A Writer's Life (43 page)

Among the people that I had been reading about in the press the past summer were a pair of individuals that
Time
magazine identified as “America's most estranged couple”—John and Lorena Bobbitt, whose incompatibility had reached epic proportions early one June morning in 1993 when, after an evening of heavy drinking on his part, followed by the alleged raping of his wife, she had retaliated by climbing out of bed, getting a kitchen knife, and, while he slept, slicing off most of his penis. Since I was already engrossed in the aforementioned subject of losers, and since few people represented the subject with the distinction of the twenty-six-year-old former U.S. Marine named John Bobbitt—who, after losing contact with his male organ for two hours, perhaps lost the pleasure of its full use forever, despite his surgeons' best efforts in reattaching it—I was eager to meet with him before I attempted to interview his impetuous twenty-four-year-old wife, Lorena. But my interest in
her
increased after I learned that although she had been born in Ecuador and been reared in Venezuela, Lorena (née Gallo) Bobbitt claimed that part of her family's ancestry was rooted in southern Italy.

She had cut off two-thirds of her husband's penis early on the Wednesday morning of June 23, 1993. She did it shortly after 4:30 a.m., using a twelve-inch kitchen knife that she had carried into the bedroom of their apartment in Manassas, Virginia, a community of 28,000, located about thirty miles west of Washington, D.C. She later hurled the penis—having unintentionally kept it in her left hand as she ran from the apartment and drove off in her car—out the window of the car onto the grassy edge of a country road. Had it not been recovered there an hour and forty-five minutes later by the police, who promptly delivered it (packed in ice) to its owner and his doctors at the hospital, it might have been devoured by field mice or taken into the next county by a hungry high-flying scavenger bird.

Although the penis-cutting story was at once big news in and around the Washington area, it had for some reason not gotten much early attention in the New York press, and thus I had been unaware of it until twenty days after its occurrence. I first read about it on an inside page of
the July 13
Times
, in a column in the “Science” section written by the newspaper's medical specialist, Dr. Lawrence K. Altman. The column concentrated on the surgical skills employed in Manassas on June 23 by the two surgeons who had labored in an operating room for more than nine hours, often peering through microscopes as they slowly proceeded to reattach, stitch by stitch, the tiny torn tissues and the vessels of John Bobbitt's much-abused penis. A male friend of John Bobbitt had driven him to the hospital and escorted him into the emergency ward at 5:03 a.m. The medical personnel who witnessed Bobbitt's arrival were surprised that he had not already bled to death. Dr. Altman's column in the
Times
reported that the patient had walked in with a bloody sheet wrapped around his hand, which was covering his groin, and that the “two main arteries and a vein that carry most of the blood to and from the penis had gone into spasm spontaneously, and a large blood clot quickly formed over the stump.” The urological surgeon and the plastic surgeon who had been awakened at their homes and were urgently summoned to the hospital to work together on the penile operation were, respectively, Dr. James T. Sehn and Dr. David E. Berman. Dr. Sehn got there first, and he was shocked as he surveyed Bobbitt's condition at bedside. In the
Times
, Dr. Sehn was quoted as recalling, “It was a horrific sight. He was on his back and there was just a clot left for where there should have been a penis.” Since the police had not yet found the Bobbitt penis as Dr. Sehn and his colleague Dr. Berman had begun their preoperative procedures, and since it was then anyone's guess if the penis would
ever
be found, the surgeons were forced to consider, in the interest of the patient's survival, stitching him back together without a penis. “The surgeons would sew the stump closed in the type of procedure that is done for cancer of the penis,” the Altman column explained. “After such an operation, a man urinates sitting down.” Although this turned out to be unnecessary—thanks to a ferret-eyed police sergeant who spotted the penis in a clump of weeds at 6:15 a.m. and had it delivered posthaste to the hospital—there was no guarantee that Bobbitt would ever again attain a full erection. “Because the nerves were cut, the man at present has no sensation in the reattached portion of the penis,” Altman reported. “But his doctors said prospects for the return of sensation are good.”

I was amazed by the story. I reread it a few times. If the optimism expressed by Bobbitt's surgeons did not entirely fulfill itself, I wondered, what sort of life lay ahead for this twenty-six-year-old onetime warrior? Would he be banished hereafter from the macho world that he had probably identified with when he had enlisted in the Marine Corps? Would
his wife, who had justified her act to the police as a proper payback for his habitually improper behavior toward her, now earn plaudits from within the battered women's lobby or win widespread admiration from multitudes of miserably married wives who might ultimately elevate her bloody deed to head-on-the-platter Holofernes status?

Even before Lorena Bobbitt had done what she had done, the media had been giving much attention to the issue of male attitude and conduct toward women. There had been many stories about Senator Robert Packwood, accused of harassing twenty-six women. There had been the congressional hearings on television focusing upon Anita Hill's allegations against Clarence Thomas. There had been the U.S. Navy's sex scandal, known as “Tailhook,” and several other reports about American military men, including senior officers, who were facing charges of sexual impropriety toward their female colleagues in the service and toward civilian women, as well. Civilian feelings of patriotism toward the military were not at a high point at this time, it seemed to me, but perhaps this was understandable. Had these times been different, had America in the early 1990s been dedicated to defending itself against threatening foreign forces rather than to demilitarizing itself within a secure and stable peacetime economy, then there might not have been the federal cutbacks that prevented such grunts as John Bobbitt from reenlisting and which eventually led to his becoming, via his wife's knife, a battle-scarred veteran of the domestic front. Lorena Bobbitt's marital frustrations, as her testimony to law-enforcement authorities would soon make clear, had peaked after her husband had been released from the Marine Corps in 1991.

