Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told?: Essays
By Jenny Diski
4.5/5
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About this ebook
Finalist for the NBCC Award for Criticism
'Nothing about Jenny Diski is conventional. Diski does not do linear, or normal, or boring ... highly intelligent, furiously funny' Sunday Times
'Funny, heartbreaking, insightful and wise' Emilia Clarke
'She expanded notions about what nonfiction, as an art form, could do and could be' New Yorker
Jenny Diski was a fearless writer, for whom no subject was too difficult, even her own cancer diagnosis. Her columns in the London Review of Books – selected here by her editor and friend Mary-Kay Wilmers, on subjects as various as death, motherhood, sexual politics and the joys of solitude – have been described as 'virtuoso performances', and 'small masterpieces'.
From Highgate Cemetery to the interior of a psychiatric hospital, from Tottenham Court Road to the icebergs of Antarctica, Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told? is a collective interrogation of the universal experience from a very particular psyche: original, opinionated – and mordantly funny.
Jenny Diski
Jenny Diski was born in 1947 in London, where she lived most of her life. She was the author of ten novels, four books of travel and memoir, including Stranger on a Train and Skating to Antarctica, two volumes of essays and a collection of short stories. Her journalism appeared in publications including the Mail on Sunday, the Observer and the London Review of Books, to which she contributed more than two hundred articles over twenty-five years. jennydiski.co.uk @diski
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Reviews for Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told?
13 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Essay collections are always galvanizing for me, creatively speaking, because they're an art form with anything under the sun for a subject. The essay is buoyed by the voice of the writer first and foremost. If the voice is engrossing, the topic at hand could be neuroscience & its implications for spiritual consciousness or the genitalia of bottom-feeders, it really doesn't matter. Diski is a winsome companion, her deadpan being felt through the pages. It's fun reading sarcastic writers because you feel in on a joke, like a spectator to a world you don't quite seek to understand as much as witness.It seems LRB frequently assigned biographies & memoirs to Diski, as they make up maybe a third of this collection. I'm largely ambivalent to memoirs, even those about figures I appreciate. The pitfall I only occasionally experienced is Diski discussing the memoir of a person (or persons) I had no knowledge of. I don't give a shit about the royal family, and clearly neither did Diski, but unfortunately even a mutual distaste for the subject of a memoir isn't enough to save the essay on Princess Margaret. I don't even know if Princess Margaret is her title, and I'm frankly unwilling to expend the net zero calories to look it up. However, her essays on broadly contemptible people (like Piers Morgan) are excellent. Her style is almost uniquely poised to leverage the sublime mediocrity of figures like Morgan for good writing.The capstone of this collection for me was the final entry, "A Diagnosis," about Diski's cancer. One of the fundamental woes of human life is realizing and remaining aware always that your life is not as unique as you might conceive it to be. There is always someone whose life or experience mirrors yours. Of course, given we can never climb out of our ontological hovel like an animal out of an egg, every experience will feel unique. We will be the protagonist of our story. As Diski discusses though, momentous life experiences, like cancer diagnoses, have yielded every reaction one would think to have. Upon her diagnosis, she makes a joke to the oncologist that she better get to cooking meth. Met with an uncomfortably stoic response, she realizes later that perhaps the Breaking Bad joke to oncologists is what "Working hard or hardly working" is to anybody who works a painfully mundane office job. It's the platitude that cracks open cancer's Pandora's box of patterns & platitudes: cancer diaries, headscarves, combat-themed metaphors that anthropomorphize the little cancerous cells, etc. I don't mean to belittle or invalidate any of these things, as someone who has not yet experienced cancer (not planning on it, but who does); these are things Diski adduces, and things she's promptly embarrassed by. She writes about how embarrassment was the foremost emotion she felt upon hearing her diagnosis. It firmly entrenched her in a well-worn lineage of survivors & victims, one that seemed to sap any chance of an authentic response to the event. However, it's this self-reflexive, circumspect response that makes her experience authentic, as anyone's response to a cancer diagnosis is authentic. She bemoans her inclination to write a cancer diary, but if she didn't, she wouldn't be Jenny Diski. It's a mordant essay that doesn't surrender to its own mordancy, but rather demonstrates irony & sarcasm's potential to abrade clichéd calculus from true lived experience.