MALE TROUBLE

Mixed Media

Leonard Michaels's new collection is a chronicle of sexual angst and blown opportunity

JAMES WOLCOTT

Before Harold Brodkey blotted out the sun with his big head (he says it's his head, and I believe him), Leonard Michaels was Jewish-American literature's most promising pain specialist— the man most likely to succeed Philip Roth in the X-ray room. He wrote with a crybaby wince as his characters plunged cursing down a shallow abyss. Like Roth, Michaels diagnosed their precipitous drop as part of a larger crisis. Life had storm-walled literature, catching its victims unprepared. In a story from his first collection, Going Places, a Turk rapes a college student, "forcing her to variations of what she never heard of though she was a great reader of avantgarde novels and philosophical commentaries on the modern predicament.

(His ironic ellipsis.) But if modernism proved no match for the return of the repressed, postmodernism made an even punier peep. "I'm skinny and nervous and finicky. . . I have problems with sublimity. I'm not Kafka," admits a Michaels mouthpiece in his second collection, / Would Have Saved Them if I Could. His flayed mind purified by the heat of his afflicted body until his eyes became hypnotic black dots, Kafka— Roth's hero too—is the patron saint of the penitential. In his new book, Shuffle (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Michaels invokes Kafka sitting at his desk imagining huge spikes driving into his knees. But for Michaels those spikes shoot from the bed of the crazy woman he was crazy enough to marry. Like Roth, he writes like a man who's been permanently speared.

Not that sex in Michaels's stories was ever a place where swans washed their wings. Granted, he usually presents the glamour pusses in his fiction as perfume inserts, glossy pictures with clingy scents. But his seducer's knack for insinuation is a smooth cover for a stem inner command structure. Women twist but wish to be tied. So train them: "No teeth," yells one man as he presses down on a woman's head. "Watch the teeth." Rein them: "Her admiration of me extended to orgasm. Even beyond. It was not unmixed with fear." Taking a tip from Mailer and Hemingway, Michaels depicts bagging a well-bred woman as a form of big-game hunting. In "The Captain," one of those paganbanquets-as-the-breakdown-of-society allegories (it reads like a rehearsal for a Peter Greenaway film), his alter ego, Phillip, buggers a bored rich socialite in a roomful of safari trophies: "She noticed smears, said, 'Shit,' and ran off to change." Relations between men and women are never relaxed, because the sexes are enmeshed in an inexplicable power play. His men try to master women physically because mentally these wounded creatures can't be fathomed. Their minds are caldrons of static, or so it seems from the male side. Hence the bravado of Michaels's men is mostly bluff. They're kept forever offstride by women's mood swings. Outwardly, they act like lion tamers. Inwardly, they develop a foxhole mentality.

This was the neurotic bond that made brothers of the characters in The Men's Club.

A Jules Feifferish jam session about the suppressed nature of male neediness, Michaels's 1981 novel suffers from stagy hysterics, his besetting fault as a writer. The Men's Club is so hermetic and mannered that only a mad dreamer could have considered it a movie property. But there are always dreamers out there wearing a hatful of rain, and Michaels was signed to adapt The Men's Club for the screen. In an article in the now defunct Movies magazine, he described how he completely gutted his novel, adding female roles, etc., and started studying movies.

There was more than professional ambition involved in his makeover of The Men's Club. A screenwriter he met at a party told him how he had been offered fabulous money, endless cocaine, and a famous beauty for a script. Such temptations hit Michaels hard. "In a dark chamber of my soul, I contemplated the money, cocaine, woman,. . .me." (His awestruck ellipsis.) In a subsequent article, he recounted a brief tour of the fast lane, where women were offered like sticks of gum. Eyeing the whole pack, Michaels realized he was outgunned. In Hollywood, hunger for fame gave the women a hardwood gloss. Their coked nostrils also flared for power. He was a short-story writer and a faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley. They might allow a sunburned producer the delight of hearing the tinkle of their ankle bracelets at dawn, but a prof with a coffin pallor? Strictly for coeds. The sigh in Michaels's eyes as he took in the scene—"I saw the host go into the pool house with two beautiful girls"— told you that he coveted a sultan's perks, an outside shot at becoming one of screenwriting's slumming superpaid Playboy philosophers (you know, like Robert Towne).

Proof of which is how he went gaga in the same article over some starlet named Audrey who used Flashdance as her videotext on the power of positive thinking. "She had a very good eye for clothes, and, whatever she put on, materials seemed to lie against her body as if they liked it." Michaels wrote as if he wanted to be one of those materials. But she had a boyfriend, to Michaels's dismay, who let her run around loose, to his even greater dismay. "If I lived with Audrey, I'd have kept her home, bound and gagged," he declared, ever the romantic.

