The Weekly Screed (#653)

The tight white Doris
by David Benjamin

PARIS — The first time I ever read a sex scene in a novel was in eighth grade, over at Danny Robinson’s house on Waunona Way. The novel Danny handed to me was, as I recall, The Tight White Collar by Grace (Peyton Place) Metalious. I remember that the paperback literally fell open to its smuttiest passage, and that the name of the woman in this salacious scene of casual coitus was Doris.

Ever since that life-altering day, I look at women named Doris with a sort of jaded, 13-year-old prurience, as if to say, “Well, I know what sort of gal you are.”

So, when I unfolded my Times this morning and saw the page-one obituary for Doris Lessing, I scrolled right back to Danny, and his well-thumbed tableau of a different Doris dropping her knickers and asking for it.

Not fair to Doris Lessing, of course. Even worse, I have yet to bite the bullet and actually read something she wrote. I know I should. I have a pristine copy of The Golden Notebook that I’ve been meaning to read since 1996. I mean, the woman won a Nobel Prize, despite prose that one critic described as “indigestible” and which J.M. Coetzee, a fellow writer, deemed “depressing.”

I suppose if I were sure that Doris had written a sex scene as compelling as the other Doris’ big moment in The Tight White Collar…

Lessing’s masterpiece is, of course, The Golden Notebook, described by the Times as “structurally inventive and loosely autobiographical.” This approach followed the “structurally inventive and loosely autobiographical” avant-garde model pioneered by James Joyce in another of the 20th century’s most widely unread novels, Ulysses, which roughly followed the “structurally inventive and loosely autobiographical” avant-garde example set by Laurence Sterne in Tristram Shandy, which I did read, in 1965 — just shy of its 200th birthday.

But I haven’t read Ulysses, yet. I do recall that, in his sprightly series of Homer Evans mysteries, Elliot Paul makes several ironic references to an always-promised, never-finished epic by a Joycelike character. This ms., called Work in Progress, eventually became the most unread novel of all time, Finnegan’s Wake.

Doris, like Joyce and so many Nobel-worthy novelists of the century just past, came to understand that structure, style and self-absorption — rather than telling the story — had become the modern key to critical acclaim. Lessing’s structural gimmick in The Golden Notebook consists of a novel and “several notebooks, each in a different color, kept by… a novelist struggling with writer’s block.”

Ah, yes. Writer’s block, the asthma of the genius mind — proof that the writer is deadly serious, tortured by a creative force too great for a mere mortal to bear. (Stephen King never got writer’s block. Dickens died before it was invented.)

Back to The Golden Notebook, where I notice that all the pages have black ink on white paper. That’s right. The Red Notebook isn’t even slightly red. Nor is the Yellow Notebook yellow, nor the Blue Notebook blue. I make note of this failure in publishing imagination because I once owned an early copy of William Goldman’s hot fairy tale, The Princess Bride: The “Good Parts” Version. In that book, the “good parts” were actually printed in red ink. (I know. Cool, huh?)

I guess that if some publisher actually used black, red, yellow and blue ink in a memorial edition of Doris’ tour de force, it would seem like one gimmick too far, a tacky appeal to the literal — rather than literary — reader. It might attract the sort of Freud-deprived slob who reads William Goldman. (Like me.)

All my life, as an alleged writer, I’ve entertained the option of being “structurally inventive and loosely autobiographical.” Even succumbed once or twice. But I’ve resisted, mostly, because — like King, Goldman, Dickens — I have a head full of stories that aren’t about me and that I want normal people to read without being confused about who I am, where I’m going and what the hell I’m getting at. In a way, given a choice between sin and penance (something James “Stephen Daedalus” Joyce understood vividly), I’ve chosen sin.

I don’t like bad writing, but I don’t mind stories that are full of wild and unfamiliar characters drinking, dancing, eating, flirting and fornicating, even lying, scheming, stealing, killing, flirting and fornicating. These are all sins, of course, both to the Puritan moralist and to the serious critic who sees no place for this sort of goofing around in what he calls “literary fiction.”

Luckily, there’s penance easily at hand. If you want to atone for the sin of reading Raymond Chandler, Janet Evanovich or Larry McMurtry, just buy a six-pack of Red Bull and plunge into Doris.

No. Sorry. Not that Doris.

Speaking of dead authors — and a big contrast — I was, honestly, moved at the news of Elmore Leonard’s death in August, and not just because he’s so much fun. Reading Get Shorty recently, it struck me that Leonard probably added more to the enlightenment of the rank-and-file recreational reader than Joyce, with all his self-referential wordplay, or Doris, with her “structural inventiveness.”

I venture this conjecture because Elmore Leonard, in book after hugely popular book, trained his readers in the subtle theme of moral ambiguity. Not one character in any Leonard novel is fully sympathetic or even slightly heroic. Elmore made us fond of characters who aren’t naturally likeable (Chili Palmer in Get Shorty, is a shylock who cons his way — over a few dead bodies — into the movie business). Leonard prepared readers, and non-readers, for semi-heroes like Tony Soprano, Walter White (Breaking Bad) and a whole series of Clint Eastwood characters, from Will Munny in Unforgiven to Walt Kowalski in Gran Torino.

Come to think of it, Doris (either one) would fit nicely into an Elmore Leonard story, preferably in a little black dress and no underwear.