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told? is a wonderful collection of Jenny Diski's short form writing. They are essays in the form of book reviews, or book reviews in the form of essays. However one wants to categorize them, they are both delightful to read on a surface level while also providing much food for thought at the many underlying levels. These run from the personal (constant throughout) to the cultural, societal, and political. Yet rarely in a way that is beating the reader over the head (unless, of course, we deserve it).I am mostly familiar with Diski's writing from her books and the periodic clippings friends used to send me of her pieces they thought I would appreciate. I came to realize that her writing did not have to be "about" a topic I was already interested in, she seemed to always find, if not a universality, a common path into any topic. From there we were free to let her offer some guidance on further musings. This collection offers very few, if any, essays that didn't cause me to consider ideas and situations far removed (so I thought) from the main theme of the piece.While I highly recommend this to readers who enjoy personal essays/book reviews, I would also make a suggestion for those who don't usually read such books. These essays are ideal for those moments when we have a short time to read but want something with both substance and entertainment value. Perhaps an essay before bed, or if you want something besides news feeds to read at lunch or a work break. While the reading time is short for each they will help keep your mind engaged and active in processing what she says.Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
Book preview
Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told? - Jenny Diski
MOVING DAY
Moving day. My ex-Live-in-Lover will come this afternoon to move his things out, eighteen months after moving in. First thing, I wave the daughter off to Ireland with her dad, for an Easter holiday of dosing sheep and castrating lambs on a friend’s farm. Apparently, they use elastic bands. Father and child might be having me on. What do I know, born and raised in the Tottenham Court Road?
I will have three whole weeks alone in my flat. It hasn’t happened since L-i-L moved in. I have a scratchy feeling of excitement in my head as I anticipate the next twenty-one days. Is this true? There must be sadness at the break-up; am I telling myself lies? No. The sadness is there, all right, but in a different compartment from the excitement. I put both on hold until the clearing out is done.
In the event, it’s a very jovial affair, with all the brittleness and pretence that joviality implies. So, eighteen months after the beginning of the Great Experiment, I do all I can to be amiable and assist. He says he’s pleased to see me smile at him. I smile away as we pack things into boxes, disconnect machines, fill black binbags with socks and underpants. We wind leads and flexes into manageable coils, joking about missed sexual opportunities and how it’s too late to be inventive now. Like a fast cut between forward and reverse in an old silent comedy, with suits over one arm, and bits of stereo equipment in the other, we put things back into the car from which they emerged something very like a geological age ago.
Two cars were needed, in fact, since by now too much has accumulated to fit into his car alone. Still smiling, I volunteer to help. We drive in convoy to his office, cornering carefully because we don’t want anything to break, decant the worldly goods, and settle down in the pub next door for a well-earned gin and tonic or two. I express surprise, as I sip, at how much extra stuff there is after only eighteen months. ‘Imagine if it had been eighteen years’, he says ruefully.
Such a timespan is beyond my imagination; in much the same way, I cannot grasp the size of the universe. The brain is not equipped for the understanding of mythic quantities. Of space: such as the universe. Or time: such as more than eighteen months of living with someone. My brain goes into spasm. ‘They say the universe is set to implode in twenty million (or is it billion?) years,’ I reply.
There was only one moment of open disharmony in the whole event. It echoed the tension there had been all along. There was always an inequality of certainty about the project of us living together. He spoke easily about forever. I did not consider the week after next a safe bet. In recognition of our different styles I bought him an ironic bottle of wine when he moved in, chosen to be ready to drink in 1997, on my fiftieth birthday. It was partly a small gesture of risk, but mostly I expected to be doing exactly what I was doing with it today: popping it into one of the cardboard boxes of his belongings, well before 1997. We stood in the doorway looking at the bottle in the box on the floor. He said he didn’t want it. I said it wasn’t mine, and neither did I. The stalemate was broken when I took the bottle by its neck from the box and swung it (I like to think with some elegance) against the stone step by the drain in the front yard. A storm cloud accompanied the crash of breaking glass, and darkened the day with the threat of sudden, electric rage from each of us. It took a dangerous moment to pass over: but it did, and the milder breeziness returned. ‘Nice one’, he said. ‘Thank you,’ I smiled, with a warm inner glow of satisfaction at the unlaunching of us. No sense crying over spilt claret.
