Lover. Bertha Harris
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was a waste of time, stuck in, they said, to distract people from the real issue at hand, which was the girls’ bodies; to make it seem, they said (when it certainly wasn’t!), that baton twirling or a ham-fisted performance of the first movement of “The Moonlight Sonata” was more important than an eighteen-inch waist. They almost always disagreed with the decision of the judges. My mother told me why she’d moved in with the beauty parlor operator: “Because I worship beauty.”
Rather than love or hate me, my mother elected to become a confirmed aesthete; I became acquainted at Mother’s knee, so to speak, with a way to overwhelm reality that has come to be called the gay sensibility.
Lover’s central characters, my sexually subversive elite —Maryann, Grandview, Honor, Metro, Daisy, Flynn, Mary Theresa, and “the beloved” (who appears under other aliases too) are highly aestheticized, like contestants in a beauty pageant; they are not intended to remind readers of actual flesh and blood. As well, my characters are from time to time distorted or magnified or reduced, like the stars (Rita Hayworth, Lana Turner, Loretta Young) in the Hollywood movies of the forties and fifties. Or they are painstakingly romanticized into melodrama, like the artists (highly temperamental composers, ballet dancers, et al.) in the camp classic of my generation, the British film The Red Shoes.
Or they are very often like those saints of my Roman Catholic girlhood, every one of them a femme fatale like Salome, who single-mindedly pursued any extreme, the more implausible the better, to escape the destiny of their gender. At St. Patrick’s Academy, holy cards were distributed as rewards for excellence in English grammar and composition, Latin and penmanship, and for keeping a straight spine up your back, especially during the elevation of the Holy Sacrament at Mass: girl-saint holy cards for the girls, boy saints for the boys. The saints I earned appeared to me against a robin’s egg blue background in a state of ecstacy: a rapturous transport often accompanied by physical phenomena (swoons, trances, stigmata, speaking in tongues, agitation of the limbs), in which the soul is liberated from the body so that it may contemplate the nature of the divine more readily. The exempla of some saints preface Lover’s episodes to honor their acumen at ecstacy.
I deliberately mistook holy cards, which were intended as aids in meditation and prayer, as objects of art. Depicted in glowing colors, with blazing eyes and parted lips, the saints were all raving beauties. I mistook, I mean, raving beauties for objects of art: I was young and unworldly. I am no longer young.
Life affects Lover’s characters as if it were, instead, Traviata or Norma —just as it did the queen of art, Maria Callas. In my mid-thirties I threw a yard sale in front of my Greenwich Village building which I advertised as “The Maria Callas Memorial Yard Sale.” Swarms of strangers approached, dropped some small change into my cigar box, and reverently bore away my mismatched kneesocks. No one charged me with falsifying my old clothes; everyone already knew that Maria Callas had never set foot in my socks. Together, the patrons of my “Maria Callas Memorial Yard Sale” and I were collaborating in a sort of workshop production of the gay sensibility, whose practice hinges, like the arts, very much on decisively choosing as if over is. I recall saying this to one devotee: “She was wearing those argyles the morning of the day she so tragically died in Paris. That’s twenty cents, please.” And he replied, “Too true. I’m going to keep them in a silver box on my coffee table.”
But real flesh and blood does hover at a safe distance behind Lover’s unreal characters. As I wrote, I had in mind some of the most intellectually gifted, visionary, creative, and sexually subversive women of our time. I got to know nearly all of them within the women’s liberation movement, and I was drawn to them in the first place because they were hot. Some appear in Lover as sexual subversives. Others are in place to sabotage how the vulgar think about love, lust, sex, intellectual activity and art. Ask them this: Are you a practicing homosexual? They will answer, I don’t have to practice. I got perfect at that years ago.
The real women join with the fictional characters to commit Lover’s “style.” All of them, like all good performers, are protean in their capacity to exchange one identity for another; they are so intrepid and ingenious they are able, when circumstances call for it, to shape-change to male. Other women I came across in the movement are responsible for the personal anecdotes and jokes in Lover, which are as much a part of its texture as anything I invented myself.
In no particular order, the real life lurking behind Lover was: Jill Johnston, Eve Leoff, Jenny Snider, Esther Newton, Jane O’Wyatt, Phillis Birkby, Carol Calhoun, Joanna Russ, Yvonne Rainer, Valerie Solanas, Smokey Eule, Mary Korechoff, Kate Millett, Louise Fishman, and myself. Books by Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Jane Ellen Harrison, and Valerie Solanas show up on a bookshelf in Lover as my own objets de virtu.
It does not flatter them to say so, but the work of Jill Johnston, Yvonne Rainer and Louise Fishman made the ultimate difference in how I imagined Lover, and determined, however obliquely, Lover’s expression.
Lover Enjoys Postmodernism: 3
In the 1960s, I saw Yvonne Rainer’s dance, ’The Mind Is a Muscle. A virtuoso dancer, Yvonne Rainer, like many postmodernist dancers-choreographers of that era, was moving against technique, especially her own technique, to abolish choreographic meaning and narrative. She freed her work from social, political, and cultural associations, and from the familiar arguments of cause and effect. She turned the body’s movement over to the play of randomness, coincidence, and chance. Her mentors were, of course, John Cage and Merce Cunningham whose music and choreography had also gone some distance in liberating me from the ordeals of purposefulness. My mind was a Zen blank as I absorbed The Mind Is a Muscle. After the performance, I thought of the noncontinuous writing of Gertrude Stein and of the ethereally discrete fiction of Ronald Firbank. The Mind Is a Muscle was a world unto itself. I wanted to make one of my own like it.
All allusions to the brain throughout Lover are emblematic of Rainer’s The Mind Is a Muscle, which was my donnée. References to cancer of the brain are memento mori, the imagination as death’s head when contaminated by exegeses. The blank spaces, the silences in Lover, where useful narrative is expected, indicate that Lover is meant to be an aesthetic rather than a useful entity. My subversive elite are recluses from usefulness and meaning: they are objets d’art.
When Lover’s character Veronica isn’t writing the fiction I’m supplying her with, she’s forging masterpieces and salting archaeological digs with fakes. Forgeries, I’m suggesting, are aesthetically at a further remove from usefulness and meaning than their originals. As mirror-images, duplicates, twins, of the originals, they are better art. Within the secluding perimeters of Lover, women are the originals, lesbians are the forgeries.
I would rather my character Flynn to have sprung fullgrown from my brain (mine, not Zeus’) than descend from a womb: but I don’t write fantasy. The mothers in Lover must make themselves reproductively useful before they may enjoy ecstacy. Motherhood in Lover is the real worm in the bowl of wax fruit: which is Lover. Every biological reality in Lover, but especially motherhood, contaminates the aesthetic surround.
I abstracted the character of Maryann from the brilliant and complex personality of Jill Johnston who, during the sixties, had become my literary hero. Her writing had nerve. Much of Lover’s deliberate plotlessness, which I hoped would affect the reader as a delirious spin, spins around Maryann, my idea of the lesbian’s lesbian.
Jill Johnston had already established herself as the most knowledgeble and sensitive critic of New York’s avantgarde when, in the mid-sixties, she began to turn her Village Voice dance column—which was always about much more than dance—into a gorgeous performance of radical self-psychoanalysis, introspection, self-revelation. She began to apply the wit, erudition, comic turns, intellectual acuity, and artistic discernment, for which she was already famous, to an in-public exposure of her own life. Jill Johnston became her own subject: the “dance” of her column became Jill’s illuminating dance through the details of her own life and mind.