalist bosses pushing rival commodities, notably pork king J. Roaringham Fatback (roasted shmoo tasted “exactly like pork”). As Abner summed it up, “Th’ reason shmoos is the worst thing thet kin happen to hoomanity is, wif shmoos around, nobody has to fight nobody else — nor cheat nobody else, nor work thar hearts out for nobody else! An’ wifout them sports, th’ whole world would come to a stop!!” Shmoos became a nationwide craze, appearing on the cover of Time and racking up $25 million in sales of shmoo-related merchandise.
The original shmoo episode was published as a book in 1948. Overlook Press has coupled this with a reprise from 1959 to form a shmoomongously entertaining diptych, in which all the elements of Capp’s artistry come into play: crackerjack drawing — with the shape of an overfed bowling pin, the shmoo has the inevitability of a creature that has tumbled out of the collective unconsciousness; wordplay — Capp’s riffs on the word “shmoo” include “good shmoomer men,” “shmoosical comedies,” and the “by the light of the silvery shmoon”; black comedy — out on a night mission to murder shmoos for the sheer spite of it, a blood enemy of the Yokums hopes to get off a round at Li’l Abner, too, because “it’s bin so long since ah shot a sleeping boy”; skilled plotting — the shmoos’ arrival in Dogpatch sets off a chain of events that jeopardizes the national economy while also threatening Abner’s bachelorhood.
The man behind it all — Alfred Caplin, who restyled himself as Al Capp — was far removed from the milieu of his backwoods creations. Born in 1909, the son of immigrant Jews from Latvia, he grew up in New Haven, Conn., where he lost a leg at the age of 9 after being run over by a streetcar. The physical splendor of so many of his characters — that parade of busty, leggy “gals” and especially the strapping Abner, often glimpsed taking a physique-revealing outdoor bath — can be seen as the wishful projections of a man with a mangled body.
In the early ’30s Capp went to New York to seek his fortune as a cartoonist. The Associated Press hired him to draw a single-panel strip called “Colonel Gilfeather,” but he soon quit to become an assistant to Hammond Fisher, creator of “Joe Palooka,” one of the most popular strips of its time. When Fisher went off on vacation, leaving Capp in charge, the young cartoonist had the gall to introduce some new characters: a hillbilly named Big Leviticus and his family — prototypes for the Yokums. Soon Capp struck out on his own, preparing 12 weeks’ worth of “Li’l Abner” material, shopping it around and selling it to United Features Syndicate, which had placed it in only eight papers when it debuted on Aug. 13, 1934. (At its peak 15 years later, “Li’l Abner” adorned the comics pages of 1,000 papers.)
For the strip’s first three decades, Capp seemed to have a direct plug-in to the American zeitgeist. But the advent of the ’60s — the Vietnam War, student protests, the whole counterculture freakout — flummoxed him. His satire turned shrill. He dragged Joan Baez into “Li’l Abner” (under the lame name Joanie Phonie) and labeled demonstrators as “Students Wildly Indignant about Nearly Everything” (you can do the acronym yourself). He took to the lecture circuit, where he excoriated liberals and championed Richard Nixon. On one of these forays something happened between Capp and a young woman (exactly what is not clear) that resulted in a 1972 conviction for attempted adultery. In the aftermath, hundreds of newspapers dropped the strip, which the ailing Capp brought to an end five years later. Two years after that, he was dead at age 70, done in by a lifetime of heavy smoking.
If you multiply the half-minute it took to get through “Li’l Abner” each day by the number of its readers, Capp’s stacks up as one of midcentury America’s most pervasive visions. To read those Kitchen Sink volumes in order is to watch an extended parody of the era, a kind of cartoon epic. John Steinbeck called Capp “the best satirist since Laurence Sterne,” and readers might well have agreed if they had known who Sterne was. The likelihood that most of them did not underscores a vital aspect of Capp’s art. He gave intelligent amusement to everyone “from 8 to 80,” as the old formula went — a knack that has all but disappeared from pop culture today.
He managed this feat, that is, until the ’60s, when he began writing and drawing so as to alienate a large segment of his readership. This was an ominous change of heart — perhaps a tragic one — but it shouldn’t be allowed to negate the glory of his previous work, when he tapped into what a broad swath of humanity has in common: a love of caricature joined with verbal tomfoolery; a thirst for vicarious adventure; an itch to laugh at stupidity, pretension, greed and cant, especially on the part of politicians and plutocrats; a delight in sex appeal; an appreciation of the difference between the male and female amorous agendas. Before he became unhinged, Capp had been shmoolike himself: a pop creator with something for everybody.
Step with me, if you will, into the Little Shop of Lofty Horrors managed by Kenneth Kamler, hand surgeon and cloud-dwelling emergency doc. The specialties of the house include bad things that can happen to climbers at heights greater than 18,000 feet or so, such as: “Those failing to acclimate themselves to the thin air must breathe deeply and rapidly to get enough oxygen, but this stepped-up activity can lead to the perverse situation in which the very act of breathing will use more energy than it creates.” A tent mate of Kamler’s experienced the Cheyne-Stokes phenomenon, a cousin to sleep apnea that is characterized by drawn-out pauses between each breath. “The body depends on a buildup of carbon dioxide to stimulate respiration,” Kamler explains, “but in thin air short, frequent breaths keep its concentration in the blood too low. Lungs forget to breathe until the gas slowly reaccumulates and then gets them going again.” Kamler himself suffered from a nearly stratospheric toothache: “When there is reduced atmospheric pressure, air that may have gotten trapped between a tooth and its filling expands against a nerve.”
A Frenchwoman whom Kamler treated on Mount Everest apparently suffered a tear in “the intercostal muscles that expand the ribs for deep breathing” because she was, well, breathing too deeply. Among the many traumas suffered by American climber Beck Weathers, who was given up for dead but survived on Everest in 1996, was a bizarre loss of vision. “He had had a radial keratomy to correct his sight,” Kamler notes, “but the operation leaves scars on the corneas. At high altitude, his corneas swelled, but the expansion made the swelling uneven, causing blurry images.” (The condition righted itself as he descended. Weathers, you may recall from reading Jon Krakauer’s “Into Thin Air,” ended up losing all of one hand and most of the other to severe frostbite.)
This a grisly lineup, and it doesn’t include other tortures — such as hypothermia and snow blindness — inflicted by the intense cold prevalent on high slopes. Kamler has made four attempts to reach the summit of Everest, all of them unsuccessful. But as a physician who knows what equipment to pack and how to use it under extreme conditions, he seems to have been an indispensable figure on every trek he has taken. “Doctor on Everest” is his account of these expeditions, with special emphasis on the 1996 “disaster” that became the subject matter of Krakauer’s bestseller.
In that book Krakauer was candid almost to the point of self-laceration about his failure to save a fellow climber’s life on the way down from the summit. (He may have overdone the breast beating, though: At the time, conditions were arguably such that every man had to fend for himself.) Kamler has yet to face such a dilemma, but he is no less frank about his own me-first impulses. During his third attempt on the mountain, one of the Sherpas plunged into a deep crevasse. When he heard the news, Kamler’s first impulse was to defend against an interruption that might scotch his summit attempt. “It would be a lot easier for me if he was dead,” the doctor recalls thinking. “The selfish, repugnant thought had surfaced immediately and I was ashamed to discover it within me. I couldn’t allow it a chance to even fully form in my head so I quickly reburied it by focusing on how to proceed if he was still alive.”