Altogether, a rather civil end to the affair. Refreshments over, I return home, nicely balanced by the gin between a proper sadness and the anticipation of the next three weeks entirely to myself. As I drive, I sing along to the Evs’ ‘All I Have to Do Is Dream’ on the radio. It feels as if the car has acquired power steering, so light and easy is the journey back.
Sunday. I wake to the sound of the kitten being sick on the carpet at the foot of my bed. I hadn’t planned for this. It was to be a morning spent repossessing my space. Still, cats are often sick. I get on with my plan.
Taking back one’s space is something of a technical operation. It involves moving through the flat, doing what one does, but in a particularly alert frame of mind that follows the activities slightly up and to the left of one’s physical body. This watchfulness, this observation of the minutiae of your use of contained space, calls for concentration. Everything is deliberate: breathing, movement, the set of the head. After a little while something else occurs: the splitting-off of a protoplasmic self that insinuates itself into every part of the flat. Like smoke, it wisps into corners and under sofas, investigating places that are too awkward for the body to go, and which never get dusted. It’s almost like a dance, a floating self that breathes its way around the place while you only seem to brush your teeth and make a cup of tea. It’s a celebration of solitude that won’t be broken by people coming in from the outside world with their own stories and their own internal speed. Without that kind of solitude, I get lost. It’s as if someone is vacuuming the air out of my lungs. Impossible to live with another person all the time and not begin to scream that they are stopping your breath. For some reason, the other person thinks you’re mad, when you’re really only being practical and trying to save your life. Then it’s time to collect empty cardboard boxes from the off-licence.
All of which is all very well, but the kitten keeps on being sick, and protoplasm won’t flow naturally under these conditions. Worry sets in. I have a special place devoted to worry that has an insatiable hunger to be filled. When it’s empty, it worries anyway about what it’s going to worry about. A sick kitten is ideal worry-material.
To the vet. It is every bit the medical emergency I’d been trying to tell myself it wasn’t. Darwin’s gut has turned inside out. Christ. An unhappy accident. Major abdominal surgery is needed. Now. I don’t ask the price. I think of the worst number I can and try very hard not to imagine how many stomachs could be filled by such a sum in far-off places (or nearer by). What am I going to say? Too expensive, kill it, please? Actually, yes. But I can’t. So I leave Darwin to the vet and his fate (he might die anyway). I feel wretched; he’s been in pain all day, while I’ve been wafting. What am I going to tell the daughter, whose kitten Darwin is?
I’m furious. I didn’t want another cat. Although, perhaps I did. I allowed the daughter to persuade me that three cats aren’t any more trouble than two. Now look. God is very strict.
In bed, I cry, which isn’t unpleasant, but it is unusual. Is it for Darwin, or Ex-L-i-L? Or is it just an interstitial sort of crying that lives between night and the following morning, between sleeping and waking? It feels like sadness, but not mine; or rather, not a personal sadness, but one of great immensity, and slightly up and to the left of me, where I lie saturating the pillow.
Monday. I call the vet first thing. Darwin has survived the operation and the night. It will be two days before he’s out of the woods, but his chances are better. I am hugely relieved, but livid at having to mind so much about a cat, or anything at all, come to that.
As luck would have it, today’s the day a man comes from Bristol to talk to me about depression. I giggle maniacally to myself when I remember. He’s making a documentary on the subject.
What about being alone? Where did that go? I consider phoning and telling him he can’t come. I spend twenty minutes inventing stories about why. An imaginary aunt has just died. I’ve had my first ever epileptic attack. I have to do an emergency reading in Aberdeen. What about a kitten whose gut has turned inside out? What about I’m too depressed to talk about depression? I give up. Anyway, if he’s coming from Bristol, he won’t be home answering his phone.
