In Praise of Messy Lives (17 page)

Gay Talese, himself a scholar and connoisseur of the messy life, tells me about the early sixties at
The New York Times
, and later at
Esquire
. He remembers people keeping flasks of liquor in their desks, and recalls coming back from lunch one day and seeing one guy with his head flat down on his typewriter. No one touched him or talked to him for hours, and eventually he woke up. He also recalls copy girls slipping out in the middle of the day with more than one man to the surrounding hotels. “You didn’t have the word ‘exploitation’ then,” Mr. Talese said. “And mostly it wasn’t exploitation.”

And of course, the words we use create our pathologies and cast our judgments and corral us into correct or healthy behaviors: they don’t allow for a huge variety of interpretation, or arguably for the full complicated range of real experience. (One such interpretation could be Oscar Wilde’s: that “work is the curse of the drinking classes.”) My mother recently finished a memoir about that same period in the literary circles orbiting
The Paris Review
. Reading the manuscript I was struck by how much these productive and famous writers she hung around with drank. Today we would dismiss them as alcoholics, the word itself carrying its own antiseptic morality, its own clinical, irrefutable argument
for balance and sobriety, but back then it was simply charisma.

I was also struck by how many of the parties she describes, on the beach, or on the Upper East Side, devolved into romantic chaos, how easily married men fell into bed with women who were not their wives. There was a flow to an evening, a sort of dangerous possibility in the air, that would be entirely foreign at the equivalent party now, at which people generally go home with the person they are supposed to go home with. The casual and flamboyant adultery my mother describes would be judged the next morning by our healthier, more staid, more quietly unhappy couples; the cheating would be rare and furtive, and certainly not part of the ambience and festivity of, say, a book party, which is now altogether a brisker, more businesslike affair. And I don’t think that in adult life most of us ever quite achieve the dissolute fluidity of those parties she describes, an atmosphere John Berryman once summarized as “Somebody slapped / Somebody’s second wife somewhere.”

My mother tells the story of sitting on the beach in East Hampton one morning, when my sixteen-month-old sister climbs onto the lap of a famous movie star and says, “I smell Scotch.” Everybody laughs, embarrassed. My mother wonders how many sixteen-month-olds recognize the smell of Scotch on someone’s breath, but by then my sister had clocked a lot of hours sleeping on the bed piled with coats at parties.

In her memoir, she also tells a story about taking my sister, who was then three, to the novelist Doc Humes’s house in the middle of the night because he was having some sort of psychotic episode. She sat up with him while my sister slept on his bed, which smelled of beer and marijuana. He was seeing flames in the
mirror. He was also married to someone else and had four daughters of his own. When the sun rose, my mother dropped him at Bellevue, and then continued in the cab to drop my sister off at preschool. In other words: not a style of school drop-off that most of us now would recognize.

I remember being at a
Paris Review
party at George Plimpton’s house nearly four decades after my mother was one of the girls draped across the couch, when he commented dryly, “Those were wilder days when your mother was here.” And the wildness he was talking about had a certain ideological cast; it was, among other things, a critique of conventional life, a refusal to accept the values of the lonely crowd, a rebellion against the well-heeled organization man. But even in literary or artistically inclined circles, our relation to mainstream bourgeois values are different now: more wishful and embracing than rebellious. Where my mother’s novelist friends were determined to defy moral convention, the novelist we currently admire sells his novel to the movies, lives in a townhouse in Brooklyn, or a loft in TriBeCa, and has a good car, his bohemianism and rebellion against conventional mores basically confined to shopping at Whole Foods—with a life, in short, that suspiciously resembles that of the banker (or advertising executive) next door.

In
Mad Men
there is a scene in which Betty Draper lies in the bath reading Mary McCarthy’s bestseller
The Group
, and it is McCarthy who perhaps wrote most frankly about the allure and embarrassment and comedy of the messy life. In her
Intellectual Memoirs
, which are not exactly that, she recalls one twenty-four-hour period in which she slept with three different men: “Though
slightly scared by what things were coming to, I didn’t feel promiscuous. Perhaps no one ever does.”

