The Naughty Bits (6 page)

She always found some good-natured fool who would get to work even if he wasn’t at all in the mood, just to give her something to goggle at. The only one who wouldn’t give until Tulla found the right words of encouragement—and that is why I am narrating these heroic deeds—was the great swimmer and diver Joachim Mahlke . . .

“Won’t you? Aw, do it just once. Or can’t you? Don’t you want to? Or aren’t you allowed to?”

Mahlke stepped half out of the shadow and slapped Tulla’s compressed little face left right with his palm and the back of his hand. His mouse went wild. So did the screwdriver . . . “Okay. Just so you’ll shut your yap.”

Tulla came out of her contortion and squatted down normally with her legs folded under her, as Mahlke stripped his trunks down to his knees. The children at the Punch-and-Judy show gaped in amazement: a few deft movements emanating from his right wrist, and his pecker loomed so large that the tip emerged from the shadow of the pilothouse and the sun fell on it . . .

“Measure it!” cried Jürgen Kupka. Tulla spread the fingers of her left hand. One full span and another almost. Somebody and then somebody else whispered: “At least twelve inches!” That was an exaggeration of course. Schilling, who otherwise had the longest, had to take his out, make it stand up, and hold it beside Mahlke’s: Mahlke’s was first of all a size thicker, second a matchbox longer, and third looked much more grownup, dangerous and worthy to be worshipped . . . Strangely enough, the length of his sexual part made up for the otherwise shocking protuberance of his Adam’s apple, lending his body an odd, but in its way perfect, harmony.

No sooner had Mahlke finished squirting the first load over the rail than he started in all over again. Winter timed him with his waterproof wrist watch; Mahlke’s performance continued for approximately as many seconds as it took the torpedo boat to pass from the tip of the breakwater to the buoy; then, while the torpedo boat was rounding the buoy, he unloaded the same amount again; the foaming bubbles lurched in the smooth, only occasionally rippling swell, and we laughed for joy as the gulls swooped down, screaming for more.

—translated by Ralph Manheim

from
Moby Dick

HERMAN MELVILLE

To know one thing truly is to know all things. I suspect that this sentiment, which I’ve long believed, is the underpinning of many an aphorism now lost to my bourbon-addled memory. The logic behind the conceit presumes that, like Andrew Marvell’s famous drop of dew, each entity in this world reflects the entirety of the universe of which it is part. The truth of any one thing stands in direct analogy to the truth of all others. Vico claimed that man, seeing things through a human brain, could only understand man; cosmology is reduced to history. I see the reverse; as we can only know through our own selves, each perceivable thing becomes a mirror or a canvas for painting our souls.

One is thus given the choice to arrive at the particular through the general or the general through the particular. The former is encyclopedism, the latter anatomism, but the difference lies only in method. Literature has mimicked both forms: Flaubert’s comic and unfinished
Bouvard
et Pecuchet
is the most literal embodiment of the encyclopedic impulse. On the other side, Burton’s great
Anatomy of Melancholy
can easily be understood as an encyclopedia of a single thing. Nicholson Baker’s
The
Mezzanine
falls somewhere in between, retelling an escalator trip at such length and precision as to appear both anatomistic and encyclopedic. But nowhere is encyclopedism more sustained, more methodical and staggering than Melville’s singular, monolithic
Moby Dick.
It is said that the Babelites used bricks of stone to build their tower toward God; Melville uses the lore of whaling to build his. Nor will it be toppled. God, apparently, is letting The Whale stand, testament though it is to human industry. And what industry! Compiling everything there is to know about whales, whaling, and whiteness, Melville creates a symbolic tapestry as intricate as anything in the world on land. Seeking only to sketch a portrait of a now-dying industry, Melville rendered the bulk of human experience, seen through the salt-crusted lens of a collapsible eyeglass.

So, although I might have excerpted from Ishmael’s curious night in Nantucket with the savage Queequeg, I opt instead for the passage on Moby’s big one. For if all things are analogous to one another, Melville’s great book sits, like Willy’s willy in the Pequod’s scuppers, dauntingly on the foredecks of world literature.