He turns out to be a perfectly nice man and pleasantly acerbic with it. His only obvious fault is that he drives up in an Alfa. We drink coffee and talk. He thinks there’s a distinction between depression and melancholia – he’s right, there is. He thinks there’s a connection between melancholia and writing (or any of that creative stuff) – he’s right, there is. But I’m wary of making much of that, because a real bone-deep depression is as painful as cancer, and that’s a fact, too. I worry about romanticising it. On the other hand, last night’s howling was precisely what he is talking about. Melancholia is a curiously different condition from clinical depression, or, at least, a place you can get to if you go through the clinical depression and wait. And it isn’t negative. It’s more like being in the part of my head that I write from. So, we bat this about a bit, but I still hear myself hissing aggressively about not wanting to make depression or writing seem mystical or magical. They are, of course, in a way. But they’re also not. Long may confusion reign. Things are difficult; why shouldn’t they be? The nice man nods. It seems we aren’t having a disagreement.
Tuesday. Wednesday. Thursday. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. These are the days. Don’t speak to anyone (except the vet on Darwin’s progress: all is well). Leave the answering machine on. Don’t answer the doorbell (luckily, no one rings it). This is it, then. Me in my space. Me and my melancholy.
I do nothing. I get on with the new novel. Smoke. Drink coffee. Smoke. Write. Stare at ceiling. Smoke. Write. Lie on the sofa. Drink coffee. Write.
It is a kind of heaven. This is what I was made for. It is doing nothing. A fraud is being perpetrated: writing is not work, it’s doing nothing. It’s not a fraud: doing nothing is what I have to do to live. Or: doing writing is what I have to do to do nothing. Or: doing nothing is what I have to do to write. Or: writing is what I have to do to be my melancholy self. And be alone.
Moreover, I don’t have to think about food. No one here now finds eating an essential part of their life. In addition to smoking, drinking coffee and writing, I make regular trips to the fridge to gaze on its cosmic emptiness. I adore its lit-up vacancy. No L-i-L, no daughter, needing the fridge full of possible feasts. I haven’t been shopping for ten days now. There’s a bit of inedible cheese, and a jar of jalapeño chillies that I nibble at when I’m peckish. Every thirty-six hours or so I call in an emergency pizza. Another nice man on a bike brings it round. I do not die of starvation. I continue to drink coffee (sometimes tea), smoke, write and stare at the ceiling.
Pages pile up. I feel guilty. Someone else must have written them. Anyway, even if I did write them, it was too easy. They won’t be any good. Uh huh, there’s the worry centre activating again. Because Friday, I have to go out.
Friday. A trip to the zoo. I want to know about orangutans for the novel. Mick Carman, the head keeper of the primates, has agreed to talk to me. He’s wearing green wellies with khaki trousers tucked into them. He’s been at the zoo for twenty-six years. Again, I feel a fraud. I’m planning to write about a talking orang called Jenny. He’ll think me frivolous. Cautiously, I tell him I’m just a fiction writer. I need some facts, but I make things up, too. Do I know, he asks without prompting, that the Malays believe orangs can talk, really, but they don’t because they think they’ll be made to work if the humans find out? I didn’t know. Thank you, God, and I love you, too.
We discuss the daily routine. Mick reckons that orangs are closer to humans than gorillas or chimps; he doesn’t care what anyone says. I’m delighted to hear this, more grist for my fiction mill. But why? Because they’re lazy, sullen and devious, if I see what he means. Oh, yes, I do see. They’re by far the most difficult animal to keep in captivity because of this, and because they’re basically solitary animals, not social like the other apes. They each live in their own territory, defending it vigorously from all comers, except for sexual encounters. It’s every orang for himself or herself. Speaking of which, I tell Mick, I read a paper written by a Scandinavian woman anthropologist demanding that ‘orangutan’ (meaning ‘man of the forest’) be amended to whatever is the Malay for ‘person of the forest’.
Quite right. Quite right. We must defend the personhood of the solitary, female whatevershescalled-utan with all our might. For she is me and I am her, and soon I’m staring through reinforced glass at Suka (meaning The Delightful), who will be Jenny in the novel. She sits in her cage, solitary and morose, and as melancholic as you please, dropping handfuls of straw on to her head. And I wouldn’t mind betting that some protoplasmic wisp is nuzzling into the corners of her cage, aching for the curious eyes of the likes of me to piss off and leave her on her own.
