A Sexual Pilgrim's Progress
Gay Talese is best known for a study of executive life and strife at the New York Times, where he once worked as a reporter. THY NEIGHBOR’S WIFE (Doubleday, $14.95) is his account of sex in contemporary America. A decade in the making, the book originated in the author’s decision, after some casting about for a large subject, that “what most intrigued him was America’s new openness about sex, its expanding erotic consumerism, and the quiet rebellion that he sensed within the middle class against the censors and clerics that had been an inhibiting force since the founding of the Puritan republic.” The research methodology adopted is participatory. Talese not only patronized massage parlors, he became their utility employee, serving for “months” as a front-desk manager in two Manhattan establishments. He not only visited various experiments in “genuinely open sexuality in a structured setting,” he entered their inmost shrines—including the group-sex pit called the “ballroom” at California’s famous Sandstone Retreat. And he not only interviewed such figures as Hugh Hefner, founder of Playboy, Alvin Goldstein, cofounder of Screw, and Alex Comfort, author of The Joy of Sex, he drew close enough to these persons to be able to write authoritatively about the nature and quality of their sexual experience. (He drew even closer to several less celebrated people in the vanguard of liberation—most notably to a pair of young couples engaged in mateswapping.)
A flurry of gossip about Talese’s way of working preceded the book’s publication, and the author addresses it in a third-person-singular biographical addendum in his closing pages. The chief charge against him, he reports, is that
his reportorial technique as a “participating observer” in the world of erotica—his patronage of massage parlors, his dark afternoons in Xrated cinemas, his intimate familiarity with swing clubs and orgiasts across the land—was an ingenious ploy on his part to indulge his carnality and to be unfaithful to his wife . . . .
In response he pleads that “his allegedly ideal assignment was frequently less pleasurable than other people generally believed.” This line of defense may not silence every detractor, but whatever the issue of the squabble, Thy Neighbor’s Wife does undeniably establish Talese’s standing as that most familiar, if not most universally admired, American character, The Unblinking Eyewitness. Few writers have lived so long, traveled so far, on the frontiers of the sexual revolution. In this not invariably sunny quarter Talese is the man, to paraphrase Whitman. Whether in suffering or in ecstasy, he saw. He has been there.
It’s true, of course, that much of his book’s substance derives from digging in periodical and newspaper files and in libraries, rather than from on-the-spot sightings along group-sex sectionals and in massage-parlor cubicles. As a serious chronicler of “the redefinition of morality” in America (“Talese . . . emphasized] on television the seriousness of his literary intentions”), the author of Thy Neighbor’s Wife felt himself obliged, in the name of comprehensiveness, to treat many matters more abstract than the actualities of coupling. He devotes chapters to the landmark court cases—literary (involving Memoirs of Hecate County, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, other works) and nonliterary—that were the vehicle of judicial advance from punitive positions about explicitness to the permissive doctrine of “redeeming social value,” and later to amendments stressing the right of individual communities to specify their own standards of obscenity. (Among the publishers profiled in these pages are Maurice Girodias and Barney Rosset.) There is, in addition, a discussion of the financing of the “revolution of the senses”—problems of capital formation in the men’s magazine industry, stages in the development (from Russ Meyer onward) of “the multimillion dollar ‘skin flick’ market,” the building of the Playboy empire (Talese’s figures hint that the empire has entered on a decline).
And, in order to measure more precisely the modern “departure from conventionality,” Talese functions, intermittently, as historian. He provides a catalogue of recent events and inventions contributing to the shaping of new attitudes—the Pill, legalized abortion, sex therapy clinics, Esalen, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, frontal nudity on the legitimate stage (Hair) and in art films (Antonioni’s Blow-up), others. He undertakes to describe levels of sexual repressiveness in the past through a survey of nineteenth-century opinion regarding masturbation. And he focuses briefly on various theoretical and practical initiatives encouraging free and communal love—the fifteenth-century Adamites, Brook Farm, John Humphrey Noyes’s Oneida community (the latter is seen, I believe unjustifiably, as a precursor of the Sandstone Retreat).
