Introduction
H. C. Hawkes has told a plain tale of light and darkness-of one young woman's tortuous odyssey out of the one., into the other; but in so doing, he has done more. Hollywood Virgin is a psychologically accurate graph of the Western psyche, from its outer layers, which are visible, its inner depths, which we hide from the world.
One of the most fundamental and deep-seated associations in the human mind is of light with good and darkness with evil. The antiquity of this idea-since it arises from the very revolution of the globe on its axis, tin diurnal shift from the light of day to the mysteries of the night-antedates by an awesome span the first stirrings not only of Western Civilization but all civilizations as well; it reaches back into what I might call the "historical id," the collective unconscious of the human species.
But in our culture, far more so than in any other, from its earliest stirrings, the black man came to be the living symbol of this primeval darkness. We see the black man not as he is but through this subjective screen, clouded with fear and unacknowledged longings; in our minds he is the very manifestation of that which we would rather remained buried, out of sight, suppressed; he is a constant, ever-present reminder of that part of us which our tradition calls "bad".
The entire history of our race can be seen as a vast interplay between these forces of subjective light and subjective darkness: the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Reformation, the conquest of "inferior" races in North and South America, slavery (with its peculiar, underlying, all-pervading guilt unknown to other slave-holding societies), the American Civil War, and of course the racial upheavals of today, which threaten to bring all this to a head and from which white America may never fully cover-just as Hawkes' Virginia Holden will never recover from her first contact, through a black man, with the hidden and unsuspected core of her own sexuality. Perhaps it is no accident that this story is set in Little Rock. Painfully, excruciatingly so, it is all coming out into the light. This book is a microcosm of that dark birth.
Traditionally, the devil is black. In Dante, "The Emperor of the Universe of Pain is ... the color that one finds on those who live along the banks of the Nile, literature of the Middle Ages abounds in references to the "tall black man" who comes in the night. In Othello, Desdemona's father-with no proof, but with an innate certainty-accuses the Moor (by which the Elizabethan's meant Negro) of seducing his fair daughter with the "drugs and minerals" of Hell. And we need no one to impress upon us the utter outrage felt by this white father when he hears Iago's malicious accusation: Your heart is burst, you have lost half your soul; Even now, now, very now, an old black ram Is tupping your white ewe. Arise, arise; Awake the snorting citizens with the bell, Or else the devil will make a grandsire of you. Indeed, throughout the play, we hear in Iago the familiar voice of the white racist of today; to a very large degree one senses that he actually believes his own lies about Othello-or at least feels them justified. Iago, if he joined the Klan tomorrow, would make Grand Wizard within the month. I have forgotten who said that the racial conflict in America today arises from the white man's deep-rooted feeling of insecurity about the Negro male's supposed sexual superiority-the fear, in other words, that a time may come when the black man will take the same liberties with his women as he has always taken with the black man's women.
I said that these psychic depths contain longings as well as fears: because, while in the darkness one cannot see, neither can one be seen. And in many of us the thin skin of the superego, stretched like a hymen between our daylight and our dark, is very tenuous indeed. Note how rapidly-almost with a kind of ease-Virginia's long-suppressed lusts rise to the surface under the stimulation of her brutal abductors. We realize that she has lived on the threshold for a long time; she needed only a slight push. The appearance of the black man, like the horse, in the dreams of women nearly always represents unconscious sexual yearnings; at night the membrane becomes porous. Dr. Emil A Gutheil, the psychologist, says that, "In the United States, the Negro appears in dreams of white people as a symbol of repressed desires, or as a symbol of white, but otherwise tabooed persons. It is the 'second ego' or the 'person in the dark.' " For Virginia the dream has broken free of its bonds and intruded forcefully upon her consciousness. Before going out into the night in search of her "person in the dark," she looks at herself in the mirror. "The face in the mirror smiled at her. It was a wicked smile, full of lust and sinful longings for carnal pleasures-the very things Virginia had been suppressing all her life."
