A Writer's Life (44 page)
Authors: Gay Talese
Despite its adulterous theme, Lawrence was convinced that he had written an affirmative book about physical love, one that might help to liberate the puritanical mind from the “terror of the body.” He believed that centuries of obfuscation had left the mind “un-evolved,” incapable of having a “proper reverence for sex, and a proper awe of the body's strange experience”; and so he created in Lady Chatterley a sexually awakened heroine who dared to remove the fig leaf from her lover's loins and examine the mystery of masculinity.
While it has long been accepted as the prerogative of both artists and pornographers to expose the naked female, the phallus has usually been obscured or airbrushed, and never revealed when erect; but it was Lawrence's intention to write a “phallic novel,” and often in the book Lady Chatterley focuses entirely on her lover's penis, strokes it with her fingers, caresses it with her breasts; she touches it with her lips, she holds it in her hands and watches it grow, she reaches underneath to fondle the testicles and feel their strange soft
weight; and as her wonderment is described by Lawrence, thousands of male readers of the novel undoubtedly felt their own sexual stirring and imagined the pleasure of Lady Chatterley's cool touch on their warm tumescent organs and experienced through masturbation the vicarious thrill of being her lover.
Since masturbation is what erotic writing so often leads to, that was reason enough to make Lawrence's novel controversial; but in addition, through the character of the gamekeeper, Lawrence probes the sensitivity and psychological detachment that man often feels toward his penisâit does indeed seem to have a will of its own, an ego beyond its size, and is frequently embarrassing because of its needs, infatuations, and unpredictable nature. Men sometimes feel that their penis controls
them
, leads them astray, causes them to beg favors at night from women whose names they prefer to forget in the morning. Whether insatiable or insecure, it demands constant proof of its potency, introducing into a man's life unwanted complications and frequent rejection. Sensitive but resilient, equally available during the day or night with a minimum of coaxing, it has performed purposefully if not always skillfully for an eternity of centuries, endlessly searching, sensing, expanding, probing, penetrating, throbbing, wilting, and wanting more. Never concealing its prurient interest, it is man's most honest organ.
It is also symbolic of masculine imperfection. It is unbalanced, asymmetrical, droopy, often ugly. To display it in public is “indecent exposure.” It is very vulnerable even when made of stone, and the museums of the world are filled with herculean figures brandishing penises that are chipped, clipped, or completely chopped off. The only undamaged penises seem to be the disproportionately small ones created perhaps by sculptors not wishing to intimidate the undersize organs of their patrons.â¦
Each day the penis is prey to sexual sights in the street, in stores, offices, on advertising billboards and television commercialsâthere is the leering look of a blonde model squeezing cream out of a tube; the nipples imprinted against the silk blouse of a travel agency receptionist; the bevy of buttocks in tight jeans ascending a department store's escalator; the perfumed aroma emanating from the cosmetics counter: musk made from the genitals of one animal to arouse another. The city offers a modern version of a tribal fertility dance, a sexual safari, and many men feel the pressure of having to repeatedly prove their instinct as hunters. The penis, often regarded as a weapon, is also a burden, the male curse. It has made some men
restless roués, voyeurs, flashers, rapists â¦Â its profligacy in high places has provoked political scandals and collapsed governments. Unhappy with it, a few men have chosen to rid themselves of it. But most men, like the gamekeeper, admit that they cannot deliberately kill it. While it may typify, in Lawrence's words, the “terror of the body,” it is nevertheless rooted in a man's soul, and without its potency he cannot truly live. Lacking it, Lord Chatterley lost his lady to a social inferior.â¦
I had often wanted to write more about the penis since completing
Thy Neighbor's Wife
, but until I had read Dr. Altman's column about John Bobbitt, I did not see an opportunity. Now I thought about Tina Brown, and how I might persuade her to send me to Manassas, Virginia, to represent
The New Yorker
in the forthcoming courtroom appearances of John and Lorena Bobbitt. There would be two separate trials in the presence of juries. In one trial, Lorena would have to defend herself against the county prosecutor's charge that she was guilty of “malicious wounding.” In the other trial, the same prosecutor would present Lorena's position that her husband was guilty of “marital sexual abuse.” But John Bobbitt's penis would also be on trial, it seemed to me, and I hoped that these adjudications in Manassas would help to clarify what I thought was still unclear despite all the media coverage of the so-called Gender Wars. In this time of expanding women's rights and demands, was a married man's penis entitled to
no
privilege whatsoever within the lawful state of matrimony? Or, to explore the question further: Did a married man's penis enjoy any legal leeway or sexual concessions that might be denied rightfully to the penis of a young bachelor or an older divorced individual who had not remarried? If one's marital situation was not relevant to this question, then from the perspective of a penis, it might be fair to ask, Why get hitched in the first place? Why go through the trouble of hiring a justice of the peace and agree to be guided by the restrictive measures of the marital code and
still
run the risk of being sliced off in bed by a wife's kitchen knife and then tossed out of her car into the weeds?
