Willem Elsschot | Will-o’-the-Wisp / 1965

cartoon in a mirror

by Douglas Messerli

 

Willem Elsschot Will-o’-the-Wisp in Three Novels, translated from the Dutch by A Brotherton (Leyden, Netherlands: A. W. Sijthoff/ London: Heinemann / New York: London House & Maxwell, 1965)

 

The Flemish writer Willem Elsschot’s last fiction, Het Dwaalicht (1946, translated into English as Will-o’-the-Wisp) is perhaps his best, if shortest, work. The story is so simple that it feels a bit more like a cartoon image than a narrative “plot.” Three “blackies,” as a grocery-store owner characterizes the three major characters, suddenly appear at her door, and when the customer—Elsschot’s Chaplinesque hero, Laarmans, who appears in several of his fictions—exits the store, they approach him for help with directions, thrusting what becomes an almost sacred piece of cardboard into his hand. The card contains the name Maria Van Dam and an address, Kloosterstraat 15.

 

    To elude further relations with the strangers, Laarmans attempts to quickly give them simple directions. But he finds it difficult in English, the only language he and the leader of the three, whom he as secretly named Ali Khan, share. Instead of going left or right, one street snakes into twists and turns, and he attempts to describe the route, accordingly, in grand gestures that only draws a crowd to the small gathering. A local tough attempts to lead them off to a sailor’s brothel, but after Laarmans explains where the boy plans to take them, the visitors, sailors from the ship Delhi Castle, insist they want only to see Maria Van Dam, and head off vaguely along the path that Laarmans has provided.

     Laarmans moves off to head home to his wife and family (we later discover that he has six children), but while waiting for his tram encounters them once again; and this time he becomes determined to help them find the right address. Thus begins a voyage as surreal and comically meaningless as any tale by Beckett.

     It is apparent from the outset that they will never find the beautiful young woman who the three men met that very morning when she visited their ship to mend bags. So taken are the three by this beauty that they award her almost everything they have, a scarf, a pot of ginger, and six packs of cigarettes. She, in turn, reciprocates with her name and address scrawled on the piece of cardboard they carry. But the search, spurred on by the slightly selfish and secretly bigoted kindnesses of Elsschot’s Flemish fool, is everything, for the journey tells us much more about these four men than any possible resolution.

      Despite the constant paternalism of Laarmans and his inner feelings that the "Indians" can comprehend little that his culture puts before them, it is the Flemish “leader,” if you can call him that, who is utterly confused, so desperate in his own married and bourgeois life that he imagines even this tawdry encounter between three men and one woman to be an exciting adventure. It is he, not the three “foreigners” who imagines that the young girl might be underage, fourteen or even younger. Ali and his friends are quite shocked; no, the woman they seek is in her 20s. Laarmans justifies his imaginative slip as part and parcel of his general disdain of his own country’s values and religion. He is the kind of small-minded burgher who refuses to see himself as a sexual prude. But the men who follow him are, we later discover, as moral as they can be. They, so they later tell him, are not from India, but from Afghanistan, loyal Muslims who are totally immersed in their religion and cultural values, and who later chastise Laarmans for his drinking.

     Yet, their very appearance in this world of blondes leads them into danger. The first address they visit sells bird cages, empty cages that lock away not only animals, but, symbolically, the sons and daughters of the Flemish merchants. Laarmans and his Afghani charges cannot help but wonder whether the old woman at the counter and her young brute of a son are hiding Maria in a back room.

      The second of their visitations leads directly to the police station, a notorious place of lock-up  obviously dangerous to these strangers, aware of the racial restrictions of the culture; they will not even enter. Laarmans takes over, prying information from the fat officer at the front desk. But even though they wait outside this gigantic cage, Ali is captured and brought inside to be charged for a nonexistent crime. Without Laarmans' identification of his friend, he would surely have been incarcerated.

      Their final destination is also a kind of prison warren, a dilapidated hotel used partially, it is apparent, as a brothel. Here both customers and clients are locked away in tawdry little rooms where the bartender-owner warns that some of its registered denizens have been dead for years.

      Through this strange night voyage, the three Afghani men behave with the greatest of grace and honor, while the Flemish citizens, even the obsequious Laarmans, dismiss, doubt, and threaten the holy trio on their search for their own Mary. These three strangely wise men do finally find, in the wretched hotel, their mother and child, but when they attempt to award her the flowers they have purchased for Maria, she merely snarls.