Virginia's father was a "Hell-fire preacher," and her upbringing was Puritan, through and through. The Puritan motto is, as everyone knows, "Pleasure is sin." Hence the closer one adheres to the rules-the further he keeps his distance from "sin"-the further he also remains apart from pleasure; this sets up a tension; the membrane becomes as taut as a drumhead. Strongly religious people are therefore at a disadvantage; it takes more to satisfy them when the drumhead breaks. Intense pleasure requires intense sin. When religion people fall from grace, they fall very hard and usually do not recover. When they embrace the Evil One, they find they cannot let go. Says Gutheil: "Religious (white) people also associate the figure of the devil with the 'black man.' " Virginia knows she is possessed, but does not et know the depth of the possession. " 'Just this once,' she whispered to her reflection. 'Then everything will be back to normal again.' " She says to herself: "A demon has possessed you. Hurry now! Go do what you must to exorcise him'"
But such demons are not so easily exorcised. Hollywood Virgin is constructed in the shape of a hollow pyramid. At the top, in the homey, apple-pie daylight of Puritan America, Virginia Holden and her faithful husband Harold are making love in a bathtub. Their little son Mark is snug in his bed. The sex this husband and wife are enjoying among the sloshing bubbles is full of tenderness and love; it is a wonderful experience. It's clean fun. This is the first time Virginia has ever had a bath with her-husband; perhaps it is the first time she has ever allowed him to see her nude body with the lights on. Sin and pleasure, after all, belong to the darkness. Hawkes' erotic description of this incident is detailed and vivid; and yet one is strangely unmoved, untittilated. It is too wholesome for us. The bath itself symbolizes purity; how many of us have not heard, as children, repeated over and over by his mother, this phrase?-"Cleanliness is next to Godliness." In the midst of coitus Virginia says: "Oh, Harold. I love you. I love you." But we would rather hear her say-and she will: "Delicious! Hot and musky and slick and slimy! Ball juice! Nigger ball juice! Dirty and vile and sweet and wicked!" Pleasure is sin. (Notice also that the Negro's hair is always "greasy", just as snakes are always slimy-two little gems of American mythology.)
Inside the pyramid, quivering in the half-light like a mirage, just below the apex, stands Wash, a huge, naked black man with an erection that staggers the imagination, poised for the spring, ready to pounce at any moment upon our wives and children; one glance at him sends us scurrying for our ropes and shotguns.
Far below, on the broad floor of Hawkes' structure, in the hot, panting gloom of the subconscious, one half-step above the animal kingdom, we perceive a veritable sea of black men, each one's phallic endowments more massive than the next. They have been there all along, but they are strangers to Virginia; she leers at them hungrily. They have paid their price and are waiting their turns, snorting impatiently, pawing at the brimstone with their bare feet, their white eyeballs glaring upward, watching for the drop. Black flames lick about their haunches-eternal flames, for hellfire is inextinguishable. When in her rapid downward progress Virginia reaches these demons at the base of the pyramid, all thoughts of exorcism will have been thoroughly burned from her mind.
The opposing forces are clearly defined. Virginia, Harold and little Mark stand for consciousness, Wash, Red, Bob and the sex-mad Lotta for the unconscious. These two are at war, but the final outcome is not in doubt. True, somewhere between the top and the bottom the embattled superego, sensing defeat, makes a few desperate rallies, such as destroying Virginia's abductors by fire, but that fire is feeble and utterly ineffective-a mere spark compared to the raging holocaust they have ignited in their victim.
"The heat in her loins was a terrible thing. It was a raging hunger such as she had never known." Masturbation does not help; for "to her horror and complete amazement, the fire inside her cunt burst into an inferno of all-consuming lust. The mental picture of Wash's incredibly sweet organ rushed back, biting into her brain and sticking like a leech. It would not be driven away this time. It sucked at her mind till Virginia realized the awful truth. There was only one way to put out the fire within her. It would take a huge, black fireman ..."
Some twenty centuries ago, at Qumran on the banks of the Dead Sea, far from the barbarian tribes of Europe, in the gathering dusk of the Classical Civilization and the pre-dawn of the Western, a scholar of the Brotherhood of the Essene sat at his desk composing a treatise on the coming Doom. It was entitled, The war of the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness. The Doom has not come-not yet-but the War rages on.