Michaels was heading for a fall. Hollywood was about to hand him the booby prize. The making of The Men's Club proved to be a cranky, mutinous affair, with Michaels banned from the set for wearing squeaky loafers. When the movie was released, it reflected this turmoil and tons of other terrible feelings. Shrill, edited with a coupon clipper, shoving ugly truths at our smug bourgeois mugs, The Men's Club resembled one of those buddy-buddy psychodramas John Cassavetes used to direct, only in rotten color and with running mascara. (And not just on the actresses—Frank Langella disgraced himself in drag.) The movie was a travesty of Michaels's novel and of itself. A long whorehouse sequence, not in the book, was like a bad acid trip in the back of a pimpmobile. Michaels was mortified. After a screening (as he confided in yet another Men's Club-related memoir) he staggered into the street, dazed and defeated, wishing he could grow cataracts on the eyes of his soul. Extreme? Perhaps. But for him it wasn't a setback, it was a blown opportunity, blown so badly it couldn't be recouped. The Men's Club was his shot at the stars. Failure followed him down the driveway as his sulky shadow hunched its shoulders. Farewell, Hollywood. Farewell, pool house. Farewell, Lassie. Time to return to literature and squirrel away those bittersweet ironies.

While the failure of The Men's Club may have lowered Michaels's morale, it hiked his style collar-high. Gone were the Gordon Lish-like provocations, the punchy colloquialisms. He now treated his voice as a venerable instrument. His venerable instrument carries about eight coats of varnish at the beginning of Shuffle, his first book in nearly a decade. An autobiographical grab bag, Shuffle (as in Shakespeare's "shuffle off this mortal coil") begins with a journal in which he uses the white space of the page as a screen. There's no flow between entries, only a sharp click. It's like sitting through a slide show entitled "The Many Moods of Leonard Michaels." Only everything's so brown, as his moods consist of chagrin, defeat, despair, pusillanimous anxiety, and claustrophobic dread ("He farted. The tight space became noxiously suffocating").

Adopting the fin de siècle dolor of a deadbeat intellectual, Michaels dodges direct action and detours down a difficult lane pebbled with erudite droppings from Montaigne, Pavese, and Plato. "Plato says the face is a picture of the soul." Au contraire, mon frere, replies Michaels. "The human face, with its probing looks and receptive smiles, is a sexual organ." Lending credence to his breakthrough theory is the behavior of one of his bedmates, who tells him as he hugs her waist, "I want to pull your whole head into my cunt." (She says it's his head, and I believe her.) This radical re-entry, birth-in-reverse, is part of Michaels's in-through-the-out-door policy regarding sex.

Afterwards, afterwards, it is more desolating than when a good movie ends or you finish a marvelous book. We should say "going," not "coming." Anyhow, the man should say, "Oh, God, I'm going, I'm going."

To which one can hear the women of America moaning, "Going? You only just got here!"

The Many Moods of Leonard Michaels also features strictly routine memoirs of Michaels's mother and father, snapshots from the family album to supply a sepia touch to the journal. But then the brown funk darkens to complete black, and the book finally seizes interest. Shuffle pulls down the blinds with "Sylvia," a blow-by-blow recap of Michaels's Strindbergian marriage to Sylvia Bloch. Fated to be mated, they met in Greenwich Village the summer of 1960. The moment he saw her brush her wet bohemian hair, "the question of what to do with my life was resolved for the next four years." Those four years turned out to be a sneak preview of hell. Not so much a wifely woman as a batlike projection of male paranoia beaming off the rafters, Sylvia spits on his shirts, hurls spaghetti at him, sends him out after midnight to buy sanitary napkins, hints at doing him damage in his sleep. And yet even after a doctor said she ought to be committed, Michaels opted for moral inertia. His weaselly explanation: "I felt confirmed in my suspicions and was very high as I ran to the subway, sobbing a little, running back to my madwoman. I'd been strengthened by new, positive knowledge, and a sense of connection to the wisdom of our healing institutions. As a result, nothing changed."

Until she got worse. Smashing at her face in the mirror with a metal ashtray, she told him, "You (smash) don't (smash) love (smash) me (smash). But you will miss me." To make sure he would miss her, Sylvia eventually made a last meal out of nearly four dozen Seconals. Could he have prevented her suicide by being more of a helpmate when it counted? Could anyone? Those left behind can only stare at their empty hands. Anything you say later is just words.

At least this time Michaels has armed his words to tell a story to its full tragic trajectory. Forget the spikes. When "Sylvia" appeared in Vanity Fair, it read as if Michaels were writing with his feet planted on a burning floor. Still does. But, boy, are his priorities screwed on wrong. If he had begun this book with "Sylvia," he might have built a besieged stone castle of a writer's hopes, doubts, vanities, loves, and runaway dreams worthy of Kafka's worst fears. Instead he expects the reader to chase miles of incense smoke from his precious journal before reaching the exorcism of "Sylvia." The result is that Shuffle slams shut just when it should explode open. Another blown opportunity. But what can you expect from a man who doesn't know whether he's coming or going? At least now we have a better understanding of what rattled his brain.