This essay originally appeared in the ebook Existential Smut 1 (Ripe Mango Take Two Press, 2023). (Copyright Info)
Over the last decade the erotic fiction of Marco Vassi (1937-1989) became available as ebooks. I first came across Vassi's The Carcass of Dreams story cycle in the 1990s and continued reading his fiction over the years.
I have mixed feelings about Vassi's books. Some books I love without reservation. Some parts are repetitive or too transgressive; some parts are overly intellectual or have so much fucking that I have to put the book down. Sometimes these books are so full of ideas that fucking is just an afterthought. At other times they read like scripts for a highbrow pornographic movie.
The Secret Record (Michael Perkins' study of modern erotic literature) describes Vassi as "primarily a didactic artist who asks the question, how are we to live? and answers: by eroticizing our lives." It's probably correct to think of Vassi as more of a sexual philosopher than storyteller, but his fiction shows great attention to dramaturgy and dialogue. Vassi's characters rise above the usual erotic cliches; they have nuanced psychologies, rich and peculiar aesthetics, and an ability to find beauty and transcendental joy in every kind of carnal moment. Vassi did not use sexual fantasies merely as an engine for his storytelling or philosophy; he pursued sexual adventures more vigorously in real life than even the most open-minded would try. Vassi viewed sexual explorations as not just an attempt to connect with people, but also a spiritual journey which could uncover the same kinds of eternal truths sought by religious people. His fiction contains sexist and degrading language and behavior, yet many of his female characters have complex motivations and rarely allow themselves to be treated merely as sex objects. Indeed, often Vassi himself (like many of his protagonists) switched between active and receptive roles during sexual encounters, understanding the power and appeal of both roles. He is still fondly remembered by a circle of friends who stayed with him until the end, and his recently published letters show both tenderness and hints of passion.
Three decades after Vassi's untimely death, it is worth revisiting Vassi's works and asking how relevant they are today.
I recently came across a 29 minute YouTube video ("Let's Talk Dirty Marco Visse") where a man interviewed 44 year old Marco Vassi at Artists' Cemetery near Woodstock, New York. The interview was casual and pleasant; Vassi was a clean-cut Italian man talking affably about metasex and the erotic world. Well-mannered, unassuming and dressed in shorts and a red T-shirt, he might pass as a yoga instructor or maybe a painter – certainly no sexual revolutionary. Many details about his biography and sexual adventures seem larger than life, but it's striking that Vassi tried many of the sexual activities described in his erotica books.
Vassi grew up in a Catholic family. He attended Catholic schools and briefly entered a Franciscan monastery before enrolling at Iona College, a Catholic institution in New York. In sophomore year he dropped out to enlist in the Air Force and was selected to work in Intelligence. After being sent to San Francisco to learn Mandarin at the Institute of Far Eastern Languages, Vassi spent three years in Korea and Japan working as a radio-intercept operator and translator. During that time he had many sexual experiences fucking himself silly (his phrase) in Japanese whorehouses. But he also had a "normal" relationship with a somewhat older Japanese woman named Hatsue who was a virgin. As Vassi later relates in A Driving Passion (1992), the circumstances of the seduction were somewhat unclear. Even though Vassi never felt a great amount of passion for Hatsue, he still liked her a lot and felt duty bound to propose to her. She accepted. Against the advice of friends and other people in the military, Vassi filed paperwork to get married, but it caused him to lose his security clearance and ultimately his military assignment. After being discharged, the 22 year old Vassi returned to New York (without Hatsue) to get his bachelor's degree from Brooklyn College. Vassi's parents lent him the money to bring Hatsue to New York and organized a wedding reception.
During the day Vassi took classes at Brooklyn College and worked as a file clerk at ASCAP at night. Vassi started hanging around radicals of all sorts; after a psychology instructor seduced him, Vassi started to question whether his marriage to Hatsue was genuine. Eventually he left Hatsue and moved into a commune—but not without feeling "profound guilt for having brought her from Japan" (ADP, 1992 p. 42). Hatsue returned to Japan (where she remarried and had children).
With Hatsue out of the picture, Vassi took classes at the New School for Social Research, learned about Gurdjieff, Ouspensky and Marx, attended yoga workshops and headed to San Francisco to hang out at the Experimental College (EC). There he led workshops, eventually playing the role of guru/teacher/performer. During one trip to Arizona to lead workshops about Zen meditation, Vassi got a girl pregnant. When he heard the news, Vassi traveled again to Arizona with friends to figure out what to do. He learned from the woman's parents that she was mentally unstable and had been in a mental hospital for six months. Vassi agreed to the marriage anyway – even participating in an orgy with her on their honeymoon. Eventually Vassi decided to leave her – learning only later that the woman had had an abortion and become addicted to drugs.
When Vassi returned to New York, he saw an ad in the Village Voice seeking writers for adult novels. He wrote a chapter and submitted it without success. Later he showed it to his friend Richard Curtis who was starting a career as a literary agent. Curtis encouraged him to pursue writing erotic fiction, and Vassi eventually published several novels with Olympia Press: The Mind Blower, The Gentle Degenerates and Contours of Darkness. Vassi found jobs writing columns for several adult magazines (Screw, Gay, Penthouse, Oui), translating things from Mandarin and serving as a reader for various publishers.
Vassi's books were unusual for the genre of erotic fiction, but they were well written and frequently compared to the Rosy Crucifixion series by Henry Miller. Many of his columns for adult publications were thought pieces about sexuality, bisexuality and "metasexuality" (the title of a manifesto which will be discussed later). Vassi tried all kinds of sexual acts and with multiple partners in his personal life, then wrote freely about these experiences in both his essays and fiction. He regularly gave workshops about sex, yoga, Tantric sex, metasex, etc.
It was a daring – some might say reckless – lifestyle. It allowed Vassi to visit the extremes of human sexuality and explore the depths of pain and ecstasy. Between the late 1970s and early 1980s (when the YouTube video was shot), Vassi was in his forties, having moderated his lifestyle and started living semi-monogamously with a woman named Sara who eventually proposed to him. As John Heidenry relates it:
The next day Sara left. "I'll always love you," she said as she boarded the bus back to New York. "But I'll probably never forgive you for rejecting me."
"I'm not rejecting you," he replied forlornly. "I'm rejecting monogamy." (What Wild Ecstasy, p. 291.)
The woman left him and Vassi continued having dalliances, eventually meeting a woman 20 years younger than himself named Eve Diana. She lived in Boston while Marco lived in New York. Eve and Marco had a pleasant and mostly monogamous 8 month relationship that was occasionally sexual but often long distance (they exchanged letters full of longing and frustration). Eventually though, after Vassi reconnected with an old lover, it became clear that Marco and Eve wanted different things from the relationship, and so they broke up. Then, a few months later on March 22, 1987 Vassi took an AIDS test which turned out to be positive. Still in shock, he failed to notify Eve (who learned the news secondhand). Luckily, neither Eve Diana nor Annie Sprinkle (whom he had lived with briefly and been sexually involved with over the years) tested positive.
Immediately after the HIV+ diagnosis, Marco fell into a depression which (according to David Steinberg) "put him beyond the reach of even his closest friends. He wandered from east coast to west, tried to commit suicide twice, was continuously morose (despite his good physical health) and totally self-absorbed." After his first suicide attempt (on March 27, 1987), Vassi stayed in the psychiatric unit for a week and then moved to Lee Lozowitz's spiritual community in Aptos, California from May to September of that same year. During that time Vassi also reconnected with a lover from a decade earlier (Marcy Sheiner) who provided a lot of support during Vassi's final year.
Even after the HIV diagnosis, Vassi was determined to explore safe sex alternatives while staying true to his metasexual ideals. Risk had always been an aphrodisiac to Vassi, John Heidenry commented, "but now he had to take into account the risk to his partners. Marco and Annie decided not to have intercourse or oral sex, but to explore new ways of having sex, experimenting with tantric, Native American and Taoist techniques, forgoing Western orgasm-oriented practices in favor of rhythmic breathing, hour-long bouts of eye gazing, and conversations about how sex was really more about tapping into and circulating energy than it was about fucking and sucking." (What Wild Ecstasy, 1997, p. 390). While Marcy and Marco were together in San Francisco, they also experimented with sexual contact which would keep Marcy safe.
