Stories about Squalor

“I prefer stories about squalor.”
“About what?” I said, leaning forward.
“Squalor. I’m extremely interested in squalor” …
“Are you at all acquainted with squalor?”
—J.D. Salinger, “For Esmé, with Love and Squalor” (1950)

Salinger’s Glass family were my sort of people. I wanted to be Franny—super bright, wearing a sheared raccoon coat with a gold-plated swizzle stick in the pocket. Mensa even. I just had to practise a little, get the vibrato right and I could be the youngest fiddle student at the Juilliard School of Music. Franny and Zooey belonged to the weird, dysfunctional family, with an elder brother, Seymour, who was far too clever for this world.

The stories were part of a series Salinger wrote wrapped around his admired novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951). Mary McCarthy named the novel’s Holden Caulfield “the great phony-slayer” but I favoured the Glasses to the shenanigans of Holden. Perhaps I was willing to embrace the phony for the seduction of brains.

Reviewers of A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, short-listed for the 2015 Man Booker Prize, have likened it to McCarthy’s The Group (1963), which was banned in Australia. Yanagihara’s book concerns four male graduate friends from an unnamed college, two of whom rent an apartment in lower Manhattan. The other two hang around playing at fraternal friendship.

That is at the outset. It peels back to a very sad story of abuse. The abused is an improbably brilliant character named Jude. (St Jude the apostle is the patron saint of hopeless causes.) There are two parts to Jude’s “Little Life” story. In the past, he was abandoned on a monastery rubbish bin, reared by the brothers, molested by them and ran away with one who acted as his pimp. More squalor, Esmé? There is a foul doctor who, aside from wreaking more abuse, drives over his young lover, causing major spinal injuries.

The second part of Jude’s story is the New York present and his immediate college past. We learn through the other characters that Jude is tall, thin and very good-looking; an accomplished New Yorker who cuts himself.

The other young men are JB (Jean-Batiste), Willem and Malcolm. Taken together, they sound like names from a graduate of a Masters in Creative Writing. In the last decade there has been much discussion over the shaping of the contemporary novel by MFA courses. Richard Jean So and Andrew Piper (in the Atlantic, March 2016) have written a program to identify features of writing that typify MFA learned skills. Their findings were equivocal but first names that recur in non-MFA novels are Anna, Tom, John and Bill. MFA novels have Ruth, Pete, Bobby, Charlotte and Pearl running amok. Agreed, neither group would seem to have an exact fit with Yanagihara’s but there is an absence of any character named Tom. There are some focal words that hold interest in MFA novels—lawns, lakes, counters, stomach and wrists. Hold your nerve, Esmé; Yanagihara’s novel inspects wrists, skin and razors.

Sam Shepard’s play Fool for Love (1983) was revived on Broadway last year. The play is considered to be part of a quintet of plays that the actor and dramatist wrote from 1976 to 1985. In May 1983, having not relinquished my alias as Franny Glass, I asked to see the off-Broadway production. My hosts suggested that I might prefer Porgy and Bess, playing to acclaim on Broadway. They sat in polite horror as Ed Harris in the role of Eddie threw himself over and over against the set. It shook. Ping-ponged bodies took centre stage. The fourth in the series, True West, has been produced twice in Australian theatres. The play had a run with the Melbourne Theatre Company in 2002 and Philip Seymour Hoffman directed it for the Sydney Theatre Company in 2010.

The quintet challenges the American Dream—Shepard says there is an alternative view to the learned desires of acquisition of objects and experiences. The American Dream is fallible, true knowledge is found in the desert, the “Old West”, not in Ivy League universities. The half-siblings in Fool for Love tryst and fling themselves around in a motel on the edge of the Mojave Desert; the brothers in True West retreat to the desert into a certain violent future. The “Old West” is not necessarily decent.

Yanagihara’s novel airs certain current interests: child abuse and fluidity of sexuality. It is known that there are irreversible changes to the immature brain and she shows bleakly that there is no recovery. She wrote her novel over a period of eighteen months that coincided with many global investigations into sexual assault by the clergy. The novel is an eyes-wide-open, unwavering record of molesting. Yanagihara knows it is tough and she rewards the reader by gift-wrapping the squalor into the American Dream. Her two central characters come out of the “Old West”—Jude from Montana and Willem from Wyoming. What follows is an acquisition of Ivy League degrees, jobs, apartments, art and food unfolding for the reader. It is almost as awful as razoring into skin, but not quite, Esmé. Overlooking décor trends such as forests of chandeliers above dark-stained timber floors, the cooking is mannered. Yanagihara needs to visit Venice with her compatriot and crime writer Donna Leon to dine at the eateries that Commissario Guido Brunetti frequents, and quieten with a plate of antipasti del mare and a radicchio salad.

In interview, Yanagihara related some personal influences on her writing. Among them were her medical father’s peripatetic journeys around America; a life in motels, waiting for her mother to return with food. She recalls her father arranging for her to draw specimens in a pathology laboratory—the pathologist kindly lowering the drapes so she could see the sutured skin flaps.

There is an unsettling reliance on medical and psychiatric documentation of patients who self-harm. I call my elder son for a description of the condition. He tells me:

• Patients with this condition are difficult to treat. At the severe end they frequently present to emergency departments following deliberate self-harm requiring treatment, or thoughts of committing suicide. When the condition was first identified, they were treated with traditional psychoanalytic interventions of the times. These patients did not respond well to an open-ended process. As a result they would leave the treatment early or worsen and require inpatient care. Services and treating clinicians need to accept a chronic risk of completed suicide.

