The Devil Gets His Due, page 46
If critics have failed to notice the influence on Melville of the urban “Mysteries,” which won a large audience of newly literate working-class readers, largely male, by combining revolutionary doctrine, soft porn and Gothic horror in a city setting, it is because these books have long since lost their mass appeal without ever having won the approval of the critical establishment. But they seemed once to represent a breakthrough in fiction of real political importance (Karl Marx devoted a large part of his first book, The Holy Family, to an attack on Eugene Sue) as well as aesthetic interest. And this seems fair enough in light of the fact that they represent the first fully self-conscious attempt to create a new Myth of the City as an arena for class warfare rather than a symbol of infernal horror.
But unfortunately, Sue used as his model James Fenimore Cooper; convinced, perhaps, that even as “the American Sir Walter Scott” had achieved popularity by mythicizing the virgin Forest of the New World and its “savage” inhabitants, he could succeed with the mass audience by mythicizing the “wilderness” of the Old World cities and their “savage” inhabitants, “the barbarians in our very midst”; which is to say, the lumpen poor and the “criminal classes,” whom he describes as gathering to plot murder and mayhem in a “mysterious language full of dark images and disgusting metaphors.”
The fascination with crime, however, takes Sue and his followers away from the factories and workshops and the daytime streets where workers demonstrated for their rights into the nighttime, nightmare region typically called by one of the traditional names of Hades, “the underworld”; which is to say, the secular Hell which underlies the Earthly Paradise, into which Utopian dreamers (some of them the very authors of these books) dreamed the cities of the world could be transformed with the coming of socialism. At the very moment, however, that Eugene Sue was writing about the old, corrupt, fascinating, shadowy Paris, it was being changed in ways he had not foreseen; the Baron Hausmann supervising operations which would break through the old tortuous byways and alleys that had become the refuge of outlaws and revolutionaries, in order to open great boulevards, down which the rich could ride in splendor and the police charge without obstruction to maintain Law and Order.
But even where socialism has triumphed, the more the city has changed, the more it has remained the same; since essentially, not accidentally, “it contradicts nature . . . denies all nature . . . [the words are Oswald Spengler’s, who for once speaks the truth] the gigantic megalopolis, the city-as-world . . . suffers nothing beside itself.” And it is a sense of the contradiction implicit in this insight between what our conscious needs demand, i.e., civilization, the city-as-world, and what our instinctive, impulsive undermind yearns for, i.e., nature, the persistence of the pre-human, a world we never made, which nurtures our underground resentment of the City and our image of it as a Hell to which we are self-condemned.
There seems (at least as far as the evidence of literature can be trusted) no way out of this trap. Just as the genre of the “Mysteries,” invented at the same moment and out of the same impulse as “The Communist Manifesto,” submitted finally to the infernal myth, so too its successor, modern science fiction, which is born with the “New City” and constitutes the storehouse of both its mythology and that of the technology which begot it. For a while in its beginnings, some of its founders, themselves often Utopian or “scientific” socialists, did their best to imagine the future in terms of a benign super-city (Looking Backward is the earliest example which comes to mind); and occasionally such attempts are made even now. By and large, however, science fiction, on either side of the ideological split which presumably divides our world (it is a genre most of whose truly successful practitioners come either from the Anglo-American world or the immediate orbit of the Soviet Union), when it imagines an urban future, imagines it in grimly, bitterly, blatantly dystopian terms. Indeed, the pattern was set very early with The Time Machine of H. G. Wells, the first novelist to leave behind a body of work universally admired and recognized as unequivocal science fiction. In later life, Wells tended to discount his first romance as the product of youthful pessimism; but he was already at the point when he wrote it a self-declared socialist. It seems therefore significant that the new genre (as if it had a mythic essence, if not a will of its own) imposed on him a vision of the remote future not as a classless society but one even more split along class lines than his own. Moreover, what looks to the Time Traveller at first glance like an Earthly Paradise, in which mankind lives at peace with nature, turns out to be merely a kind of super-garden suburb presided over by effete and sterile consumers, the Eloi. Beneath the sunlit world which they inhabit, lies a hidden industrial city of perpetual darkness, inhabited by bestial workers, the Morlocks—who emerge out of their living hell from time to time under cover of night, and, in the guise of slavering demons, quite literally consume the consumers.