Vassi had to return to New York (temporarily at first, then permanently) when his father had a heart attack and both his parents turned out to be very ill. Alone and despondent, Vassi attempted suicide again in January 1988, a month before his novel The Other Hand Clapping was published (receiving praise from the New York Times). Eventually Marcy moved to New York to stay with him between April and early July 1988. Shortly after, on July 22, 1988 Annie Sprinkle threw a celebration party for Vassi. That lifted Vassi's spirits, but from that point forward both his health and spirits began to decline. In December he went out into a snowstorm practically naked, caught pneumonia and locked himself in his room for almost a month. Eventually his friend and ex-lover Andrea Ossip found him and arranged for Vassi to be admitted into a hospital and put on a ventilator (where he died two weeks later). At the memorial service, author Norman Mailer called Vassi the "foremost erotic writer in America … a sexual explorer … his own experiment, and, ipso factor, a rare mortal."
Author David Steinberg discussed Vassi's final days in a 2023 interview I did with him. Steinberg once described the contradictions of Vassi's personality:
As a person, Marco was no less contradictory than his writing. He was at times able to give another person complete and absolutely focused love and attention, while at other times being so self-absorbed and inaccessible as to be totally infuriating. He would at one moment be open to all the complexities of multipartner relationships, free of possessiveness, ego, and the like, and then descend in a matter of hours into simpleminded jealous tantrums hardly worthy of a TV soap opera. He was able to look the most complex, difficult truths — about sex, about relationships, about life – directly in the eye, but he was often unable to sustain even the most elementary forms of honesty and compassion with partners and friends. He was at once brilliant and idiotic, profound and trite, loving and abusive. He was the ultimate lover of irony and contradiction, the ultimate coyote trickster, and thus an accurate embodiment of the complex life force we conveniently reduce to the word "sex." He was, to me, the finest sort of complex hero: the wise man who is also a goat, the monkey who is also a monk (This Thing We Call Sex, 2015, pp, 99-100).
Before looking at Vassi's fiction, one should take a moment to consider how the changing cultural and sexual mores allowed Vassi to explore his radical ideas and lifestyle.
Starting after World War 2, social forces were coming together to liberalize U.S. sexual norms. Birth control was becoming more wildly available, premarital sex and same-sex relationships were starting to become more common and accepted. So was divorce and sexual aids (and in the 1970s, abortion). Following Freud's theories about sex and psychoanalysis, Masters and Johnson started studying human sexuality and trying to understand the varieties of it. Talking about orgasms or oral sex no longer seemed taboo.
Women were demanding equal rights; dress codes and spoken language became more casual. "Free love" seems like something of a 60s cliche to contemporary readers, but college-age students were experimenting with new lifestyles in their dorms, and protesting in the streets against racism, injustice and the Vietnam War.
Magazine and book publishing had also undergone a transformation. Foreign publishers like Olympia Press were publishing lots of decadent and sexually explicit fiction – including de Sade, Genet, Bataille. Grove Press was publishing American beat poets and novelists who embraced sexual liberation and experimentation and even homosexuality. During the 1950s books by Jack Kerouac (On the Road,The Dharma Bums) and William Burroughs (Naked Lunch) were gaining controversy and fame while poets like Gary Snyder were exploring Eastern philosophy and Buddhism in their works. Yes, there were controversies – prohibitions of certain books and obscenity court cases – but generally even the most extreme works could be published and purchased if you looked hard enough.
At the same time, men's magazines like Playboy and Penthouse were establishing themselves and achieving a certain notoriety. The illustrated sex manual, The Joy of Sex, became a mainstream bestseller in the early 1970s. Sex advice columns were popping up in both men's and women's magazines.
These were the times that Marco Vassi lived in. Despite growing up Catholic, his sexual adventures and spiritual journeys and experiments in communal living would probably not have seemed that unusual to Vassi's peers even though he probably pursued these alternative lifestyles more vigorously. Once, when asked how his fiction compared to Henry Miller's, Vassi said, "I did my writing in the throes of the sexual revolution where going to a 50 person orgy was a casual thing to do on a Thursday night.… Miller never attended sadomasochistic bisexual orgies. I did, so I got to write about that."
It's one thing to go to an orgy or have hanky-panky at a bathhouse; it's quite another thing to describe the lifestyle vividly in your writings or lead workshops about it. Compared to the libertine and transgressive things being published by Olympia Press, Vassi's writings at least had some grounding in compassion and spirituality. Maybe his philosophies weren't as systematic as that of other psychologists, but at least they were grounded firmly in humanism and love.
It probably is no surprise that erotic fiction would include lots of vulgar sexual words (even though for my own erotic fiction, I use such language sparingly). But what about the language of literary criticism?
Vassi writes in complex sentences and often uses philosophical language. He often uses metaphor and elevated language to convey emotional intensity. It's clear that almost all the protagonists are highly educated and articulate. At the same time, the protagonist and other characters use sexual language all the time. Vassi's books probably use the word cunt and cock and fuck and asshole and cocksucker and whore more often than any book I have seen.
But it is more than that. Consider this passage from a different author:
I was walking along on this fucking fine morning, fucking sun fucking shining away, little fucking country lane, and I meets up with this fucking girl. Fucking lovely she was, so we gets into fucking conversation and I takes her over a fucking gate into a fucking field and we has sexual intercourse. (The Anatomy of Swearing, U. of Penn. Press, 1967 pp. 314-315.)
In this context, the word "fucking" has nothing to do with sex or anatomy. It has to do with cursing or yelling or emotional emphasis. Even in the bedroom using vulgar words sometimes can be a deliberate choice to highlight the thrilling sense of taboo or suggest strong emotions. By contrast, in Vassi's fiction, these words are used by the narrator simply for their functionality. I can't think of a single instance where the narrator uses a sexual euphemism (except in an ironic, self-mocking way). Vassi could certainly write compelling sex scenes with restrained language and sexual euphemism (and he does that somewhat in The Other Hand Clapping).
When privately contemplating sexual acts and fantasies, you can use any language you want. But when you write, you choose language for a variety of reasons: succinctness, expressiveness, comprehensibility, readability. Time and time again Vassi opts for raw language not so much for shock value but because it is the simplest and most direct way to express things. The words "cock" and "cunt" are easy to say and pair together; the language is reductionist and totally objectifying. Except in cases when the words are used playfully or to emphasize physical positions or sexual acts, they rarely are used to express anger or contempt.
This may simply reflect the casual language of the 1960s and 1970s or the fact that such language prevailed in the commune or that Vassi didn't spend much time in professional settings where profanity was discouraged. There's an amazing scene at the end of the "Dying Gynecologist" where the protagonist is fading out of consciousness while his soul goes wandering into the cosmic afterlife:
As the darkness of his death deepened, the memories fade, and the immense cunt before his mind's eye began to tremble, and open. From its roseate serrated center another cunt emerged, and another from the center of that. Cunt after cunt opened from the cunt preceding it. It was an infinite progression, never fully reaching him, continually spilling forth. He strained forward, to be taken into the heart of the budding cunt machine. It was the baby attempting to return, it was the man diving into the mystery, it was both and wall.
As he reached up in revery, the body on the bed bent at the middle and sat bolt upright. The people in the room were shocked at what they thought was a corpse perform such a sharp strenuous act. His lids flew up, but he saw nothing. His lips moved. A single word leapt from his throat.
"Cunt," he said.
The frequent use of such language in Vassi's fiction is designed to stress our sexual natures and also the importance of acknowledging that fact. Otherwise, we are acting like hypocrites and perhaps even alienating ourselves from our physical and sensual side. Love and romance certainly have spiritual qualities and the textual aspects of prose can make everything seem more abstract. Vassi's use of such language calls attention to the sexual potential in gender designations regardless of how old or young people are.
When writing an essay about Vassi's fiction, I am tempted to sanitize the language in my descriptions except when giving direct quotes. But what would be the point?
Vassi wrote an essay, the "Metasexual Manifesto," which encapsulates both his philosophical approach and aesthetics.
He divided the erotic world (eroticum) into two forms: sex (which is mainly procreative in purpose) and metasex (which is more about expressing affection and reaching for pleasure).
Sex is more serious, reverent and responsible. Metasex is for pleasure, for expressing affection, for exchanging energy, for money, for communication and exploitation, for meditation, etc. It might be labeled "play eroticum." As Vassi writes:
The basic error in all erotic thinking lies in muddying the aesthetics of metasex with the moral contingencies of sex, and of subverting the mystery and grandeur of sex with the relativistic values of metasex … There is no real difference between what two men do in bed, from what three women might do in bed, nor from what a man and a woman do in bed. To label the action homosexual or bisexual or heterosexual is divisive, alienating us from one another as human beings first and foremost.
