runaway moon, or the duchess
of lust
by Douglas Messerli
Gilbert Sorrentino The Moon in Its Flight (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2004)
As a long fiction and
short story writer, an essayist, poet, and teacher, Gilbert Sorrentino has
several personas; and in his short stories he uses many voices, but there are
two opposing voices I’d like briefly to explore.
“You will discover that
the stationery on the shelves is nothing, really, other than good American
paper and nothing but; nothing to be in awe of, letterheads or no. And you
would do well to ignore the rumors suggesting otherwise. Rumors of all sorts
are born and circulate in a large and virtually omnipotent corporation such as
this one. They emanate, for the most part, from the “creative” divisions of the
firm, the Professional Trash-Fiction Division, the Memoir Division, the
Hip-Youth Division, the Sure-Fire Division, the Dim-Bulb Division, the Texas
School-Adoption-of-Everything Division, the Devout-Christian Rapture-Mania
Division, the Unborn-Child-Series Division, as well as those divisions that
support what the company likes to think of as its old soldiers—those editors,
publicists, accountants, and lunch-eaters who have made their lives into one
long testament to their belief that they have done their best to make real for
all humankind the kind of book that is both an exciting read and a contribution
to the general culture of regular Americans….”
In these pieces, which
are so sharply satirical that there is no attempt at mimesis, the author
empties his tales of any remnant of humanity, going straight for the jugular
vein, or centering his language on Oulipean-like devices that call attention to
form over matter. There is no question that these works are tours de force of
writing, but ultimately they entertain more than they evoke any substantial
emotional response outside of laughter, even though we might recognize
ourselves at the periphery or even at the center of the stories themselves.
I
prefer, however, what I’d describe as the “other” Sorrentino, a writer who,
despite his often caustic demeanor and hard-boiled attitudes toward life in
general, at heart, is a poet who detests while being attracted to sentiment, a
kind of wise fool who desires to believe what he himself has determined is not
worthy of belief. It is almost as if Sorrentino has never recovered from the
recognition that many of his early childhood ideals were revealed to be false,
an apparently devastating realization that he summarizes in a poem,
“Razzmatazz,” the first the stanza of which reads:
“Young and willing to
learn (but what?) he was the boy
With the sweaty face the
boy of the Daily News
The boy of bananas
peanut butter and lemon-lime
Who read Ching Chow
waiting for the punch line
Who watched the sun more
often than not a bursting rose
Swathe the odd haze and
clumps of the far-off shore.”
The poem ends, in part,
where it began, but the tone has moved from one of possibility to cynicism:
“Young and willing to
learn (but what?) he was the boy
Who found that the
fabled dreams were fabled
In that their meaning
was their own blurred being
Who suddenly found his
alien body to be the material
From which could be made
a gent or even life. Life?
Young and willing to
learn oh certainly. But what?”
In the long, final story
of The Moon in Its Flight, “Things That Have Stopped Moving,” Sorrentino
covers similar ground in a beautiful description of the narrator’s Sicilian
father—clearly with autobiographical overtones—who, dressed in his white
Borsalino suit and snap-brim fedora, bets his fellow ship-cleaning workers that
he can walk through a Norwegian freighter—in those days Norwegian ships were
known for their filthy conditions—“without getting a spot or smudge or smear of
oil or dirt or rust on his clothes or hat.” To his then-young son’s amazement,
he puts down a wad of cash and proceeds to walk through the Trondheim without a
spot. In the context of a tale in which the narrator presents himself as a
self-loathing slave to his lust for his friend Ben’s wife, Clara—so well-known
for her sexual escapades with men that the narrator himself describes her as “a
duchess of lust”—this dream-like image stands in opposition to what his father
might have desired for him but which he, in his own generation, cannot obtain—a
kind of sureness of self and grace in living. Cast out of Eden, perfection for
the son has no appeal; it is the squalid, “filthy” little lives of his friends
and him that drive him forward in what he himself describes as a “dementia.”
In
“In Loveland” the narrator tells the story of his collapsing relationship with
his wife, a perfectly petite doll-like figure of a woman, who ultimately has an
affair with the husband’s empty-minded former-employer and friend, Charlie, who
finishes off their marriage, with the narrator’s wife’s encouragement, by
imitating his friend in costume and manner—in short, by becoming and,
symbolically, “replacing” him. In the middle of this typical story of failed
love, however, Sorrentino posits a stranger, Hawthorne-like tale concerning an
accident that occurred to his wife just before their marriage. Falling down a
flight of subways steps—accidentally or on purpose—his fiancée is temporarily
scarred with a huge scab over one side of face. The appearance of this scab
somehow makes her appear almost as a stranger and, accordingly, increases the
narrator’s lust for her. Indeed, from the marriage until the healing and
disappearance of the scab, he is sexually aroused by her “new” face, so perfect
on one side and so flawed on the other. As the “scar” disappears so does his
fervor dissipate. Like the narrator of “Things That Have Stopped Moving,” this
narrator is more attracted by the flaws of the woman than by the perfection his
wife will later seem to represent to other men.