Although she earned all that she could as a nail sculptress in a Virginia shopping mall, her husband proceeded to lose, or to lose interest in, one job after another. He had failed to retain such positions as a furniture mover, a landscape laborer, a taxi driver, a cargo unloader at a trucking depot, a barroom bouncer, a 7-Eleven counter clerk, and a waiter in a restaurant located near the highly mortgaged home that the Bobbitts occupied for less than a year between 1990 and 1991. One of John Bobbitt's difficulties as a waiter was his slowness in operating the restaurant's computerized menu screen, which transmitted the customers' requests in the dining room to the printer in the kitchen. In any case, after he had been released from the regimentation and the predictable income of military employment, he proved to be insufficiently helpful to his wife in paying their bills. Still, I thought that losing part of his penis was a heavy price to pay under any circumstances, and I could not help feeling sympathy and compassion for this young man, nor could I avoid thinking about the many men whom I had read about or heard about whose genitals had
been victimized by terrifying experiences, either deliberately inflicted upon them or due to other reasons.

I thought about the war-wounded and castrated Jake Barnes in Hemingway's novel
The Sun Also Rises
, and the character in Hemingway's story “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen” who takes a razor blade to his penis in the interest of abating his sexual urges. In the John Irving novel
The World According to Garp
, a married woman unwittingly bites off her lover's penis while fellating him one evening in the front seat of an automobile that is parked in her driveway and that is rear-ended unintentionally when her carelessly driving husband returns home. The African writer Bessie Head wrote a story years ago in which a woman cuts off the penis of an acquaintance who had persistently preyed upon her. Ms. magazine would later reprint this story. And in Emile Zola's 1885 novel,
Germinal
, a group of French women vent their rage during a workers' riot by pouncing upon the dead body of a loathed ex-shopkeeper, Monsieur Maigrat, and after dismembering him, they parade around town with his penis on a pike. In Thailand, during the 1970s, there was a real-life situation in which nearly one hundred women took vengeance upon their philandering husbands by cutting off their penises at night. Dr. Altman had mentioned this in his
Times
column, adding that “reattachments were tried in about eighteen cases, with mostly poor results.” I had read elsewhere about an episode that took place in Tokyo many years ago—a woman strangled her lover, then emasculated him—and was subsequently cited as inspirational in the creation of the critically acclaimed 1976 Japanese film
In the Realm of the Senses
.

While I was aware that in the annals of fact and fiction I was recalling relatively few of the myriad instances in which a penis is objectified, I could not imagine anyone surpassing the efforts of the late English author D. H. Lawrence in describing the vagaries and vicissitudes of the male organ in ways that are at once wise, explicit, and unblushing. I am referring to Lawrence's tenth and final novel,
Lady Chatterley's Lover
, which he completed in 1928. It tells the story of the sexually desirable Lady Chatterley and her impotent husband (paralyzed while serving on a French battlefield during World War I) and her husband's virile gamekeeper, who resides on the couple's estate. The gamekeeper not only gratifies Lady Chatterley during her furtive visits but also remains with her after she becomes pregnant and leaves her husband, her home, and her social class.

This work, which Lawrence himself called a “phallic novel,” was quickly banned as obscene in his homeland and also in the United States and other nations. One critic in England referred to it as “the most evil
outpouring that has ever besmirched the literature of our country. The sewers of French pornography would be dragged in vain to find a parallel in beastliness.”

It was in Italy that Lawrence found printers who would set his manuscript into type. They were unable to read English, but after he had verbally explained to them what Lady Chatterley and her lover were described as doing in the novel's bedroom scenes, one of the printers remarked offhandedly, “We do it every day.” The first few thousand copies of this underground edition (which would soon be smuggled into England, the United States, and elsewhere) were printed on creamy hand-rolled Italian paper and were finely bound and inscribed by the author. These editions would be followed by a variety of pirated imprints. Some were cheaply bound reproductions that had been copied photographically, and contained printed pages that were unfocused. Others were black-colored hardcover volumes that were designed to resemble hymnbooks or Bibles, and these were usually more expensive than the original
ten-dollar Italian edition that Lawrence had autographed two years before his death in 1930.

Nearly thirty years would pass before his controversial novel could be sold legally in the United States. In 1959, a federal judge, influenced by the less restrictive definition of obscenity that the Supreme Court had rendered two years earlier in the case of
Roth v. United States
(Samuel Roth being an imprisoned New York pornographer who had long trafficked in the sale of
Lady Chatterley's Lover
and other lawfully forbidden books), rescinded the ban against Lawrence's last work. But the liberation of the novel had actually been initiated by the courtroom efforts of a New York publisher, Grove Press, which had filed and won its case against the U.S. Post Office, which until then had assumed broad authority in banning “dirty” books and other objectionable materials from being mailed in America. The courtroom triumph of Grove Press was immediately celebrated by advocates of literary freedom as a national victory against censorship and an affirmation of the First Amendment.

I was assigned to cover this news story in 1959 as a staff member of the
Times
, and after the federal judge's announcement, I attended a party at the editorial offices of Grove Press, where all the guests received free copies of
Lady Chatterley's Lover
, after which I read it for the first time. In later years I reread it twice, and in 1980 I summarized its literary history in a chapter of my book
Thy Neighbor's Wife
, which included my personal appreciation and appraisal of D. H. Lawrence's achievement: