Thy Neighbor's Wife Book

I'm not going to lie at the outset and say I picked up this book because it's a classic. I could, because it is. Gay Talese was one of the pioneers of New Journalism. Thy Neighbor's Wife combines the scope and detail of a Tom Wolfe epic with the vivid scene recreations of a Truman Capote and filters them through the Marquis de Sade.

But that's not why I read it.

In the internet era, porn is cheap and easy. I wanted a challenge. I wanted my smut done up right, by a literary professional.

Unlike many classic-and-controversial books, which seem so quaint now, Thy Neighbor's Wife still manages to be immensely provocative. I also discovered, however, that it is truly a classic of its type: an elegantly structured, beautifully written journalistic piece (of course, whenever you write about sex, there are going to be some groaners, and not even Talese is immune from this inevitability).

If I was going to give this book a tagline, it would've been "the classiest dirty book you'll read this year (or any year since 1979)". However, when I thought about it, I realized how much I've been conditioned. The book isn't "dirty." Unless you find sex - talking about it, thinking about it, doing it - "dirty." In which case, I'm sorry.

Americans are singularly bred as anti-sex and pro-violence. It probably harkens back to our earliest days as Puritans in New England, where we funneled our suppressed sexuality into killing Indians and witches. That mindset has continued unabated to this day, where you can easily buy a first-person shooter videogame at any store, or sit down in front of CBS for two or three primetime hours of gruesome crime procedurals (usually against women, natch), but where the nation does a collective freak-out when Janet Jackson's pasty-covered breast is shown for a fraction of a second on live television. (Oddly, the moral police, from their earliest days viewing peep shows and perusing sex mags, have always gone out of their way to be offended, as attested to the high-DVR playback rates for the "wardrobe malfunction).

Talese noted our country's social history, and also how it seemed to be changing in the late seventies, so he set out to write a book about it.

His first chapter was probably designed to drive the moral police crazy. It is a tour de force set piece in which Talese graphically recreates a masturbatory night of 15 year-old Harold Rubin. Suffice it to say, there are no euphemisms involved. After you get over wondering how Talese could possibly know all these details, you move onto the second chapter, which tells the life story of Diane Webber, the model in the skin magazine that Harold was perusing in the previous chapter. The third chapter begins with a young Hugh Hefner gazing at a picture of Diane, as he fits her into the layout for his fledgling magazine, Playboy.

Here, you are given an idea of the structure that Talese maintains throughout this sprawling, digressionary book. He always ends a chapter with the subject of his next chapter. This seems simple, but it never becomes too neat; to the contrary, his use of a handful of artfully drawn, fully-realized characters is a subtly-sewn thread that knits everything together.

The structure is important, because Talese goes a lot of places and talks about a lot of things: massage parlors, sex shops, magazine and book publishers, swingers, and swing clubs. There are a lot of names, both famous and unknown: Rubin, who's onanism starts the book, later owns an erotic massage parlor; Betty Dodson, who's graphic drawings were meant to allow women to enjoy sex as much as men; John Williamson, who's (in)famous Sandstone retreat operated on the twin pillars of honesty and partner swapping; and Hugh Hefner, who's magazine about living the good life helped pave the way for much harder porn (it's odd now, in a day and age in which Hefner has become the caricature of an old dirty man, to think of Hefner at the leading edge of 1st Amendment freedoms).

By far the most fascinating aspects of the book were its discussions of "obscenity" and the 1st Amendment. Talese starts with Anthony Comstock, who masturbated often during his childhood, felt guilty about it, and then took his guilt out on the US Constitution and thousands of innocent Americans. His "Comstock Law", prohibiting the sending of obscene articles through the mail, was used to ban the sale of such titilating works as Joyce's Ulysses. As though anyone could read that thing anyway. (I had no desire whatsoever to read Joyce until I found out that it was once controversial. Take that Anthony Comstock. By the way, you failed).

