Lover. Bertha Harris
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Introduction
How Lover Happened in the First Place: 1
I grew up in an excessively hick town in the South where there was never anything to do, so when a big-time polio epidemic hit one summer there was suddenly even less to do than nothing. I was kept confined to the house and yard.
This happened before television. My family didn’t own any books. I spent a couple of days outside trying to dig a swimming pool of my own with a teaspoon. Then I went inside and switched on the radio. The radio was encased in green Bakelite, its dial was hot orange with black numbers. It was perched on a cast-iron plant stand beside a red begonia. It had to warm up for a minute or so before it started broadcasting. What I wanted was the baseball game; that’s what I believed I wanted.
It was Saturday. Vic Damone was singing over the radio. I gagged. I was a child aesthete. At nine, I had joined the Girl Scouts because the leader was an antiques dealer; instead of letting me touch her eighteenth-century chairs of “chewed paper” (some know it as papier-mâché), she’d led me and the rest of the troop deep into some piny woods to heat up beef stew over damp sticks: I turned in my uniform. Within the year, I would fail to construct a chandelier out of the only available materials—three wire coat hangers, a thoroughly smashed milk bottle, glue and thread. The polio epidemic had aborted my plan for the summer, which was to be kidnapped by a family with exquisite taste. I was a lonely, anxious, skinny child; on a daily basis my mother compellingly described to me how worthless I was. I had early on elected to love beauty rather than love or hate my mother.
I spun the radio dial. A man with a honey of a voice came in loud and clear, dispassionately reciting the events of the final scene of Salomé by Richard Strauss: Herod, who is enflamed by an unnatural lust for his daughter, Salome, promises her anything she desires if she will only dance for him. Salome, who is enflamed by an unnatural lust for the prophet Jokanaan—who has repulsed her advances—performs the dance of the seven veils, then tells her father that what she wants is the head of the prophet Jokanaan on a platter. Herod is horrified by his daughter’s wish; his unnatural lust for his daughter turns to abhorrence. But he keeps his promise. When the executioner hands the head on a platter to Salome, she sates her unnatural lust for Jokanaan by kissing it passionately on its mouth. Her father orders his soldiers to crush Salome with their shields. They do so.
The honey of a voice belonged to the late, great Milton Cross whose career was spent telling the folks at home what was happening on the stage of New York City’s Metropolitan Opera House during the Saturday afternoon performances.
Unnatural lust couched in sumptuous harmonics was my first experience of art. I lay on the floor next to the plant stand’s bowed legs and let it convert me. I never missed a single broadcast. The kid across the street sneaked off to the movies one Saturday afternoon and wound up in an iron lung. Not me.
Lover should be absorbed as though it were a theatrical performance. Watch it. It is rife with the movie stars and movies of my childhood and adolescence. A perverted, effeminate Hamlet, and Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier have supporting roles. There’s tap-dancing and singing, disguise, sleights of hand, mirror illusions, quick-change acts, and drag. In opera, when a soprano performs the role of a young man who is in love with the soprano who is the girl in love with the young man, the soprano who is the young man is singing a “trouser role.”
Lover has a vaudeville atmosphere. My father did tapand soft-shoe dancing in the waning days of vaudeville, and when vaudeville died, he consoled himself by recreating (or, twinning) the good old days with the means he had at hand. I was the means at hand. My father taught me his routines and we performed regularly for the lifers at the state asylum for the insane, and for the residents of the state home for the deaf and the blind: which was better than nothing; it was, in fact, much better than nothing. To tap-dance for people who cannot hear, and do soft shoe for people who cannot see, and to do both for people who are certain that the dancers are not at all who they say they are, but instead are Satan and the Holy Ghost, or a plate of fried chicken, or President Harry S Truman and Princess Margaret Rose—this gave my father a few essential horse laughs out there on the “death trail,” which is what very small-time vaudeville was called, and engendered in me a taste for surrealism whose expression would eventually worm its way into Lover.
In my father’s day, and before, vaudeville dancing was done exclusively by men. In Lover, replications are perversions and effeminitizations of originals. Francis Bacon’s example of perversion, in one usage, was governance of men by women. A lapsed definition of effeminate is addiction to women. One of the twins in Lover, Rose-lima, suggests that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer plans to film an extravaganza based on Lover. It will be, says Rose-lima, a pastiche of every Hollywood film ever made before the end of its author’s adolescence, with special appearances by gallons of menstrual blood and the Blessed Virgin Mary.
The character of Flynn thinks this: “That a thing, if performed, is its own duplicate.”
Lover Falls in Love with the Women’s Movement: 2
Women’s liberation in New York was, at its onset, about sexual liberation; too many men were not interested in finding out what makes a woman come. Too many women had sedulously anaesthetized libidos. The women’s liberation movement was about the American woman’s American orgasm. It was that simple.
Every other thing that the women’s liberation movement was about during the sixties and seventies in New York followed from that, including the fact that I looked out my window one morning and saw lesbians everywhere. It’s easy to recognize lesbians; they look like you, only better.
The early days of the women’s liberation movement in New York was as intimate as the boudoir scene which opens Der Rosenkavalier. The more intimate the women, the higher their consciousness, the greater their liberated displeasure in men, the greater their pleasure in one another. That’s how liberation initially worked. But pleasure frightened many women; so did the displeasure of men. Betty Friedan, a social reformer from Peoria and the author of The Feminine Mystique —a primitive analysis of sexism which immortalizes Ms. Friedan as the liberated housewife’s liberated housewife—put the fear of pleasure into words; she accused lesbians of trying to subvert the women’s liberation movement with orgasms. A sexual panic broke out.
When the dust cleared, the movement was roughly divided between the sexual subversives and the rest of the women’s movement—women who feared both the displeasure of men and the pleasure they felt with one another.
Lover is the pleasure dome—which includes fêtes champêtres and excursions to bars, the movies, and Niagara Falls—I imagined for those sexual subversives. The twins, Rose and Rose-lima, tell their sister Flynn that at the end of the movie everyone ascends into Heaven. Lover “ends with Justice being done … true lovers united.” It’s a Renaissance heaven I had in mind, where there’s sex.
Just as my father had invented an “alternate” existence for vaudeville dancing, with me, so I assumed the women’s movement’s sexual subversives (as if they were, en masse, a duplicate of the Blessed Virgin Mary) into the “heaven” of Lover. I wanted them to have a good time, unmolested by women who were afraid of pleasure.
Although Lover is presumed to be a “lesbian” novel, and it is, the sexual subversives I put in it are not always, nor necessarily, lesbian. I am no longer as certain as I used to be about the constituents of attraction and desire; the less certain I become, the more interesting, the more like art-making, the practice of love and lust seems to me: it becomes more like something I first grasped as a child.
Shortly after I was born, my mother moved in across the street with a beauty parlor operator. Their ordinary routines centered on hard work and the double bed they bought on layaway. Their “hobby” (but it was an obsession) was attending beauty pageants. They made notes—