      As they return to their ship, the exhausted Laarmans heads home, suddenly realizing the brutal irony that the object of their search likely was, after all, to be found in the brothel where the butcher’s boy originally had intended to take them. Their dream, this likeable fool now comprehends, is far superior to the utter and endlessly boring ties that bind him. The cartoon image with which the book seems to have began has been mirrored back unto the society which created it.

    

Antwerp, June 2, 2010

Reprinted from EXPLORINGfictions (July 2010).

John Rechy | City of Night / 1963

even the heart rebels

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Rechy City of Night (New York: Grove Press, 1963)

Somewhat inexplicably, after finishing my essay on The Hustler by John Henry Mackay, I was immediately reminded of a book I had never before read, John Rechy’s City of Night., I had several reasons perhaps for never reading the 1963 fiction until now. And it was clear that 2015 was an appropriate year in which to finally attend to that work, given my concerns with life in Southern California, issues to which this work, I presumed, might attend.

    Indeed, City of Night is very much about identities separate from those of the majority of society, and it does reveal a world that, until its publication, was basically unknown to everyday readers. What I was not prepared for, however, is just how remarkably written this book is and, although it certainly presents events of the underbelly of ordinary sexual behavior, that it is not really at all a book about sex. While the “hero” dives in and out of beds and other sexual locations with the regularity of an overweight adolescent munching on a bag potato chips, Rechy’s work, nonetheless, only rarely portrays the actual sexual act, and when it does so, it is with such a polite abstraction that would probably not even bring a blush to the cheek of a maiden librarian. Here’s a scene from our unnamed hustler’s sexual encounter with an endlessly speaking “professor,” who obviously ends his verbal encounters with an oral encounter of another kind:

                     

                  He snuffed out the cigarette he had been smoking, looked through

                  the box by the bed, found the lavender one. Held it up toward me.

                  “Now comes the time for the lavender,” he said. He lit it, inhaled

                  it deeply, this time, placed it on the ashtry; said: “Now, Angel, come

                  here, stand near me—but first, lower the bed for Tante Goulu please.

                  Thats it. Now come closer, you see I have great difficulty moving.

                  There, thats nice, thats fine—stand a little this way—thats—just—fine.

                  Youre a good boy, an angel….”

                      When he had finished, he leaned back on the bed.

 

     In numerous other situations, such as his encounters with “Mister King,” who wants only to be seen with the hustler, who he dresses up in leather, no sex is even involved. And in the hustlers’ attempts to pretend that their gay sexuality is simply a way of making a living and not the sexual reality of their own lives, sex between one another is generally forbidden, as the central figure purposefully ignores the touch of the hustler Pete who is determined to stay, one night, in the hero’s flat:

 

                   The lights are out now. The darkness seems very real, like a third

                   person waiting. I lay on the very edge of the one side of the bed,

                   and he lay on the very edge of the others. A long time passed. Hours.

                         “Are you asleep” he asked me.

                         “No—I can’t sleep.”

                         “Me neither,” he says. “Maybe I should go.” But he didnt move.

                         More silence.

                         And then I felt his hand, lightly, on mine.

                         Neither of us moved. Moments passed like that. And now his

                   hand closes over mine, tightly.

                        And that was all that happened.

 

In short, the well-read and quite intelligent figure who tells the tales of City of Night is not as interested in the actual sexual activities in which he is almost endlessly engaged as he is in searching for the reasons for why he is so driven to seek out those brief and almost meaningless interchanges.

      Indeed the real “focus” of this hero’s travels from New York to Los Angeles, Los Angeles to San Francisco and back, from San Francisco again to Chicago and New Orleans, is not  upon flesh or even the often uninhibited bodies of those he meets, but is on their words and actions in the bars, plazas, and streets outside of the shabby rooms where they have sex and sleep. Rechy’s hero in portrayed as a rather laconic being, instead of playing the loquacious confabulator of someone like Djuna Barnes’ Dr. O’Connor in her gay underworld fiction Nightwood (he purposely plays dumb, learning early on that his clients don’t want to bed somewhat who’s read books and might know more than they do), letting his own characters speak exuberantly for themselves, City of Night, like Nightwood, nonetheless, is a Menippean satire or anatomy like Petronius’ Satyricon, which usually features a pedant.

     Like the other works of that genre, Rechy’s fiction takes us from party to party with a large range of sexual types who represent various social classes of American society. Rechy’s book is structured around these speaking figures (very much like Barnes’ living statues), each of their sections named after the figures, alternating with briefer sections titled “City of Night,” which sets the next location and place of action through which the nameless hero meanders in time and space.