Vassi defines different modes of sex and metasex which can differ in motives, goals and presentation.
The Procreative Mode is sex for the purpose of having a baby. It has a serious and urgent quality. There is a "quality of silence which has nothing to do with whether the participants make sounds or not. There is an almost holy intimacy which is unmistakable." For Vassi, even two men having anal sex can experience the "vibrations" of the procreative mode, as a kind of mythic structure deep within us.
The Theatrical Mode involves a performance and distance between performers and onlookers. It requires a lightness of touch and a sense of the visual. Also, this mode requires maintaining the performance as an act, as a performance which audiences can understand and enjoy, aware that participants are playing roles only temporarily. The acting out of fantasy requires that the participants be able to tell the difference between using and abusing one another. This could involve scripts or regular routines or stylized motions. Alternatively, it may simply be a private performance between two people aware of what roles they play in the performance, and the archetypes and costumes they assume for these roles.
The Therapeutic Mode involves using sex to liberate repressed feelings to help the partner express these feelings more easily. Vassi said that this mode provides a "potent mythic structure within which to pursue greater self-knowledge" and allows the individual tap into deep emotions while in an almost childlike state.
The Romantic Mode taps into the joyous feeling of love and admiration where "'I want to be with you forever' comes easily to the lips." Language plays an important part of this mode, allowing one to wax poetic directly to a loved one. Yet Vassi warns about the issue of truthfulness. If such feelings are genuine and spontaneous, then the Romantic mode can provide a lifetime of ecstasy. But as emotional intensity wanes and expressions of devotion become so exaggerated as to become ridiculous, one must be careful not to extend it for too long. If that happens, joy starts to become hollow.
The Masturbatory Mode is no less valid than the other modes of sexuality. It can even seem more intense; it does not have to be limited to one person by himself or herself. It can involve partners or even several people simultaneously. Vassi called this mutual masturbation a "subtle and delicate game … requiring sensitivity to the inner works of the other(s)." The masturbatory mode can even favor the tendency to celibacy and might be viewed as a way for the individual to keep the erotic energies flowing within oneself.
The Zen Mode is "produced through transmodality" and reflects our ability to shift between modes and operate in several modes simultaneously, collapsing them all together. Vassi does not get more specific than that, but suggests that shaking up the erotic modes can reveal "the moment's utter reality" and expose "all the joy and terror of coming face to face with The Nakedness."
The Metasex essay ends by discussing how procreative sex brings an "ecological consciousness" and an "awareness of the nature of life in general and of humanity in particular." At some point, Vassi consciously tried to conceive a child with a lover named Lucinda (the same name as the pregnant woman in the Saline Solution novel). It made him confront certain things:
At once, not only the species, but we as individuals, were on trial, and on all counts from the personal to the geopolitical. For example, we both smoke, and we are guilty about being enslaved by a self-destructive habit. Now the question: will the nicotine we ingest into our blood streams infect the child? And more subtly: shall the child have parents who are still prey to debilitating habits. ...
And what of the fact that almost any school I send the child to will be a factory run by mindless conformists, processing human beings on a conveyor belt of pseudo-knowledge the way automobile parts are run through on an assembly line? What of the fact that we live in a world where only a few know even of liberty, much less freedom? And what of the realities of monstrous warfare, and unwholesome food, and foul water, and filthy air? The human species is making a concerted effort to prove conclusively that it is the lowest form of life on earth, and into such a situation, what is the purpose of bringing a child?
Vassi wrote a lot more essays – many for magazines and some which were included in the Erotic Comedies volume. Many were for the consumption of readers of adult magazines. They were almost all about sex and metasex, homosexuality and bisexuality, communes, S&M, anal sex, fetishes, Tantric sex, that sort of thing. All very provocative, somewhat exhibitionist, talking about various lovers and sexual encounters. Many of Vassi's anecdotes in these essays were attempts to illustrate the ethical and psychological insights he had gained from his free-loving sex-positive lifestyle. They also show how he worked through ethical doubts and found solace and joy from that lifestyle.
Vassi had already given lots of self-help workshops and was comfortable playing the part of guru. I think one important aim of Vassi's essays – and probably his fiction – is to champion the metasexual lifestyle but also to show how a person like himself can adopt the lifestyle while still abiding by a personal moral standard and not be ravaged by self-doubts or guilt.
Psychology has moved well past the psychological frameworks of Freud or Wilhelm Reich that Vassi used as his philosophical foundation. Over the past 40 or 50 years, academic departments have emerged to study queer theory, gender/transgender studies and both the physiological and psychological dimensions of human sexuality. Counselors, therapists and support groups have sprung up to help couples to navigate through sexual issues – to say nothing of better sex aids, more informed laws to crack down on sexual abuse and evolving language ("sex worker" instead of "prostitute," etc.) Vassi had witnessed the variety of ways sexual desire could manifest itself and had flirted with the most taboo of behaviors, but his ideas reflected that of only one person during one era.
Still, Vassi's fiction indicates an intuitive understanding of the dynamics of the gay, polyamorous and S&M lifestyles. They also incorporate many Eastern concepts in the words and actions of characters. At the same time, Vassi's metasexual ideas did not present a comprehensive system of understanding sex and society. It made assumptions about people's personal freedoms and emotional independence. For instance, metasex never was intended to address exploitation or rape as social problems; it didn't address marital fidelity or how children develop a sexual identity over time. Vassi died at the age of 51. There was no opportunity for him to explore how people's approaches to sex and identity change over a lifetime; it was his devotion to metasex that led to his death, but really, who in the 1980s knew that AIDS would be so terrifyingly fatal? One can hardly fault Vassi for being ignorant of the risks inherent in his polyamorous lifestyle – especially when at the time no one – not even the scientists – fully understood these risks.
Vassi worked primarily in the genre of erotic fiction. He got started in 1970 when he saw an ad in the Village Voice seeking "writers for adult novels." After he sent in a chapter to the publisher, the response he received ("it's too literary for the fuck market and it's got too much fucking in it for the literary market") typified the dilemma Vassi faced. How do you accommodate both kinds of readers?
Vassi finished a novel (Mind Blower) which was published by Olympia Press and followed that with several other erotic novels. As adept as Vassi was at writing sex scenes (in terms of mechanics, sensory evocations and psychological insights), the number and duration of the sex scenes in these novels might seem excessive. Vassi might have been aware that these literary-sexual fantasies were too cerebral for the average reader of this genre and made up for it by throwing in extra amounts of sex.
The question of how long or detailed to make sex scenes is a constant issue with erotic fiction; how do you keep the reader interested and excited? How do you persuade the reader to care about the characters? If you have written a threesome scene, would adding two or three people or extra orgasms make the scene more erotic? Sometimes more and longer sex is better for readers; sometimes less is more. A novel offers additional challenges. Wall-to-wall sex might work in short fiction, but a novel needs suspense, a variety of incidents and believable characters. The reader needs a reason to stay with a protagonist for 200 pages. (That's hard to accomplish in any novel – erotic or not).
All fiction has an element of artifice, and erotic fiction can sometimes drown the reader in fantasy. In his essay "Marco Vassi: Avatar of Eros", David Steinberg notes that
Almost every bit of Marco's writing has a twist, a jab, a way of saying that things are not what they seem, not what we like to pretend they are. He is, in this sense, a true Sadean in that he wants to expose the artifice, the unreality, the hypocrisy so prevalent in how people act and talk about sex. (This Thing We Call Sex, pp, 97-101).
For simplicity's sake, this essay will examine four Vassi works. In Touch is enjoyable both as a light-hearted story and a social satire. Erotic Comedies contains a brilliant and imaginative series of erotic portraits. The early novel Saline Solution is a real mess, but it also was a compelling drama with genuine social issues. Other Hand Clapping is the undisputed masterpiece, although ironically it has the least fucking of all. These four struck me as good starting points for entering Vassi's beautiful and inconsolable worlds.
"Illusion … reality … it all depends on the point of view, doesn't it?" he said.
"But whose point of view, that's the question." (Ch. 1)
Erotic fiction – if it becomes too serious or tragic, can lose its magic. It can also become arduous to read.