Out of curiosity I once parsed out how much McCarthy drank in the course of a particular night: three daiquiris, two manhattans, a couple of glasses of red wine, which she, by the way, refers to as “Dago Red,” and then some Benedictine and brandies. These nights often involve regret, but she writes about them with such exuberance, such festive humor, that one can see how seductive that messiness can be.

Juxtaposed against all this flamboyance, the tameness of contemporary sins can be a little disheartening. Try telling a group of young parents in a Draper-like milieu that you have decided to give your baby non-organic milk instead of paying $4 for organic, or give a toddler an M&M to quiet them down in front of a gaggle of stay-at-home moms (“they’re only baby teeth,” a friend of mine once said) and see what sort of unbridled disapproval you can elicit. It seems that some of us are so busy channeling our energies into doing what is good for us, for our children, into responsible and improving endeavors, that we may have forgotten, somewhere in the harried trips to Express Yourself Through Theater or Trader Joe’s, to seize the day. Of course, people still have hangovers and affairs, but what dominates the wholesome vista is a sense that everything we do should be productive, should be moving toward a sane and balanced end, toward the dubious and fragile illusion of “healthy.” The idea that you would do something just for the momentary blissful escape of it, for intensity, for strong feeling, is out of fashion.

When we talk about the three-martini lunch these days, it is with a sort of dismissive contempt, tinged with a pleasurable thrill of superiority. How much more sensible we are than them!
How much healthier! How much more prolific! “How did anyone get any work done?” someone will invariably ask. But maybe that’s the wrong question, or maybe the kind of work they got done was a different kind of work, or maybe that is not the highest and holiest standard to which we can hold the quality of human life.

Of course, it’s hard to write in praise of that much drinking in the middle of the day without being perverse; it’s equally hard to advocate blazingly destructive affairs; it’s harder still to defend the four packs of Winstons a day that Jerry Della Femina smoked in the heyday of his youth. And yet can these messy lives tell us something? Is there some adventure out there that we are not having, some vividness, some wild pleasure, that we are not experiencing in our responsible, productive days? In the seventeenth century, the metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell wrote, “But at my back I always hear / Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.” He also wrote, “The grave’s a fine and private place, / But none, I think, do there embrace.”
Mad Men
seems to be telling us the same thing, in its own stylish, made-for-television way: we are bequeathed on earth one very short life, and it might be good, one of these days, to make sure that we are living it.

If every era gets the sadist it deserves, it may not be surprising that we have ended up with Christian Grey, the hero of
Fifty Shades of Grey
. He is not twisted or frightening or in possession of a heart of darkness; he was abused as a child, a sadist Oprah could have dreamed up. Or as E. L. James puts it, “Christian Grey has a sad side.”

He is also extremely solicitous and apologetic for a sadist, always asking the book’s young heroine, Anastasia Steele, about every minute gradation of her feelings, and bringing her all kinds of creams and lotions to soothe her after spanking her. He is, in other words, the easiest difficult man of all time.

Why does this particular watered-down, skinny-vanilla-latte version of sadomasochism have such cachet right now? Why did masses of women bring the book to the top of the
New York Times
bestseller list before it even hit the stores? Most likely it’s the happy convergence of the superficial transgression with comfortable archetypes, the blushing virgin and the whips. To a certain, I guess rather large, population, it has a semi-pornographic glamour, a dangerous frisson of boundary crossing, but at the
same time it is delivering reassuringly safe, old-fashioned romantic roles. Reading
Fifty Shades of Grey
is no more risqué or rebellious or disturbing than, say, shopping for a pair of black boots or an arty asymmetrical dress at Barneys.

As it happens, the prevailing stereotype of the
Fifty Shades of Grey
reader, distilled in the condescending term “mommy porn” as an older, suburban, possibly Midwestern woman, isn’t entirely accurate: according to the publisher’s information, gleaned from Facebook, Google searches, and fan sites, more than half the women reading the book are in their twenties and thirties and far more urban and blue state than the rampant caricature of them suggests.