As Kamler soon learned, the Sherpa had indeed died, after failing to attach himself to a safety line and then suffering a fall. Such heedlessness is apparently not unusual: The Sherpas have developed their own form of macho daredevilry. Clipping into safety ropes “takes time,” Kamler explains, “and they always want to show each other how fast they can go.” This observation leads him to another moment of self-examination. “Enticing people to risk their lives for us is an abuse of power. We exploit them in the name of sport, offering them easy money and expedition glamour, and they don’t stand a chance.”
But wait. The money’s not all that easy — acting as a load-bearing Sherpa seems like arduous work to me — and what’s all this about expedition glamour? Who cops more of that particular commodity, a Sherpa or a Westerner with a book contract? To his credit, Kamler eventually recognizes the irony here. That poor Sherpa, he admits, “was responding to a deeply felt need to prove himself, impress others, taste glory, or whatever else it is that brings people to the highest mountains. In that way, he was no different than us.” But Kamler leaves a more tender spot unprobed. What’s so glorious about climbing Mount Everest these days, anyhow? By now more than 700 people have done it — 300 more than what I’ve always considered to be the largest a group could reach and still be elite, the fabled 400 of old New York high society (said to be the number of East Coast swells who could fit into Mrs. Astor’s ballroom) — and the cost of doing so has escalated to a sum that rivals what the average American family makes in a year. To “conquer” Everest, you have to be rich or sponsored, and even then the achievement has become rather commonplace and showoffy — the mountaineering equivalent of riding around in a stretch limo. Kamler makes a game attempt at invoking the human spirit as it copes with ultimate adventure and underscoring the nobility of realizing a grand dream, but more and more the climbing of the world’s highest mountain looks like rushing a costly fraternity that isn’t nearly as exclusive as it used to be.
That said, Kamler tells a good story and impresses the reader as a reliable guide. Though he’s not in Krakauer’s league as a stylist, the good doctor’s book complements “Into Thin Air” with his ability to translate medical arcana into terms comprehensible to the general reader. And in his rendering, the centerpiece of the 1996 disaster — the death of Rob Hall, freezing near the summit while he and his wife tried to comfort each other via cellphone — becomes one of the most poignant anomalies the telecommunications age has ever spawned. What a strange time we live in — your voice can be in your loved one’s bedroom thousands of miles away at the same time that your soul is gradually slipping into the void.
Reinventing the American family entails a paradox: The qualities that
inspire a person to reject the living arrangement traditionally sanctioned by religion, psychology and the IRS — Mom, Dad, Bud and Sis holed up in a single-family house with a two-car garage — may not be conducive to
smooth immersion in a replacement clan. Take a passel of dropouts and freaks — whether they be anti-war rebels, first-wave feminists, closet-exiting gays and lesbians or members of the raving, piercing, clothes-swapping underground — put them under the same roof, and you may
have trouble assembling everybody for group meditation.
Such, at least, proved to be the true for most of the commune-dwellers who
figure in Timothy Miller’s “The 60s Communes: Hippies and Beyond.” For this, the second volume of a projected trilogy, Miller and his research assistants conducted several hundred interviews with former and
current communards. The author, a professor of religious studies at the
University of Kansas, is palpably sympathetic with the movement (which no doubt loosened tongues during those interviews) and intent on finding out why, with rare exceptions, ’60s communes were such fleeting things.
Starry eyes were unquestionably a factor, and Miller recognizes the, shall we say, dippiness of so many hippies. Yet he painstakingly harks back to the predecessors of the ’60s movement (he chronicled these early communitarian efforts in the first volume of his trilogy, “The Quest for Utopia in Twentieth-Century America”) and cites cases in which embryonic groups took over old ones rather than starting afresh. This
emphasis on wise continuity scants, I think, the brave-new-world mentality
that shaped so much ’60s rebelliousness. Most of us who reviled the presidents and the Pentagon, ducked out of the money-grubbing rat race, disdained matching china, used marijuana and LSD as passports to countries of the mind, strapped on backpacks and took to the trails, lived defiantly in what used to be called “sin” or “perversion,” helped make celebrities of the utterly untalented or the marginally gifted (Tiny Tim, Andy Warhol) just to flex our baby-boomer power and outrage our elders — most of us wanted no truck with the past. Half the fun of doing anything in those days was making it up as you went along.
