My Secret Life (2 page)

So what we do have in
My Secret Life:
An arty sexual autobiography that will remind us of Henry Miller; a cynical bit of pornography; an accurate and serious (if quickening) peek at the habits of our far-from-starchy forebears; or a novel? What mask are we to put on when we read
My Secret Life?
It all depends on what we think we’re reading — and that’s not easy to decide. First of all, do we regard what Walter’s telling us as plain fact? Walter says he has had intercourse with twelve hundred women and manually manipulated the genitals of “certainly three hundred others.” That number, which modestly excludes the men and boys with whom he had fun, gathers into its fold women of twenty-seven “empires, kingdoms or countries and eighty or more different nationalities, including every one in Europe except a Laplander.”

On the other hand, the matter-of-fact tone of the work and the mundane details that the narrator includes seldom suggest Casanova-style boasting, parody, or mad fantasy. Maybe Walter just had a way about him, but he says he didn’t: He insists that he was an average guy who just happened to be persevering; as if fifteen hundred different sexual partners would fall into the lap of anyone who wasn’t a slacker. He suggests that women are really as anxious to have sex as men and that they’ll do just that, given reasonable encouragement and opportunity. He says further that what he’s doing is nothing very remarkable: “What I have done, thousands of others are doing.”

Sure. Perhaps others will simply nod in agreement at this observation, but my own experience and perhaps gaunt sense of the probable cause me to abandon at just this point the idea that Walter is an historical character, at least in the usual sense, though he is a brilliant fictional narrator, a novel-writer. It’s a novel whose plot is, I grant, formed as a set of variations on a single theme. Here we have a picaresque (or post-modern) novel which invites us playfully to participate in all the episodes — or the single repeated episode. Dickens’s
Great Expectations
opens with Pip recalling his first memory of “the identity of things,” of the whole cosmos; but Walter’s first words take a more limited world for his survey: “My first recollection of things sexual . . .” Walter’s focus (one could say his artistic integrity) is so intense that he makes sex the measure of all things, even time: When he is young, he orders events not by the calendar but by the size of his penis. This novel operates as a subversive version of genteel fiction and its main motor: How sheer tenacity and good luck can overcome the odds, master the obstacles created by class, modesty, and money. As in many other novels, from Defoe to Horatio Alger to Joseph Heller, Walter overcomes them again and again, and yet again.

This work takes as its subject the Inexhaustible and poses as its main artistic goal the representation of recurrence. Now, recurrence is a different thing from blunt repetition, to be sure, but not much different; and how does an author make us feel that each going-at-it is indeed a new dawn and not just another slog through the same old routine? Walter knows he has a problem on his hands: “fucking is always much the same,” he says, and fucking, he admits, is his major (only) subject. “The roads to copulation are like the act, very much the same everywhere.” There is, in fact, “nothing mysterious about it excepting in the psychology.” Only that — but that “psychology,” which he elsewhere terms “imagination,” is everything, transforming dull routine into heady new exploration. For Walter, as for any artist, “novelty always stimulates my salacity,” and he can always, literally always, find novelty by exercising his imagination, the secret of all art and, we gather, sexual bliss.

It is true that, especially in the second half of the novel, Walter does seem to locate variety not simply through ingenious imaginative contemplation, but through more and more direct recourse to external stimulants: including boys, flagellation, partners with unusual body formations, and group play. He decides at about midpoint in the novel that his life (sex-life that is, but they seem the same) has been “simple, commonplace, and unintellectual,” so he vows to cut down the amount of “simple belly to belly exercise,” charming as it has been, and to add a lot of, as he puts it (and who could say it better?), “suck and fuck all around.” One could see this welcoming of variety as an act of sad desperation, an attempt to hide from himself the emptiness of his life, an addiction he cannot rid himself of.

But Walter himself sees his life in grandly heroic terms: He was “determined to know everything, and to do everything once in my life.” Everything! And he’s not talking about skydiving, snorkeling, and safaris. He’s not some timid Ernest Hemingway sort. He really means everything that is personal, vulnerable. Walter has a literal mind, and he has a literal courge: He means to make his body available to pleasure at the risk of ridicule, failure, and pain. The very opposite of Hemingway in this respect, he throws himself into the most sensitive and dangerous tests of all. He doesn’t need to shoot a lion as a substitute for sex. Walter has no truck with substitutes and thus is like a bedroom-Faust — unsatisfied with less than All. Walter laments his failure not simply to sleep with a Lapland woman but with the entire population of Lapland. But he’s a comic Faust, of course, since, there’s so little that he doesn’t get at the finish. At the end, Walter says, “Eros adieu,” but this is just a way to stop the book, not conclude it. Nobody believes him when he says adieu to anything, certainly not eros. Even if Walter were to be stricken with a fatal disease, he’d make love to the ambulance drivers, the entire emergency room, the undertaker, the grave diggers — his erotic urge would not stop for death.