As might be guessed from the author’s enthusiastic talk of a “quiet rebellion” against “an inhibiting force,” the perspective throughout most of Thy Neighbor’s Wife is resolutely positive: You and I have come a long way, babe. Remembering his boyhood in a wretchedly restrictive “Victorian community in Southern New Jersey where even now, in the 1970s, the sale of liquor [is] forbidden,” Talese quotes a nun telling him and his classmates that they should “sleep each night on their backs with their arms crossed on their chests, hands on opposite shoulders—a presumably holy posture that, not incidentally, made masturbation impossible.” He contrasts the furtive selfexcitement of that period with the franker tone of the massage parlor.
(". . . to be masturbated by an appealing masseuse, to be in the physical presence of a woman with whom there was some communication and understanding, if not love, was gratifying and fun.”) Yesterday rich aesthetes alone were permitted to appreciate artistic representations of human nudity; today these treasures are democratically available in centerfolds. Yesterday possessiveness and exploitativeness were norms beyond challenge in marriage; today, owing to the idealism of the founders of Sandstone, among others, these norms have been called into question. Yesterday the arena of sex was joyless and solemn; today there’s room for hilarity and glee. (As evidence, Talese cites “a recreational scene in the [Sandstone] ballroom in the exalted company of Dr. Comfort and a famous Hollywood ventriloquist who, though his head was buried between the thighs of a schoolmistress, nevertheless continued a humorous dialogue between himself and his absent wooden-headed alter ego.”) We’ve leaped forward, in short—in Talese’s view—from shame to happy expressiveness, from unacknowledged burning to relaxed acceptance of our pleasures, from superstition to light. Therefore—inevitably—a book about sex in America must take the form of a paean to Progress.
It’s a mindless form, in my opinion, far out of touch for much of its length with the best current thinking about the behavior and attitudes it presumes to describe. I know of few historians, anthropologists, or semiologists nowadays who don’t consider it a mistake to seal off change in sexual attitudes and behavior from the broader structures of life, as though such change occurred in some inviolable theater of ideas, Benightedness and Enlightenment wrestling each other, one on one, for domination of the human future. Some experts take as a starting point the assumption that true liberation for humankind necessarily entails a struggle for recovery of a sense of human solidarity—a recovery hard to achieve not because of prudery but because of divisions rooted in property and class. Others stress that the new sexual permissiveness—“repressive tolerance,” as Herbert Marcuse called it—is simply one of a hundred instruments of social control guiding the consumer economy. But no writer of consequence in the field shares Gay Talese’s vacuous faith in the autonomy of the so-called sexual revolution.
The reason this vacuity isn’t fatal to Thy Neighbor’s Wife is partly that Talese is journalistically adept at ferreting out undernoticed intricacies of overpublicized events—sexual curiosities past and present, revelatory details of the personal life of celebrities, numberless other items of “feature interest.” It was news to me that some chastity belts for males sold in England, as cures for masturbation, in the last century “were adorned with spikes on the outside, or came equipped with bells that would ring whenever the youth touched his genitals or had an erection.” I hadn’t heard, either, of the existence of a massage parlor on South Wabash Street in Chicago that was decorated to resemble the interior of a church. (“The manager’s small reception desk was enclosed within a sixhundred-pound wooden Gothic confessional that had been purchased from a wrecking company that had demolished a South Side church . . . .”) I knew of Daniel Ellsberg’s reputation as a swinger, but not that “after he had made copies of the Pentagon Papers, and might have assumed that the FBI would soon be tapping his telephone and tailing him by car, [he still] made no attempt to conceal his nocturnal carousing, traveling from swing bar to orgy—and also to Sandstone—as casually as if he were attending a reunion of Harvard alumni.” And while I remembered that Nixon in his reign had appointed a Presidential Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, I wasn’t aware that the commission had funded an experiment in which
twenty-three male students [were shown] sex films for ninety minutes a day, for five days a week over a three-week period, in an attempt to determine what effect the films had on the student’s personal habits and passions. All of the student volunteers watched the films while wearing robes under which their penises were sheathed in condoms attached with electrodes that gauged penile erection, and they also wore bellows around their chests and electrical instruments in their ears. Prior to each daily film session the researchers privately asked the students whether or not they had masturbated or had intercourse during the intervening twenty-four hours.
