John Waters' Role Models: Part Four

Picking up from where we left off yesterday, the latest excerpt from John Waters' new book Role Models looks at Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children and Jane Bowles' Two Serious Ladies. It's about adult rage. Here are parts one, two and three – the final part from the chapter on the famous director's literary heroes follows tomorrow.

John Waters - Role Models

“Bookworm”
- Part Four.

Sick of reading about weird children? Let's turn to the rage in adults. I love to read about anger. A "feel bad" book always makes me feel good. And no other novel in the history of literature is more depressing than Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children. This devastating portrait of one of the most hateful, spiteful, unhappy marriages ever imagined was originally published in 1940 with little fanfare and some backhanded good reviews ("Eventually, Christina Stead will impose herself upon the literature of English-speaking countries," Clifton Fadiman wrote in The New Yorker. "I say 'impose herself' because her qualities are not apt to win her an immediate, warm acceptance"). Her fellow novelist Mary McCarthy was not kind, calling the book "an hysterical tirade" filled with "fearful, discorded vindictiveness." It's hardly surprising that The Man Who Loved Children quickly disappeared. But when it was rereleased in 1965, the book finally found the praise it deserved: "a long neglected masterpiece" and a "big black diamond of a book." I became a rabid fan.

Henny Pollit, our furious heroine, is trapped in a marriage to a sanctimonious bore who keeps her pregnant. Worse, he constantly lectures her on "love and goodness." When he begins one of his pompous sermons and sees Henny is frantically scribbling something down on paper as she listens, he thinks his wife is so inspired she's taking notes, but when he looks over her shoulder he reads, "Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up." Henny hates her husband with such venom that the reader feels like visiting the emergency room of a hospital after hearing her tirades of vitriol.

"How dare you say that! How dare you-" her husband sputters, but when Henny starts, nobody can control her bitter attacks. "You took me and you maltreated me," she rages, "and starved me half to death because you couldn't make a living and sponged off of my father and used his affluence, hoisting yourself up on all my aches and miseries . . .  boasting and blowing about your own success when all the time it was me, my poor body that was what you took your success out of. You were breaking my bones and spirit and forcing your beastly love on me . . .  slobbering around me and calling it love and filling me with children month after month and year after year while I hated you and detested you and screamed in your ears to get away from me."

Let's form a "Hate Book Club" and read the dialogue from this amazing novel out loud. Come on, you play Henny and I'll play the husband and we'll shout out the malignant taunts and experience together the group horror of a failed marriage. Go on, give Henny's furor a voice! Rant aloud what she's had to put up with: "Your everlasting talk, talk, talk, talk, talk . . .  boring me, filling me, filling my ears with talk, jaw, jaw, till I thought the only way was to kill myself to escape you . . .  I'm through; you can pack your bags and get out." Okay, build now! Start bitching about his family, "your loudmouth, dung-haired sister," shout out, "Take your whore sister with you!" like Henny did. Now I'll play the husband and smack you. And then just like in the book, you attack me with a knife. Maybe the neighbors downstairs will hear all the commotion coming from inside our Hate Book Club and will rush up in concern to investigate. Once we get them inside, we can force them to read The Man Who Loved Children, too, and then they can imagine the terrible calm at the end of this scene, when Henny lies defeated on the floor and I, playing the husband, whisper the most maddeningly abusive dialogue of all: "The worst part of it is, Pet, that you love me still in a way; everything you do-even this!-shows me that. I know it!"

Okay, you want something happier to read? Even absurd? The author was an alcoholic and spent a lot of time in mental hospitals, but Jane Bowles's Two Serious Ladies, Tennessee Williams's "favorite book," might just perk up your mood. I remember when Elloyd Hanson, the late, great co-owner of the Provincetown Bookshop, recommended this novel to me when it was rereleased in 1966. Once I read it, I felt insanely grateful to have gone beyond the door of literate lunacy into a world of complete obliviousness to emotional reality. I've never come back. Two Serious Ladies made a real reader out of me, and if you give it a chance, it will do the same for you.

