The Well of Togetherness
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
WRITERS&WRITING The Well of Togetherness By Stanley Edgar Hyman Freud saw homosexuality as a stage of development on the way to heterosexual genitality, and he regarded anyone who stopped...
...when he is tossed into a cell, his cellmates carve him an imitation denture out of orange peel...
...His has not been a triumphant progress, but then comedy seldom chronicles triumph...
...Are those fellows talking about this book...
...The deeper indecency that homosexuality masks in Radcliffe is class, which is England's dirty mystery (as ours is race...
...A scene in which Radcliffe and another man empty a public latrine is truly nauseating, as is a scene in which Tolson tricks Radcliffe into biting into a sandwich filled with Tolson's excrement...
...An astonishing achievement A major work of art It establishes David Storey as the leading novelist of his generation," said Jeremy Brooks in the Daily Telegraph...
...At the book's end Paul confesses: "I don't even know what I am any more-sexually, I mean...
...Even suicide is imaged as jumping out of a high window at night, into "the great negro throat...
...the thrill of the servants' entrance...
...Here is a girl in a latrine: "She paused there a moment to an accompanying sound of jetted liquid, then re-arranging her clothes and without a glance at either of the three men, except for a brief frenzied smile at Leonard, she squeezed out between the four cans standing in the doorway...
...It would be where it is, I think...
...Radcliffe (Coward-McCann, 377 pp., $4.95), by David Storey, the author of This Sporting Life, is one of the worst novels that I have ever read...
...Paul's last word from Belinda is that she is leaving for the Crimea with a Soviet woman doctor named Sonya, but that she will eventually return to England and her marriage...
...Paul's first sight when he disembarks is a toothless man, "his bare gums like polished coral...
...But if one is to explore these nowfashionable watering places, how much better to explore them with comedy, with style...
...This emancipation comes somewhat too late for me, alas, but I can read novels about it, and I have just read two English ones...
...Radcliffe of course kisses the wound, and stumbles home bloodymouthed and saintly...
...thus he is probably the person most responsible for the gradual change in our climate of opinion, however much he might not have welcomed it...
...All of this guilty filth, in Storey's view, must eventually be washed away in blood...
...Once you've started you're always wanting it...
...It is Honey for the Bears (Norton, 256 pp., $3.95), by Anthony Burgess, whose powerful A Clockwork Orange I praised in these pages last year [January 7, 1963...
...It is as though all experience were translated into violation of the mouth, rarely painless but always funny...
...I shall not attempt to synopsize its plot, which is preposterous beyond recounting...
...The book is terribly funny, mainly at the expense of Soviet humorlessness...
...Nevertheless, Freud convinced the world of the existence of repressed homosexual impulses in all of us...
...Storey has not made it as an intellectual with me, it is true, but there is no doubt that he has made it with the English reviewers...
...Our sexual passive has finally become active, masochist has turned sadist, and all is purged...
...Paul rejects the idea, but it turns out later that he not only knew Robert's bisexual nature, but had sex relations of an unspecified sort with him when they were in the service...
...WRITERS&WRITING The Well of Togetherness By Stanley Edgar Hyman Freud saw homosexuality as a stage of development on the way to heterosexual genitality, and he regarded anyone who stopped off along the way as retarded and perverse...
...The attraction that Tolson has for Radcliffe is the attraction that Mellors has for Connie Chatterley: the fabled virility of the working class...
...Paul does manage one triumph...
...Like Radcliffe, Paul is a masochist, but comedy saves him...
...Murder or suicide?," and Paul promptly replies: "Oh, murder, I think...
...What has shattered his sexual identity is Paul's three discoveries abroad: that his beautiful American wife Belinda wants from him sex practices that he considers perverse, instead of what he proudly calls "the roast beef of Old England...
...For Burgess, homosexuality is not furtive and glum, but open and comic...
...then that she has acquired these tastes in an affair with Robert's wife Sandra...
...Afterwards Tolson tells Radcliffe: "Why, you're like a woman...
...When Paul asks a Russian girl, "Where would that be?," she reproves him in the voice of the Duchess in Wonderland: "That is very funny English...
...Storey's prose is so unclear that one can seldom tell exactly what is happening...
...Radcliffe in that he has made it as an intellectual...
...It is Belinda's freedom from guilt that holds out what hope there is for Paul...
...When he tries to rape a young Russian girl named Anna, he isn't able to go through with it (it is like trying to eat a live frog sandwich, he decides), but even Anna agrees that the attempt is to his credit...
...The ship on which the Husseys travel to Leningrad contains a considerable homosexual population...
...Radcliffe is an allegory of self-love, since both characters embody the author: Tolson in that he is a brawny lad of working-class origins...