In the end, though, it’s merely the author’s alertness to piquant sidebar material that distracts attention from his weak intellectual scaffolding. The case is that, lodged in the middle of his book, as utterly unpredictable and unassimilable as a sermon on radix malorum est cupiditas would seem if encountered midway through, say, How You Can Become Financially Independent by Investing in Real Estate, is a narrative of liberation that’s extraordinary in its crude emotional power, and that burned off, for me, swiftly and irresistibly, much of the jungle of progress-prattle surrounding it.
The story in outline is simple. John Bullaro, a young insurance salesman, un homme moyen sensuel, married, occasionally unfaithful to his wife, is drawn into an affair with an exceptionally independent married woman, Barbara Williamson. (These are real names, the author says; this is real life.) Barbara assures John Bullaro that her husband John Williamson has no objection to her infidelity—welcomes it, in truth, because he does not believe in marital possessiveness. John Bullaro is unaware that this strikingly unconcerned cuckold is a mechanical engineer turned sensual engineer who, selfschooled in the theories of Wilhelm Reich and the elitist visions of Ayn Rand, and afflicted with on-the-job ennui, is planning the experimental center that one day will be world-renowned as Sandstone. Disbelieving Barbara Williamson’s asseverations, John Bullaro is filled with fear when her husband arranges to lunch with him —but the man not only confirms what his wife has said, he invites John Bullaro to drop by his house to meet a group of similarly liberated folk. Skeptical, wary of entrapment, John Bullaro pays the visit, becomes acquainted with the sexual experimenters for whom John Williamson is guru, and, enticed by a glimpse of forbidden delights, commences a new life. He initiates his wife, Judith, into the mysteries of mateswapping and group sex, over her protest, and gradually the couple’s commitment to Williamson the guru strengthens. They contribute labor and other resources to the refurbishing of the buildings that are to be reborn as Sandstone—Williamson’s embryonic Celestial City. Judith Bullaro falls in love with the guru. The Bullaro center—family life, children—does not hold. John Bullaro dwindles into jealousy, and, under the tutelage of the guru, attempts to purify himself through acts of ritual isolation and exposure in the California desert—separation from the human community. But in the sequel he loses wife, children, family, job, and home.
Not a riveting tale in synopsis, and on the page it’s often overshrill—as in the chapter on the Bullaros’ first visit to the Williamsons’ house. Will John acknowdedge, in the presence of his wife and a clan of sexual radicals, that he went to bed that very afternoon with another woman, that he has often before been unfaithful to his wife, that he has lived a domestic existence rotten with falsehood while pretending to his wife that he has been undeviatingly honest? (“ ‘All right, for God’s sake . . . I went to bed with Barbara this afternoon! Is that what you all want to hear?—I went to bed with Barbara this afternoon!’ ”) Will Judith have the “courage” to “watch her husband walk off to a bedroom with another woman to make love,” thereby to be taught that “an open act of physical infidelity was less threatening than one that she might suspect and embellish with emotion”?
The scenes in which John Bullaro makes love to an experimentalist named Gail while outside the door his wife screams in torment combine, repulsively, Grand Guignol, sob story, and low comedy.
. . . . Bullaro heard high, hysterical howling coming from the living room, and he recognized the voice as Judith’s. He tried to block out her cries and drive himself on to orgasm, but he was unnerved by this conflicting counterpoint: Gail’s ecstatic sighs and moans, and Judith’s desolate wailing and shrieking; and quickly he lost his erection.
Nightmares, in sum, garish and sensational—as many as a half-dozen—are distributed throughout the BullaroWilliamson chapters of the book. Soap, catchpenny lubriciousness, and sideshow chills jostle each other in these scenes. Repeatedly as one reads one finds oneself wanting to hoot at the extravaganza, the spectacle of lordly, half-educated Faustians, self-styled Ayn Randian Leaders, imagining themselves as instructors to nature, exhorting their presumed inferiors to break every chain of attachment to the past, to common humanity, ordinary trust, ordinary shame. What have we here but a hideously farcical reduction of the decent aspirations of democratic individualism? What response to such madness could be appropriate except a chortle?
