Outside of a Dog (5 page)

One day, though, I paused in my envious contemplation of this exclusive piece of furniture, and noticed the titles. It was a day – I must have been twelve – when my reading life was
to change forever, a day after which reading was to become my major source of excitement and delight. The titles of those dull looking books, once focused on, though admittedly puzzling and
obscure, had something to recommend them:
Psychopathia Sexualis
by Krafft-Ebing,
Sexual Anomalies and Perversions
by Magnus Hirschfeld,
Sexual Aberrations
by Wilhelm Stekel,
MD. Sex, all sex! Anomalies (I looked it up)
and
Perversions? Bliss.

A chirpy ‘
Can I borrow this, dad, it looks pretty interesting?
’ was not likely to withdraw these books from their appointed shelf. If I wanted to read them I would have to be
sneaky. That, it was to turn out, was part of the fun. Reading them was going to be exciting
and
dangerous, like a Hardy Boys adventure with nefarious foreigners. The entry of these books
into my life coincided with the onset of puberty – indeed, they probably caused it – and they were to fuel my imagination for the next few years. I was so intensely stimulated that it
was embarrassing just to be me. Surely, anyone would be able to tell? Mom would be able to tell. She would know. I was in a cringingly explosive cycle of lust, shame, delight and abandon. Nothing
could better exemplify Carlyle’s dictum that ‘the best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self activity.’

I liked Hirschfeld the best. The plots certainly weren’t up to much, there was too much medical jargon, and a deeply frustrating amount of the text dropped into Latin at key moments, but
there was plenty to hold my attention. The characters were distinctly interesting, and each had a little story to tell. Not enough detail, of course: the stories were reprehensibly succinct, but
there was sufficient to fire the imagination. Anyway I only wanted the dirty bits.

Rereading the texts, fifty years later, I was astonished how much I
remembered
. Oh my God, it’s her! It’s him! It’s
that
!

There were further reports of an American girls’ boarding school where there was ‘a veritable epidemic of lesbianism’, an account of a thirty-year-old doctor much given to
bottom kissing, a Parisian inventor of an electrical flagellating machine, and a serious and stern woman given to ‘punishing and cherishing’ her male lovers, while riding them about the
bedroom. Though chapters on masturbation reassured me that it was
not
proven that it led to ‘softening of the brain’, nevertheless Hirschfeld did not recommend that one lathered
one’s penis (like one of his masturbators) and carried on gaily. No, ‘the principal effect of masturbation is depression which may change to melancholia, leading to thoughts of suicide
or even actual suicide.’ That didn’t scare me: as long as my brain stayed unsoftened so could my penis, lathered or unlathered.

Though unimaginably distant in time and place, Hirschfeld’s people were not, by-and-large, freaks or monsters. A few were distinctly to be avoided – chapters on Sadism and Sexual
Murder required quick skipping over (who’d want to read about
that
?) – but many of these obscure mittel-Europeans became exemplars of human possibility. Who would have supposed
human life so richly peculiar, so various in possibility, or imagined that adults – those distant, intimidating, over-dressed and other-worldly creatures – could have been so rude? For
some time I lived the overheated inward life of a Viennese petit bourgeois. I scoured Huntington for ladies dressed exotically in furs, with nothing but corsets on underneath. I wasn’t sure
what a corset was, but according to my sources it could elicit astonishing homage. Ladies with big breasts and protuberant bottoms were enticing, until I noted with dismay that my Granny Pearl
pretty much fitted that bill.

The discovery of my father’s erotically charged books signalled the beginning of that period when mere proximity to a lockable space was sufficient to cause an erection. Obsessed though I
was with reading and rereading my father’s secret library, it wasn’t long before I had internalized the most exciting bits, refined and extended them according to what I began to find
were my own needs and desires. An internal catalogue of fantasies began to emerge, and they were every bit as satisfactory, inside those lockable spaces, as the books were. Better, even: no book to
hide (try putting the two volumes of
Psychopathia Sexualis
under your shirt). No book to balance precariously whilst otherwise pressingly engaged. Fantasies were prompted by books, but they
were better than books.

My bedroom had a rudimentary lock on the door, but it was hard to justify why one needed to be locked in there so often. Bathrooms – at home or away – were the best, because no one
could question why you were in there, though they might well wonder why you needed to be there quite so frequently. I must have seemed to be suffering from chronic diarrhoea. And there is nothing
that piques the interest and concern of Jewish parents and grandparents as thoroughly as trouble in the lavatory.
Was I all right?
I was asked, returning from a third trip to the bathroom in
two hours.
Oh, fine, yeah, all right
, I’d say, hurrying away, ashamed. Did they know?

Granny Pearl did, I was sure of it. In her tiny apartment in the Hotel Brewster on Manhattan’s West 86th Street, there was a glass-fronted bookcase in the living room, with an assortment
of books, each bearing poppa’s book plate
STOLEN FROM THE LIBRARY OF NORMAN KORNBLUEH
. There was one that I wanted to steal for sure, but presumably its absence would
have been observed, and (worse) remarked upon. Written by two Danish psychologists called Kronhausen, its unassuming yellow and orange paperback covers announced the title
Pornography and the
Law
:
The Psychology of Erotic Realism and ‘Hard Core’ Pornography
. There was nothing lurid about the book, but the promise of the title was sufficient to ensure that it sold
in large numbers to a readership ostensibly interested in its liberal agenda.

