Couple Trouble: Mod & Trad

Can a guide to sexual liberation help us to know ourselves? Will the emergent literature of mod marital life-style—autobiographical fragments, novels, therapists’ interviews—be of real service in “placing” the age?

It will indeed, says the California psychologist Carl R. Rogers, provided readers first clear their heads of cant. Critical of people who confront the new domesticity with chatter about decadence and loss of moral standards, the Doctor posits— in BECOMING PARTNERS: Marriage and Its Alternatives (Delacorte, $7.95; paper, $2.95)—a contemporary cultural crisis necessitating the development of wholly new relationships. And he attempts to provide, through extensive interviews with individual experimenters, firsthand information about present-day innovative partnerships—“as perceived and lived and experienced from inside.”

Among the interviewees are an “unmarried-married couple” (youngsters in a highly precarious union), partners in a “now” marriage, a black man divorced from a black woman and about to marry a white, several communards, and a husband and wife married for fifteen years whose union has undergone almost continuous radical transformation from year one. Piquant details of feeling abound in many of the tapes. A young married woman acknowledges that, to her surprise, “it seemed more personal somehow to me to hold hands than just about anything else. You know, more personal somehow than making love.” A couple acknowledges that the decision to marry came at the summit of a domestic fight, while they were living together, and constituted an invocation of magic and miracle. A husband discovers what it means to say that roles are “culturally imposed” (guilt about his joblessness began only when the in-laws came to town).

But it isn’t details of feeling that establishes Becoming Partners as a provocative witness to the times; neither is it the expressed conviction that domestic experiment is the new American frontier (“the risks [these couples] take are just as real as those taken by Daniel Boone”). It’s the author’s troubling persona. Father of let-it-all-hang-out, Dr. Rogers is an extraordinary relisher of “openness” as a thing in itself, severed from content, freestanding, pure. Several of these interviews recount furies and frustrations; the interviewer not only never loses his cool but invariably responds on an upbeat. “That really hits me,” he will say, leaning forward enthusiastically. “This is extremely insightful and very thought-provoking.” “I really dig that.” “That is really fascinating.”

At moments his blessings actually startle. If the tapes transcribed in Becoming Partners speak them true, Erik and Denise, radical marriage partners, are a very nearly heartshaking domestic disaster area. Hunting salvation (“got to find another way of relating”), they’ve flogged themselves ceaselessly toward the New—“into things like basic encounter groups, into things like drugs—grass, LSD. into things like experimenting with relationships with other people outside the marriage,” into “bioenergetics and yoga.” And they and their two children have suffered pain and collapse on the way. Denise has had breakdowns stretching over a period of four years. (“I started feeling as though I was getting fuzzy around the edges, unsure of my ego, all kinds of weird sensations.”) Erik goes on the sauce, “crawling under the bed, and curling up on the floor and screaming and crying and clawing at the carpet and things, and refusing to do anything.” They are in terror that Erik is “going to grow up with two small children and a wife who was nuts.” To this day Erik leans hard on grass, and there seems no end to the pair’s fearfully exacerbating restlessness—“we’re dissolving the structure of our marriage,” “selling our home ... all our properties,” “we’re leaving our friends, our jobs, professional positions, we’re leaving the country we were married in”—a new tangent.

All this is hung out before Doctor Rogers, chaos, crisis, despair—“as perceived and lived and experienced from inside.” But, some kind of wonder, the man “really digs” this, too. “Well,” he says, concluding the interview, “well, this has been a lot of fun, as far as I’m concerned.” The age demands, as it seems, not an image of its accelerated grimace but a superlatively impervious good cheer (“must do this again”), smack at the edge of ruin. Ample and earnest in its display of evidence, Becoming Partners deserves rank among the more informative works in its field. And the Doctor’s frontier metaphor signals he’s aware that many “domestic experiments” take place at the borders of hell. But that awareness doesn’t restrain him from cheer-leading. As I read it. there’s ice at the core of his book.

A chill of a different sort permeates Erica Jong’s novel FEAR OF FLYING (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, $6.95), and John and Mimi Lobells’ JOHN & MIMI: A Free Marriage (Bantam, $ 1.50)—celebrations (more or less) of radical sexual experiment, Isadora Wing, Ms. Jong’s heroine, is twice-married, Barnard-educated, under thirty, and (like Erik and Denise) fiercely restless. Attending an international congress of analysts in Vienna with her psychiatrist husband, she meets an English Laingian who instantly arouses her sexually, and subsequently exhorts her to cast off marital ties and live by his self-proclaimed existentialist nonrules. The pair lights out for the European Territory, leaving the heroine’s husband behind. And then, after two weeks of roaring about the Continent in a Triumph, coupling with each other and with strangers met in roadside camps, they split: it’s time for the English existentialist to rejoin his wife and kids. Spirits intact, Isadora hunts up her husband’s holiday digs; finding him away when she calls, she awaits his return (on the closing page) in his tub.