Which could mean that you might suddenly find yourself living in a Seattle
Victorian with four or five decent sorts — a woman who stayed up half the night consoling callers to the Rape Crisis hotline, a man who was trying to cobble together a living by leading walking tours of the city, a
woman who worked for the Lutheran Church but was savvy enough not to
proselytize her housemates, a straight couple so adamantly leftist that they supported the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia — along with a creepy guy who inhabited the basement, ate nothing but a vegetarian mush that left residues impossible to dislodge from a saucepan and poured his energy
into a cult centered on mutual excoriation (you and a co-cultist sat down
and systematically ripped each other’s ego to shreds).
The line between a tight group house and a commune was so slender as to be almost indistinct, but in either case the enduring clusters in Miller’s survey tend to be ones that laid down rules, respected individual privacy and screened applicants. Accepting any loser who showed up seeking admission was almost a surefire recipe for early breakup. As one
member of a failed commune told Miller:
It is said that happy people do not volunteer to go to War. Neither, I say, do they join Communities. The roots of this unhappiness may lie in either themselves, or their
world. We at Sun Hill did not know how to determine one from the other, and so we hardly tried; we accepted virtually all who came. But I think that we at Sun Hill tended to assume that each other’s various inadequacies to live in the Mass-Society were due to the faults of that Society, and
not to those of the individuals in question. Therefore, we of course,
assumed that such inadequacies (or “hangups”) would straighten themselves out within the “healthy” context of our Utopia. This — needless to say — was naive.Another investigator, cited by Miller, concluded that close sharing, “supposedly the essence of what communes are all about,” in fact shortened communal life spans: “The level of sharing typically diminished over time if the group survived. In essence, modern communards were always individualists more than communalists.”
Reading Ann Powers’ “Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America,” you get the impression that today’s dissenters may actually have learned something from my generation’s fuck-ups. On the whole, the people whose stories Powers tells seem more shrewd, informed, measured and
persevering in their rebellion than we were. Instead of fleeing the system
and then rebounding to embrace it whole-hog, they have learned how to stand slightly apart and manipulate it.
I can’t claim to have always followed the thread of this book — an inspired
chapter on drugs is followed by a strange one that touts shoplifting from the very shop you work in as a way to mitigate drudgery and low pay. Powers has accommodated herself to the system sufficiently to be pop music critic for the New York Times. (She seems to like the job, but in light of her book, who can blame the security guards if they start checking her bag for pilfered office supplies whenever she leaves the building?)
Powers is a terrific storyteller and a cheerleader for the lifestyle she
advocates: a kind of enlightened hippiedom, in which people pick and choose among domestic and sexual arrangements, job possibilities and available stimulants while eluding some of the most oppressive influences of the establishment, including the tyranny of fashion and the reluctance to examine sex closely. “As conventions continue to self-destruct,” she writes, “the bohemian choice to live differently suddenly becomes essential for everyone … If we who are working on those reconfigurations begin to reflect openly upon our choices, we can provide a moral vision that challenges the antiquated ones that conservatives cling to and that most
Americans seem eager to reject.”
For Powers, the cardinal virtue is rationality, even when you’re doing something stupefying, like taking drugs. “Finding the balance between the drug’s will and your own,” she writes, “is the crucial step in negotiating that reality instead of letting it just crash over you.” Drug-taking, she seems to be arguing, is a skill like many others. You’re bound to make some mistakes
while driving with your learner’s permit, which argues for doing drugs in
the company of loyal friends who can come to your aid if you need them. This is an odd, almost startlingly sane approach to a superheated topic. So many Americans take an absolutist stance toward drugs — Just Say No or libertarian indifference to what anyone else does — that Powers’ determination to slow down and scrutinize the subject is refreshing and useful.
