Introduction
The Degenerates is like a necklace of magic charms discovered quite by accident in a dusty old trunk in the attic. Give it a rattle and up spring all those old demons of lust and degradation, those devilish companions of our youth who refuse to die—who deep arising from their trunks like the wives of Dracula from their coffins, sex-mad and bloodthirsty. The stage is set. Rattle the chains again and the full moon rises over the campus, transforming us into Boone and Dent and Roach and Mason, teenage werewolves prowling the barren, Puritanical corridors of Prunella Garfield's mind. Whether these manifestations arise from Miss Garfield's mind or that of Grant Dexter, the dean, or our own, makes little difference; they all come from that erotic pressure cooker of our sexually restricted youth. Writers like Miss Baxter exist solely as steam vents; they are witch doctors, skilled in the esoteric tradition of conjuring up these phantasmagorical archetypes of our memory, whether real or imagined.
Prunella Garfield herself, the prudish young teacher, with her fantastic body and her desolate soul—"Convent educated, disciplined to harsh self-denial, every instinct suppressed, . . . resigned to solitude, a confirmed spinster,"—Prunella herself is the very symbol and substance of the social environment out of which this book arises. Disregard the long hair of Boone and his gang and the single reference to a "love-in"; these are only futile attempts to update the old dreams. In essence the story takes place in the early forties, in a typical college town in the Midwest—the "Heartland", used by conservative politicians nowadays as the emblem of American tradition—meaning patriotism, morality, etc. But we know what it really is, don't we? We know about that beautiful teacher with the big breasts and the steel-rimmed glasses, Miss Garfield, whom we dreamt of catching one dark night in the woods; we know about the unyielding tyrannical dean who could not possibly have had anything between his legs but a cauterized scar; we know about his daughter, Phyllis, the "nice girl" whom no one could touch except with the imagination, and even then you ran the risk of frostbite.
We were with Boone and his gang that night, drunk as skunks, when they pinned Phyllis down in a dark room and raped her without mercy. And perhaps—even as we labored over her frigid, untouched beauty—perhaps we longed for something more: expiation, punishment, confirmation of our guilt, the guilt they handed out to us at Sunday school in return for a small donation. This dread apprehension is like the cherry atop the ice cream sundae that we used to eat down at the corner drugstore where they had those paperback books with the sexy girls on the covers—books which we weren't allowed to buy but which we sometimes stole, and then our mothers would catch us masturbating while reading them, exactly like Miss Prunella Garfield caught us raping Phyllis and made it all worthwhile. Yes, we know all about those dark corridors, those paths in the park where you could always see naked lovers in the bushes—or imagine that you could—those abandoned quarries outside of town where the girls always swam naked just so you would see them when you came creeping through the bushes, except that somehow you could never manage to get there quite at the right time. A better title perhaps would have been Middle America: Perversions of the Silent Majority.
So settle back and let Sharon Baxter rattle her charms and chant these magic incantations that transport us back into our sweet sexual darkness. Darkness!—that's what quickens our blood. In a short essay from his journals, Jan Kott, the Polish drama critic, says, "'Erotics always means being pushed into darkness, even if the act takes place in full daylight."* He means, of course, the darkness of the mind. He is one of us, you see—Jan Kott—a true "Heartlander." Because Middle America is not a geographical region, it is a condition of the over-thirty Western psyche. The open-air, sunlit lovemaking of the Flower Children does nothing for us. If the youth around us does not understand, if they seem healthier, if they fail to comprehend that sexual health is anathema to our erotic natures, that we need darkness and a measure of guilt for fulfillment, the hell with them. Let us not add to our frustrations by denying ourselves even the stimulation of our magic charms. At least now we can buy them openly, on the newsstands; true, it's a little healthier—and thus perhaps somewhat less stimulating—than those mimeographed manuscripts we used to pass around, but it's also more convenient, eh?
In this connection, I might mention that, to the dismay of my colleagues, I always keep a shelf of these books in my classroom—at the disposal of my students. Sometimes, to be sure, they show a marked interest, but to them it is just anthropology—source material from another culture. For us they are magic hymns to preserve the darkness.
In that same essay Kott gives the formula for these hymns. "Language goes back to its roots, to the moment of its birth. It is either non-articulated, a cry and onomatopoeic sound, as if it were only learning the names of things, actions; or it is articulated and then its function is magic, or close to magic. The difference between a concept and an object, between a token and a thing, is blurred or disappears. Language becomes action, as in magic; i.e., it causes a thing or action to exist just by naming it, and gives it qualities that have been expressed in words." And there is a very important requirement which these words must fill in order to cast their spell: "This erotic, or rather sub-erotic, language constantly breaks taboo."* There is our measure of guilt: the language, and hence our imagination, must break the rules.