Whether we regard the work as a comic novel or not, we will notice about it some very striking and unusual features. It is, for one thing, the least sexually squeamish work to come down to us from the past. Walter is apparently incapable of censoring anything, even when we might like him to do so. Walter is wildly excited by many things most of us might regard as uninteresting or actively unattractive. For instance, nothing excites him more than the sight or sound of a woman peeing: “seeing them piddle became a taste I kept all my life,” he says right off the bat. (page 27) He carries an auger with him to foreign hotels, eagerly drilling holes so he can catch others at play or at the chamber pot.

Not that this peculiarity blocks him from more conventional engagements, though even these are sometimes portrayed as more than a little grotesque: “I had to pull open this one’s sausage lips and hold back the dark fringe, which got into my eyes and tickled my nose.... Then her thighs closed round my head tightly enough to squeeze it off.” The Rabelaisian humor is not lost on the narrator, who can even laugh at the vagaries of his mind-of-its-own penis, and the difficulties he has in choreographing the more complex figures in group sex, at one point having so many arms and legs blocking the essential organs that he resorts to a series of ceiling hooks, pulleys, and ropes to hoist the excess out of the way. We sometimes feel we are in the middle of an X-rated
Night at the Opera.

But just as often we glide over from the grotesque to the lyrical, especially to passionate celebrations of the woman he’s near — or near to engaging. He often says that he has little interest in faces or bodies (apart from one area, on which he is a connoisseur), that he simply likes best of all in the world the woman with whom he is about to copulate, no matter what she looks like. Sometimes he falls in love, and he often seems to develop considerable affection for women he knows, even when their relationship is decidedly short-term. Indeed, one of the most attractive features of Walter is the respect he has for prostitutes and the easy and quite convincing friendships he forms with them. He can move us most strongly when he is talking to these women, inquiring after their interests and needs, wondering how it is they get by. Such passages are probably more affecting than the self-conscious apostrophes to “cunt” or, even worse, the celebration of the power (untold) of the penis. All his life, he nourishes the belief that once he gets his penis — “What a persuader!” — into a woman’s hand or even into her line of vision, she is a goner “Powerful organ which all women worship!” I like him better myself when he is talking about pleasure rather than worship; for instance, when he tells us how much fun he and a very early partner named Charlotte had together, totally unable to keep their hands off one another and going at it in halls, privies, on tables, in a schoolroom, in fields, in the rain, standing up and kneeling — hanging from the ceiling, probably. He reflects on all this with an unusual note for him, understated and simple lucidity: “Nothing in my career since is so lovely as our life then was.”

I have held off talking directly about the character of this “Walter,” since there is so much about him that will assault modem sensibilities, and perhaps any sensibilities. Except for the time with prostitutes, he is pretty much devoting his life to a career of sexual harassment; when he isn’t, that is, actually committing rape. There is probably no other way we can view all this, though we ought to remain aware that such terms would not be altogether meaningful then. Still, Walter clearly believes that he knows what women want and what they mean much better than they do; that he is, always and without exception, doing them a favor by fulfilling what, if they only knew it, is their own will and deep desire. His scientific curiosity, while sometimes amusing to us and perhaps even commendable, also leads him inevitably to wonder what it would be like to deflower ten-year-olds.

For some readers, there is no more to be said; and to point out that Walter is also honest, often compassionate, and without conceit would be as wrongheaded as insisting on the Marquis de Sade’s good grooming habits. Still, it is worth noting, though not as an apology, that Walter does not see himself as exceptionally endowed (in any way) or even exceptionally successful with women; that he is invariably generous in his financial dealings, and that he never imagines that he is seeking or finding some kind of higher truth. He knows very well that the search for pleasure will get you, if you’re lucky, pleasure — but not enlightenment. The wisdom he picks up on the way he does give to us, but it amounts to no more than a few (dubious) tips on how to use “the persuader” to best effect in the seducing game and a long essay on the genitals, offered for the naive of all ages.

The best that can be said for Walter is that, for all his occasional brutality, he does certainly, by his lights, respect and like women. He believes that they love what he loves and that their pleasure in it is every bit as intense as his. Walter has in mind an organization of our (male
and
female) being in which will and consciousness are more or less superficial, in which libido, once awakened and released, can give us a taste of bliss in a cold and careless world. Walter can be hard-nosed and callous about money and class (most of his relationships are with poor women), but he rarely makes the error of believing that women are demeaned by being poor, or that poor women are any different from those more fortunate. He is, in this sense, a liberal, a democrat.