Conversely, sex scenes which are too silly or far-fetched can be just as tiresome. If characters jump into bed too quickly or demonstrate superhuman agility or stamina, the reader may feel cheated. Satire offers small doses of realism; its characters don't need psychological depth, but they may still take things seriously and have recognizable (though slightly absurd) motivations. Satire can lack a tragic dimension even if there is death and downfall. In a satirical novel, you can slap a character in the face and not have to worry he will be scarred for life.
One Touch (1975) is a kind of cosmic joke. It opens with a beautiful young woman named Marsha who has snuck onto the rooftop of a New York skyscraper and started dancing nude while police officers and emergency crews ponder what to do. Was she suicidal? Delusional? Harmless? A young doctor at the scene begs the nude woman not to jump while "fighting the stirring of an erection from the moment he laid eyes on the woman." Eventually her therapist Lydia Stone, PhD. is found. Lydia shows up at the scene with her boyfriend (a wisecracking screenwriter named Fred Fenwick) and tries to engage with Marsha in order to keep her from jumping. But it becomes clear to Lydia that "she knew no way to do that except by convincing the other woman that her current reality – dancing naked at the edge of the tallest building in New York City – was merely a fantasy and should be put aside. But for what? What was Lydia offering as an alternative?"
Lydia keeps trying to coax Marsha to safety, but instead Marsha just dives off the ledge to her death, to the shock and dismay of onlookers.
As Lydia tries to sort through what has just happened, she goes home and has sex with Fred. At the start, Lydia fucks her partner
in total silence, and from time to time she actually dozed off, soaring into delicious dreams of flying, and then descending to consciousness, only to find that the man above her was still invading the deepest recesses of her body with insidious sensuous awareness." (Ch. 2)
The next day Lydia sees another patient, Nora, a 36 year old housewife with difficulty having orgasms. In previous visits Lydia had concluded that there was nothing wrong with this patient, but her usual counseling so far hadn't brought any breakthroughs. Her boyfriend Fred suggests a simple remedy:
"… take a housewife, give her a valium and a glass of Scotch, and plunk her down in an easy chair in front of the tube, and then feed the collective fantasies of the nation directly into her subconscious. It's cheaper, easier and free of all the rigmarole you indulge in. Soap operas are much more honest than therapy, because they don't pretend that each individual's tacky little melodrama has any more value than being merely an idiosyncratic manifestation of the national mentality at any given time. The soap opera provides precisely what your therapy does: catharsis." (Ch. 2)
Instead Lydia, following the advice of her mentor Dr. Monroe, urges Nora to try masturbation. She walks Nora through some fantasizing exercises, but to Lydia's surprise, Nora takes things too far, disrobing and masturbating to orgasm in Lydia's presence. Lydia recognizes that by allowing this to happen, she has crossed a boundary that therapists do not typically cross; she has allowed herself to become a participant in her patient's sexual explorations and self-discovery.
For the rest of the novel Lydia learns to accept her new role. Instead of trying to avoid having patients transfer their feelings and affectionate desire onto her, Lydia welcomes it – and even invites it. She visits her mentor and control therapist to explain her ethical dilemma; despite his initial disapproval, eventually Dr. Monroe is seduced by Lydia's new approach to therapy – both figuratively and literally.
Gradually Lydia shifts from being a therapist to that of facilitator and guide for groups of people seeking to open their minds and hearts (and bodies) to new experiences. As Lydia opens herself more fully to the emotional needs of patients, she finds that she has gained a new kind of curative power. Her presence becomes sought after, to the point where it transforms her regular social life (not to mention her relationship with her cynical boyfriend). Soon she is using her visualization exercises and sensual explorations to help groups of people all at once.
Along the way there are ample opportunities for sex and complications coming from various groups who disapprove of Lydia's new mission.
The novel is offering a critique of the therapy profession. But there is another struggle: how does the fantasizing process let you cope with the ugliness of the world? Earlier, right after the patient's suicide, as Lydia goes to a party with her boyfriend, she looks at the city:
… She hadn’t realized how far she had been carried down the stream of dissolution until she tried to measure her present state with what she’d previously considered to be normality. Now, the entire edifice of her civilization appeared as a monstrous block against the flow of life. The movement inside the dance parlor had been liquid, warm, sinuous. Out here she could see the crystallized anti-life tendencies of the ordinary world. Square houses lined perpendicular streets. People moved with an unconscious self- consciousness. The cars rolled past like deformed beetles, ugly and noxious, great wasteful carriers emitting poison gas. It was as though humanity were a single lovely body and civilization a straitjacket choking it slowly to death, a constraint constructed of time-clocks and rules which served the abstractions of finance rather than the eternal and infinite pulse of life itself. This was the reality, she suddenly saw, that she had been attempting to get her patients to adjust to. This was the reality which she had taken as a measure of health. (Ch. 3)
For Lydia the real challenge is not teaching patients to change their perspective on the world but to change the world itself. She does this by creating a safe place where a circle of friends can come together and re-imagine the world and its assumptions. Her boyfriend Fred is initially supportive, but expresses skepticism. "Fantasy is the way to beat the reality game," Fred says, "but you’re perverting that. You’re trying to infuse fantasy into reality to change what is. And that’s a form of pride, as well as a futile exercise.”
In fact, Fred is jealous of Lydia's devotion to her new group and her willingness to direct the attentions and affections of her followers. Indeed, Lydia admits that the group is helping her as much as she is helping them. How does Lydia explain herself to Fred?
Lydia told him, “I do love you. But that means something far different to me than it once did. Love for me used to mean tension, the struggle between my autonomy and the man’s will. Now it means sharing, the ability to enter a common space together. I have a purpose now. I don’t exist as a reflection or an extension of a man. I’m my own woman. And I have my own destiny and vision to fulfill.” (Ch. 7)
Lydia moves with her group to New Mexico and even invites Fred to join her commune, but Fred is convinced that her group is nothing but a bunch of misfits who are taking advantage of Lydia's emotional generosity. Fred, she has concluded, simply cannot understand her journey.
The novel ends on a surprising note which I will not reveal, but it is attempting to reconcile two irreconcilable viewpoints as embodied by Lydia and Fred. I really enjoyed inhabiting this fictional world not only for the sensual delights and evocative descriptions, but also the struggle with ideas. Yes, this novel had a lot of fucking (tons of it) but that is almost beside the point. Let us appreciate the difficulty in trying to merge the erotic with the philosophical in the same novel. Milan Kundera was one author who could do this artfully and lyrically. Kundera accomplished this by using a polyphonic structure with short chapters of varying length and moods. But as radical as Vassi's novels are in style and theme, In Touch has a conventional novel structure and (with one exception) a consistent point of view and no flashbacks. As Lydia makes her decisions, the reader can see her struggles and self-doubts. The erotic embraces of the novel flow naturally and never seem forced. The conversations are cerebral but seem so natural and spontaneous that it never weighs down the prose. In Touch is a rich and complex tale masquerading as minor satire.
The Carcass of Dreams (a story cycle found in Metasex, Mirth and Madness: Erotic Tales of the Absurdly Real – and later renamed as Erotic Comedies) is the most likely to gross out and offend the greatest number of people; it depicts all kinds of fetishistic behavior. These stories can be entertaining, beautiful and poetic. They are as simple as fairy tales or fables; characters may not be fully developed, but their motives and impulses and sexual curiosities are recognizable. Taken together, the collection tries to imagine the full variety of sexual experiences from the degrading to the sublime.
These perverse sketches are to be taken more metaphorically than literally. Characters have bizarre desires or sexual arrangements, but they pay no attention to social rules or conventional morality. Nobody would call these characters deep or particularly complex; their fetishes or secret desires exhilarate and oppress them. Reading these stories is like a tourist visiting indigenous villages with unfamiliar customs; all these alternate modes of living seem exotic or hilarious or even a little sexy, but it is hard (or even impossible) for an outsider to embrace them fully and sincerely. That is just not the point. These perverse sketches challenge the reader's notion of sexual normalcy and raise the question of how future generations might regard whatever counts as "normal" today.