Jude is managed clinically and emotionally by a long-term friend, Andy, an orthopaedic surgeon. He sutures Jude’s cuts and seems to be permanently on call. He struggles with Jude’s condition for thirty years, eventually going into early retirement.

• Some clinicians will sometimes develop a fantasy that they can save these patients. However, over time they will feel burnt out and disengage from them. This is particularly the case in clinicians with little or no psychotherapy training, which is possibly the position of the orthopaedic surgeon.

• Some clinicians will feel sympathy for them, while others see them as attention seekers undeserving of medical care.

Reviewers are divided on Jude. Daniel Mendelsohn in the New York Review of Books thinks he is a pill. Other readers interpret his responses to his friends as manipulative. Yet others are heartened by the love and affection shown to him by these same characters. Yanagihara has described the condition accurately and divides the reader’s responses. The question has to be asked: Is there blue sky? Do they improve? And why do it?

• Some cut so they can feel something, others do it for an endorphin rush. Certain patients will improve over a long period—they mature and establish greater social skills.

Mike Parr is an Australian artist who early in his career focused on performance art that involved blood and cutting. He has documented his work in a recent publication, Mike Parr, 1970–2008. His interest lay in the quandary of an audience when presented with meaningless violence to the artist’s body in the name of art. And he did assault it. Esmé, I think this is past your bedtime. Parr writes:

some works were performed with audiences in an effort to humanise anti-social art activities. I meant that many of my pieces were private and compulsive so I wanted to involve the audience … to make the works part of the collective experience.

Parr disclosed his responses to cutting himself with a Stanley knife in front of an audience. “I felt euphoric, disassociated … but the entry into the body is tremendously controlled.” Yanagihara has her fictional Jude saying and doing much the same. The novel could be performance art—writer, reader and characters are in it together. We read about Jude razoring through scar tissue and think about an exit. Only the audience has changed.

Tan Twan Eng’s 2012 novel The Garden of Evening Mists explores this phenomenon of skin piercing, pain and euphoria. The central character arranges to have a torso tattoo by a great Japanese artist of the form, a horishi. He advises that she will feel pain. At the onset, it could be almost unbearable, but later she will look forward to her sessions and lament the finish.

Two artists working today with applied decoration on and into the body are Ah Xian and a New Zealand-born Samoan, Greg Semu. Ah Xian has produced haunting porcelain busts taken from live models and overlaid with traditional Han patterns. Public galleries have been keen to add these beauties to their collections; they have an absence of pain, a convincing composure. Semu talks about his Samoan tattoos as a Pacific icon—the patterns too are traceable for thousands of years. Semu’s triptych, his eye-watering photographs of his naked body covered in Samoan Tatau, Self-portrait with Pe’a, Basque Road, Newton Gully was exhibited in the aptly titled “Earning my Stripes” at the 2015 Venice Biennale. He has returned recently from Berlin and is showing at the National Gallery of Victoria, The Raft of the Tagata Pasifika (People of the Pacific). He chose a masked self-portrait for an interview to promote the NGV exhibition. No visible tattoos, a whiff of a squiff and very poised.

The photograph selected for the US cover of A Little Life is Peter Hujar’s Man Orgasmic, from his “Love & Lust” series that was published last year by Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco. Far from a head-lolling Warholesque orgasm, he looks as if his big toe is being squeezed. The image does suit the book’s characters—they are self-regarding, self-conscious and performing.

Though Yanagihara has reflected on art images she used while writing, the best visual fit for the novel is Robert Longo’s Men in the Cities, 1979–1982. Longo produced about sixty drawings, the most notable the image Fassbinder taken from a still of the film The American Soldier. The series shows sharply dressed men and women in black impaled on white urbane grounds. On ochre, a similar young man is posed on the cover of a recent Danish lifestyle magazine Kinfolk, “The Adrenalin Issue”. Jude and his friends would adore making the vanilla panna cotta with liquorice dust but aside from the recipes, the issue is given over to the allure of danger—the call of the void. The idea is that we need physical challenges to keep us from a siren song of ease. “Without risk, it’s like Disneyland,” writes Jeff Ferrell, a contributing professor. Seagram might say the dark side of the reach for an adrenalin rush is cutting into skin. Yanagihara has seen the trend.

The apprentice is shampooing and humming along to Purple Rain on loop. A tattooed tendril is escaping up her neck and furling along her arm. I wonder if she has a complete torso tattoo. Then she massages my head with conditioner and I forget to ask. I wanted to know how much pain was involved or if she formed a relationship with her tattooist. Instead, she says,

“My great-aunt died recently and left me this gizmo in her will.”

“How sad for you. Tell me about the gadget.”

“It’s a small silver stick that twists to open into a bunch of sticks.”

“Ah, a swizzle stick, very useful. Great pity it isn’t gold plated. Do remember to order your Martinis less than twenty to one in strength, and leave the olive,” snaps Franny Glass.

And eat like a bird, adds Esmé, quite unnecessarily.

Jane Sutton, a regular contributor, lives in Melbourne. She reviewed White Sands by Geoff Dyer in the October issue