or Anne Lister. Thus no attempt has been made to homogenize that diversity, and no agenda exists to attempt to carve out a “politically correct” lesbian studies perspective at this juncture in history or to pinpoint the “real” lesbians in history. It seems more important for all the voices to be heard before those with the blessings of aftersight lay the mantle of authenticity on any one vision of the world, or on any particular set of women.
What each work in this series does share, however, is a common realization that gay women are the “Other” and that one’s perception of culture and literature is filtered by sexual behaviors and preferences. Those perceptions are not the same as those of gay men or of nongay women, whether the writers speak of gay or feminist issues or whether the writers choose to look at nongay figures from a lesbian perspective. The role of this series is to create space and give a voice to those interested in lesbian studies. This series speaks to any person who is interested in gender studies, literary criticism, biography, or important literary works, whether she or he is a student, professor, or serious reader, for the series is neither for lesbians only nor even by lesbians only. Instead, “The Cutting Edge” attempts to share some of the best of lesbian literature and lesbian studies with anyone willing to look at the world through lesbians’ eyes. The series is proactive in that it will help to formulate and foreground the very discipline on which it focuses. Finally, this series has answered the call to make lesbian theory, lesbian experience, lesbian lives, lesbian literature, and lesbian visions the heart and nucleus, the weighty planet around which for once other viewpoints will swirl as moons to our earth. We invite readers of all persuasions to join us by venturing into this and other books in the series.
When I queried the board of “The Cutting Edge” series about which books they thought worthy of reprinting, Bertha Harris’ Lover was the title most often named. The novel’s experimental form and panoply of fictional and historical characters who run the gamut from saint to poor white trash and who are by turns vulnerable and strong make Lover one of the finest examples of early post-Stonewall lesbian fiction when some writers, such as Bertha Harris, broke with patriarchal narrative structures as well as with traditional content. The rich language, which reflects that of Djuna Barnes, makes Lover the perfect sequel to Ladies Almanack in our reprint of lesbian classics.
Karla Jay
Pace University
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