Several stories are about people with workaday dreams and sexual hangups. "The Dying Gynecologist" shows how a male doctor's lifelong obsession – both professional and personal – with the female anatomy has transformed his Weltanschauung and even his dreams. "The Sicilian's Revenge" is a monologue of a narcissistic Wall Street executive proclaiming his own business genius to a prostitute sucking his cock. Ordinarily this woman might be pitied for sullenly doing her job until it becomes clear that the woman is simultaneously indulging her own power fantasies and that both individuals are feeding one another's fantasies while never really gaining anything. In "Yesterday's Iago," a married man named Albert offers emotional support to Margaret, a Platonic friend in an abusive marriage. Then Margaret leaves her abusive husband and has a series of sexual flings while sharing the graphic details with Albert. As the flings become more unrestrained and even abusive, Albert is torn between continuing to offer support as a friend and showing anger at Margaret for taking him for granted and expressing his repressed lust for her. It's an unsettling story that leaves unclear the motivations of both people until the end. Another story, "Subway Dick" is about a man who inconspicuously rubs his body against a pretty woman on the subway and then has to decide whether the woman is reciprocating his sexual interest or he is only imagining it. "No Woman of Man Born" is about a transsexual who has completed surgery to become female. She feels liberated to explore her sexual desire for men, but finds that the kinds of people now attracted to her has completely changed as a result.
A few stories imagine fetishes and taboo acts. They are reminiscent of Poe's horror tales, exposing readers to the sadistic irrationalities of the human soul. A story about sexual fetishes might force you to imagine the unimaginable and haunt your dreams for a while or inspire perverse imaginings. On the other hand, tens of thousands read Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado" in high school literature classes each year without ever triggering a spike in murders by immurement.
Most of Vassi's stories are merely suggestive and satirical. All have a spiritual quality and portray people dealing with sexual desires in the only way they know how. Even the fetishist in "Bluebeard's Instant Grecian Urn" who beheads women in order to preserve their "orgasm face" seems not particularly cruel or heartless; he seems unaware of the magnitude of the crimes he has been committing; he is just a fetish collector who knows no other way to capture the orgasmic beauty that is his lifelong obsession. He is depicted as a tragic figure killed by his own obsessions. Readers should condemn these crimes – it is savage murder! At the same time, the story portrays him as striving towards an unattainable ideal; he might as well have been an obsessed fan cutting up pictures of women he adored or compiling a series of favorite porn clips. The character's actions are wrong and pathetic, but the story offers the reader a way to better understand his motives for pursuing this solitary fetish without needing to offer sympathy.
Probably the most taboo stories are about shit-eating ("Organic Coprophiliac"), fist-fucking and masochism ("Fist Fucker") and enema play ("Bowel Boogie"). The "Organic Coprophiliac" takes a satirical look at the generation gap and a parent's attempt to educate a teenage child about crazy sexual acts. Such a conversation is going to be cringey and uncomfortable regardless of what kind of bedroom behavior is being discussed. "Bowel Boogie" imagines a clinic that forces its female clients to take enemas – presumably for the satisfaction of the perverted male doctor. But what if the doctor's promises of spiritual serenity gained from enema treatments turn out to be accurate? "Fist Fucker" tells the story of a boy sexually abused from an early age but who continues to allow himself to be used sexually by men as he grows older. Ironically, despite the cruelty and the sexual exploitation done to the helpless boy, the style and tone is sympathetic and modest, comparing the profane sacrifices of the young man to Christ's crucifixion.
Some stories ponder sexual peccadilloes from the standpoint of the unspoiled or innocent. "Land of the Sperm King" tells about an indigenous people in a remote area whose leader gains sustenance only by drinking sperm from all the men. Elaborate community rituals facilitate the collection of this semen, but when people from the outside world come to visit and condemn these sperm rituals, the village has to decide whether to give up these practices or reject all the benefits of modern civilization.
In another bizarre offering ("Circus of Jade") a libertine lesbian named Butch Medusa grows tired of organizing lavish lesbian orgies ("This orgy has no socially redeeming value" she declares) and mixes things up by recruiting a bunch of gay cocks to assimilate into her orgiastic projects. After traveling far and wide to find fags with exactly the right temperament, the giant orgy becomes a kind of "sexual cyclotron" that unleashes enough raw sexual energy to bring the world into a "euphoric cloud" for weeks. It's a far-flung fantasy bordering on magic. The orgy begins to resemble
a jellyfish pulsating at the edges … and at the brain of the superorganism was Butch Medusa, coursing all the vibrations through herself.… (A) power emerged that was greater than the ability of any single person to claim. It began to take over by itself, reducing the men and women to units in a conglomerate.
In the final story "Kingdom of Come," a promiscuous woman retreats to her apartment to indulge her elaborate masturbatory sexual fantasies in private. Then she is visited by a green-skinned intergalactic deity who is impressed by how she has "hacked a hard-won path through all the tedious variations on the public sex act" and who offers to fuck her to help her "see into the heart of the void from which all existence springs."
Although the story ends as ludicrous supernatural fantasy, it begins as solitary philosophical investigation. The slut-philosopher protagonist reflects on her years of sexual promiscuity and wonders "why she was expending so much energy on what had suddenly come to seem a senseless melodrama." At first glance it might appear that the woman is seeking to atone for her profligate adventures. No, she is merely expressing her desire to separate her unquenchable sexual desire from her dependency on other people for sexual relief. She realizes "the only real question that has any validity in the erotic realm: why involve others at all?"
The slut-philosopher engages in a series of questions about her behavior and motivation. Finding joy in masturbation liberates her from the expectations of others and allows her to see who she is and what she really wants. Eventually she walls herself from society and "los(es) her conventional good looks and became sublime, the way a snarled tree ravaged by wind and salt air grows terrible in its aspect on cliff overhanging the ocean."
This woman's spiritual-erotic journey is an engrossing, entertaining fantasy; and really, meeting an intergalactic deity is probably the only suitable way to resolve a plot that has solipsistically removed the rest of the human race from the picture. In real life, this woman would quickly run out of money, food and suitable entertainment options before crawling back to human society. Does graduating from copulation to masturbation provide a path that is more spiritually rewarding? I suspect that the modern day equivalent of this character would be content to spend the rest of her erotic life in a virtual world or even a world of her own imagining. Vassi is not condemning this withdrawal – just exploring its limits. In the story, the slut-philosopher attains a kind of salvation through immortality (at least that is what the deity has promised). But it's more plausible to imagine that this woman pursues these erotic dreams for a while but eventually returns to the mundane world of day jobs, housework, electric bills, and family get-togethers. One myopic thing about this story's perspective is to think that erotic fantasies or rituals permeate a person's consciousness 100% of the time. No matter how tantalizing the prospect of a fully realized erotic life might seem to be, it's hard to imagine that a person in real life would find it to be sufficient – more like a beautiful and exciting experience which if repeated too often would become tedious.
The Saline Solution (1972) is a lurid mess of a novel, yet its heartlessness can sear the soul.
It reminded me of Jean Paul Sartre's Age of Reason, a novel I read at college and admired without really enjoying. Like Sartre's novel, The Saline Solution features an anti-hero wandering aimlessly through life, seeing the falsity of things and engaging in careless and almost self-destructive behavior.
The novel's first lines present the situation:
We didn't know whether we wanted the baby, so we drifted until Lucinda passed the third month of pregnancy. And then it became a question of murder.
The novel was published in 1972, one year before the US Supreme Court protected the right to abortion across the country. In fact, abortion was legalized in New York in 1970, two years before the novel came out.
It seems apparent from the start that the protagonist does not have the right temperament to be father. He was cynical about life and not particularly invested in his current relationship with Lucinda (a divorcee who was already raising two daughters). Sure, he liked Lucinda and liked fucking her. On the surface at least he doesn't seem particularly bothered by his predicament. He is somewhat opposed to the idea of having children – but not absolutely so. He is self-aware enough to know that he would not be a good parent. But he is angered at the notion that it threatens his freedom. Is that what causes people to surrender their freedoms and live boring conventional lives – a stupid biological mistake?
