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PARTISAN REVIEW
"womanizers" and not "lovers of women" here, because no one could
accuse--then-Americans of that willing if sometimes whimsical subjec–
tion to the magics and manias of love that we call romance. All the
Americans I knew had a certain attitude to sex-let's not call it love-and
they all played a role. Mensch. Tough guy. Where did it come from? I
think, like jazz and a lot else in American culture, from black culture. A
real man loves them and leaves them-no, fucks them and leaves them.
There was something willed about it and something joyless. A practical lot,
they are, down to earth. Or were. Now, the essence--surely-of this mas–
culine woman-haver-and-subduer is something active, dominant, is one
who sets the pace and draws the boundaries. But as we all know, extremes
meet, and extremes turn into their opposites.
Imagine a room and in it several women, all European, and it is the
mid-sixties. We are talking about American men. We have all had
American lovers-no, bedfellows-and two of us have actually had, or
been had by, the same man. It is not common, this kind of conversation
between women-or it wasn't then--and it all happened by chance. There
we were, ten or so of us ... the talk led from one thing to another. The
conclusions I am offering are too comprehensive to be the result of only
one woman's researches.
Would we all agree that American men loved with their heads and not
their hearts? Absolutely; their hearts were not involved. Would we agree that
in those heads was a blueprint for behavior with women, in bed and out of
it, and they performed-or fucked-not from some deep instinct or (perish
the thought) the need to express love, but from a need to affirm to them–
selves that they were indeed mensches? Here
D.
H. Lawrence was quoted:
"warm-hearted fucking," for instance. It is interesting how often this writer
is quoted in conversations of this sort. For
if
he knew very little about sex,
he did know a lot about love. But in parenthesis, perhaps we should remem–
ber that the expertise in sex we all pride ourselves on is after all recent:
nothing unusual then about Lawrence's ignorance; it was general.
It was as if-we agreed-in the solar plexus of this performer was a
cold place, an icy promontory, an extension from some continent all tun–
dra. There was the intelligent head, there were the hot prick and balls, but
in between, a cold defensive place.
The talk strayed off to the legacy of the troubadours and
trouveres
in
France, in lovely France, for could we perhaps make a case that loving of a
certain poetic and even fanciful kind had never reached Germany, whose
culture had so extensively influenced America, and particularly its univer–
sities ...? Well, that was the kind of talk, and its culminating moment was
when one television woman offered a li ttIe tale of a certain American
filmmaker, an exemplar of cock-and-balls, poised over her like an arched
