Wendy Cowles Husser

Too Many Men, Too Little Time

Read at the Chicago Literary Club

17 December 2007

No woman was ever ruined by a book.

Jimmy Walker, NY

(1881-1946)

Good December evening. I am very flattered to have been asked to present a paper about men. An event like this happens very infrequently to me, and if I survive this, I hope to do it again.

I am here as a member of the Chicago Literary Club because Peggy Sullivan encouraged me to join this wonderful group about five years ago (she must be our permanent recruiter by now). I am here, on this particular night, though, for the simple reason that actually highlights my very theme. I could not say no to Paul Ruxin. Well, I mean, I could not say no to his invitation to speak. In literature, however, as in love, both fitting topics for the tastes of this sophisticated gathering, we are always astonished at what is chosen by another. Eh?

As brief background, I am the daughter of a man who had two brothers; his father was one of seven boys; my own brothers number three; I married a man who was one of two boys only; he and I had three boys only; those three boys of mine also are parents of three boys (one lone girl – but- she plays soccer). Who could a girl grow to know and love but boys/men?

Ah, men. I was practically damaged goods right from the start.

And there were compounding nurture factors: When I was 10, my handsome, unmarried, 26 year old uncle took me with my parents to a nightclub in Rochester, NY, for a special birthday celebration for me. This was a real “night” club, The Triton. I mean they even had a band. My uncle danced with me and people at other dinner tables were looking at us. I asked my uncle: “Do you think that they think we are boyfriend and girlfriend?” Painfully I recall this because it haunted me that any one could ever have been that stupid. But oh, I loved my Uncle Al…Ah, Men.

Now, right here at the beginning, I want you to start thinking the right way. And here is what I want you to remember: A woman can be sexually attracted to many men in her life (that sentence is from “What Every Woman Knows,” Act I of a play from 1908) and you are going to hear this again, so keep it in mind, eh? A woman can be sexually attracted to many men in her life….I think that the first of my inamorata is going to be a disappointment for you to hear about because he lacks the more interesting lust-filled rapturous times that would come later, but remember, I was in my mid teens, working as a volunteer shelf-reader in the adult book section of the Edgerton Branch Public Library. I had to start with someone, and I found Frank Yerby and his Foxes of Harrow; I was launched on my lifelong non paying career, if you will. He was my first stepping stone to many men and to discovering how little time there really is.

And a decade after this, with several flirtations, but nothing really lusty happening, I fell deeply, lastingly, forever and ever, for two men at the same time and with the same approach to what would become increasingly meaningful to me personally, and in my life’s work. The perfect men for a puritan woman. I am quoting now from William Strunk and Elywn White, two men who provided me most of my Elements of Style.

Style takes its final shape more from attitudes of mind

than from principles of composition, for, as an elderly

practitioner once remarked, ‘writing is an act of faith, not

a trick of grammar.’

The love affair with these intellectual men taught me that sentences should have no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, and, all of this for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines, and, of course, a machine would want no unnecessary parts. William Strunk has been perhaps my longest and most constant love, certainly more than 35 years…and even with many more interesting and playful affairs, he remains a man I return to for solid goodness. I like to think that I a still retain a certain sense of style because of these two men.

But: On With the Story.

Once Upon a Time, at The End of the Road, I came across a Baltimorean Sot Weed Factor, John Barth. Oh Lordy, I fell fast and hard. I was bedazzled, bewitched, and bestirred. An affair in full bloom – a girl could practically die from it. I was succumbed by the outrageous Sheherezade stories with Pocahontas and John Smith emerging through Ebenezer Cooke, I spent time with the artful and Barth-madeup language of Barth, after Barth, after Barth. But Coming Soon, I had that clarity, you know, the clarity that comes with a sudden absence of desire? I mean that absence of desire gave a girl time to think. What was a girl to do? I had to give him up. He was dismayed and a little hurt because it’s hugely unlikely that someone from Johns Hopkins would summarily be let go. But it was time to move on, I was sated with that language and there were too many men in the future, and too little time, to linger in, well, uh, let’s say it, ‘Balmore.’

At about this point in my emotional growth, I thought I Was Mary Dunne, and soon became enamored with Brian Moore, he of the 20+ novels. The way a writer uses language tells us about his spirit, his appetites, his capacities. Mary Dunne is the nearly unbearably intimate story of one day in the life of one woman; I can remember where I sat reading it and what impact it had. I kept saying to myself, looking again at the title page to be sure, this was written by a MAN. Oh, what a man. I adored him for the sensitivity and truthfulness he could portray. An old poet friend said that truth was beauty, beauty truth. And so it was. I was bereft when Brian died just as our Chicago Caxton Club Nobel reading group included him in our list of must reads for the Nobel Prize in literature. (Bereft as I was, it was confirming that I had made some good choices in men). Well, that is, uh, in literature.