A first-person first novel, Fear of Flying is more than a report of an affair. Backflashes tell of the heroine’s Manhattan adolescence, first marriage, and dealings (from Boston to Beirut) with her three sisters, who are wedded to a black, an Arab, and an Israeli. (The best of its pellmell pages recount the fantasies of Pia Wittkin, a superbright, sex-raddled schoolgirl. Haunted from puberty by lust for a Bogart-Olivier “with very savage white teeth,” Pia sees the chap making love to her in an “abandoned monastery” in Vermont—a pad fitted with “extremely rustic floorboards,” “black satin sheets,” and Siamese cats “named things like John Donne and Maud Gonne and Dylan.”) In another of its dimensions, the book is a diatribe against marriage—against the dread dullness of habitual, connubial sex, against the paucity of means of reconciling the desire for freedom and the need for closeness, against childbearing. Isadora Wing’s opinions, jokes, bawdy brio, and victory over inhibition (this is perhaps the first work of fiction to explore, through a heroine’s consciousness, the comedic possibilities of masturbation and menstruation) could win Fear of Flying an audience in The Movement.

But the book’s primary cultural interest lies elsewhere—in the character of the relationships it depicts. Miss Jong’s “lovers” are notable for reverence of the experience of the self and for their achievements in “managed” remoteness; they neither expect nor desire to touch each other’s subjective centers, nor, in turn, to be touched in those quarters themselves. Isadora, a writer, repeatedly objectifies her lover as a prospective hero for a novel (or as an item for an alumnae news note); her beloved, for his part, perceives the adventure as a way of providing himself with a contrived, mimetic, semi-genuine experience of existential breakout. In a word, personal creativity—a phenomenon not to be confused with generativity, to use an Erik Eriksonism-is all.

And it also is in John & Mimi: A Free Marriage, a “blueprint for sexual exploration that goes far beyond ‘open marriage’ into a new realm of sexual pleasures.” The pleasures, enumerated in brief, naughtily worded chapters, narrated by mod mates John and Mimi, stress “total freedom” and the “excitement of a forbidden joy made accessible.” (The activities often consist only of probes of neglected bodily apertures by accomplished hetero-homo teams.) The book is heavy with oversimplifications traceable to idealization of self-indulgence, dimness about the relation between freedom and discipline, and dread of socialization-fear that any commitment to another entails a violation or reduction of self:

It feels wonderful to give another person freedom, and it feels horrible to restrict it. [Is freedom awarded true freedom? Do restrictions leading to self-mastery really restrict?] People who restrict their loved ones out of insecurity and suspicion never know if the love they receive is given by choice or because they demand it. [After such knowledge, what forgiveness?]

The Lobellian dogmas about trust flow more directly from longing for escape from the entanglements of full response to another, than from concern for the quality of moral relationships between persons. For John and Mimi are performers to the end, stars in sex-art shows, films, and the like that serve to objectify their feelings for each other. They are also on the prowl for aesthetic foundations, ways of linking the swinger’s life-style to the taste for complexity and contradiction in the fine arts. (They quote various architectural credos— “more is not less”—in building their case.) And they regularly seek metaphorical release from the obligation to “interact” as consciously responsive persons. (“I can see our lives. We are like two liquid films floating on an endless field reflecting all the rainbow . . . continuously slowly shifting . . . free to slip apart and float off. . . .”)

The thoughts of John and Mimi on freedom, children, security et alia don’t quite warrant solemn address—too much porn and uplift in the mix. And it’s proper to note that these opinions, like those of Isadora and Adrian and Erik and Denise, are products not of personal invention but of social and economic structural.change. As an image of the new styles of absencewithin-presence in man-woman relationships, however, and also as an intimation of ideologies of remoteness to come, the book repays a glance.

In the context above, the season’s two divorcing novels—Richard B. Wright’s IN THE MIDDLE OF A LIFE (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $7.95) and Richard Stern’s OTHER MEN’S DAUGHTERS (Dutton, $6.95)—look like works of “conventional domesticity.” But oddly, the problem of detachment from feeling surfaces in these pages too. Messrs. Stern and Wright have shown in previous outings a satirical edge (tenderer in Mr. Wright’s first novel The Weekend Man than in Mr. Stern’s memorable Golk). Each writer is, at his best, stylish and witty. But neither— this is the matter of substance—can summon intensity in an address to domestic feeling. In the Middle of a Life, set in Toronto, tells of a moderately successful, determinedly lowkey effort, by a middle-aged divorcé named Freddy Landon, to resume work life and sex life as a single. Other Men’s Daughters, set near Harvard Square, tells of a moderately successful, equally low-key effort by Robert Merriwether, a bland, middle-aged, Shakespeare & Chablis professor, to shuck his wife of decades, and win happiness with an undergraduate beauty named Cynthia. Both heroes are likable, and while Stern’s Cambridge seems sanitized, neither landscape is unrecognizable, and a quantity of civilized intelligence is kept steadily in view.