28 May 1992
GOOD HOUSEKEEPING
By the age of thirty-one Jeffrey Dahmer had killed seventeen people, all men, none of whom he had known for more than a few hours. He masturbated with the bodies, dissected them, had sex with the viscera and performed fellatio with the opened mouths of severed heads. Not long before he was caught, and while in the process of yet another killing, his flat in Milwaukee contained two corpses in the bath, a headless torso immersed in bleach, several severed heads, hearts and genitalia in the fridge and freezer, and the body of a man killed two days previously under a blanket on the only bed, where, presumably, Dahmer slept until he discovered the head crawling with maggots, and was obliged to cut it off and prepare it for freezing.
Do we need to know about this man and his activities? Is he of intrinsic interest? Wouldn’t it be enough to catch him, account for seventeen missing people, and prevent any more deaths by locking him securely away for the rest of his life? It could be useful for specialists – criminologists, psychiatrists – to have the details of Dahmer’s life and doings with a view to learning about the causes, and therefore the prevention, of such aberrant behaviour. But is it useful for you and me, with no more than a window-shopper’s interest, to know about Jeffrey Dahmer? Brian Masters (in The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer) says yes, not only is it useful, it is vital to examine this human being in detail, because he is one of us.
I suppose the world divides into those who look and those who look away. Looking away is easiest, of course, because it requires no justification, implying, as it does, decent sensibility. Looking is altogether a more difficult activity. I doubt that it’s ever entirely free of prurience, but the decision to gaze on the abominable – starving children in faraway countries, death and destruction in vicious wars, images and accounts of the Holocaust – might also be a conscious decision to bear witness to the monstrous possibilities of our own humanity. Part of Primo Levi’s final depression centred on his belief that fewer and fewer people were listening to what he had witnessed on our behalf. ‘Nothing human is alien to me’ is more than an affirmation of species togetherness: it’s a warning that by denying kinship with the worst of our kind, we may never know ourselves at all. There have been others like Dahmer, but he’ll do as the worst.
Masters quotes Colin Wilson: ‘The study of murder is not the study of abnormal human nature; it is the study of human nature stained by an act that makes it visible on the microscopic slide.’ This is a seductive argument for insatiably curious creatures like ourselves, but why then don’t we pick up (or review) with equal relish books about the good, the gentle or the kind? If wickedness is a black hole we peer intently into because we are unable to comprehend it, isn’t goodness, actually, as mysterious? Why isn’t it as interesting?
Masters is severe with his readers; there is a touch of the moral tutor about him. His study of murder and psychological mayhem is a philosophical enquiry which we are bound to contemplate if we seek the truth. ‘I realise, of course, that this is a dangerous undertaking, and there are many who will take refuge in any manner of evasions rather than face it … The reader must have something of the therapist who draws on his own psychotic possibilities
, or he will flounder in the reassuring soup of objectivity
.’ In spite of quoting the dubious authority of R.D. Laing, there is no questioning Masters’s intention, which is serious, as it was in his previous book on Dennis Nilsen, another killer whose behaviour was inexplicable to most people.
Murder is the borderline between society and the wilderness. It is the irreversible act which must make the killer an outcast, forever set apart by his or her act. But this does not mean he (or she) is inexplicable to the rest of us. The taking of another life is always terrible, but it is also sometimes understandable. Even the most dreadful of murders, infanticide, is not beyond the comprehension of parents who remember the power that the cries of small babies have to distress. From time to time we have all had to use self-control when faced with the rage other people can create in us. But such feelings, even when acted on, are still feelings, and connect us with others. Murder is usually a social crime.
Jeffrey Dahmer is extraordinary (although not alone: Nilsen’s affect and motivation are remarkably similar) in that absence of feeling is at the root of his crimes. So absent is the feeling that murder is hardly the crime at all. It only happens to be what he has to be charged with because the law does not recognise his real transgression. The death of others for Dahmer was merely a necessary stage on the way to what he really wanted: lifeless bodies deprived of all volition. Depersonalised from childhood, he needed to subtract the person from individuals in order to make a relationship with them. In this sense, Dahmer (like Nilsen) was not destroying, but creating: he was making dead bodies which he then, and only then, could have and hold. Before he began habitually killing people, he drugged them insensible even when they were willing to have sex with him. And later, when dead bodies proved so unsatisfying because they could not be kept for very long, he tried, a crazed and ill-informed Dr Frankenstein, to create a living zombie by drilling into a sleeping man’s skull and injecting the frontal lobes with acid. Death was not his object: objects were his object.