As time goes on, he can't help but ponder the implications. "The only true revolutionary is the one who affects a life style which takes the imminent destruction of the entire species as a basic premise." Expanding further, he thinks:
The child was a mockery of our purpose. But its existence raises a serious question. If it were my life against its, I would not have hesitated for a second to despatch it. But it was my life style against its life. Was how I lived more important than that it lived? Did it point to some essential defect within my person that I could not allow this infant to come into the world and maintain myself as well? (Ch. 4)
This is a self-centered perspective, and frankly it ignores the needs of the would-be mother. But what is his lifestyle like anyway? He hangs around friends, has sexual dalliances and feels a degree of anger at society and the political situation. But mostly he is devoted to sensual pleasures and the company of woman. In one scene, the narrator goes off on a rant about how "culture is sick at its core... So distorted that there is no way to even remember what a healthy human being is like." ("'And what about the baby?' Lucinda replies with tears in her eyes.") After receiving little interest or cooperation from the narrator, Lucinda announces that she will schedule the appointment with the abortionist. The narrator wonders to himself:
Am I a criminal if I refuse to assume the role which is necessary to give Lucinda the support she needs to have the baby? Not in any judicial sense, but existentially. If I knowingly commit the act, or omit the act, which leads to having the baby flushed out of her womb, I have ended the life of another being... And if I follow that path, doesn't a new door open for me in the corridors of action? For if I kill my own child, why should I hesitate at obliterating any of the monsters who strangle freedom in the name of authority?…"
… I was at a point where I could find no reference point for value, and was fast slipping into the stream of my own nameless becoming. From time to time I would leap like a salmon into the turbulent air and flash on the delineation of my condition, and I find that I had transmogrified into a revolutionary, or a homosexual, or a junkie, or a heretic, or any one of the thousand things my civilization said I should not be." (Ch. 5)
Later the narrator calls himself a "clever killer ape – while the liberal in me was horrified at the spectacular atrocities committed by the military, the observer in me pointed out that not a day went by in which I didn't kill with a thought or a gesture." This is a nuanced and sophisticated rant; it was practically a rationalization for nihilism. On the other hand, he was sexually adventurous before the pregnancy; there is no reason to think that having a baby will change that.
It may be disconcerting to read these cogitations in a novel that is mostly about sexual experimentation and flirting with the bisexual lifestyle. Right after this scene, there was an entire chapter devoted to a passionate affair with a Jewish girl, a graphic description of a time they invited another man into the bedroom and her parents' misguided attempt to break them up. Following that is a chapter where he spends a casual evening with his best friend Francis and her girlfriend Donna, getting high on mescaline, walking around the park and then fooling around a little with Donna. That is followed by a chapter about cruising in a wooded area and engaging in a "time-hallowed rite of cocksucking" with five other men.
Clearly the novel is not just about childbirth or monogamy or even heterosexuality vs. homosexuality. It's a character study of the thoughts and attitudes of a hypersexual man trying to understand his values and moral limits. While awaiting Lucinda's return from the city, the protagonist rides his bicycle around the island in a "state of phenomenological flux – and giddy with the open potential of the moment," so he pays a nighttime visit to another female named Carol. Carol lives with a three year old son, a painter and her mother. The giddy protagonist greets Carol who is watching television in a skimpy outfit. His desire for Carol increases as she tells him to "please just go."
The protagonist orders Carol to undress and threatens to rape her. After she struggles, he drops his pants and forces himself on her. But it is not clear whether this is really a rape or some playacting thing they are doing. The protagonist thinks, "There was nothing to do now but fuck her. But my excitement at the moment was other than sexual. I needed her to struggle, or show signs of revulsion. How could there be a rape without a contest?"
As he is beginning to fuck Carol, he notices that Carol is still watching the movie on the TV. It's a movie about a man trying to escape from the Nazis. The man in the movie is going through a trapdoor and looking at the face of a young woman in tears.
"The girl's a nun," Carol said. "She's helping him escape from the Germans." …
"The rape," I hissed. "Let's get on with the rape." ...
"You don't want me," Carol said, "you want my cunt. Why are you wasting my time with me?"
It's a strange sex scene, splicing parts from the TV movie into it – the hero tries to kiss the pretty nun who pulls back, then Nazi soldiers burst through the door, grabbing and twisting the nun's arm and threatening to torture her. During the TV movie the narrator starts getting rough with Carol while she urges him to "Fuck me good … I haven't been fucked good in a really long time."
By that point it was clear that this was no rape but playacting (Carol later offers him coffee and asks him to spend the night). There is a similar kind of encounter in later chapters, and while the protagonist relishes the dangerous way to appease his lust, his mind occasionally returns to the fetus in Lucinda's womb. Speaking about his latest conquest, he asks:
What difference whether I fucked her or not, hurt her or not? When you’ve destroyed one human being, you’ve destroyed us all. And it is possible to acquire a taste for the process, growing more subtle, able to play hide and seek with one’s motivations, pretending to oneself that one is in love again, or simply seeking sex again, while the unrelenting hidden purpose is murder. (Ch. 13)
Lucinda pops into various scenes and indeed, they talk in vulgar ways about their sexual histories, but ultimately no decision is made about the pregnancy. For all practical purposes, this novel is just a countdown to the inevitable abortion. He spends more time with Lucinda, continuing to fuck her and engage in wild sexual fantasies while keenly aware that he is becoming inured to the moral shock of having rejected the baby. In the final chapter, Lucinda has completed the abortion procedure, and they have returned home. They are talking about movies, eating ice cream, taking care of the cable TV connection, relaxing. Here's the novel's final paragraph:
I pissed into the urinal, thinking about what I would do next. It was impossible to stay, and there was no place to go. I flushed the tank with a deliberate twist of the wrist, and watched the yellow water swirl into the base of the bowl on its way to the pipes, into the bowels of the building, under the city street, into the river, and to the wounded and vengeful ocean beyond.
This Saline Solution is unsettling, to put it mildly. The dialogue and the characters are interesting, and so are the sex scenes and ruminations. Vassi is a thinker after all. By the end the protagonist seems to have accepted who he is and that an abortion is an inevitable consequence of his freewheeling lifestyle. But it's unclear whether his attitude towards Lucinda will change or if their relationship is doomed to disintegrate.
It's true that Lucinda is treated badly by the narrator through the novel. But when the male characters are not fucking them tirelessly, female characters in Vassi's novels are colorful, sympathetic and certainly not acquiescent to male desire (at least not all the time). Yet the novel feels shapeless. It is full of extraneous stuff. The scenes go on and on. The protagonist is not a good person even if he is honest with himself. All the dilly-dallying about the pregnancy question only prolongs the agony for them both. But they are still young, and in 1972 abortion was still a freedom that very few people appreciated or understood. The Saline Solution has a lot of incidents (and tons of sex), but little direction.
The Other Hand Clapping was published in 1987, months after Vassi tested positive for HIV. In many ways it is Vassi's most conventional novel – a psychological portrait of a married couple in crisis. Not sexually explicit in the least, it still simmers with sexual tension. It is contemplative but still has drama and twists.
Larry and Eleanor are both educated and creative people who have been married for six years. Their careers and personal goals have been pulling them in opposite directions. Larry is a bookstore owner trying to perfect Zen meditation, and Eleanor is an accomplished actress who hadn't yet achieved significant success. Larry's focus on meditation has also taken the passion out of marriage; lovemaking is less assertive, more Tantric, even less intimate. Eleanor signs up for an acting workshop with a provocative teacher near Woodstock and suggests to her husband that they rent a house there for the summer. That summer retreat is the ultimate realization of a dream – uninterrupted time and space for individual pursuits. It provides space to ponder their respective futures: should Eleanor wind down her acting career and have a baby? Does Larry have enough discipline to master the intricacies of Zen meditation and remain a good husband? They even decide to avoid sex for a few months to minimize distraction and hopefully reveal where they want this marriage to go (or as Eleanor says, to "see if we still have a marriage we want to save.")
For the couple it's an interesting challenge and opportunity. For a storyteller, it's also a great premise. It allows the novel to focus on the mundane aspects of this couple's life and odd minor details which ordinarily wouldn't merit attention (either in a novel or real life). For much of the novel, Eleanor is away at her acting workshop, leaving Larry to stew in his jealousy and feelings of irritation. He was supposed to be meditating! Up to that point Larry's Zen training had made him hyperaware of external surroundings as well as his breathing and posture. Now though, he is constantly distracted by his wife regardless of whether she's at home or in class. Larry can't get her out of her mind; could it be true that "a woman is an impediment to man's realization"? Small things about her behavior catch his eye. Eleanor was acting edgy, or was it just his imagination? In the bathroom he noticed that a pair of Eleanor's undergarments was torn. But why? He imagined Eleanor being taken by another man – an actor at the same workshop? – but then dismissed it as mayko (a Zen term for hallucinations when people meditate too long).
Larry notices that Eleanor was no longer wearing a locket he gave her during their honeymoon. Eleanor becomes alarmed until she remembers that she had removed it during a class exercise which everyone had to do in the nude. She assures Larry that she knows the exact spot where she left it. But Larry is still fuming about the "acting exercise" that permitted her classmates to see her nude. He realizes that he is tasting "anger and jealousy, feelings he'd not known for a long while and, like a longtime vegetarian sitting down to a steak, was surprised that his taste for such meat had not diminished."