      The figures of City of Night—the already mentioned seasoned New York “youngman” (Rechy’s word for hustler) Peter; the absurdly overweight, bed-bound pedant “The Professor”; the determined-to-marry drag queen, Miss Destiny; the now devastated, formerly “beautiful” hustler, Skipper, who carries his youthful photographs with him wherever he goes; the still-larger-than-life, handsomely-chiseled would-be movie-star Lance O’Hara and the elderly gay Esmeralda Drake III from whom O’Hara swindles a grand Hollywood house; the crew-cut-topped, good looking married man attracted to the hero but unable to abide the “fairies”; the S&M, Nazi-supporting, leather-dressed Neil, with a closet of costumes through which he hopes to help his devotees discover their true violent selves; the tough gay bar owner, Sylvia, who lovingly protects her clientele out of guilt for how she has treated her son upon his revelation of his gay sexuality; the tall, heavily muscled drag queen Chi-Chi posed against the wall in order to call out to all the New Orleans Mardi Gras celebrants; the dying transgender beauty, Kathy; and, finally, our hero-hustler’s would-be savior, Jeremy, of the white sheets, who begs the narrator to stay just a little longer while he skillfully enters a dialogue that might just awaken the narrator to his self-destructive addiction to loveless love—each speaks his piece, behaving as bizarrely as do all human beings on the prowl for love, self-respect, and meaning in their lives.

      And yes, we do laugh at the outsider outrageousness of Rechy’s types—at the very same moment that we, through Rechy’s non-judgmental and fair-minded depiction of them, come to admire and feel for them as individuals. Who might have imagined that a fiction about the illicit gay underworld—and, it is important remember, that during the time of this work, all the actions of the characters are not only against the law but often resulted in their arrestment—might bring the reader, at least this reader, to tears over and over again.

      Finally, one wonders why this considerably intelligent work, although quite popular in its time, was never completely respected by Rechy’s readers or fellow writers, or why, perhaps, the author himself was not more lionized. This work is most certainly way ahead of its time with regard to its liberated and liberating attitudes toward the gay, lesbian, and even transgender communities. And Rechy’s detailed portraits of gay environs such as Times Square in New York, the New Orleans French Quarter, and Los Angeles’ Pershing Square and its bars, along with the streets of Hollywood Boulevard depict a series of lost worlds being destroyed at the very moment in which Rechy was recording them.

                                                                           David Hockney, Building, Pershing Square, Los Angeles

                                                                                                                           (inspired by Rechy’s fiction)

 

       One might theorize that some of the distance that both the gay and literary communities have kept from this near masterpiece has to do with the author himself, who like his narrator, was so addicted to his lifestyle that even after becoming a university teacher of writing still moon-lighted as a hustler, his students sometimes discovering him near local cruising areas shirtless in dungarees. Rechy himself, although for years now in a long-term gay relationship, admits to hustling even into his 70s.

       One of the most repeated of motifs is how the hustlers perceive their own desirability, the fact that they are paid to have sex, as representative of their beauty and youth, in opposition to the reality of death. This book makes it clear that the author, although so wise in his perceptions of that world, could never himself quite escape that need to be wanted for his youthful looks. Obviously—and it does in fact became more and more obvious as the story continues—both the author’s and his hero’s addictions have more to do with deeply ingrained psychological issues than with authorial logic. Even after a long dialogic encounter with the man who wishes to save him, ending in the stranger’s insightful statements,

 

                There isnt any difference, really, between the hunter and the hunted. The

                hunted makes himself available—usually passively, but available nonethe-

                less. Thats his way of hunting…. I’m sorry,” he said, relenting, “I just

                wanted to see you defend the very innocence youve probably set out to

                violate…You see,” he said, again smiling so that I cant tell how serious

                he is,” “even the heart rebels—finally against its own anarchy. And that’s

                the most powerful rebellion.—

 

even then the hero returns to the fray, joining the Mardi Gras celebrations, drinking, doping, sucking, and fucking until he and those around him collapse, becoming the ghosts of which they are in terror. If the fiction seems to end with the possibility of a transformation, as the hero returns, if only briefly, to his native El Paso, the life of the author went on as if nothing in this profound work had truly meant anything, the reality suggesting that nothing had truly changed from what the narrator says in the first paragraph of City of Night:

 

                Later I would think of America as one vast City of Night stretching

                greedily from Times Square to Hollywood Boulevard—jukebox-winking,

                rock-n-roll-moaning: America at night fusing its darkcities into the

                unmistakable shape of loneliness.

 

—Los Angeles, September 5, 2015

Reprinted from EXPLORINGfictions (September 2015).