If we are looking at Dahmer to see our own distorted reflections, there are two essential questions: how did he come to be the way he was? And: was he mad, a monster or evil? In order to answer the first question, Masters details Jeffrey Dahmer’s upbringing. A tranquilliser-addicted, neurotic mother, a distant, though not uncaring father, a country-town boyhood. It is not a happy childhood, and like many children of disturbed families, he became withdrawn. The problem here is to make a distinction between Freud’s ‘ordinary unhappiness’ and the devastating turmoil of this particular individual. Masters pinpoints details which, with hindsight, look powerfully significant. The game he invented at the age of eleven was called the Infinity Game, where stick people were annihilated if they came too close to each other, and tightly drawn spirals called Black Holes were the entrances to Infinity, from which nothing returned. He had an early addiction to being drunk. He vented his unhappiness by smashing at trees with an axe in the woods, rather than speaking to anyone. At four, he had the experience of a double hernia operation, and a (presumably subconscious) memory of having his viscera handled, then of waking in such pain that he asked his mother if his penis had been cut off. And he dissected dead animals.
This last was Dahmer’s single boyhood enthusiasm. He took roadkill apart, examined the internal organs, let the flesh rot and then tried to reassemble the skeleton. He never killed anything, nor took pleasure in giving pain. It’s tempting to think that, finding a void within himself, he was taking living things apart to see what it was he was missing. When he began to kill men he picked up, it was with the intention of keeping them, of not letting them go away. There was something he wanted from them and in all probability, it was life. But like taking a watch to pieces in order to see where the tick is, the thing he was looking for vanished in the searching.
None of these aspects of Dahmer’s youth really explains what he became, and even if the combination of all of them signals what he was, there is still no clue as to why. Which, of course, is the real mystery. An early interest in form and structure might turn an adolescent into a sculptor, an architect, a butcher, a biologist. Young boys who have had hernia operations don’t regularly become the kind of necrophiliac even necrophiliacs shy away from. Drunkenness might make it easier to do unspeakable things to human beings, but most people who get drunk to overcome their inhibitions do not want to do what Dahmer did. And might not the young inventor of the Infinity Game become an astrophysicist or SF novelist? Masters does suggest (nerve-wrackingly for the inhabitants of North London) that Dahmer’s kind of withdrawal has two possible outcomes: if it doesn’t make a killer of you, ‘it promotes the creative isolation of the artist, who is, in this respect, the antithetical twin of the murderer.’
If we must confront wickedness, we may also have to confront our inability to grasp it in a simple cause-and-effect way. Not long ago someone suggested I read Alice Miller’s case study on Hitler, because, she said, ‘the way she analyses his childhood makes him completely understandable.’ Do we want Hitler’s childhood to make him understandable? And could it ever? The fact is, the range of unhappiness in childhood is so vast and so dreadful that I doubt Hitler’s home life was worse than that of many another infant who did not grow up as he did. But it is not Hitler, really, who we need as comparison to Jeffrey Dahmer. It is the concentration camp guard we need to wonder at, the man who looked human beings in the eye while he performed the acts which Hitler merely ordered. The mystery is in the absence of shame and humanity on the small scale of Dahmer and his visitors, or you and me. It’s at that singular point we can find no other word more appropriate than evil.
The question the jury at Dahmer’s trial had to decide on was not guilt or innocence, but whether the man was a mad devil or a sane monster. Technically, did he have a mental disease? Did he have any control over his impulses? Dahmer spoke of being ‘compelled’ or ‘possessed’ by the hunger to have bodies. He did not only use the bodies for sexual gratification, but had a black table with skulls and a skeleton arranged on it, which he called his ‘shrine’, and he also ate human flesh.