But the start of a new life in the one book and the end of an old life in the other seem equally unmomentous. Vague nostalgia and vague melancholy are the central emotions here, and only at wide intervals do they become affecting. Mr. Stern’s divorced couple produces, jointly, after the day in court, a gorgeous family Christmas; no bitter phrase is spoken. Once, while lecturing, the husband thinks: “This is the last day of my married life”—and he resumes, barely missing a beat (the subject is the formation of the genetic nucleus). Mr. Wright also ends with a dying fall—“sad affection” between the new mates, easy comparisons between beat-up machines and beat-up hero. (“There was much to repair in his car. In his life, too.”)

Dim lights of life living on their length of years, these characters are insufficiently energized even in lovemaking to be studied for general meanings. But the hint in their life stories that heavy weather about marital choices leads (in novels) straight to soap opera does connect with assumptions on fronts that are farther out. And both books bid, therefore, like the wilder tales of swingers, for regard as cultural symptoms.

Heed only the works just cited and you’d conclude that fullness of human feeling isn’t long for the Western world. Lightness about rupture of relationships, and endorsements of remoteness as a value seem in process, in letters, of becoming conventions. But, as nobody needs telling, pain and tormented connectedness persist in life, and so too do authors disposed to credit their reality. A different disposition seems implicit, to be sure, in the title of Mel Krantzler’s forthcoming book CREATIVE DIVORCE: A New Opportunity for Personal Growth (Evans, $6.95). And the author, a divorced “divorce therapist.” isn’t above discourse about “The Promise in the Pain,” or reliance on the staples of self-help manuals (the invented alliterative disease—“separation shock”; the numbered list— “Avoiding the Nine Emotional Traps of the Past”). But Krantzler does have a darker, decent side, and people for whom the suffering of a divorce is still raw could find help in his book. The reason is that Krantzler’s self-help chapters are lighted by an authentic imagination of pain, awareness that only fools allow the belief that divorce can foster growth to overwhelm consciousness of the immediacies of the experience itself. The author knows that the tribe of Johns and Mimis is multiplying; he also knows that most ordinary men and women can’t be jokey about deaths of relationships, and aren’t encouraged to try to be by authority. (Krantzler quotes interesting documents from Conciliation Court services to back his contention that the “official judgment society lays on the divorced man or woman [is that] you are a failure.”) A reader in search of confirmation that human beings still buzz with contradictions, vulnerabilities, and intensities could be comforted by the descriptions in this text of states of feeling among the recently divorced: so too could people recovering from the collapse of a marriage.

Viewed as a document in social history. Creative Divorce is most provocative for its drafts of scenarios, strategies, and techniques for putting a marital relationship to death, insuring that divorce means The End. No previous period can have been called upon to codify and test rituals of mourning in this mode. But Mr. Krantzler deserves better than to be ticked off as an evidential snippet. Smutched by gimmickry, his book attempts to deal seriously with a serious thing, speaks kindly and realistically, and, best by far, presupposes the continuance of complex affective life.

That life is abundant in Joyce Carol Oates’s newest novel, whose subject is a married woman’s ascent to a measure of consciousness of her situation, of the characters of her husband and lover, and of the complications of her feelings for both. Like many of this author’s previous works, Do WITH ME WHAT YOU WILL (Vanguard. $7.95) is ungainly—an outpouring without a shape. The social observation is less pointed than in, say, them. And several defects visible in earlier books have yet to be overcome—density of viewpoint that obscures a denouement, shrill patches of italics signifying the Subconscious on The Boil, jumbles of pretentious narrative short takes (here called “Unrelated Time Durations”).

But if this edifice rumbles and teeters over various abysses (melodrama among them), it is a restorative volume even so. And that is because Ms. Oates’s people, like those shadowed forth in the divorce tract just mentioned, aren’t simply bundles of odi et amo, confused and confusing; they’re absolutely incapable of denying or neutralizing the feeling that drives them. They can be shattered by an outward spectacle or tortured from inside; they register their crises not as “lots of fun”; they seldom thin themselves out into films. Hope goes forth ever for a keenly reflective, proportioning intelligence destined to order contemporary domestic affairs in a shapely work rich with truth about where we are. But while we wait, we need voices that keep us in contact with our unreduced selves, that insist on the range and force of human feeling, that can’t be conned into calling “loss of affect” a new frontier. Luckily, such voices exist; Ms. Oates is important among them.