And of course, the current vogue for domination is not confined to surreptitious iPad reading: in Lena Dunham’s acclaimed new series,
Girls
, about twentysomethings adrift in New York City, a similar desire for sexual submission has already emerged as a recurring theme. The heroine’s pale hipsterish ersatz boyfriend jokes, “You modern career women, I know what you like,” and his idea, however awkwardly enacted, is that they like to be dominated. He says things like “You should never be anyone’s … slave, except mine” and calls down from a window, “If you come up I’m going to tie you up and keep you here for three days. I’m just in that kind of mood.” She comes back from seeing him with bruises and sheepishly tells her gay college boyfriend at a bar, “I am seeing this guy and sometimes I let him hit me on the side of my body.”

Her close friend and roommate, meanwhile, has a sweet, sensitive, respectful boyfriend in the new mold, who asks her what she wants in bed, and she is bored out of her mind and irritated
by him; she fantasizes instead about an arrogant artist she meets at the gallery where she works, who tells her that he will scare her in bed. So nice postfeminist boys are not what these ambitious, liberal-arts-educated girls are looking for either: they are also, in their exquisitely ironic, confused way, in the market for a little creative submission.

It is intriguing that huge numbers of women are eagerly consuming disparate fantasies of submission at a moment when women are ascendant in the workplace, when they make up almost 60 percent of college students, when they are close to surpassing men as breadwinners, with four in ten working women now outearning their husbands, when the majority of women under thirty are having and supporting children on their own; a moment when, in hard economic terms, women are less dependent or subjugated than ever before.

It is probably not coincidence that, as more books like
The Richer Sex
, by Liza Mundy, and Hanna Rosin’s
The End of Men
and a spate of articles on choosing not to be married or the steep rise in young women choosing single motherhood appear, there is a renewed popular interest in the stylized theater of female powerlessness. We may be especially drawn to this particular romanticized, erotically charged, semi-pornographic idea of female submission at a moment in history when male dominance is shakier than it has ever been.

In the realm of private fantasy, the allure of sexual submission, even in its extremes, is remarkably widespread. An analysis of twenty studies published in
Psychology Today
estimates that between roughly a third and 57 percent of women entertain fantasies in which they are forced to have sex. “Rape fantasies
are a place where politics and Eros meet, uneasily,” says Daniel Bergner, who is working on a book on female desire. “It is where what we say and what is stand next to each other, mismatched.” The researchers and psychologists he talked to for a
New York Times
article, “What Do Women Want?,” often seemed reluctant to even use the phrase “rape fantasy.” The idea of rape fantasies was clearly making even them, the chroniclers and scholars of these fantasies, extremely nervous and apologetic. Even though fantasies are something that, by definition, one can’t control, they seem to be saying something about modern women that nearly everyone wishes wasn’t said. One of the researchers he interviewed preferred to call them “fantasies of submission,” and another said, “It’s the wish to be beyond will, beyond thought.”

But why, for women especially, would free will be a burden? Why is it appealing to think of a given night in the passive tense? Why is it so interesting to surrender, or to play at surrendering? It may be that power is not always that comfortable, even for those of us who grew up in it; it may be that equality is something we want only sometimes and in some places and in some arenas; it may be that power and all of its imperatives can be boring.

In
Girls
, Lena Dunham’s character finds herself for a moment lying on a gynecologist’s table perversely fantasizing about having AIDS because it would free her from ambition, from responsibility, from the daunting need to make something of her life. It’s a great scene, a vivid piece of real-seeming weirdness, which raises the question: Is there something exhausting about the relentless responsibility of a contemporary woman’s life, about the pressure of economic participation, about all that strength and
independence and desire and going out into the world? It may be that, for some, the more theatrical fantasies of sexual surrender offer a release, a vacation, an escape from the dreariness and hard work of equality.