About 10 years ago, novelist Mary Gordon argued that of all the
revolutionary impulses of the ’60s, only one had enjoyed lasting influence: the sexual. In Powers’ view, that may have been enough. Sexual liberation has not only freed up people to choose the partners and practices that
suit them but also has led to a rethinking of what a family is. With
gay men and lesbians in the vanguard, sexual freedom and open unorthodoxy have led to planned single-parent families, two-mommy and two-daddy families, sperm-donating fathers, womb-donating surrogate mothers — and a huge increase in the percentage of households not centered on a married couple.
Here again Powers insists on probing a topic — sex — that many people
would prefer not to focus on, if not because of Puritanism then because they’re afraid that too much scrutiny will rob eros of its mystery. I myself have always thought sex can take care of itself, no matter how much light is shed on it. I grew up in an era when the navel was considered too racy to be shown on movie or TV screens, and no amount of attentiveness to sex can be more joy-killing than that.
As if to establish her credentials as a non-flinching examiner, Powers
dwells on the S/M scene — or, rather, scenes, since there appears to be a marked difference between, say, the safety-conscious San Francisco brand and more reckless international kinds. In an electrifying passage,
Powers quotes an aficionado of stun-guns explaining how she talked a
reluctant partner into going with the current. “We were able to negotiate through it,” the informant reports. “It was awesome.” More power to them.
Toward the end of “The 60s Communes,” in summing-up mode, Timothy Miller quotes several grizzled hippies who take issue with the term “failed commune.” The mere fact that their communes ended, these onetime members argue, doesn’t mean that the experience wasn’t worth having. Looking back, a nostalgic woman remembered “the way we all worked
and lived together without any power or authority structure, simply following our own consciousness of what should be done each day … The way that children [were] cared for communally, with the men also caring for them, without any stigma about child-rearing being effeminate … And
nudity, bodies of all shapes, so readily accepted just as part of nature.
And no power! Only a natural hierarchy of skill, experience, and knowledge.”
If the naive idealism of the ’60s communes has served as a cautionary tale to
the steely-eyed inhabitants of the bohemian enclaves investigated and experienced firsthand by Ann Powers, well, my generation could have left worse legacies than a primer on How Not to Rebel.
Stacey D’Erasmo’s first novel, “Tea,” is divided into three parts, each of which presents a literary snapshot of Isabel Gold, the daughter of a Philadelphia dry cleaner and his frustrated wife. The first picture, which shows Isabel at age 8 or 9 in the late ’60s, is the best — a funny and charming portrait of a kid who is both knowing and naive. She picks up a volume of Anaos Nin’s self-besotted “Diary” but puts it down after observing that the writer “didn’t seem to have any friends.” Accompanying her mother on a tour of a house the family might buy, Isabel decides that the messy occupants are “poor, and not nearly as smart as the Romans, who built aqueducts.” Along with the cleverness, however, comes a sense of foreboding. Isabel’s mom tells the girl that sometimes she wants to die, and soon enough she does, by her own hand.
In the second section, Isabel, now 16, hangs out with two friends who are sleeping together, listens to a lot of Joni Mitchell records and tries to make sense of her mother’s death. One tactic she adopts is getting involved in the theater — her mother had chucked a fledgling acting career to marry Isabel’s father. Isabel approaches drama in a roundabout way, first volunteering backstage at a local little theater, then letting herself be drafted to play one of the horses in “Equus.” By this point she is beginning to realize that she is a lesbian.
The third section finds her, at 22, involved with a woman named Thea, not just in a love affair but in an experimental-film project in which Isabel is to play the goddess Diana, wielding bow and arrow. The co-creators’ relationship betrays signs of trouble: When Thea asks whether Isabel wants them to be “nonmonogamous,” Isabel replies, “Not this second”; and when Cricket, a new friend of Thea’s, tries to horn in on the cinematic planning, Isabel reacts stormily.
