310
PARTISAN REVIEW
always entail sweet feelings toward Ithe girl. Sal, for example, is fixed
up with Rita Bettencourt in Denver, whom he has never met before.
"I
got her in my bedroom after a long talk in the dark of the front
room. She was a nice little girl, simple and true [naturally], and tre–
mendously frightened of sex.
I
told her it waS beautiful.
I
wanted to
prove this to her. She let me prove it, but
I
was too impatient and
proved nothing. She sighed in the dark. 'What do you want out of
life?'
I
asked, and
I
used to ask that all the time of girls." This is
rather touching, but only because the narrator is really just as frightened
of sex as that nice little girl was. He is frightened of failure and he
worries about his performance. For
performance
is the point-perform–
ance and "good orgasms," which are the first duty of man and the
only duty of woman. What seems to be involved here, in short, is
sexual anxiety of enormous proportions-an anxiety that comes out -very
clearly in
The Subterraneans,
which is about a love affair between the
young writer, Leo Percepied, and the Negro girl, Mardou Fox. Despite
its protestations, the book is one long agony of fear and trembling
over sex:
I
spend long nights and many hours making her, finally
I
have her,
I
pray for it to come,
I
can hear her breathing harder,
I
hope against
hope it's time, a noise in the hall (or whoop of drunkards next door)
takes her mind off and she can't make it and laughs-but when she
does make it
I
hear her crying, whimpering, the shuddering electrical
female orgasm makes her sound like a little girl crying, moaning in the
night, it lasts a good twenty seconds and when it's over she moans, "0
why can't it last longer," and "0 when will
I
when you do?"-"Soon
now
I
bet,"
I
say, "you're getting closer and closer"-
Very primitive, very spontaneous, very elemental, very beat.
For the new Bohemians interracial friendships and love affairs ap–
parently play the same role of social defiance that sex used to play in
older Bohemian circles. Negroes and whites associate freely on a basis
of complete equality and without a trace of racial hostility. But putting
it that way understates the case, for not only is there no racial hostility,
there is positive adulation for the "happy, true-hearted, ecstatic Negroes
of America."
At lilac evening
I
walked with every muscle aching among the
lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section, wishiI1g
I
were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was
not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music,
not enough night. . . .
I
wished
I
were a Denver Mexican, or even a
poor overworked Jap, anything but what
I
was so drearily, a "white
man" disillusioned. All my life I'd had white ambitions....
I
passed
the dark porches of Mexican and Negro homes; soft voices were there,