In this respect, Miss Baxter's incantations are classic. Consider a few examples, taken at random. " T wouldn't mind sucking you off, John . . . but another time, eh? . . . 1 want to be fucked, lover. Real hard, my darling. I want all this lovely cock inside me. Ooooh, yes. Fuck me, John. I feel so terribly wicked tonight.' " (Italics mine.) " 'Do you like to hear me say it straight out, like that? Fuck me. Fuck. Fuck. FUCK! . . .' " And another-this from the lips of Prunella herself after discovering the joy of carnal sin: " 'I want you!' she rasped. 'I want THAT again, Paul, the way it was before. Oh, I know it's wrong. I KNOW! . . . Please, Paul! PLFASE! ...I'm burning up ... I MUST be mad ... I can't resist anymore. Fuck me, Paul. I want it. I want all the filthy things those teenage morons made me do ... I NEED you. Put it in, for God's sake . . . Damn you, fuck me! ... Take me. Enjoy me. Purge this dreadful agony from my body—' "
Dreadful agony, to be sure; but how sweet the pain when it finds its release. There are three phases: repression, release, and expiation. In the beginning, Boone and his werewolves are like fleshless phantasms, stalking their beautiful forbidden prey through the tortuous passages of Prunella's twisted mind, never quite breaking through into conscious desire. But her loathing of them is a necessary ingredient to her coming joy. And then, after the disgusting young rapists have been safely tucked away behind bars, leaving Prunella alone in her sexless desolation, fearful of the slightest intimacy, even from women, she and the equally unfulfilled dean, Grant Dexter, are walking in the woods, the forest of Limbo, talking of trivia, and dying inside with their secret desire for each other. We know Dexter's type more intimately than we would like to admit; we know this "paragon of virtue" from his first entry into the story—long before learning that the "infrequent and reluctant fornication permitted by his wife was insipid and uninspired . . ." and that she "had always made him feel degraded" afterwards. Nor do we need Baxter to tell us that "beneath the frigid crust a volcano seethed on the brink of eruption." Onto this scene of lacklove and bottled lust Boone and his gang descend like angels of mercy. They spring fullblown from the sexual needs of the spinster teacher and the timid, inoffensive dean as Athena sprang from the brow of Zeus. I think it was Henry Miller who said, "Where there is a need, it will be met." Hence we have Miss Baxter and The Degenerates, and the demons will always manage somehow to escape from the prisons of our repressions—so long as we have need of them.
And after the dark springs have been unplugged and the waters of lust have flowed freely for a time, then comes the third phase: the return of guilt—because the purge, too, must be purged. This is the meaning of Boone's parting shot—the dumping of a load of wet swine dung upon the naked bodies of his ravished victims. With instinctive logic Miss Baxter pursues our need—the need for the foulest most revolting punishment in return for enjoying our moment of carnal degradation. She goes further and tells us that even after washing "some of the manure smell still adhered stubbornly to her skin .. ." Yes, because the guilt must remain or else the pleasure dies. This foul inundation, I might also mention, comes precisely upon the heels of Prunella's first pleasant psychosexual stirrings at the sight of her future lover's exposed genitals.
How does Miss Baxter punish the dean? Simple: by sending him back into the onanistic world where we found him at the beginning—back to his cold wife and his sterile office. But we're not sorry for him; it was well worth it. Left alone in the woods after having been forced to make love to Prunella by those demonic angels—he actually smiles! The animal blood has at last rushed in his veins; if only briefly, never to be repeated—so what? All the better. "Utterly bizarre," he thinks, "altogether fantastic." We leave him there at the scene of the orgy, masturbating happily.
True, Miss Baxter has met the classical requirement and pinched her story off with a happy ending; Prunella, ostensibly, has shed her Puritanical hangups and run away with the gamekeeper. Magicians, too, have rules to follow. But to me the happy ending is a delusion. In the first place I don't see their relationship as a lasting one: much too healthy for the likes of Miss Garfield. Shell need some more pig shit somewhere along the line. In the second place the nature of Baxter's parody on the Lady Chatterly's Lover theme reveals the emptiness of this "final" happiness. Paul West and Lady Gloria are grotesque inversions—or I might say perversions—of the characters in Lawrence's book. (Not that we sexual occultists would have it any other way; nobody ever read Lady Chatterly's Lover for erotic stimulation except for lack of something better; and putting Lawrence and other great writers far aside for a moment, how much more honest are books like The Degenerates than those pseudopornographic prick-teasing novels that make the best seller lists every month?) But Lady Gloria and Paul West reflect Lady Chatterly and her gamekeeper like distorted images in a funhouse mirror. Lady Gloria and young Harry Golthorpe, with his "unhealthy preoccupation with sex," make a perfect pair, because the boy's withered arm precisely matches Gloria's withered mind. And what of Paul West? Healthy enough on the surface, eh? But compare him to Lawrence's gamekeeper, Olive Mellors. The latter in the end goes into farming—growing things; while West heads for a job in the timber business—cutting things down. These occupations reflect the personality of the two characters. And again: "My soul flaps in the little pentecost flame with you," Mellors writes to his Connie, "like the peace of fucking . . . How can men want wearisomely to philander. What a misery to be like Don Juan, and impotent ever to fuck oneself into peace, and the little flame alight, impotent and unable to be chaste in the cool between-whiles, as by a river." Can you see Paul West fucking himself into peace? Peace, love, health—these are the kiss of death to our new-Puritanical erotic sensibilities. "Prunella's savage exultation [was] replaced by guilt and violent, panting reaction bordering on hysteria." There is the purge which refills the cloudy reservoirs of our eroticism.
So let the kids study us as though we were beasts in a zoo. We too can express our disdain, eh? It all depends on which side of the bars you're on—or which side you think you're on. Do what the monkeys do—throw crap in their faces. And let the degenerate magic of The Degenerates cast its spell.
Bad health and pleasant reading, brothers!