Whenever Channel 4 beamed a pair of naked buttocks into our living room (and that was way more often than you may remember), my mother would jump from her chair as at a point of order and declare (in a voice that might easily have been a model for late-period Margaret Thatcher at the dispatch box) “THAT’S UNNECESSARY!”
Every time I read a Leonard Michaels story, I find myself leaping out of my chair, and biting down on my lower lip so as not to let Harold Bloom catch me summoning the strong dead.
This is the story of one of those New York loft parties that you never get invited to (and by “you” of course I mean “me”) — a “love?!” triangle, working itself out with mind-numbing absurdity and viciousness in a dance of jammed doors and tangled underwear, literary quotations and dead-eyed confessions.
“‘My feet are like seashells, Henry.”
‘No.’
‘Seashells. Curled, hard. I walk bonky, bonky”
Michaels was one of those wilful, leering, permanent adolescents who garnered plaudits and patrons now and again, much as Baal garnered virgins in the Brecht musical, and for the same reason: people’s well-intentioned cloth-earedness. (How often must we be confusing “protean” with “unwashed”?)
His writing is like an accident in a firework factory — all fun and games until somebody loses an eye. A spew of me-me-me and hee-hee-hee.
Ah, but who am I kidding? It’s all so compelling, catching and fixing everyday human hate in an eruption of verbiage the way Weegee caught fucks in his news-camera flashlight on the shores of Coney Island.
And as it was with Arthur ‘Weegee’ Fellig, so it will be with Michaels: in fifty years time he’ll be hailed a genius.
“I reread the note, chucked up laughs like the clap of big buttocks.”
Oh, for heaven’s sake man, was that really NECESSARY?
First published in Going Places, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, 1969; also in The Collected Stories, FSG, 2007
A Personal Anthology 