Once invented, this notion of locating the working-class ghetto on which the prosperity of the industrial city depends underground, which is to say, in the very place in which the cosmology of the pre-Death-of-God imagination located Hell, proved very attractive. It appears, for instance, in E. M. Forster’s much-anthologized tale of the future, “The Machine Stops,” and in the first real science fiction film, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. But above ground or below, the city of science fiction remains infernal in key works of science fiction in all media, from dystopian classics like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984 to more recent favorites like Anthony Burgess’s Clockwork Orange and Samuel Delany’s Falling Towers, whose title is intended to remind us of Eliot’s The Waste Land and behind that of Dante’s Inferno, where it all started.
Nor are such extrapolative works confined to the capitalist world, where urban alienation has presumably been exacerbated by shameless profit-seeking and the exploitation of labor. At least equal in horror are visions of the urban future dreamed in the cities of “socialist” eastern Europe. Beginning with Zamyatin’s We, which appeared in Moscow not long after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, such books reach a grim climax in The Futurological Congress (1971), of Stanislaw Lem, a Polish writer who was born in Łwow, and has lived since the annexation of his part of Poland by Russia, in Cracow. In the opinion of many (including me), he is the greatest living writer of science fiction; and though his Marxist philosophy is orthodox enough to insure him publication in the Soviet orbit, he seems unable to imagine a post-industrial urban future in which, no matter who owns the basic means of production, humankind will flourish. In The Futurological Congress, for instance, he projects the society of 2089, the world as dying city, the city as dying world, in which sixty-nine billion legally registered inhabitants—plus another twenty-six billion in hiding—struggle to survive, though the annual average temperature has dropped four degrees and the return of the glaciers lies only fifteen or twenty years ahead.
The actual inferno these men of the future inhabit is made bearable only by the final invention of the advanced technology which has produced it, i.e., psycho-chemicals, secretly introduced into the water supply, which create shared euphoric hallucinations that everyone takes for the “reality” of their lives. Everyone that is, except for Lem’s hero, Ion Tichy, who by dosing himself with an antidote to the hallucinogens is able to see the hideous truth behind the glorious illusion: a world of wrecked machines, rusted robots, collapsed buildings and monstrous mutant humans who tread a perilous way through frozen accumulations of rubbish, until stumbling over obstacles they never see, they themselves freeze to death—not even knowing it until the last spark of altered consciousness flickers out. But Tichy, who has read his Dante, is scarcely surprised, observing only, “I thought there would be ice in hell.”
Yet though the very pit of Dante’s Hell is ice, into which Satan himself is frozen forever, the walls of his City of Dis are lit by eternal flames; and, indeed, in the popular imagination of the Christian West, it is fire which represents the ultimate torment of the damned. So, too, many writers of modern science fiction and urban fantasy imagine the end of Megalopolis in terms of fire rather than ice. Think, for instance, of fire-bombed Dresden in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, a book banned in the pious provinces of America for denying the existence of God, which nonetheless ends in a Dantesque apocalyptic vision; or the fantasy of “The Burning of Los Angeles” which possesses Tod Hackett at the conclusion of Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust. Guilt and terror are the feelings evoked by Vonnegut, by West, who, like his artist-protagonist, imagines Hollywood in flames with something more like relish than fear or foreboding.