Talese makes his way through the "great" cases - Roth, Miller, Jacobellis, etc. - which simultaneously granted more freedoms (the eventual publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover) and muddied the waters (national standards verses community standards). The most amusing parts of these sections was Talese's dead-on thumbnail sketches of the Supreme Court Justices. These all-male, mostly-white, most-likely-sex-deprived bearers of the moral torch, sat on high and called the rest of us perverts. They were quite a bunch: Lewis Powell, who could barely stand to watch the porno films screened at the Supreme Court, while Thurgood Marshall laughed his way through them; pragmatic Potter "I know it when I see it" Stewart; smut-hating Harry Blackmun, who tethered Roe v. Wade to the doctor-patient relationship, probably because his idea of a right to privacy never advanced as far as his other evolving progressive views; and the biggest suprise at all, the great liberal William Brennan, who consistently voted in favor of censorship in his early days.

The Supreme Court-oriented sections of Thy Neighbor's Wife had a much bigger impact on me than the Sandstone-centered orgies. This is probably because Sandstone was a passing phase, while the Supreme Court's obscenity saga tells us a lot about ourselves as a nation. (There is also an extended, and fascinating, section on the Oneida "utopia" that flourished in New York during the mid 19th century).

I am shocked and appalled and shocked again that people have gone to jail in this country for what amount to thought crimes (of course, child pornography doesn't figure into this discussion; as Justice Ginsburg has recently explained, in child porn, the taking of a picture is in itself a species of child abuse). The way this nation dealt with publishers and sellers of erotica is indistinguishable from the censorship+prison equation utilized by Hitler and Stalin. Funnily, I'm guessing the people who most advocated in favor of the Comstock Laws were the same ones that screamed most loudly about Communists in the State Department. Because "liberty" is defined as whatever I am comfortable with. I was disgusted by the numerous stories of men who were sentenced to prison terms of up to fifteen years for selling a book or magazine that 12 hayseeds from Deer Hump, Alabama or Corn Lick, Iowa found objectionable.

Maybe it's reductive, but Justice Black was onto something when he memorably stated: "No law means no law." In contrast to the densely worded, oddly structured language of its neighbor, the notorious (and violent) 2nd Amendment, the 1st Amendment is a model of clarity: "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech."

There isn't any room for exceptions there, and while I agree that exeptions are necessary in some remote instances, I cannot agree that "obscenity" in any form, can be one of them. There isn't a clause modifying the 1st (preeminent) Amendment saying that Congress shall not abridge free speech as long as the speech is popular and acceptable to either (a) a Judeo-Christian national majority or (b) a Judeo-Christian local majority or (c) a Judeo-Christian minority with loud voices. No law means no law. (Oddly, Talese never touches on Stanley v. Georgia which made the possession of "obscene" items Constitutionally protected).

It's a testament to Talese's work that I'm able to get so excised about this subject in 2009, even though, in reality, the forces of repression have lost. Sure, even today, ESPN broadcaster Steve Philips was fired from his job for having an affair with a consenting adult. The moral arbiters of this nation will always have a disproportionate say, abetted by a (crumbling) media establishment that loves a reason to talk about sex without ever honestly talking about sex. The internet, though, has finally fulfilled the promise of the 1st Amendment.

At the end of his book, Talese memorably injects himself into the story, speaking of himself in the third-person. This is a controversial move, which is highlighted (and derided) in just about every contemporary review I've read. However, this is only a small section, and I didn't really mind, especially because it allows him to hit a towering home run on the last page: an amazing scene where Talese succinctly demonstrates our glaring sexual hypocrisy: the outward priggish morality and our inner desires.

My only disappointment was that this is a purely straight story. There is very little discussion of the treatment of homosexuals during this time period. Perhaps it was because Thy Neighbor's Wife prefigured the gay rights movement? I don't know. At the very least, it was written before the astoundingly insulting Supreme Court decision in Bowers v. Hardwick. Still, for as many intimate revelations as he makes, Talese seems awfully reluctant to even mention homosexuality. It felt like I was only being told about half the battle.