Originally published in 1943 to confusion ("To attempt to unravel the plot . . .  would be to risk, I feel sure, one's own sanity," the New York Times reviewer sputtered) and then trapped in out-of-print limbo for years, this peculiar piece of fiction's street cred never quite faded. "Few literary reputations are as glamorous as the underground one she [Bowles] has enjoyed since her novel . . .  was published," remembered another New York Times critic on the book's revival. "The extreme rarity of the book once it went out of print," he continued, "has augmented its legend. When a London publisher wanted to reprint it . . .  even Mrs. Bowles was unable to supply him with a copy." For years and years I wanted to own the first edition of this hardback and I finally got it. Sometimes when I want to feel smarter, I sneak up on this volume on my bookshelf and kiss it.

Two Serious Ladies is the parallel tale of a pair of ferociously eccentric women who search for crackpot adventures and some sort of cockeyed inner peace. Their unfathomable sexual attractions are completely wrongheaded. Mrs. Copperfield goes on a dreaded vacation with her husband and wanders away and falls in love for no apparent reason with a female hooker named Pacifica, who certainly does not return the feelings but halfheartedly plays along for the money. "You can't imagine how I dread leaving you," Mrs. Copperfield tells her startled new friend just after meeting her. "I honestly don't know how I'll be able to stand it . . .  I'm so terrified you might simply vanish." "She wants to stop thinking," says Pacifica, the whore, as she struggles to explain Mrs.
Copperfield to a male customer. When Mrs. Copperfield suddenly throws back her head and starts to bellow a song, the john asks politely, "Did you ever sing in a club?" She answers happily, "Actually I didn't. But when I was in the mood, I used to sing very loudly in a restaurant and attract a good bit of attention."

[caption id="attachment_21894" align="aligncenter" width="200" caption="Jane Bowles"]

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When the Copperfields' friend the wealthy widow Mrs. Goering gives up her family estate to move into a run down house in the country, with a bunch of hangers-on in order to find her "little idea of salvation," she realizes even this impulsive action is not enough. So she decides to go on a little adventure to explore the seamy nightlife of towns both near and far. But Mrs. Goering seems to bring out unexpected hostility in other people. When she tries to make small talk to a woman on a train, this stranger reacts with unexpected anger. "I won't stand for this another moment," she yells. "I have enough real grief in my life without having to encounter lunatics." Even the conductor joins in the furious scolding of Mrs. Goering. "You can't talk to anyone on this train, unless you know them," he lectures. "The next time you're on the train stay in your seat . . .  and tell this to your relatives and your friends." Unaffected, Mrs. Goering gets off the train and fearlessly enters a crummy bar, where she meets Andy, a motley bum, and immediately falls in love and moves in with him the next night. "You're some lunatic," Andy marvels, and he's right! After living with Andy for just eight days, Mrs. Goering dumps him to run off with a fat businessman named Ben who drives a hearselike car and mistakenly thinks that she is working as a prostitute. Andy moans, "You, as a decent human being, cannot do this to me." "Well, I'm afraid I can, Andy," Mrs. Goering replies. "I have my own star to follow, you know."

When Mrs. Goering and Mrs. Copperfield reunite at the end of the book in a hotel bar, accompanied by their inappropriate love interests, these serious ladies' blurting out of rude truths reaches a crescendo of loony reasoning. "I am completely satisfied and contented," the deluded and cluelessly loyal Mrs. Copperfield announces even as her supposed girlfriend Pacifica runs off to meet a boyfriend she has announced she plans to marry. When the fat businessman Ben totally ignores the smitten Mrs. Goering and leaves her stranded at the hotel, he barely notices her distress. "Hey, you," he calls out to her as he gets in his car to leave, "I forgot about you. I've got to go big distances on some important business. I don't know when I'll be back. Good-bye." Both women respond with astonishing rationales. "True enough, I have gone to pieces," Mrs. Copperfield explains, "which is the thing I've wanted to do for years." "Certainly I am nearer to being a saint," Mrs. Goering reflects, and I for one believe her.

CHECK BACK TOMORROW FOR PART FIVE: IVY COMPTON-BURNETT

Role Models by John Waters, is published by Beautiful Books on 2 December 2010. John will be signing copies of Role Models at Waterstones, Piccadilly, London at 1pm on Saturday 4th December.

Top photo: © Greg Gorman