Masters makes a good deal of anthropological evidence on the cannibalism/primitive religion nexus, citing the Aztecs, the windigo psychosis of Canadian Indians who become eaters of human flesh, and of course, the Catholic Mass. Certainly, Dahmer seems to fit in with these notions, as well as the dark area of the psyche which includes werewolves and vampires. The sacrifice of humans and eating people as an act of love, or a desire to partake of their qualities has a long history. Masters speculates on the spiritual plainness of Dahmer’s Lutheran religion, and how it might have created a vacancy which hankered after Dionysian excess and primitive ritual. (You almost get the feeling Masters is suggesting that had Dahmer been a Catholic – of the Southern European variety, it would have to be – he might have been all right.) It’s important, says Masters, that Dahmer is not a moral idiot. He knows right from wrong. But that is no proof against possession. The Devil only triumphs over a man capable of putting up a fight against him. Corruption must have a decent medium in which its bacilli can multiply. Dahmer was finally taken over, but there were periods when he tried for normality.
In the end the labels seem transferable: what we might call multiple or schizoid personality and feel comfortable with, is surely no more than a current transformation of the ancient idea of possession by spirits. In either case, what the individual feels is that his ordinary social self has been overcome by a force, a will, beyond his control. Call it devilry, call it madness; either way Dahmer was obviously not very well.
Which is not what the jury decided. On all counts of murder Dahmer was found, by ten votes to two, not to have a mental disease. It suggests, since there is no death penalty in Wisconsin, that the ten were those who choose to ‘look away’. They decided not to have his condition examined, but to lock him away out of sight.
Masters is very likely right to suggest that Jeffrey Dahmer’s crimes were extreme versions of our own unacted-on fantasies, on which we prefer not to dwell. A desire to explore the internal labyrinths and possess the interior of a lover’s body is not beyond the sexual imagination. Indeed, it is implied in the various acts of penetration people perform with one another. Sexual hunger is visceral; though, unlike Dahmer, most of us settle for dark dreams and do not go beyond the limits of reason.
The danger in this line of thought is that Dahmer becomes an existential hero, the outsider who dares to act on what ordinary mortals can barely think about. But the reality of Dahmer is otherwise. Finally, I doubt that his actions can tell us more than we know already from myth, story and fantasy. The strongest and most awful image of both Dahmer and Nilsen is that of housekeeping in hell. Both come to a point where the bodies pile up around them – Dahmer taking a shower with two corpses in the tub – the smells are intolerable, the logistics of disposal impossible, and they are condemned to a seemingly unending task of dismembering, eviscerating, dissolving, and scrubbing away at the disorder and putrefaction they have created. All the classic images of hell are present in each of those flats, inhabited by the ghost of Hieronymus Bosch and the two increasingly bewildered, dull-minded men, who finally long to be caught so that their nightmare can stop. The question of whether Jeffrey Dahmer is, in the end, of vital interest is addressed by Dahmer himself, and I’m inclined to agree with him: ‘This is the grand finale of a life poorly spent … How it can help anyone, I’ve no idea.’
11 February 1993
HE COULD AFFORD IT
This is the story of a man who insisted on having precisely twelve peas on his dinner plate every evening. He threaded the peas all in a row on to his fork and ate them, but if one of the peas was too big to fit on the prong with the rest, it was returned to the chef to be replaced by a pea of standard size. Once you know this everything else follows.
Howard Hughes’s life is a series of obsessions, each overridden in its turn by a bigger and better fixation. It begins with twelve peas on a plate, and ends with urine stored in Mason jars. Actually, it’s not an unusual story as such – the world is full of people dogged by ritual obsessions. What made Hughes remarkable was that he had the money to give absolute licence to every desperate whim. There was no practical reason for him to try to control his madness. The rest of us have to make our neuroses fit in with the world around us – a touch of reality that may trim our unreason. The rich are different from us not just because they can afford to indulge their madnesses, but because they can pay other people to sustain their nightmares.