My first and only employer until I moved to Chicago in 1996 was the University of Rochester, and again, I found the best of both worlds; on the River Campus (where I did graduate work in English Literature) were men and books; at the medical campus (where I worked to support three small boys and me) there were men and books, and men in books, and men writing books. What was a naïf grown woman to do? Even though the men were surgeons, I was able to develop a male reading pal or two (but that really is ANOTHER STORY – one that will not be read here EVER). And my task tonight is to provide the REST OF THE STORY at hand.

I studied Milton during my early working years and discovered something I’ll bet very few among this august gathering know: all the endings to Milton’s lines are masculine. Imagine this? Despite his shortcomings of blindness, and, apparently, deeply innate chauvinism, and the fact that he was 400 years older than me, I adored him, his mind, and grew immeasurably during the time John and I spent in our own kind of Paradise Lost.

At this point I grew restless, and spent a quiet and restorative few months where A River Runs Through It, with Norman Maclean, but his relationship with his brother overshadowed the, uh, well, let’s call it fishing for substance between us. But that was early in my adventures, and anyway, I was looking for more unbridled experiences. Two Puritans did not a combustion make. I already was pretty certain that there was too little time. By now I knew that there was absolutely too little time; I was not sure that there were ever too many men, however.

Now, each time I fell in love or lust, it was never with just your average, decent, next door lawn-mowing nice guy. Oh no, I ventured where angels fear to tread, right up to Harvard grads, Guggenheim Fellows, Nobel Laureates. With my youthful and childlike daring as an undergrad, I had early-on embraced the avant-garde fad in my Presbyterian undergraduate school. As an aside, even though I was Anglican, we attended Presbyterian Chapel every day at 8:11am.

Well then along came Edward. It is so sad that he died almost before I could tell him how aroused I’d become with his erotic blend of typography and picture- painting poetry. Oh yes, I was ripe for the kill for Edward Estlin, aka e.e. cummings, celebrator of love, sex, rebirth. (aside: operation in Rochester colectomy in lower case) See what I mean about men and books etc, even in the medical center. I was surrounded.

e e cummings’s poetry was full of:

you and I and everyone who’s we:

I carry your heart with me (I carry it in

my heart) I am never without it (anywhere

I go you go, my dear; and whatever is done

by only me is your doing, my darling)

But the wise and funny words that really lured me (humor is a the sexiest, isn’t it) is one poem I can’t locate, but recite from memory and in those youthful, untainted days, we all loved this:

As Joe Gould says in his terrifyingly human manner,

The only reason every girl should go to college is

So that she can never say, Oh if I’d ownly gawn to college

Some loves and losses later, on a flight from Rochester to Arizona, for some reason I renewed an old relationship with an Everyman, a man with a deep Human Stain indeed, to say nothing of a Plot Against America. Although I was indifferent to his lures earlier, when Portnoy was complaining, when he was a sensation, I now read Patrimony and I cried for the length of that flight. I readjusted my goals immediately and found time for one more man. This is from Patrimony, Philip Roth: and here he is describing a scene with his terminally ill father, and quintessentially Roth, he in involved in every hiccup, nuance, clothing faux pas, bowel movement, etc.

These teeth were the new ones, made for the lower right side of

his mouth. Because of the facial disfigurement, the dentist was

having a lot of trouble fitting them precisely; only two days

earlier, out taking a walk with me, my father had yanked

them from his mouth – these God damn things. Too many teeth.

But then when he had them in his hand he didn’t know what to do with them.

Here, I said, give them to me, and I took the dentures and stuck them in my

pocket. To my astonishment, having them in my own hand was utterly

satisfying….I had, quite inadvertently, stepped across the divide of

physical estrangement that, not so unnaturally, had opened up between

us once I’d stopped being a boy. (Here Roth goes on to discuss holding slimy false teeth in his hand…..)

I think I wanted Philip as a lover because he was interested in the aesthetic jolt you get inside the story, to say nothing of the fact that his words are so delicious running around in the back of your throat as you read. But we fought too often; he did not like parts of my reticent expression, if you take my meaning, and even if the erotic reverberations were wonderful and exhilarating, they also were tiring and trying. I admired him for believing that there were no demarcations in literature, no black, no Jewish, no feminine literature, and believing that “everyone who opens a book enters the story without noticing these labels.” But I was worn out, really had had enough. Well, I told him I simply had to move on, so in New York at Columbus, I said Goodbye and made my Exit Ghost moves.

