’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.
Shortly after the Stonewall revolution in 1969, Jill came out in print like gangbusters and became my sex hero. Her Voice columns were collected under the titles Marmalade Me (1970), and Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution (1973).
Lover’s Stab at Manhating: 4
I’ve read somewhere lately that what the real-life (the biblical) Salome wanted cut off from the body of John the Baptist (“Jokanaan” in the opera) was not his head.
In the late sixties, the women’s liberation movement felt a rush of manhating. So did I. It was a heady, Dionysian sensation. We went up on the mountain and stomped. Sensation led to daring suggestion, which Valerie Solanas elegantly dealt with in her publication the S.C.U.M Manifesto; the acronym stands for Society for Cutting Up Men. I chose to deal with the daring suggestion with less than daring. In Lover, from time to time, I recount, sometimes word for word, stories women were telling me about what men, sometimes their men, had done to them. Toward the novel’s conclusion, I wheel in the body of a murdered man. Think of the corpse as Lover’s revenge motif. The character of Veronica hides the corpse by hastily turning it into fiction. Lover’s author loves murder mysteries.
Life Before Lover: 5
My pre-Lover fiction was still entrenched in the themes of Southern Gothic and Lesbian Gothick; they are not dissimilar, nor are they unlike Italian opera. Both genres tend to be soaked in booze, blood, and tears; both are thick with madness, violence, suicide, and love’s tragic finales. I was perversely laboring to apply, perfected, my version of a literary technique that had died, already perfected, along with the Bloomsbury group, to booze, blood, tears, madness, violence, suicide, love’s tragic finales.
When I asked Parke Bowman (who would publish Lover) why she was so eager to take my novel on, one of the things she told me was that she wanted her company, Daughters, to represent the work of a female avant-garde and that as far as she was concerned, I was it. She went on to say that she was disinterested in feminist and lesbian content or sensibility. Parke freed me from any sense of responsibility to force a direct figuring of the politics, ideals, or goals of feminism or lesbianism or lesbian-feminism in my writing. Nonetheless, my politics (such as they are) exist side by side with my DNA in Lover.
But I’ve never been much of a political animal, nor even a social one: it’s the rules, the ordained procedures and ideologies. I like to be either alone or having a good time. A good time is an interval of passionate and intimate exchange followed almost immediately by seclusion; a night in a great gay bar followed immediately by seclusion; a big, lavish party musiked by wall-to-wall Motown, washed in gin, and dense with new breakups, new couplings, new networking, new gossip, and good dope—and when it’s over, two days later, a month of seclusion.
At one of those parties, circa 1973, the funniest and smartest and straightest woman in New York, Eve Leoff (Keats scholar and Professor of English at Hunter College), told some bozo that she’d rather sit on my lap than dance with him. The bozo threw a sexist, heterosexist, and homophobic tantrum, after which Eve danced with me. Politics are where you find them.
I became, sort of, to the best of my ability, a political animal in the early seventies because, most particularly, I didn’t want to disappoint Kate Millett, whose first book, Sexual Politics, turned me instantly into a radical feminist. But mostly I became a political animal in order to have a good time. Feminism struck me as a good time, and it was. Back then, it still frightened the horses; it made most men foam at the mouth, and it got the best women horny. As such, feminism forcibly yanked my writing up from under the Bloomsbury tomb where it had been trying to pass as good but dead.
Some of the best times I had being political were with the artists, Jenny Snider and Louise Fishman; with Phyllis Birkby, the Yale-trained renegade architect; with Smokey Eule and Mary Korechoff, master carpenters who also kindly hammered some sense into me; with my highly significant attorney, Carol Calhoun; with the anthropologist Esther Newton, whose first book was Mother Camp, a study of heterosexual male transvestism; and with Jane O’Wyatt, mystic and graphics designer. Very often, the most political thing these friends and I did together was to tell one another the truth. Which made us fearless.
Lover Regards Print: 6
By the early seventies, the new political consciousness created by feminism and lesbian-feminism, and by the 1969 gay Stonewall revolt, was being met by a corresponding cultural consciousness out of which a new kind of highly politicized writing was born. Mainstream publishers, by and large, found this work either too