But loss is not mocked —not substantial human loss, not when accompanied by deep and intense awareness that it is self-caused, and that alternatives existed. Two hundred pages before the end of Thy Neighbor’s Wife we see John Bullaro contemplating the wreckage of his days, recalling in despair the “first sexual encounter with Barbara at the insurance convention in Palm Springs, the emergence of John Williamson as a problem solver, the nude evenings in the Williamsons’ house on Mullholland Drive . . .” That teasing time, rich in intimations of holiday release, seemed “so exhilarating and liberating”—and now Bullaro understands it as nothing other than “a preamble to destruction and chaos.” Whatever love and order had been the stability of his life he had “sacrificed to the whim of experimentation and change.” Had there been any compensations? Was the knowledge of other women worth nothing? Might not his marriage have collapsed even if he had behaved otherwise? If he hadn’t “drawn Judith into those evenings in which Oralia and Gail and Arlene Gough had seemed so tempting and available ... if he had resisted Williamson’s promise to release the suffocating bonds of traditional marriage”?
Possibly, but: “. . . his own hollow reminiscences ... all seemed reduced to fragments of emotion scattered senselessly. He was alone, jobless, without a sense of hope .... Months passed, and while he continued to see his children, his aimlessness prevailed . ...” I can imagine a reader of taste and good sense refusing sympathy to this victim, stiffening against the current of sentimentality. But the refusal is difficult; I was moved.
The author himself seems not to have been. The entire hundred-page Bullaro exemplum seems indeed to have had minuscule impact, psychological or otherwise, upon him. After dutifully running it through, he returns to the upbeat chronicle of Reason Triumphant, as though no real interruption had taken place. A sketch of Dr. Comfort in the Sandstone ballroom during an orgy, “reassuring, humorous, erudite,” depositing “his cigar in a safe place [and joining] a friendly clutch of bodies and [contributing] to the merriment.” Views of Dan Ellsberg “open to suggestions” at sex parties, “as comfortable in large crowds as in threesomes.” A shot of Hugh Hefner “lying naked in the center of the bed surrounded by a half-dozen nude Playboy models and Bunnies, each of whom [is] gently massaging him with oil.” The book concludes, as indicated, with a celebration of our “ever-increasing tolerance for sexual expression,” our “more accepting attitude . . . with regard to what had once been considered ‘kinky,’ ” our readiness to salute the effort of “Hustler magazine ... to extend the limits of explicitness,” the eagerness of our “surprisingly attractive actresses . . . to perform in hard-core sex films— one of which, in the secluded hills of Pennsylvania, Talese watched as it was being made.”
Doubtless some readers will follow only at a distance, returning in mind often (as I did) to the fable—the “real life” episode with allegorical force—featuring John and Judith and Barbara and John, sexual pilgrims. “Do you see yonder shining light?” said Evangelist in Bunyan’s story. “I think I do,” answered Christian, squinting, and, with a little help from his friends, he made it across and over and onward and upward at last to the Lucky Place. But sad and innocent John Bullaro, a loser, mistook Vanity Fair for Celestial City, and it cost him wife and kids and home: all wagered away not for love but for mate-swapping.
Thy Neighbor’s Wife says a good deal, I’d argue, about the impacted condition of moral discourse in the late twentieth century. A fair conclusion is that we can bear reminders of the profound historical admonitions against covetousness and betrayal only if they’re spotted into alien surroundings, allowed to peep out through the scrim as though by accident, claiming no more than an impatient and reluctant attention. Cameo appearances. Yet I remain impressed that Gay Talese, eyewitness, represented so fully the pathetic anguish of his experimenting couple. Despite chic obtuseness and intellectual naiveté, he possesses, as a good reporter, the ability to recognize (if not to understand) a whole story when it’s proffered. Beyond this he has an honorable sense of obligation: whole stories, assimilable or no, deserve to be passed along in their fullness. Thanks to these gifts, nourished in this instance by a purely professional code (what besides purely professional codes survives?), the paean to Progress in Thy Neighbor’s Wife may self-destruct.