At this point, if there was any love that emphasized my ‘so little time’ theme, it was my 10 year intense and meaningful relationship with Sherman Alexie. I was sexually growing up, and I craved his ruthless intensity. I soon learned he was The Toughest Indian in The World, and played a huge part in the Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. Not only the toughest Indian in the world, but the First Indian on the Moon and he was playing Ten Little Indians, and discussing Reservation Blues with his pals in Old Shirts and New Skins. And one time, after the Business of Fancy Dancing, we had some private and soft moments when he told me about a sad time in his life; this is called

Sociology

Waiting in line for U.S. Commodities

I fell in love

with an Indian woman and her six kids

loading up a truck

with the maximum allowance.

I took her hand

and helped her into the cab

and drove them home

where my minimum wage

raised the household income

and lowered our benefits

When the cheese was gone

she told me to leave.

But the real reason I loved Sherman so much was not that he was young, articulate, educated, and handsome in that boyish Coeur d’Alene Indian way (will we ever forget his Smoke Signals movie) but he was so deep and so facile with words, and so confounded himself by generations of internal wounds; this is called Evolution:

Buffalo Bill opens a pawn shop on the reservation

right across the border from the liquor store

and he stays open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week

and the Indians come running in with jewelry

television sets, a VCR, a full length beaded buckskin

outfit it took Ines Muse 12 years to finish. Buffalo Bill

takes everything the Indians have to offer, keeps it

all catalogued and filed in a storage room. The Indians

pawn their hands, saving the thumbs for last, they pawn

their skeletons, falling endlessly from the skin

and when the last Indian has pawned everything

but his heart, Buffalo Bill takes that for twenty bucks

closes up the pawn shop, paints a new sign over the old

calls his venture THE MUSEUM OF NATIVE

AMERICAN CULTURES

charges the Indians five bucks a head to enter.

Now to prove what I mentioned at the beginning of this talk, about women being sexually attracted to many men in life, another of my fulfilling lovers was a man much older than the youthful Sherman, but oh, so intense and rewarding. I had many Conversations with William Styron. And, as an aside, again, my home city and university of Rochester, NY played a critical role. As badly and wrongly as Styron was bashed after his Confessions of Nat Turner, interestingly, it was a huge voice from my university, Eugene Genovese (who went on to become the preeminent historian of American slavery). Genovese issued a massive rebuttal to the critics who lashed out against a white writer describing a black experience. I briefly thought about moving my affections to a more winning side, but cravings got the better of me. It’s funny, isn’t it - brains are sexier than anything, in the long run, eh? Sadly, Styron died, but for the time we had, he was one of my deepest, most intense, rewarding loves, and the loss of him is hard to discuss even now. Roth mentions in Exit Ghost, that great love later in life comes at cross-purposes to everything. I’ll bet that a few of us can attest to that little aphorism, eh?

Well, for a while, I was buoyed by Edgar, rather on the rebound. I think what mesmerized me was not what he said, but the kind of dreamscapes he created. True, he was a New Yorker (my absolute unraveling), and he was from the Bronx High School of Science and did graduate work at Columbia. Now how could a shikza from upstate New York resist?? What was a girl to do? He was older than me, more educated than I’d even dreamed I would be, and I think I felt rather like “Rita” ready to be educated in some interesting ways….

Well my syncopated rhythm moved to his Ragtime, in a big-time way. I think I loved EL Doctorow because he used fiction to open up and provide the real colors to history. But mostly it was because characters lived in those dreamy tones of his. Like all good things, it did come to an end for the time being - for the time being - because occasionally that desire came back and I repeated that satisfying love affair. He never seemed to want to get rid of me either. A smart man. Remember, even though he was a repeat, he counts as only one man, but time was still fleeing into an ever increasing horizon.

About this same time, and maybe the reason that my desire for EL was ebbing, I met The Moviegoer and he really was The Last Gentleman I was to know (a southerner). Walker Percy studied Kierkegaard, and Dostoevsky, questioning the ability of science to explain basic mysteries of human existence, he converted to Catholicism (well, I had to avoid that issue) gave up as a physician, and became a writer. So he was more interested in the soul than the body, which, we admit, has its good and its not so good points; my soul was just fine, thank you very much. I was NOT worrying at that point about my soul. Well our love got Lost in the Ruins but I did hang on through a Second Coming, and I remember the awe of being able to connect with his characters, however; the ordinariness of them was a confirmation to me in those unsophisticated years. This from Walker Percy, the man once quoted as saying “why has the South produced so many good writers? Because we got beat.” Anyway this from Percy:

I had discovered that most people have no one to talk to, no one, that is, who

really wants to listen. When it does dawn on a man that you really want to hear about his business, the look that comes over his face is something to see.