Had you stepped on board the Pequod at a certain juncture of this post-mortemizing of the whale; and had you strolled forward nigh the windlass, pretty sure am I that you would have scanned with no small curiosity a very strange, enigmatical object, which you would have seen there, lying along lengthwise in the lee scuppers. Not the wondrous cistern in the whale’s huge head, not the prodigy of his unhinged lower jaw; not the miracle of his symmetrical tail; none of these would so surprise you as half a glimpse of that unaccountable cone—longer than a Kentuckian is tall, nigh a foot in diameter at the base, and jet-black as Yojo, the ebony idol of Queequeg. And an idol, indeed, it is; or rather, in old times, its likeness was. Such an idol as that found in the secret groves of Queen Maachah in Judea; and for worshipping which, King Asa, her son, did depose her, and destroyed the idol, and burnt it for an abomination at brook Kedron, as darkly set forth in the fifteenth chapter of the First Book of Kings.

Look at the sailor, called the mincer, who now comes along, and assisted by two allies, heavily backs the grandissimus, as the mariners call it, and with bowed shoulders, staggers off with it as if he were a grenadier carrying a dead comrade from the field. Extending it upon the forecastle deck, he now proceeds cylindrically to remove its dark pelt, as an African hunter the pelt of a boa. This done he turns the pelt inside out, like a pantaloon leg, gives it a good stretching, so as almost to double its diameter; and at last hangs it, well spread, in the rigging, to dry. Ere long, it is taken down; when removing some three feet of it, towards the pointed extremity, and then cutting two slits for arm-holes at the other end, he lengthwise slips himself bodily into it. The mincer now stands before you invested in the full canonicals of his calling. Immemorial to all his order, this investiture alone will adequately protect him, while employed in the peculiar functions of his office.

That office consists in mincing the horse-pieces of blubber for the pots; an operation which is conducted at a curious wooden horse, planted endwise against the bulwarks, and with a capacious tub beneath it, into which the minced pieces drop, fast as the sheets from a rapt orator’s desk. Arrayed in decent black; occupying a conspicuous pulpit; intent on bible leaves; what a candidate for an archbishopric, what a lad for a Pope were this mincer!

from
The Floating Opera

JOHN BARTH

A lovely word, now out of fashion, permitted poets of the seventeenth century to denigrate rivals whose verse achievements were not quite up to snuff: poetaster. Ben Jonson addressed one of his poems “To Poetaster”; you won’t be surprised when I tell you it’s not nice. Sadly, there is no comparable term for fiction writers. “Scribbler” lacks precision, “hack” has a blunt edge and “novelistaster” is an abomination. Nor does it exist, though that is really what I am after—some way of dismissing the epigones and the claimants, the muddlers, the half talents, and the stone-footed who would drink at the muses’ fount. We don’t need novels; we need novelists, writers whose very names would daunt the occasional ink dippers from ever scratching out a single clause. I have written of Gabriel García Márquez as being one such writer and Cormac McCarthy another (
Blood
Meridian
is like something released from the fist of an angry god); there are few others who qualify. But having read in the last few weeks an armload of John Barth, I can happily name him among them.

Three things, in my opinion, make for worthwhile novels: wisdom, style, and imagination. Possessing any one, you’re likely to get published; two, you’ll write a damn good book; possess all three and you’re truly great. In books like
Giles Goat-Boy, The Sot-Weed Factor,
and
Chimera,
Barth shows a range of styles and, even more, a scope of imagination barely rivaled in American fiction. But even in his first novel,
The Floating Opera
(written in his mid-twenties), he displays a human wisdom and sensitivity that remains consistent through the rest of his work. As far-fetched as his experiments can be, Barth’s fictions remain true to the truest truths, and this is what gives them meaning.

In
The Floating Opera,
protagonist Todd Andrews has his first fateful encounter with the wife of his best friend. It begins a love triangle that sets into motion much of the plot of the book (an extended recounting of why Todd doesn’t commit suicide, having decided one day to do so), but the triangle doesn’t come off without a hitch. Cast within the following five hundred words is the unsugared reality of the quick male trigger—a hard topic, harder still to sketch with grace and humor. Barth shows us how.