To me though, and I suspect to most of its readers, the allure was simple: because the work was a serious intellectual enterprise it could, in the service of argument and analysis, quote from a
vast range of dirty books which were otherwise unavailable through the normal American outlets of the 1950s. There were excerpts from Victorian pornographic classics like
The Lascivious
Hypocrite
,
The Autobiography of a Flea
, or
The Oxford Professor
by L. Erectus Mentulus, which were then unfavourably contrasted to their apparently ‘higher’
counterparts, those novels that are erotically realistic rather than pornographic, and which need clear criteria to distinguish them as worthy of general release: books like
Ulysses
,
Lady
Chatterley’s Lover, Memoirs of Hecate County
. My dad had some of these – I’d even pawed my way through a few – but I liked the proper dirty ones better. I was not
interested in redeeming artistic quality, it got in the way of the sexy scenes, or diminished their impact. I wanted unadulterated smut. Who cared what the various characters thought, where they
came from, what their aspirations outside the bedroom might have consisted of?

Not that the smut
was
unadulterated, even the Kronhausens weren’t allowed that. They could quote from the most salacious passages, but a frustrating semantic propriety pertained:
no
dirty words. Thus we have the ludicrously censored scene from
The Strange Cult
:

Even I skipped over this [vernacular for risible persiflage]. But there were sufficient passages to keep one’s pecker up. I spent hours with the book cradled in my lap, in a chair in the
living room of the apartment, so that neither the cover nor my excitement would show, recurrently half hobbling back and forth to the bathroom. When mom or dad came to pick me up, granny would say,
‘Oh, Ricky’s been shpritzing over the books all day,’ which I was guiltily certain had a wry knowingness. (The Yiddish verb to shpritz usually means to add a dash of seltzer, but
it also means to squirt or to spray.)

These early experiences of reading stolen erotica from family sources transformed the act of reading for me entirely. It would be catastrophic to be caught reading such books, for not only were
they clearly not for me, but my excitement at reading them would mark me as a pervert of the class of those chronicled in the texts. (Though it did not signal my father or grandfather as similarly
deviant, of course. They were intellectuals. I wondered how they kept mom and granny from looking at the books.)

Farewell, Hardy Boys. From now on, I would seek better and more exciting things to read, forbidden ones. I learned how to skim a page and instantly pick out the key words: breasts, nipples,
vagina, buttocks, anus. My father’s whole library of fiction loomed. I began to skim it, book by book. Some piqued my immediate interest, only to disappoint. There was a copy of Van de
Velde’s
Ideal Marriage
:
Its Physiology and Technique
, which even I recognized as a peculiarly evasive title. I scoured the pages for illustrations and examples sufficient to
ignite sexual fantasies, though this research was retarded by the inscription on the front end-paper, from my mother to my father: ‘For Bernie, in the hope that ours will be.’ I tried
desperately to block that out, its implications unthinkable, and skipped through the pages in search of something to get my fingers round. I ignored all that detail – bit yucky – about
periods and pregnancy. I skipped all of the stuff about something called the clitoris, and about female orgasm. I didn’t have one of those, and I had boy orgasms. This lack of curiosity was a
mistake, and my first girlfriends (and I) would pay for it.

When, for my Bar Mitzvah, I asked for a subscription to the Book of the Month Club, it was mistaken for a precocious academic request, and honoured accordingly. What I was looking for, of
course, was a new source of books with dirty bits. MacKinlay Kantor’s
Andersonville
had a couple of choice moments, but they were hardly worth the trouble of finding, and more
frequently monthly offers were feel-good cutesy books like
The Snake Has All the Lines
, or
Cheaper by the Dozen
.

Anyway, I had already assimilated whatever fantasy material our family erotica could prompt, and there was no further supply of such books. The fever didn’t go away – it never does
– but it abated, and left room for something more substantial than the Hardy Boys. It was time, at last, to start reading some proper books. It was time for literature.

3

‘High school.’ To this day the very words provoke in me the kind of anxious repulsion occasioned by terms like ‘ethnic cleansing’, ‘root
canal’, or ‘George W. Bush’. I loathed being in high school, loathed it so utterly and viscerally that I was hardly aware of the cause of my discontent. I seethed with a restless
unhappiness wildly in excess of the usual teenage surliness and sense of entitlement.

The recently constructed Huntington High was much admired by all save those who had to use it. A low brick building with endless corridors along the sides of which were austere, vaguely ominous,
metal lockers, painted in institutional greys and greens, with linoleum floors, fluorescent lighting and an overactive boiler, the place looked like a film set of a laboratory where sadistic
psychological experiments were performed. At the start and close of the day, and between classes, these aisles would be crammed with rushing, gossiping, overheated students, but during classes,
they were transformed into a bleak no-go zone, patrolled by monitors and hawk-eyed teachers anxious to corral truants of any kind. You needed a pass even to go to the bathroom. The message was
simple: this place was hard to break out of. You’d better knuckle under.

There was a dress code – no jeans, no sneakers, no shorts, dresses and skirts at an ‘appropriate’ length. Hair fell under opposite injunction: it
had
to be short, crew
cut if possible, and I remember my mother, observing a trace of curling at my neckline, warning me, censoriously, of the consequences if it were allowed to fester. I cut it off, brutally, and
whatever festering went on thereafter was purely internal.

Oddly, there were touches of great satisfaction: I was leading the life that most of the other kids aspired to. I captained a tennis team that won 110 straight matches. I was dating an
exceptionally pretty and loveable girl, and having amazing fun with her. Nor were the classes unstimulating, though I proved curiously intractable in my post-Burgundy Farm ignorance, like the hero
of Sam Cooke’s ‘Wonderful World’, who didn’t know much about history, biology or the French he took.