Of course, Percy (PERCY? where is Rhett when you need him) was a southerner, and given that, and his Church with the capital C, and his National Endowment for the Humanities award, we parted as characters in an unfair fight. I have to say in all honesty that my flaws probably outstripped even his interest in flawed characters. I mean I might have been, as they say, something else. Another aside I have to read to you is a quotation from the author Pat Conroy, yes, another man, but not one of mine in THAT sense. This gratuitous humor insertion:

My mother, Southern to the bone, once told me:

All Southern literature can be summed up in these words:

‘On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard

What Daddy did to Sister.’ She raised me up to be a Southern writer,

But it wasn’t easy.

I mention a truly fascinating lover who endured only briefly because right after this I plunged into deep and long-lasting forays with Asian lovers. Jose Saramago and I met in The Cave, and after we confessed everything from our erotic pasts, revealing All the Names, a kind of Blindness came over me, possibly because of the bad air in the cave, but for whatever reasons, I simply could not see what I originally saw. So, sated, for a time, I again had that clarity I mentioned, you know, the one that comes from the absence of desire, and I traveled on.

I went romantically to Turkey where I stood out because My Name Is Red. ‘Knowing’ Orhan Pamuk, a terrifyingly intense, articulate, and intelligent man is a lifetime high in my amorous excursions. Talk about celebrated virtue (I speak here of his, not mine) and this with at least a couple of wives so far. But after we frolicked in the Snow, I began to tire of his coldness, apartness, and anyway, he was so busy writing he had little time for me really. Faulkner said about writers: “Everything goes by the boards; humor, pride, decency….to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.” Well that, in capsule form was my Orhan. A Nobel Prize and wives later, however, I still have to say: not bad, not bad, Ah, men

And now, about the Asian experiences. I saw Japan through Yasunari Kawabata

(I know, my penchant for highly placed men is showing again with yet another Nobel Laureate, but I have to aim high for the little time I can have…I can’t suffer fools, after all), I encountered Kawabata on The First Snow on Fuji, in the Snow Country, where I watched a Thousand Cranes, and, later, the Master of Go. These experiences remain so beautiful and so delicate and so filled with subtle psychology acting on me, they are difficult to discuss openly.

Kenzaburo Oe was another attempt on my part to really understand the Japanese sensitivity. And once again, I had to deal with a Nobel Prize winner (1994). We had A Quiet Life; it was A Personal Matter for us, and as with all his writing, everything was personal first and then linked to society, the state, and the world. What a magnificent education I received. And that is as much as I am willing to undress, ah, that is, address at this time.

Kazuo Ishiguro won my heart at The Remains of the Day, and I beseeched him to Never Let Me Go. Sadly, even though I was one of the Unconsoled, we did part. After all he had a wife and so many awards he really could not concentrate on me; and once he began the movie with Isabella Rossellini, I decided, quite sagely, to move along.

It was time for real passion and adventure…I found time to fly with the Wind-up Bird Chronicles that Haruki Murakami provided me. I say this cautiously (because there are more men to come) but Haruki was probably the most sexually adventurous of all my inamorati. Here are words from a review that I could have written: “That he manages, in his sexual explicitness, to make intimacy real – appealing and un-embarrassing, innocent even ….” Well, he was a tad younger than me, but oh so amazingly gifted, if you take my meaning here, and that probably accounts for the short -lived fantasy, and, I mean, given the language barrier and all. Full disclosure; he writes in Japanese but often is the translator into English for his own Japanese readership. He lived in the US for many years. It is likely, actually, that he lives like there is too little time and too few women, at least that’s what I took from this man with a voracious appetite.

So I took a brief respite from all the shadows of Murakami, the sadness of Oe, and that withheld demeanor of Ishiguro, and stayed in the good old USA with a recuperative Book. I recently read that:

The word book is found with variations of form and gender

in all the Teutonic languages, the original form postulated for it

being a strong feminine Bo˚ks, which must have been used in the sense

of a writing tablet. The most obvious connection of this is

with the old English boc, a beech tree, and though this is not

free from philological difficulties, no probable alternative has

been suggested. [AW Pollard, “Book” 11^th Edt Encyclopedia Britannica]

Well Bob Grudin and I spent some linguistically parrying, intellectually-daring, and always laughing times out in Oregon. Oregon, I mean you have to laugh, eh? I am an easy mark for a PhD with a facile mind, and words are so sexy anyway, what was a girl to do? But after the amusement and intellectual sparring, I was and am still hoping for more amore. But through it all

“A book is the only place where you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face.” [Edward P Morgan 1910-1993] And you can have a torrid arm chair love life that goes on and on and on.

Now I leave you with the opening words that I hope you remember. Okay?

What was that phrase? A woman can be sexually attracted to many men in her life;

but she can only truly adore about 50.

Amen.