There is much to admire in “Tea.” The dialogue is frequently artful, and Isabel’s take on the world is slanted and witty. At home with her family for Hanukkah, she joins them in watching the local news, “which seemed to her to have a charmingly flawed, handmade quality.” The minor characters are vivid, especially the other Golds. Isabel’s younger sister, Jeannie, collects dogs, of which she has half a dozen when last seen, all living in and around the family house, which she shares with their dad. As for him, his passion for dry cleaning recalls the Swede’s love affair with glove-making in Philip Roth’s “American Pastoral.”
But D’Erasmo lacks Roth’s fire and zeal and ability to persuade readers that a family’s history can harbor deep American truths. Her novel’s diction is spare (we’re on the outskirts of Greater Minimalistville here); the jumps from section to section — and from one stage of Isabel’s life to the next — leave too many characters dangling; and the question of how Isabel will cope with her mother’s death is never satisfactorily resolved. Line by line, D’Erasmo is a talented writer, but a firm sense of construction is not yet one of her strengths. For all its flashes of humor, “Tea” left me yearning for an infusion of caffeine.
If you visit the Web site of a gay Washington hustler whose nom de shtup is Fratboy, you can, after checking out near-naked but tasteful pictures of the product, click on a self-interview in which the young entrepreneur explains why he puts out for pay: “College is extremely expensive, not to mention living off campus in one of the most expensive cities in the country. Given the choice of working a service job for $8-$10 an hour versus $150 an hour, it’s a very clear choice for me.”
Fortunately, that blandly pragmatic approach is not the one Rick Whitaker takes in “Assuming the Position,” a touching, brainy and disarmingly frank account of his years as an “escort” in New York City. As he tells it, the precipitating event for his stint on the wild side was being left by a boyfriend, Tom, who had once done some hustling himself. Whitaker’s notion was to shock and hurt his ex while at the same time distracting himself from his pain by taking a role in what he calls “a cultural tragedy.” What’s more (witness Fratboy), there was good money to be made for relatively little work. “Hustling was appealing because it was lucrative,” Whitaker writes, “it was against the law, and it was congruent with what was by then my fairly serious drug habit” — which ran to pot, cocaine and occasional snorts of heroin.
Whitaker hooked up with an agency, carried a beeper, took virtually any business that fell his way and, after his work was done, often went to a bar seeking a freely chosen sexual chaser. During his downtime, he read Nietzsche and Wittgenstein and performed classical music — one entry in the diary he periodically excerpts from begins, “Great dinner with D. last night. I played a Haydn sonata for her …” The detachment with which Whitaker presents this disconnect between his cultural high-mindedness and his carnal crassness — one that most of us feel from time to time but few act out so dramatically — coats his story with a veneer of cool.
Beneath that veneer, however, lies a welter of dissatisfaction. Whitaker argues that the question of whether prostitution is immoral never struck him as “authentic”: “I was not hurting anyone apart from, perhaps, enabling some men to perpetuate an expensive bad habit. And I have never been concerned with the world’s verdict on prostitutes. The world is forever making unfair judgments; people become prostitutes (and do all sorts of things) because life is hard, and life really is hard.” But he admits that in his case hustling took its place among a matrix of addictions, including a craving for affection that stemmed from a love-starved childhood. And the close of one diary entry hints at the toll hustling takes on someone capable of doing justice to a Haydn sonata: “My life is pretty much as inelegant as it could possibly be.”
Whitaker says he liked meeting a variety of men; he hopes that the mental snapshots he took of their apartments and lives will stand him in good stead as a writer. But he hated the game many clients insisted on playing: that the transaction was not sex for hire but philanthropy — an older, richer guy helping out a younger, poorer one. In the end the job was emotionally draining: “It was hard to be relied upon by so many different people, if only for an hour, in an emotional, intimate way, especially by regular clients …” This ennui contrasts with the perennial freshness of an intriguing minor character in the memoir, Francisco, a veteran hustler who knew how to ply his trade without becoming jaded. “Francisco was somehow able to think of his clients as people,” Whitaker writes, “whereas I inevitably thought of them as examples of something like waywardness.”