The penises of married men were treated far better, I believed, during the era of my early adulthood in mid-twentieth-century America. Indeed, most men of my generation recognized many benefits in marriage, not the least being the almost effortless accessibility and the abundance of what the marriage manuals then preferred to call “coitus,” and which under normal circumstances was readily and conveniently available within one's own home and usually within an arm's reach at most hours of the day and nightâexcept when it wasn't. It would be misleading, I must
admit, to convey the impression that husbands in the 1950s assumed sex-on-demand status while dwelling in close quarters with a spouse. It was understood in those days, as I guess it has been understood since the time when couples lived together in caves, that a woman possessed the irrefutable right to be ailing from a “headache” or to be otherwise excused from participating, now and then, in sexual intimacies with her mate. But I do not recall any woman of my generation ever lodging a litigious complaint of “marital sexual abuse” against her husband while she was willingly residing with him. And yet this is exactly what Lorena Bobbitt had done. Moreover, as she herself acknowledged to law-enforcement authorities, she had partaken in consensual lovemaking with her husband in their bedroom just two days before he had allegedly committed acts of “marital sexual abuse,” prompting her to remove his penis.
In singling out Lorena Bobbitt's response to what she deemed to be her husband's unpardonable behavior, I am
not
discounting the probability that many women of my generation had also been frequent victims of “marital sexual abuse”âbut the women of my day, as I have indicated, would not have been inclined to publicize it. Wives rarely discussed their private lives with anyone back then, and it was also tacitly understood that women of high moral character did not even think much about sex. Men often characterized such women as “frigid.” This word is not in the lexicon of the 1990s, but it was commonly used a generation ago, and it was not necessarily meant to be pejorative. A frigid woman was imagined by men to be a wholesome virginal creature on the verge of becoming erotically aroused by the very men who were doing the imagining. Such women were more highly valued as trustworthy potential spouses than were those relatively “loose” women who had been cheerleaders in high school and dated star athletes, or who later in life tried to escape convention by working as airline stewardesses. Since sexual favors were less casually distributed by the bachelor girls of the pre-Pill 1950s than would be the case with the
jeunes files
of the next generation, it was not uncommon for mid-twentieth-century men to welcome the prospect of marriage as a surcease to their unmet nightly needs, to their miscalculations and unrequited flirtations, and to the physical discomforts of having sex with their lovers in the seats of cars parked in the woodlands (while mosquitoes buzzed about, and Peeping Toms watched from the trees, and the patrolling policemen occasionally knocked on windshields while frowning within the glare of their upheld flashlights). Matrimony was supposed to mark the end of such gruesome experiences for unwed couples. It was supposed to offer them an emancipating alternative to borrowing and using friends' apartments as love nests, and arranging amorous meetings
in third-rate hotels and motelsâplaces where no self-respecting libidinous male was likely to sign his real name in the registration book.