This is a practical, rather than a moral point, and not one made in Charles Higham’s biography Howard Hughes: The Secret Life; Higham’s moral fervour in telling this wretched story twangs with self-righteousness. There’s talk of ‘moral cesspools’ and ‘man-hungry, tweedy heiresses’ – it’s a world where God and Charles Higham sit in judgement and everybody gets their just deserts. You might think that a man whose lovers include Katharine Hepburn, Ava Gardner, Claudette Colbert, Bette Davis, Lana Turner, Rita Hayworth, Marlene Dietrich, Tyrone Power, Robert Ryan and Cary Grant must have had some kind of good time, but no one gets to have much fun in Higham’s book. Higham explains with nice elaboration that, with women, Hughes ‘preferred intermammary intercourse – making love between a woman’s breasts – or fellatio to vaginal intromission. With men, he also preferred oral sex.’ On the other hand, we’re told later that after marrying the virginal Terry Moore on a yacht outside the five-mile limit so that the marriage wouldn’t be legal, he ‘massaged her clitoris, using a Japanese technique of arousal that overcame her inhibitions’. Unfortunately for inhibited women everywhere (except in Japan), Higham doesn’t amplify.
Women are either virgins or sluts to Higham, and he doesn’t give much for their strength of character whatever their moral state. Here’s how he describes Katharine Hepburn: ‘She was no stronger than any other woman when it came to meeting an immensely powerful and wealthy young man with stunning good looks and a lean, hard body who looked vulnerable and anxious to be mothered.’ Do you hear the weird sound of simultaneous salivation and teeth-grinding? As a final thrust we’re told: ‘It never seems to have occurred to her, in her extraordinary state of self-centredness, that she would be sharing Hughes with Cary Grant, Corinne Griffith and any number of unnamed beauties of both sexes.’ The slurping and gnashing reach ear-splitting proportions.
But however loud the voice of the moral majority, the tale of Howard Hughes comes across for the miserable, sad thing it was. Not a tragedy. That would require a poor, talented boy who hungers for success, makes good and can’t handle it. What we’ve got is a rich, talented boy who starts off with everything, wants more and handles it well enough, but is unfortunately also a fruitcake. It wasn’t just the peas: during the same period, he took to conducting his business conferences on the lavatory. Severe anxiety about constipation had set in. Apparently, the business associates of rich young men do not refuse to meet wherever the rich young men require them to.
What made Howard run? Was it that wicked Uncle Rupert who sodomised young Howard? The late Photoplay publisher James Quirk told his nephew Lawrence (who decades later told Mr Higham) that Rupert put pressure on Hughes to go to bed with him. Higham says they say that Rupert owned a circular graveyard in New England in which he kept the bodies of people he’d murdered, drowned his daughter, replaced her with a double and made love to his sister. Which is pretty conclusive, and who knows, maybe that was where the funny stuff with the peas – not to mention the constipation – began. Then, thank God, we’ve got an explanation for the whole sorry mess and we can go about our business safe in the knowledge that once again child abuse is to blame for it all.
Then again, perhaps it was the family holocaust that happened when Hughes was in his late teens and, over a period of less than two years, his germophobic, hypochondriacal mother died under an anaesthetic, his alcoholic aunt hanged herself, and his father fell off his chair and died of an embolism. Or did Hughes’s congenital deafness so isolate him that his world shrank to the peas on his plate? Actually, there’s no indication that Higham cares to explain why Hughes was the way he was. The family background and tales of his youth are not developed as psychological causes but are merely tossed on an accumulating pile of corruption. Everybody is doomed because everybody, past and present, is contaminated. This is quite Greek, except the chorus is that of the tongue-clicking virtuous – no hint of pity attends this drama.
Of course, sex has nothing to do with Hughes’s life. Women were conquests and in that sense not very different from planes – Hughes had a number of record-breaking flying exploits to his name. When one – sadly unnamed – movie star refused to go into his bedroom after weeks of being wined and dined, he went in by himself, leaving the door open so that the astonished woman could see him having sex with a life-size, anatomically correct, rubber replica of herself which he had had made. But by the early 1950s he had given up the real-ish thing and was spending days at a time locked in the Goldwyn studio’s screening room, peeing into bottles and masturbating to the bad movies he had RKO make for the purpose. This ended when Otto Preminger screened a rough cut of Porgy and Bess in the room, and Hughes, as anti-black as he was antisemitic, refused ever to go there again.
All along, it was about power, and although he seemed not to be very good at business (luckily he was rich enough to stay rich whatever messy deals he made), he had a real talent for buying influence – with Nixon, the CIA, Somoza, the Mafia and