Introduction
For those still uncertain about the moral stance of Marcus van Heller in the series of erotic works which he has been writing throughout the last fifteen years, The Wantons will easily be able to clear the tabletop of any doubts. There is, in here, as clear a descent of innocence as one could possibly mark off in a time of youthful psychedelics, rumbles, bewilderments and mass confusions. The work has the quality of a violent adolescent diary, the diary of a nightmare; and when I say adolescent I do not necessarily mean that the work is limited to that sphere of age from puberty to 'adulthood.' The truth is that contemporary times, with its heavy emphasis on youthful advertising, youth fads, movies, and a generally anarchic approach to the reality of the mind, is awfully hung up on or in that Coke bottle called adolescence; wherein we pretend to project ourselves into acting our ages but at the same moment would nullify and deny our age at the drop of a turntable handle or the price of the ticket to Saturday's football game. The time of youth has traditionally been known as the most poetical, the most innocent and the most dangerous part of a human being's life. It is then that the doors are at once opened all the way, and closed all the way; when one's destiny in this life seems to be given the first impetus of which one becomes conscious; when the heroes one worships appear to rise and fall with each day's awakening; when one is both, deeply alone and yet with a wide feeling for community, for that invisible community of the heart's fellow-feeling; when one sees paths unfold before one's eyes; when one is fulsome with precedence, pretentious for sincerity and sincere in one's pretensions; when, most of all, love and fear are most profoundly fleshed not to be, as in later years, finessed and rationalized for social and/or economic reasons.
Given these traditional values relating to adolescence, and given then the cruelly fractured world which so many kids, not unlike Linda, the book's heroine, find themselves caught up in, it is no wonder that The Wantons comes off as a sort of warning against those evils which, falling short of love, are sundry and everywhere tempting. This is not a question of soul, of any belief in the divine light. In the last lines of the book, a young woman who has been propelled through a series of encounters involving' sex, drugs and prostitution, is dead, physically dead.
Van Heller shows many hands in the telling of this hard-bitten story of young corruption. For one thing, unlike his other tales, located either in an historical past or a contemporary present, the sense of 'place' is absent here. It is as though he wanted his readers to understand that this work was not particularly London or Liverpool or New York or Paris, but the anywhere that is nowhere when one climbs aboard the fugitive train. Then, too, the author not unknown for a certain tough-mindedness in relation to his characters takes a definite "stand" in terms of his heroine. From the very outset she is presented as the helpless object. One sees, very early, that it is that quality of helplessness, so central to the young, which interests van Heller most of all; for, helplessness makes for vulnerability, vulnerability literally a being-able-to-be-wounded-and, as such, heroic in the author's mind. Time and again in The Wantons the helplessness of Linda is presented, a certain causeless vacuity which drives her on. It is not a question of kicks, and here there may be a revelation for those who too easily condemn others at the level of kicks: a massive internal fear drives this young woman, whose story opens in the limbs between the broken family and family of contemporaries found at the lower depths. And this fear, with physical rage and submission at its end, is what sophisticates the story, if that can possibly be the right word.
For there is something half-comical and certainly more than a little pathetic in those descriptions of human and animal cruelty dumped around the shoulders of one so young, so young and so old at the same time. And it is the quality of this derangement in age which gives a special impact to The Wantons: we are able to see that in the eternity of the nightmare of a sexuality utterly on the loose, in the loveless depths where the human animal is all claws and insect bites and Bosch-like grotesquerie, there is a nullification of history, of the process of things occurring in their own time, that amounts to defamation. It is as though, through Linda, van Heller were crying out to the generations of the earth: For God's sake, pull yourselves together; the human animal or beast or what you will is, as human, helpless; and, as helpless, in need of care. Of all his works, none strikes so centrally at the hard facts of the inner voyages involving the fantastical and physical in our time, when each day more and more find themselves submitting to images of inner beasthood foisted upon them by the sense of humiliation, futility and defeat from the inner workings of the home to the workings of government machines. Perhaps a work like The Wantons will help to draw the lines heavy, which have been so much smudged and vagued by so much subliminal weaponings these cruel, distancing and crushing years.
Jack Hirschman, Ph.D. Los Angeles, October 1967