And reflecting on this, I am led to the final question evoked by this meditation. Do those who imagine the end of the City, whether in fire or ice, wish it or dread it—or, like me, dread they wish it, wish they dreaded it? Certainly, I at least, who have fled the city and returned in fact, but flee it still in my troubled sleep, am caught in an unresolvable ambivalence. And I suspect that those others, too, endure fantasies bred by their love/hate for the City the world threatens/promises to become. I have been forced to confront this doubleness in myself, since the last story I have written but not yet published, a kind of dream-fugue entitled “What Used to Be Called Dead,” which started out to be a fairy tale set in a magical wood, insisted on turning into science fiction; taking me back at the moment of transition to where I found myself in an underground cavern (womb or tomb, place of refuge or simply Hell once more) under the statue of the Wars of America in Military Park. Above me, the city burned in a fire from which I an old man grown young again—with a handful of long-dead shoe salesmen beside whom I worked nearly fifty years ago—had somehow managed to escape:
No matter. The old man was not there, but lay in the bosom of his boyhood, grounded in a dark concrete chamber far underground. And before he quite knew it, he was remembering why. The city had burned for two days and three nights. But what had started the fire no one could guess. The Blacks, perhaps, eager to destroy the rat-infested ghettos in which they lived. Or the Whites no longer able to abide the reproach of their misery. Or others, neither Black nor White and more like trees than men, whom no one had ever seen in daylight, though both Black and White dreamed them nightly. Or perhaps it had only been the long hot summer that had dried everything up: sidewalks and plateglass show windows, wood and stucco and brick and the streetside maples in their jackets of wire mesh, cats in back alleys and dogs breathless beside stone lions on the stone stoops—parching everything to a dryness that could grow no longer, only burn under the unremitting assault of the sun.
But notice, please, as I had not noticed until I re-read my little parable for the purposes of this essay, that my city burns not in a future close or remote, but has burned in an irrecoverable past, before my character’s, my fifteenth birthday; which means I have never left Newark, but have always been there, been here: in a womb, a tomb, a place or refuge or a chamber of Hell, far beneath the threatening flames, the city streets and the monument to our futile wars.
Whatever Happened to Jerry Lewis? That’s Amore . . .
I was no more than five or six and not yet able to read when my mother, because a baby-sitter failed to show up, felt obliged to take me with her to a showing of The White Sister (1923), starring Lillian Gish. This premature venture into the world of adult magic made me an addict of moving pictures. Indeed, in the years since, I have seen more movies than I have read books, though it is for doing the latter that I have come to be paid. From the start, however, I wanted not to be just a passive watcher of films but to participate in making them. This seemed possible since, as was true of many Jewish American families, members of my own had played a part in the production of Hollywood’s ready-made dreams. A cousin of mine was a property man; his two sisters worked in casting; and his daughter, whose first visitors after she was born were Charlie Chaplin and Theda Bara, had led the MGM lion onto the set for the first time. All these relatives, however, had not created films but had only done the small chores that made it easier for the directors, script-writers, choreographers, musicians and actors to create them. Although some of these jobs required skills I did not have, there were two I felt at least qualified to try. Some of the stories I had published had been optioned, and for two of them screenplays had actually been written. But neither The Second Stone nor Nude Croquet had made it to the screen.
For a while it seemed as if I might have more luck as an actor, since my performances in several amateur productions and a semi-pro off-Broadway one had been favorably received. But none of my stage appearances was filmed until, in the late 1950s, I began to be invited to participate in talk shows, in which I appeared so often (and was paid scale) that I had to join AFTRA (the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists). On these shows, however, I played only the same role I lived offstage, that of an anti-academic academic and a part-time social critic—called by the producers of such programs a “nut,” as were Allen Ginsberg and Norman Mailer, who were their first choices. But finally these shows gave me a chance to diversify my act. One night when I confessed before the cameras that I desperately longed to play any other part, someone apparently had listened. As I opened the door to my home in Buffalo, the phone was ringing; and when I picked it up I heard a strange voice asking if I could come to Hollywood for six or eight weeks to play the part of a gypsy caravan driver in a full-length film. I said immediately, “Yes, yes, yes,” and before I knew it I was in California wearing tights and a plumed hat and rehearsing my lines in what turned out to be a movie called When I Am King (1981). It was so badly written, directed and edited that though it had in the cast competent veteran actors like Aldo Ray and Stuart Whitman, it never made its way into any theater, and its producers eventually disappeared without a trace.