Larry dismisses most of these jealousy pangs as byproducts of meditation, but each new thing adds to his suspicions. He even begins to wonder whether it is all playacting for some acting exercise. One evening Eleanor arrives home very late, and when she offers what seems to be a plausible explanation (being a little drunk, taking a wrong turn and getting lost), Larry immediately starts poking holes through the excuse, antagonizing her even more.
On another day Larry surprises her at the acting workshop only to find that his entrance was almost … expected? The acting teacher immediately welcomes Larry and invites him to stay during the acting exercise, allowing Larry to watch a variety of informal performances. It does little to allay his suspicions. If anything it reminds Larry of how easily his perceptions and attitudes could be manipulated by someone skilled in the acting craft. That makes him even more likely to see through Eleanor's words and gestures, to the point where he is driven to take more drastic measures.
I won't spell out exactly what these events lead to. It is definitely not what you might think, and the lovely thing about this novel is how skillfully it misleads us along the way. Larry's jealousy drives them closer together – almost suffocatingly so. There are no villains here – just two people trying to figure out whether they belong together and what they really want.
Not only do the novel's conflicts have a universal quality, they essentially represent two different approaches to living. Eleanor's personality ends up frustrating him:
Larry looked at her, aware as always of her beauty which included not only the wild-child face and hot-woman body, but the gracefulness and sureness of movement born of many years of training for the stage. But for the first time in his life he was also seeing her as an impersonal vortex of energy, as a principle. As a person she could be maddening or delightful, affectionate or hateful, faithful or wanton, and he would be vulnerable to all that. But as a koan, she could do nothing that would not feed his insight, intensify his meditation. (Ch. 6)
Let me pause for a moment to admire the dialogue which is some of the best I've encountered. All of Vassi's protagonists speak eloquently, especially when denouncing social convention or making some pronouncement about metaphysics or the nature of sexuality. These speeches are mostly monologues for the benefit of other characters (and the reader). But Other Hand Clapping doesn't have any rants or philosophical speeches, just ordinary remarks that any couple might make during a normal day.
Every writer knows the importance of pruning dialogue to leave only the essentials, but striking the right balance between dialogue and action and description is always tough. Especially for the final scene, this novel depends almost entirely on dialogue to create ambiguity, suspense and a range of emotions from hurt to sarcasm to tenderness. As an actress, Eleanor might be inclined towards melodramatic words and gestures, but in fact none of her speeches in the novel are grand or eloquent. That's also true for Larry. Even the acting coach who appears later in the novel uses light-hearted language to express concern or defuse tension at certain moments. The dialogue always feels naked and unadorned and naturalistic. The novel ends up with a fairly throwaway line that is almost too trivial to notice. Indeed, despite having read the novel several times, I am always surprised to find nothing after that.
So what is the book's final line? It's nothing really, just an invitation to play Scrabble. It's fitting that a novel with Zen sensibilities would end not with a grand insight but a line so ordinary that it was practically a gesture.
Metasex as a philosophical framework is interesting and compelling, but what about metasex as a lifestyle?
It assumes that people have enough freedom and time to engage in sexual play behavior.
Certain periods of a person's life seem conducive to such explorations and adventures. College years provide that kind of freedom; vacations, retreats and long trips do this too. The beat writers were lauding the itinerant lifestyle in the 1950s; by the 1960s communes and protests were springing up. Vassi went to a cheap public college and hung out at communes and meditation centers where he stayed financially afloat by giving classes. It was easy and convenient to fill this time with navel-gazing and metasex.
In contrast, U.S. students today can barely afford college without taking out loans. After graduation you must start paying these loans (and making payments for the car, health insurance, rent, credit cards, etc.) Or what about living with one's parents – that's hardly the ideal way to foster a radical approach to living. Sure, a little recreational drugs might facilitate a spiritual journey, but then again you have to worry about passing that drug test for the next job (not to mention the employer-mandated background and credit checks). In other words, you are free to spend three day weekends at the commune or take alternative lifestyle classes as long as you keeping making your car payments and still have a job to return to.
Some longer getaways are possible for those who save and plan ahead. There are Peace Corps jobs, missionary excursions, music festivals, art/technology conferences, Burning Man, religious retreats, and seven day cruises. Or does self-discovery have to wait until your retirement? Many teachers get summers off and occasionally sabbaticals. Perhaps it is easier for people in Europe or Asia. Perhaps you can get lucky and win the lottery or inherit money. But for most people, escaping the rat race even for a little while gets to be impossible.
Vassi saw metasex as something you could explore throughout your life. But I see it as something mainly possible when people are in their twenties or thirties. Perhaps if Vassi had lived longer, he would have been able to discover a way to broaden this metasexual perspective into a more long-term and sustainable way of living. (Vassi's longtime friend, lover and collaborator, Annie Sprinkle, has tried to do precisely that – see her 2021 book, Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth as Lover.)
If Marco Vassi were alive today and I had the opportunity to interview him, my first question would be, "And what about fiction?"
What role can fiction play in the metasexual universe?
The end of In Touch reveals that almost the entire novel is nothing more than a crazy dream of Lydia Stone's screenwriting husband. Does that turn the novel into escapist claptrap – or at least undermine the message about whether therapists should involve themselves emotionally in their patients' problems? Or is it simply protesting the contrivance of fiction itself (even if it provides occasional frissons of pleasure)?
A reader might wonder: what benefits does reading erotica bring apart from a few hours of recreational contemplation? Is fiction supposed to inspire or guide a person's actions in the real world? Or is the external world more complex (and messy) than anything depicted in fiction? Is the main purpose of erotic fiction to awaken and perhaps satiate momentary physical impulses in a nonthreatening way? Can it heal people from bad experiences in the bedroom – or even sexual trauma?
An erotica writer might wonder, are there better ways to record and depict erotic dreams? What kinds of erotic dreams are worth writing about – the ones likely to have universal appeal or the ones peculiar to the author's personal history and psychology?
Fiction has character and drama, but it is also a self-contained world controlled by one puppet master. It is less like metatheatre than a sustained meditation. The character's roles are predefined and their actions rarely surprise the author – only readers.
On the other hand, most plays at a theatre are carefully choreographed, leaving little room for improvisation or error. Even the skilled improvisor may sometimes fall back on standard scripted behaviors.
Vassi's sex scenes bask in the sheer physicality of sex. His fiction uses raw language (cunt, cock, etc.) and never shies away from bodily fluids, smells and tastes.
What would Vassi think about metasexual activities like virtual sex or sex with androids where some of the participants have no physicality at all?
The irony of Vassi's vision of metasex is that it depends on presence and physicality and spontaneity – even though in the world of fiction these things remain impossible.
Michael Perkins on Marco Vassi. Even though the preface to the 1992 edition of The Secret Record : Modern Erotic Literature mentions Vassi's death by AIDS, I am guessing that Perkins' chapter on Marco Vassi (XI. The Metasexual Novel pp. 235-258) was entirely written for the first edition published in 1976. The Secret Record mentions The Mind Blower (1970), The Saline Solution (1971), Contours of Darkness (1972), The French Job(1973), Pro Ball Groupie (1974), Metasex, Mirth & Madness: Erotic Tales of the Absurdly Real (1975) and In Touch (1975). It includes a brief discussion of his "lesser" novels like The French Job and mentions earlier titles for things (Pro Ball Groupie was later sold with the title Tackling the Team and the half-fiction/half-nonfiction Metasex, Mirth & Madness was later published as the Erotic Comedies).
Perkins examines in great detail the early Mind Blower novel (which is a study of extreme sexual fantasies at the Institute for Sexual Metatheatre). About Vassi's erotic fables, Perkins tersely says that they "do not show Vassi at his best as a writer" and that the Carcass of Dreams subtitle "indicates their adolescent tone.... They accomplish a kind of intellectual seduction." While admiring Vassi's sexual descriptions (comparing them to the graphic depictions of violence in mystery novels), Perkins says that: "It is not his imagination but the power of his ideas that make him the most interesting figure in recent erotic literature.… Vassi bothers very little with plot or characterization in his novels. He is a didactic artist, an explorer of eroticism with findings to present: like most such writers from Sade onward, his narrative only serves as a vehicle for the exposition of his ideas."
