A Feast Unknown (34 page)

One of his questions, then, is “Why don’t your superhumans, your heroic fighters, leaders, battlers for good and against evil, so seldom have a sex life—or, indeed, sex organs?” Now, I don’t know if Philip José Farmer has a Man from Mars like mine, but a book like
A Feast Unknown
is his riproaring answer—sure they have, and they refuse to be responsible for the misstatements of their bowdlerizing biographers. And if a man has been brought up by apes, he will eat like an ape and play sexually like an ape, and carry no burden of guilt for it, and will still continue to be a superman.

One of the most interesting aspects of this book is the absolutely direct and unconcealed connection between sex and violence. Surely it takes no specially trained perceptions to
understand that the popularity of violence in the popular media is invariably a seasoning for sex, whenever it is not a substitute for it. If Farmer says nothing else in a work like this—and he says many other things—he makes it clear that unlimited violence coupled with unlimited sex is an unlimited absurdity. There is nothing in the pattern he presents that shakes my basic conviction that people who get enough sex—and enough is like enough food, enough water—cannot be obsessed by it and will need no substitutes, including violence. This is the healthy, constructive aspect of the new freedoms in sexual expression, and long may they wave. Freely enough expressed, described, and secured, human needs cease to be preoccupations, and we can go on to other things. I do not believe that violence is in itself such a need, it is merely the manifestation of denial—denial of food, of shelter, and of the phenomena surrounding procreation. This is the very core of the healthy truth expressed in the slogan, “Make love, not war.”

There is one other profundity which, under the hyperbolic “chase” and the swashbuckle, Farmer explored with great acuity, and this is the function of the Nine—his name for something which has preoccupied humanity since it could be called human. It is the awareness of a controlling Presence or Entity of immense resource, merciless power, and a set of inexorable aims against which we mortals (they, of course, are immortal) must be tested. We are to be tested whether we understand those aims or not, and to fail the tests is to incur frightful punishments.

To identify this Power, to isolate its signs and symptoms, to recognize its agents, to comprehend its ends, and to assess its strength has been the basic chore of the philosophers and theologians since the first of them, in his snake-fang beads, glared
redly at an approaching thunder-head and clubbed a neighbor in an act of propitiation. Farmer, with his Nine, brings out an extremely important point: that perhaps the ultimate aims of such a power are functionally Neolithic—which says two things: that it is in our blood and bone, and that it is hopelessly outdated— as good a description as any of the human predicament. It is gratifying to explain ourselves with naked apes and territorial imperatives. It is not wise to excuse ourselves with them.

Read
A Feast Unknown,
then, for its sprawling, brawling, shocking, suspenseful, hilarious self, and you will be well repaid in pure entertainment—which is true of all Farmers work. True also, however, is that Farmer writes in symbols. His plays and his players are natural forces, natural people (by harmony and by contrast) and he is always questioning. He makes you recoil in horror and shock—but always in a manner that makes you ask yourself why you found it horrifying or shocking. He makes you laugh, and you wonder why you laughed; he makes you hope for certain outcomes, and you wonder why. He is, in short, continually asking you questions: questions about marital fidelity, questions about your fixed ideas about sexual practices, about violence, about prejudices—whether they involve eating worms or helping disadvantaged peoples, about clothing and hunting and passports and gratitude, and loving and atomic weapons.

My God. I never thought to ask him. Maybe he’s a Man from Mars too.

Theodore Sturgeon Sherman Oaks, California 1969

AFTERWORD

BY ARTHUR C. SIPPO MD, MPH

In the summer of 1969, award-winning science fiction author Philip José Farmer published a short novel entitled
A Feast Unknown.
The publisher was Essex House, which specialized in publishing pornographic novels in large-print paperbacks. It included a postscript by fellow sci-fi author, Theodore Sturgeon. The novel caused quite a stir.

Over his entire writing career, Farmer had been an iconoclast, willing to take risks and to test the limits of propriety in his work. But A
Feast Unknown
was the most sexually explicit novel he had yet published. It was also hyperviolent and dealt with extremely controversial themes.