Nevertheless, thinking back I find that time to have been one of the most satisfactory in all my life—mostly because it was so unreal. I was put up in a room in the venerable Roosevelt Hotel, looking down from whose windows I could see the tourists gathering before the even more venerable Grauman’s Chinese Theater. From there I was picked up every morning and driven to a location familiar to me from a thousand sleazy Westerns, in one thousand and one of which John Wayne had starred. My driver was a fellow actor, a dwarf and former circus clown who arrived each day already drunk and got even drunker from the beers he gulped as we sped down the freeway. From the start I had the sense of being in not a real Hollywood but a mythic one that existed only on the pages of Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust. It was as if the Screen Actor’s Guild contract I had been given was a passport into that magic space behind the movie screen that I had longed to penetrate.
That visit to Neverland, however, turned out to be my last as well as my first. A couple of years later my name appeared in the credits of a much better film called Exposed (1983), starring Rudolf Nureyev and Nastassja Kinski, but I never appeared in the flesh. What the camera did close in on, in an opening scene, were some lines from my Love and Death in the American Novel being written on a chalkboard by a professor played by the director of the movie. In a later scene the book itself was shown pressed to the breasts of his students, including Nastassja.
Yet, though I never participated in the making of any other movie, I did continue to watch them and even, reluctantly, to write about a few of them, such as Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959) and The Birth of a Nation (1915); all of them works that annoyed someone or other enough to be condemned, picketed or banned. I did not, however, deal with any of the films of Jerry Lewis until I was asked to contribute to this collection and realized that he, who was once a super–best seller, had become virtually taboo because he had treated the crippled and handicapped as ridiculous rather than pitiful.
His defense by European snobs who typically like only what Americans despise proved to be a kiss of death. Moreover, his American detractors were not convinced by the French defenders, who defended him on aesthetic grounds rather than on the ethical ones of which he was condemned in his own country. They seem not to have been aware of what I would have pointed out: that the portrayal of cripples as laughable is one of the three main ways in which writers have traditionally treated such unfortunates. Homer, for instance, portrays all malformed characters as appropriate targets for ridicule, whether they are mortal monsters such as Thersites or immortal ones such as Hephaestus. Nor is such portrayal of the disabled as comic absent from the culture of our own country. In fact, the minstrel show, a form of popular theater unique to America, began with “Daddy” Rice “Jumping Jim Crow,” which is to say, doing a wild dance that he claimed was based on that performed by an old black slave so crippled by rheumatism it was both wonderful and funny that he could dance at all.
The second traditional way of portraying the handicapped is as monsters, ugly in their souls as well as in their bodies. Best known of these is Shakespeare’s Richard III, to whom he gave a hunchback he never really had but who turned out to be not just hated and feared but loved and admired by actors and audiences. So, too, in the later nineteenth century, malicious amputees such as Long John Silver and Captain Hook fascinated as well as terrified small boys and their fathers. But in Victorian England and America there was a sentimental backlash against the negative portrayal of the disabled as vicious and ridiculous. This created a vacuum that was filled to overflowing by a third way of presenting the handicapped, as beautiful souls trapped in unbeautiful bodies. The best remembered of these saintly cripples is Charles Dickens’s Tiny Tim. It was largely because of him that A Christmas Carol became a best seller and has remained one right down to the present. By the end of the century in which it first appeared, however, more sophisticated readers began to feel, and were candid enough to confess, that all of Dickens’s cripples moved them not to weep but to laugh. Given the choice, they found he was truer to himself when he portrayed the handicapped as comic or grotesque than as pathetic, as in the case of Quilp, the character who he once said was the closest thing to a self-portrait he had ever created.