Needless to say, I dreamed of Jane. The absence of Harrison—the first time he’d left Jane and me alone together, as it happened, because of my supposed shyness—was embarrassingly obvious, and on my way to sleep I was acutely conscious of her presence on the opposite side of the plywood partition between us. I fell asleep imagining her cool brown thighs—they must be cool!—brushing each other, perhaps, as she walked about the kitchen; the scarcely visible gold down on her upper arms; the salt-and-sunshine smell of her. The sun was glaring in through a small window at the foot of the bed; the cottage smelled of heat and resinous pine. I was quite tired from swimming, and sleepy from beer. My dream was lecherous and violent—and unfinished. Embarrassingly so. For suddenly I felt a cool, shiveringly cool, hand caress my stomach. It might have been ice, so violently did all my insides contract; I fairly exploded awake, and wrenched up into a sitting position. I believe it was “Good Lord!” that I croaked. I croaked something, anyhow, and with both arms instantly grabbed Jane, who sat nude—unbelievable!—on the edge of the bed; buried my face in her, so excruciatingly startled was I; pulled her down with me, that electrifying skin against mine; and
mirabile dictu!
at the sheer enormous lust of it I did indeed explode, so wholly that I was certain liver, spleen, guts, lungs, heart, head, and all had blown from me, and I lay a hollow shell without sense or strength.

Damned dream, to leave me helpless! I was choked with desire, and with fury at my impotency. Jane was terribly nervous; after the first approach, to make which must have required all her courage, she collapsed on her back beside me and scarcely dared open her eyes.

The room was dazzlingly bright! I was so shocked by the unexpectedness of it that I very nearly wept. Incredible smooth, tight, perfect skin! I pressed my face into her; I couldn’t leave her untouched for the barest sliver of an instant. I quiver even now, twenty-two years later, to write of it, and why my poor heart failed to burst I’m unable even to wonder.

Well, it was no use, and if I’d had a knife handy then, I’d have unmanned myself. I fell beside her, maddened at my impotency and mortified at the mess I’d made. That, it turned out, was the right thing to do: my self-castigation renewed Jane’s courage, gave her the upper hand again.

“Don’t curse yourself, Toddy,” she soothed, and kissed me— sweetness!—and stroked my face.

“No use,” I muttered into her breast.

“We’ll see,” she said lightly, entirely self-possessed now that I seemed shy again: I resolved to behave timidly for the rest of my life. “Don’t worry about it, honey; I can fix it.”

“No you can’t,” I moaned, as strickenly as I could.

“Yes I can,” she whispered, kissing my ear and sitting up beside me.

Merciful heavens, reader! If you must marry, marry from Ruxton and Gibson Island, I charge you! Such a magnificent, subtle, versatile, imaginative, athletic, informed, delightful, exuberant mistress no man ever had, I swear.

from
A Moveable Feast

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Penis size: a topic for the ages. Few will go to the grave not having discussed it, though only two opinions seem to have emerged: bigger is better, or it’s not. Maybe it’s not that surprising —other equally binary topics have merited similar scrutiny (Does God exist?)—but I for one remain fascinated with our fascination. Breasts, though seeming to have considerable size-based cultural import, don’t elicit the same mystery. Although many or most women obsess about the size of their breasts, there is little or no ambiguity to the matter. They get ranked with cup size, they can be pushed up or bound back or surgically augmented, but it’s pretty much a scientific process. Not so with penises, apparently. I myself have gone through the gamut of perceptions of my Johnson: it’s little, it’s big, it’s normal, it’s weird, I don’t really know, I couldn’t care less, I couldn’t care more. As the apparatus itself never really changed, these opinions obviously have more to do with my sense of self and my relationship to my own sexuality than anything you could measure in inches. To that extent, then, the penis for a man might less be the fleshy appurtenance dangling between his legs and more a consolidation of his sexuality as a whole. No wonder we worry.

Commonplace as penis questioning is, it, like pooping, does not have a strong literary history. The exceptions are noted: Joyce advanced modern literature by putting Bloom on the can; Hemingway advanced modern biography by making public Scott Fitzgerald’s concerns about his ability to satisfy women. I can’t say that I list Hemingway among my favorite authors; his baby-step sentences never jazzed me the way those of more self-conscious stylists do. But, old Hem loosens his belt a little bit when he’s writing autobiographically, even permitting himself the odd comma. And nowhere is he funnier than in
A Moveable Feast,
the account of his time in that hunger-inducing expat haven, Paris. His tales of trying to negotiate the arrondissements without passing a single restaurant (to keep from teasing his underattended-to stomach) reminded me of my own Gallic misadventures, but his escapades with Fitz and Zelda are even better. We don’t often get to go behind the scenes of a writer working up to and through his masterpiece; Hem’s account of Fitz is a rare portrait of an artist. Here is the most intimate detail.