It was ostensibly the ninth volume in the autobiography of James Cloamby, Lord Grandrith (pronounced “Grunith”), who was clearly a pastiche of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ creation, Tarzan of the Apes. His antagonist in the story was one Doctor James “Doc” Caliban, who was clearly a pastiche of 1930s pulp hero, Doc Savage, whose adventures were primarily written by Lester Dent under the Street & Smith house name “Kenneth Robeson.” But these two new characters were
not
like the iconic heroes upon whom they were based.

Burroughs’ jungle lord was conceived as the exemplar of the noble savage raised in the wild by apes, apart from the corrupting influence of human society. Doc Savage, on the other hand, was raised by scientists and other experts to be a renaissance man shaped by the highest ideals, education, and training available in modern civilization. They were classic good guys who embodied virtue, temperance, restraint, and moral rectitude as defined from their dialectically opposed perspectives. The ordinary faults and foibles of lesser men did not burden them. They were above all of that.

Farmer decided to depict his pastiches more realistically. Heroes were idealized in American culture. They were caricatures of human beings lacking the baser urges that plague mankind in general. Farmer challenged this sanitized image of the hero; it was his intention to deal with themes Burroughs and Dent would not have dared portray.

Lord Grandrith had the mind and personality of a man who was just a hair’s breadth away from a wild animal. He had no compunction about disobeying political authority or killing his enemies, even in gruesome ways. He also had no hang-ups about sexuality and admitted to experimenting with masturbation, homosexual activity, and bestiality during his feral upbringing. Furthermore, he did many things in his life that civilized people would have found disgusting, but which would have been second nature to the apes amongst which he lived.

Doc Caliban was depicted as a Nietzschian superman who
exploited his physical and mental abilities to achieve whatever ends suited him, with little regard for other lesser human beings. In fairness, this was largely a side effect of an immortality elixir that he and Grandrith were receiving from the ancient order of the Nine, the secret rulers of the world. Prior to the events in
Feast,
he seems to have been very much like the Doc Savage of the pulps, at least outwardly. In private, he maintained an incestuous affair with his own cousin, Trish Wilde, and in one situation killed a woman who raped him. It was clear Farmers Doc Caliban was not the self-effacing do-gooder Lester Dent had written about in the 1930s.

In his postscript, Theodore Sturgeon claimed Farmer was doing a send up of the pulp heroes who were undergoing a paperback renaissance at that time. As he put it, “ultimate sex combined with ultimate violence is ultimate absurdity.” He saw
Feast
as just Philip José Farmers idea of a pulp story. Many other critics more or less agreed with this assessment. When it was first published,
A Feast Unknown
was seen among Farmer’s fans and reviewers as an aberration: an excessively vulgar and disturbing story intended to shock and titillate, but of little importance in the grand scheme of his work.

With several decades of perspective behind us, including a large oeuvre of Farmer’s subsequent work in the pulp realm, I think we need to reassess the meaning of
A Feast Unknown
and its place in his lifetime of writing.

Farmer’s fiction was always preoccupied with sexuality: human and otherwise. His was not a prurient concern but more that of a biologist, an anthropologist, or a depth psychologist. He tried to portray sex as an integral part of life and of storytelling. Farmer’s portrayals were not “clinical” or merely mechanical, nor were they particularly erotic. He tried to get behind what sexuality meant to his characters and how it functioned in his stories. Sex was often something that “just happened” to his characters in the course of the plot and was not exploited to titillate the reader.

This attitude was present in
A Feast Unknown.
Grandrith’s tales of sex play and bestiality before—and after—meeting his wife Clio are told in a matter-of-fact manner. His incestuous coupling with his cousin is something that Grandrith says made little or no sense in context. It was a spontaneous act that was neither planned nor intended by the participants. It just happened. The casual sexual dalliances between the candidates for immortality at the stronghold of the Nine were likewise spontaneous results of the isolation from one’s real life, and the nudity that the Nine demanded was a sign of the full submission of the candidates. The Nine required loyalty from them over and above all other allegiances, including spouses and families. Even the bizarre sexual cannibalism that is the tribute paid to the Nine for the elixir of immortality makes sense as the trading of one’s natural relationships based on sex and its consequences (i.e. marriage and family) for immortal life in submission to the Nine. The painful mutilations reminded the candidates that they had forsaken even the most deeply personal relationships in order to live forever.