Whitaker has quit the life, he tells us, and mastered most of his other addictions as well. What ultimately bothered him about prostitution was its numbing effect on him. The only way he could endure it was to close himself off to feeling and, worse, to reflecting upon what he was doing: “Thoughtlessness is the crime, or the sin, that comes before all others, and hustling requires it.”
What we have in this little book, then, are not just the confessions of an unhappy hooker but the musings of a philosopher of carnality. “Assuming the Position” will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about selling the body and will satisfy your nostalgie de la boue in a very muddy way. But it will also stimulate your soul.
A character in “The Spell” smiles the smile of someone with access to “huge cross-indexed files of sexual anecdote.” That phrase almost works as a capsule summary of Alan Hollinghurst’s breezy new novel, which interweaves sexual anecdotes involving four main characters, not to mention a host of supporting players caught up in London’s gay scene.
After an opening chapter set in the Arizona desert, the novel jumps two decades forward and then shuttles between London and the English countryside, where one member of the quartet owns a cottage. Robin Woodfield, now in his late 40s, is the same chap who went poking around the desert in the first chapter, studying Frank Lloyd Wright houses and straying from his marriage to have sex with men. Robin has long since divorced and come out, and he now lives with his lover, Justin, a witty, sluttish, bored egomaniac. Often underfoot is Robin’s son, Danny, a hot 22-year-old who’s also gay and whose life centers on taking ecstasy, dancing the night away to house music and carrying on short-lived affairs. The fourth member of the group is Justin’s ex, a handsome but crashingly earnest civil servant named Alex .
In a fit of impishness, Justin invites Alex down for a weekend in the country; the idea is to see how much jealousy his presence can stir up. But an unexpected twist spoils Justin’s sport: Despite the 15-year difference in their ages, Alex and Danny fall in love. Neither Justin nor Robin likes this development one bit, and readers get to shake their heads over its slim chances of lasting. But the affair proves to be a tonic for Alex. The sex is great, the grieving over Justin dries up and the drugs that Alex takes under Danny’s tutelage shake him out of his torpor.
There’s a bit more to the plot, but not much. After the gay-bashing that darkened Hollinghurst’s superb first novel, “The Swimming-Pool Library,” and the romantic obsession that pervaded his second, “The Folding Star,” this is a lightsome performance, and it has a bravura set piece — a party at that country house on or about Midsummer Night (though precisely which night is the shortest of the year is disputed by a pedantic heterosexual neighbor of Robin’s). What distinguishes “The Spell” from most romantic comedies is the author’s keen observation of gay mores, along with a graceful style that smoothly accommodates earthy details. Take, for example, this snapshot of Alex and Danny on the beach: “Alex looked down at him, the sun-pinked nose, the dip at the base of the throat, the lop-sided tenting-up of his shorts that any friendly physical contact seemed to bring about, the bare ankles scratched by grass stalks. It would have been unreasonable to expect more than this from life.”
Yet for all its witticisms and apergus, “The Spell” looks pallid next to its two predecessors. These characters are too resilient, the stakes they are playing for too low, for the story to have much of an impact. And although the older gay man’s infatuation with The Boy is a rich theme, the time may have come for Hollinghurst to explore another one. At one point Justin, miffed because Robin has cheated on him during a trial separation, harks back to the sleaziness of their first encounter, and the author gets off another mordant line: “For the first time, it struck him as absurd to expect loyalty from someone he had met in a toilet.” It would not be absurd, though, to expect more from a novel — especially one by a writer as gifted as Alan Hollinghurst.