In
some ways Sorrentino is our most “American” writer, cataloguing as he does the
psychoses of the child-adults of our society. Like Scott Fitzgerald, Sorrentino
seems effortlessly to present a world where men and women merrily delude
themselves with art, literature, alcohol, and drugs that they are living
“happy” and meaningful lives, while in truth their dreary lives are almost
completely empty. The author’s most Fitzgeraldian stories in this volume,
“Pyschopathology of Everyday Life” and “Land of Cotton,” clearly present the
phenomenon.
The
self-deluded characters of the latter story, Joe Doyle—who transforms his
family name for Lionni or Leone to Lee, ultimately claiming he is a descendent
of Robert E. Lee—his wife Hope and mistress Helen, whom he ultimately jilts as
she lays dying of cancer, are obviously all self-deluded beings seeking a
reality to match.
The
first story is representative, once again, of Sorrentino’s fascination with a
seemingly Edenic world suddenly revealed as disastrously fallen. The two
characters in this fable, Nick and Campbell, represent two aspects of American
culture, the ordinary working man represented by Nick and the moneyed WASP,
Campbell, living in what appears as an enchanted world. The tale reveals the
growing friendship between the two office workers as Nick guides his friend
through the lunch-time and after-work dining and drinking establishments of the
city, of which Campbell seems to have no prior knowledge and is now fascinated
to encounter each day before returning to his Connecticut home or his New York
rendevouses at the Plaza, the Pierre, the Blue Angel, or Carnegie Recital Hall.
The
friendship flourishes until one day Campbell invites his friend to visit them
in Connecticut, shortly thereafter presenting him with a stack of photographs
of himself and his wife Faith, one of her which is nearly pornographic. Nick
perceives the photo as a sort of tease, a direct assault upon his sexual
desires, and is disgusted by what he senses is the husband’s attempt to use his
wife as a lure to bring him to their home. Doubting, however, what he has
imagined, he soon forgets it until another photograph, even more pornographic
than the first is delivered to him, whereupon he recognizes that he is being
encouraged to think of Campbell’s wife as a sexual companion. He is quite
obviously aroused by the possibility, but continues to delay his visit until it
is finally clear he will not make good on his promise. Campbell is depressed
and reveals that, after a fight with his wife, he has met a young man who
“sucked him off.” Nick’s decision to take a job in another city drives his
friend into further despair which reaches its peak on the day of Nick’s
departure, when he reveals his love for Nick and attempts to plant a kiss upon
his lips.
Sorrentino
presents a world, in short, where love is not only impermeable and fleeting but
is impossible, a world where passion is unfulfilled and even a kiss is
potentially a dangerous event. Perhaps none of Sorrentino’s short tales reveal
these facts more thoroughly than my favorite story of the book, “The Moon in
Its Flight.” Unlike so many of the later works, trapped in a post-Edenic
reality, Sorrentino allows this story of a budding love affair between a
nineteen-year-old young man and a fifteen-year-old Jewish girl, Rebecca, to
develop in a “summer romance,” when “The country bowled and spoke of Truman’s
grit and spunk,” and the whole nation “softly slid off the edge of
civilization.” As in Aberration of Starlight, the author here allows youthful
clichés into his work, this time, not just for the purpose of artful satire,
but as a support for the lovingly naiveté they reveal:
“The first time he
touched her breast he cried in his shame and delight. Can this really have
taken place in America? The trees rustled for him, as the rain did rain. One
day, in New York, he bought her a silver ring, tiny perfect hearts in
bas-relief running around it so that the point of one heart nestled in the
cleft of another. Innocent symbol that tortured his blood.”
And later:
“Stars, my friend, great
flashing stars fell on Alabama.
Reality, nonetheless,
will not allow these lovers to exist; they have no place to which they might
escape in order to fulfill their desires. In one of the most beautiful
narrational intrusions he has uttered, Sorrentino cries out passionately
(despite being equally mocking):
All you modern lovers,
freed by Mick Jagger and the orgasm, give them, for Christ’s sake, for an hour,
the use of your really terrific little apartment. They won’t smoke your
marijuana nor disturb your Indiana graphics. They won’t borrow your Fanon or Cleaver
or Barthelme or Vonnegut. They’ll make the bed before they leave. They whisper
good night and dance in the dark.”
No apartment is
available, and the couple, a mismatch when it comes to their families, drifts
apart, only to meet again years later when they are both married to others.
Only now can they finally culminate their love in sex, but despite the tears of
joy and shame, they will never encounter one another again.
I
don’t think Sorrentino is arguing through these somewhat exasperatingly dreary
tales that love is impossible. It is merely the false ideas and notions that
surround the vision of oneself and the other that make it so difficult. It is
clear that Sorrentino heartily longs for that “spotless” innocence of the past,
but that he recognizes, just as surely, that that desire for “innocence” is the
cause of the current emptiness and squalidness of his subjects’ lives. It is
almost with a cry of despair that Sorrentino asks, “Who will remember // the
past is past?” The furious frown he casts upon his characters can be seen as a
stern warning to all that is doesn’t help a damn to invoke a childhood vision
of innocence: life is not perfect, there is no “dream” to be found, no
“rainbow” at its end, no coherent “America” even to be had. It is no wonder his
narrators often struggle in their attempts to tell their stories and admit that
something is missing in their revelations of the awful truths they find difficult
to accept.
Los Angeles, May 25,
2006
Reprinted from Golden
Handcuffs Review, No. 8 (Winter-Spring
2007).
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