Some commentators found the partial castration of the male candidates and the clitoridectomy of the females revolting, but they should be reminded that both male and female circumcision—which are forms of genital mutilation—
have been venerable rituals that are practiced by many cultures even today Male circumcision is considered a
mitzvah
among most Jews and a
sunnah
by many Muslims. And the horrible mutilation of women in female circumcision for alleged religious and moral reasons is an ongoing problem in the some countries. The sacrifices required by the Nine were intended by Farmer to mimic and satirize these practices.

In many ways, the use of sexuality in
Feast
is typically Farmerian, albeit more explicit than his earlier work. It is significant that in 1969, as an award-winning science fiction author, Farmer published this work with a company, Essex House, which was more tolerant of explicit material than his usual publishers. (It is possible that he was deliberately mimicking Kurt Vonnegut’s fictional science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, who was only able to get his work printed by pornographic publishers.) There were subsequent printings of
Feast
for popular consumption, starting with the 1980 Playboy Books edition (by the time of the 1983 reprint, Playboy had been acquired by Berkley), as well as several mass market releases in the U.K.

Community standards have changed quite a bit over forty years and now the content of
Feast
would not trouble most mainstream publishers.

Farmer was a little ahead of his time in the explicitness of what he wrote, but I think the use of sex in his stories—including
Feast
—was consistent with his previous work.

One thing considered very controversial in 1969 was the mental illness that afflicted Grandrith and Caliban, which caused them to become sexually aroused by violence and achieve
orgasm by killing. Many readers were disturbed by this, yet this mental disorder was something well known among criminal psychologists for almost a century.

Some people—mostly men—derive sexual pleasure from torturing, raping, and killing other people. Jack the Ripper was the most notorious of these criminals. He has been dubbed the first serial killer of modern times.

The concept of the serial killer was unknown in 1969. It came to public awareness in the 1970s, especially after the arrest and trial of Ted Bundy. The concept is attributed to former FBI Special Agent Robert Ressler, who was the basis for the character of agent Will Grant in the Hannibal Lecter stories by Thomas Harris.

In
Feast,
Grandrith and Doc Caliban were the sons of Jack the Ripper by different mothers. This was no accident. Farmer wanted to associate his protagonists with the same psychosexual dynamics as Jack the Ripper, which he considered an exaggeration of the pleasure that readers get from adventure fiction. Farmer knew that the appeal of the action hero was the vicarious thrill evoked in the reader by the story. That thrill in Freudian terms was libidinous and had to have a sexual component. More modern heroes in the 1960s, like James Bond, were openly portrayed as sexually active and Farmer followed the stereotype by portraying this as typical for men engaged in adventurous lifestyles. Both Tarzan and Doc Savage were portrayed in their original stories as loving the thrill of adventure. Many times, Doc Savage said very clearly in the “Super Sagas” that he engaged in the fight to “right wrongs” for the thrill of it. Farmer was just letting us in on the dirty secret of what we really loved about our
heroes and what would have motivated them in real life to take such great risks.

The particular aberration from which Lord Grandrith and Doc Caliban suffer is depicted as temporary due to the longevity elixir, but it is a direct consequence of their seeking immortality. In the story, the Nine demand absolute obedience from their candidates with no room for personal conscientious objection. Grandrith and Caliban loathe their aberration, but isn’t it commensurate with the Faustian bargain they have made? They traded away everything in order to avoid their own deaths. Now it is only death that can give them the ultimate pleasure.

In the end, the climactic battle between them leads Grandrith and Caliban to break with the Nine. Their bond of blood as brothers comes to mean more to them than immortality itself. After they realize this, the strange orgasm-by-killing aberration goes away. They regain a moral focus and direct their wrath towards the annihilation of the Nine themselves. Their anger is redirected to the deaths of specific people for specific moral reasons.