Pointing out the tension between Vassi's personal philosophies and that of his characters, Perkins says:
Although he espouses metasexuality, he agonizes over his biological sexuality. He is at times macho, jealous, possessive, chauvinistic, and even misogynistic, and these feelings make for painful heterosexual relationships. Frustrated, he seeks escape in impersonal sex with both women and men. He attempts to transcend his biological sex role with all its drawbacks by becoming just the opposite of it. Unity is found only during sex....(p248)
Perkins was an astute critic both of erotic literature and Vassi's fiction. Perhaps if his study had considered Vassi's last work, The Other Hand Clapping, Perkins might have revised his opinion about the didactic nature of Vassi's fiction and come to believe (as I do) that Vassi was too subtle a storyteller to view fiction merely as a way to proselytize.
(YouTube video ). From Mark Stevens' "Lets Talk Dirty" series. Undated, but he says that he was 44 during the interview, dating it between November 1981 and November 1982 (probably spring or summer of 1982). The interview took place at Artists' Cemetery near Woodstock. Vassi said that he'd lived there between 1971-1974 and after moving away to East Hampton, NY, was living there again. He said he would come that place 3-4 times a week just to sit quietly for an hour or so. He described the area as "almost aggressively anti-erotic – a very conservative square place; there's no sexiness in that area." In this interview Vassi alludes to having recently published a book called Gay Like Me (which I can find no record of).
Books about Vassi's life. I am relying mainly on biographical summaries in John Heidenry's 1997 book, What Wild Ecstasy: Rise and Fall of the Sexual Revolution, John Heidenry, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1997. This book describes the U.S. sexual revolution as experienced by certain notable individuals (such as Marco Vassi). During his life Vassi shared details about his life in his writings – starting with his 1973 memoir The Stoned Apocalypse. Although Heidenry's book summarizes these details, it also fills in gaps about Vassi's life from his 1986 AIDS diagnosis until his death in 1989. It mentions the role that Annie Sprinkle played during those last years. Recently Eve Diana (one of Vassi's girlfriends) published their correspondence when they were together in 1986 before his AIDS diagnosis. (Shepherd and the Nymph: The Erotic Letters of Marco Vassi and Eve Diana. Edited by David Steinberg, Red Alder Books, 2020).
Marco Vassi Memorial Archive. David Steinberg is a writer and fine arts photographer who kept in touch with several of Vassi's friends and lovers after Vassi's death. He met Vassi briefly twice during his final years, but has been collecting papers and memorabilia by and about Marco Vassi over the decades which he calls the "Marco Vassi Memorial Archive." I was fortunate enough to show Mr. Steinberg a copy of this essay, and he corrected the biographical section for accuracy. Although Vassi's own writings provide lots of detail and insight about his life, Steinberg provides a different perspective. In 2023 I interviewed David Steinberg about Vassi's life, and you can read the full interview here.
Marriage and Vassi. Marco Vassi describes this relationship with Hatsue in great depth in Chapter 3 of his 1992 collection of essays, A Driving Passion. In his 1997 book, John Heidenry writes in a footnote:
No one is quite sure how many times Marco Vassi was married, though most estimates range from eight to nine. Several were heavily SM in orientation. Since his liaisons, both legally recognized and casual, are far too numerous to chronicle, and were both heterosexual and homosexual in nature, this book provides only a representative sampling of his career as one of the century's foremost sexual adventurists. Marco also unknowingly fathered out of wedlock a son whom he later legally adopted.
Source: What Wild Ecstasy: Rise and Fall of the Sexual Revolution, John Heidenry, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1997. p. 421
Catholicism and Vassi. During the YouTube interview, when asked what career he would have if he weren't an erotic writer, Vassi playfully answered "Catholic cardinal," while also calling organized religion "an unfortunate occurrence." Despite being a "sexual explorer," Norman Mailer noted that Vassi
was born and raised a Catholic. If Catholicism has many faces, its presence in the psyche of a sexual explorer must be felt first as a great weight. Marco Vassi was a mountain climber who carried this impost in his psychic knapsack, and what it must have cost him is hard to measure. (Preface, A Driving Passion by Marco Vassi, 1992.)
Metasex essay. This fascinating essay (which appears in the ebook Erotic Comedies) contains a transcription error which I corrected in the quote. The ebook shows, "processing human beings on a conveyor build of pseudo-knowledge the way automobile parts are run through on an assembly line," but I feel 99.9% certain that the text should have said "conveyor belt."
Homosexuality/Bisexuality. I didn't have time to delve into this topic for the essay (which is already running long). But Vassi has written lots about the topic in both his essays and fiction. See A Driving Passion and the second half of Erotic Comedies ebook (which contains his "Collection of Bones" essays). Typically in Vassi's fiction, a male protagonist has a semi-monogamous relationship with a woman, but then goes out to have casual sex with other people (men as well as women). Based on my reading, Vassi wasn't adamantly gay (and really didn't make grand political statements about gay rights although he most certainly would have supported it). He seemed more "omnisexual" and wrote in his Metasex essay that "to label the action homosexual or bisexual or heterosexual is divisive, alienating us from one another as human beings." Yet Vassi and his characters often point out differences in the sexual dynamics between hetero and gay fucking. Here's how the protagonist in The Saline Solution describes it:
The one advantage homosexual sex seemed to have over all this was that it took place between people who had a more precise understanding of one another’s desperation. I have punished women, and meant it; I have punished men, but never forgotten that it was theatre. For me, the man who slaps my face is helping me to get my scene together; the woman who rakes my back wants literally to destroy me. (Ch. 5).
When was The Other Hand Clapping written? The answer may never be known, but Goodreads shows that the book was first published November 1, 1987 and Publishers' Weekly printed a review on November 2, 1987. Vassi struggled with celibacy and jealousy until his final years, so one might have guessed that it was one of his later creations. Yet David Steinberg reports in a private email to me, "I have a note that he wrote it in 1977, then re-wrote it in 1984." Consistent with this is the fact that the erotic letters of Marco Vassi and Eve Diana (which covers February 19, 1986 to July 13, 1987) make no mention of this novella. Frankly it astonishes me that this chaste and spiritual novella was composed at approximately the same time as the wildly transgressive Carcass of Dreams.
Celibacy Adventures. Perhaps because of growing older, Vassi – like the couple in The Other Hand Clapping – had become interested in celibacy and what it could offer. In his letter to Eve Diana, Vassi writes:
Celibacy has strong appeal. I've not been celibate for more than a few months in my life, and then it was because of my situation rather than as a result of a decision. It seems to me I can't claim that my metasexual and erotic education is complete until I've been celibate for a year or so. But I don't know if I can do it.
Source: April 2, 1986 letter in Shepherd and the Nymph: The Erotic Letters of Marco Vassi and Eve Diana. Edited by David Steinberg, Red Alder Books, 2020. Ebook.
Copyright Info. This essay (1.06) is copyrighted by Hapax Legomenon ( CC BY-NC 4.0). More detail can be found at the www. ripemangotaketwo.com website. This essay includes quotations and graphics from other sources which are still protected under US copyright law, but used here in a fair use way. These quotations are used for commenting upon or critiquing a copyrighted work. These sources are listed below.
Bibliography & Credits. Quotes from these Marco Vassi novels were included in the essay: The Erotic Comedies (The Vassi Collection Book 11), In Touch (The Vassi Collection Book 7), The Saline Solution (The Vassi Collection Book 4) and The Other Hand Clapping (The Vassi Collection Book 12). All of these come from the Open Road Media ebook editions (2014 Kindle). The "fucking quotation" was cited by Ashley Montagu in the book Anatomy of Swearing, U. of Penn. Press, 1967 pp. 314-315. Images of book covers from four Vassi novels are copyrighted. They are reproduced in low resolution format in compliance with U.S. fair use guidelines regarding the use of book covers for criticism, comment, scholarship and research. The low-resolution photo of Marco Vassi comes from the Sensual Mirror, which appeared in the 1996 edition by Second Chance Press. Photograph was uncredited. Cover art for In Touch came from the 1975 edition published by Manor Books Inc. and no artist was credited. Cover Art for Other Hand Clapping was by Bruce McGowin and originally appeared in the 1987 edition published by Permanent Press. Cover art for Saline Solution was by Brian Lynch (and cover design was by Steve Powell) and originally appeared in the 1993 edition published by Second Chance Press. Cover art for Erotic Comedies came from the 2014 ebook edition published Open Road Integrated Media (No Artist was credited). Two quotes about Vassi by David Steinberg come from his essay "Marco Vassi: Avatar of Eros" which appears in his essay collection, This Thing We Call Sex: A Radically Sensible Look at Sex in America , Red Alder Books, August 2016, pp, 97-101).