...When a Soviet detective beats Paul up, the denture is lost...
...then that Sandra was not the first such affair...
...You can't do without it...
...Thus, ultimately, Radcliffe beats Tolson to death with Tolson's hammer, repeatedly smashing the claw end into his head as the blood gushes out...
...And so on...
...The other recent English novel about homosexuality is as remote as one can imagine from Radcliffe...
...Tolson's characteristic amorous address to Radcliffe is: "You bugger, I want you...
...A Russian detective tells Paul that his dead friend Robert, the inventor of the dress smuggle, was a "gomosexual...
...The problem here seems to be that male homosexuality, insofar as it is anal, has come to be identified with the excretory, the shameful, and the disgusting...
...Belinda's "rich honeyed plumpness,' not the drilon dresses, is truly the honey that Paul has brought for the bears...
...On its deepest level...
...Later Paul gets drunk at a party of young Russians and makes passes at the men...
...Perhaps...
...Tolson wins and keeps Radcliffe's heart by bashing him in the cheek with his hammer, tearing his wrist open while they kiss, raping his virgin sister, bashing him in the face again when challenged about the sister, and finally raping him orally, I think (again, the language is so unclear that it is hard to tell...
...Tolson then proceeds to demonstrate his own finer feelings by urinating in a corner of the room and breaking wind...
...He holds it in with matchstick wedges, then with a folded tram-ticket, finally with chewing gum...
...Lest all this not seem quite Dostoevskian enough, the rape is followed by a tableau in which Kathleen sees Radcliffe to the door, and as a farewell gesture slices the ball of her thumb so that it jets blood...
...If Radcliffe is a camp Raskolnikov, Tolson is a camp Heathcliff...
...Paul gets his ear boxed by the detective because he is a homoerotic masochist, but ultimately so that Burgess can call the pain "loudly hosannaing frostbite.' With the denture gone, Paul's mouth shows "blackness in which red flickered, flanked by wolfish infangthief and outfangthief...
...Only once in his life does he make it with a girl (or perhaps he doesn't...
...That is when a young mother named Kathleen rapes him while Tolson watches through the window, having been put up to watching (as Kathleen was put up to raping) by Kathleen's eccentric old bisexual father, who is also the father of her three illegitimate children...
...The other form that the universal Russian violence takes is to threaten Paul's mouth...
...To avoid so expensive a term as "tragedy" for this worthless trash, let us say that Storey sees homosexuality glumly, as degradation and guilt...
...When the Husseys eat in a Leningrad restaurant besieged by stilyagi (young hoodlums), Paul imagines them as the inhabitants of Sodom, demanding that Lot give up Paul to them...
...A stranger accosts Paul in a restaurant to ask, "Ernest Gemingway...
...Burgess' Russians watch spiders in order to admire "Soviet arachnidial engineering...
...Radcliffe is a camp Raskolnikov, as his name hints...
...I have space for only one example, but in the unloveliness of its detail, the imprecision and leadenness of its diction, the clumsiness of its construction, and the faults of its grammar and syntax, it perfectly represent's Storey's style...
...A major work of literature in achievement towering above his contemporaries,' said Arthur Calder-Marshall in the Financial Times...
...Honey for the Bears is as obsessively oral as Radcliffe is anal...
...And showing it, too...
...Kathleen's father then disposes of whatever guilt remains on the scene by cutting the throats of his wife, his daughter, his three children by her, and himself...
...In the book's key scene, Tolson and Radcliffe leave their companions downstairs in Radcliffe's ancestral mansion, and run upstairs for a quick bit of sodomy on the floor...
...Because Paul's denture cement has been confiscated by a customs officer, his denture keeps popping out...
...The ideal is carefree bisexuality, an enlargement of possibility, and we are led to hope that Paul may yet achieve it...
...Suffice to say that it deals with a passionate relationship between Leonard Radcliffe, a puny upper-class homosexual intellectual, and Victor Tolson, a giant working-class bisexual bruiser...
...Honey for the Bears is a farcical melodrama about the misadventures of Paul Hussey, an English antique dealer, in his efforts to dispose of 20 dozen drilon dresses he has smuggled into Leningrad...
...His courtship of Radcliffe is an endless series of brutal acts...
...An erotic image...
...Now such Utopian Freudians as Norman O. Brown call for the unrepression of our polymorphous perverse natures, and such romantic Rousseauians as Norman Mailer clamor for full functional bisexuality...
...Wherever Paul goes in Leningrad, some big strong peasant woman in authority bullies him or beats him...
...Worse than anything else in Radcliffe is the author's prose...
...If homosexuality masks deeper fascinations with class and self in Storey, it conceals a lifetime romance with language on Burgess' part...
Vol. 47 • April 1964 • No. 8