The nom de plume that I sometimes used when registering in such hotels and motels on those occasions when I could convince my college sweetheart to accompany me overnight to attend football games or other events taking place far from the campus was “Johnny Lindell”âmy favorite baseball player on the mid-1940s New York Yankees. He had also been the first player to ever give me an autograph, doing so when I was twelve and traveled daily by trolley to watch the Yankees' spring-training activities held in 1944 and 1945 in Atlantic City. I believe that I scribbled Johnny Lindell's name, together with various made-up addresses, five or six times on registration forms during the two-year period of my Alabama romance.
Some years later, while I was in the army and stationed at Fort Knox, Kentucky, I recall once using the name of another Yankee player, Jerry Coleman, on the registration card of a motel near the Louisville airport, where I was spending the night with a stewardess I had met earlier on the flight from New York. Although I admired Jerry Coleman's athletic abilities, I had never sought his autograph, nor had I ever met him personally until he had retired from the game and was working as a sports broadcaster. It was at an Old Timers game at Yankee Stadium during the middle or late 1960s that someone had introduced us, and I impulsively decided to tell Coleman about what I had done in Louisville. I thought he might be amused. But after hearing my story, his lips suddenly tightened, his face reddened, and, saying nothing, he turned and walked away from me. I would never see him again. I was surprised and sorry about what had happened, but at the time I had not chased after him and attempted to apologize, because I did not exactly know what had aggravated him. It occurred to me that Coleman's reaction was perhaps traceable to how he had been conditioned to feel as a ballplayer whenever a teammate had borrowed his favorite bat and hit a home run. Or maybe Coleman felt that my registering under his name had somehow put his personal reputation at risk, although this made little sense to me, because his name was very commonâthere were surely many similarly named men listed in every metropolitan telephone directory in Americaâand I could not understand why my belated confession about what I had done in Louisville during the mid-1950s would bother Coleman when I told him about it ten or fifteen years later.
Whatever Coleman's reservations were, this was a point in time when a majority of Americans were enjoying, and were
insisting
that they were entitled to enjoy, unprecedented access to freedoms and choices pertaining
to how they conducted their private lives and how they exercised their constitutional rights within public spaces and accommodations. These were the years when the civil rights marchers were popularizing “We Shall Overcome,” and when the anti-Vietnam War demonstrators were advocating “Make love, not war,” and when the laws and moral standards of the nation were changing to such a degree that what had been prosecutorial and socially abhorrent in the not-so-distant past was now lawful and being longed for and being indulged in by masses of people. There were the bra-burning rallies of liberated women, and the frontal nudity of male and female dancers performing together on the stages of legitimate theaters, and the fact that nightclub comedians could get away with using words that in the fifties would have hastened Lenny Bruce into handcuffs. It was during the late sixties and early seventies that countless coeds helped to pay for their college tuitions and their supplies of marijuana by working in massage parlors, places where male patrons could remove all of their clothing and, uncovered by towels, recline on their backs and receive what was understood to be the
spécialité de la maison
âa hand job, or what the parlors' advertising brochures more discreetly described as “manual relief.” These were boon times for penises from coast to coast.
But not all the permissiveness of this period would be accepted as desirable social behavior by younger Americans in the decades that followed. “When America is not fighting a war, the puritanical desire to punish people has to be let out at home,” wrote the novelist Joyce Carol Oates, and I accepted this as one possible explanation for the burgeoning spirit of rectitude and correctness that seemed to pervade much of the country from the 1980s into the 1990s. This restrictive trend might also have reflected a newer generation's reaction against the perceived excesses of their parents' timeâthe drugs, the sex, the demonstrativeness, the dropping out. Or maybe it expressed as well a newer generation's fears and concerns about the well-publicized warnings of the existence of genital herpes and AIDS. It was a time when feminist activists campaigned against pornography as degrading to women, and when police departments' morals squads raided businesses in the sex industry that catered almost exclusively to menâstrip clubs, peep shows, and massage parlors. In 1972, there had been at least thirty massage parlors operating openly along the thoroughfares of New York Cityâand nearly equal numbers in Los Angeles and some other major cities; but by 1992, whether I was on the East Coast or the West Coast or traveling elsewhere within the country, I could not find a single one. These were no longer boon times for penises.