Sunday Morning! “Modern Love” by Constance DeJong

Let’s start with a shopworn observation: even though writers may be malcontents and thwarted revolutionaries at times, the novel is not a revolutionary art form. Many more folks are spurred to action by songs or images than by extended stories on paper. Novels generally encourage reflection rather than reaction. The main consumers of novels are pretty solidly middle-class and looking for pleasant distraction rather than jarring provocation. Even the format of the novel is remarkably conservative, changing very little since the 1800s. And while it’s possible to do just about anything in a novel, very few writers take up that promise.

Of course, there are times and places in which artists are fairly conservative, and other times in which they seem to be breaking up everything and trying to put it together differently. Kembrew McLeod’s book The Downtown Pop Underground makes a fairly strong case that lower Manhattan in the late 60s and 70s was one of those epicenters of experimentation, which I suppose we all knew, while also showing just how much happened in an area of roughly a square mile over a few years. It’s where I live now and, sure the Lower East Side, might be more gentrified and bland than guys in their 60s might care for today; but, for me, it was where the Renaissance happened just yesterday.

So, it would stand to reason that novels were also remade and messed with and warped and recreated in that time and place. After all, tremendous innovations were being made in poetry, filmmaking, music, painting, performance, and theater all in the same place at the same time, and often by the same people. I’ve said it before, but the striking thing about the spirit of the times was how many people seemingly said: “I can write and paint, but I can’t make music- I’d better make some music!”

And yet, can you name the great experimental novelist of the Lower East Side in the late 70s?

I think plenty of us would name Kathy Acker and then get stuck trying to think of others. Maybe this is my personal failing though. Two recent publications- the complete run of the Top Stories literary journal and the Cookie Meuller collection Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black – have really brought it home to me that I don’t know nearly enough about experimental fiction writers in the era and that it’s possibly because so many of them were women.

Delancey-Street-1978-Susan-Beallor-Snyder.

Constance DeJong’s Modern Love, written between 1975 and 1977 (and republished by Printed Information and Ugly Duckling) could be considered one of the great misplaced novels of the era, not exactly forgotten, but never quite clear where it might go on the bookshelf. It’s the story of a broke writer surrounded by pinchbeck losers (they ain’t even broke!) at a time and place that seems to be coming apart:

I hear talk of a new world. Everywhere I go: eco-paleo-psycho-electro-cosmo talk. Of course, men do all the talking. I don’t get the message, my ears ache; my eyes are falling out, I don’t see these street talkers as the makers of a new world. Anyway, they’re not real losers. And the new world’s an old theme.

A 27 year old in the City, Constance DeJong/Charlotte is ready to take advantage of the changing mores of the new world; she takes home a lover from the street with the classic line: “Hey Honey, come up to my place, I’ll show you my best recipes. Do you have a lot of cash?” It seemingly works out; she calls him Rodrigo and they have sex in every possible place and position.

That’s modern love: short, hot, and sweet.

Today, it’s a bank.

She’s recently returned from India- the story takes a side trip there and we experience India. She’d traveled earlier to Paris- the story takes a digression here for the love story of Fifi Corday/Rita and Jacques: she’s a mime and stage performer whose success with the public brings out his resentment and finally dooms their love. Our narrator then recalls her affairs with Monsieur Le Prince, who lives in the Gem Spa and made love to her in the past century. We also take a historical digression to the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 and the treacherous revenge schemes of Ruiz Cortez, the ancestor of Rodrigo. The story zigs through history and zags into comic book science fiction. Genres break apart.

They’re united with all the destined lovers, the doomed lovers, the perfect lovers, all the perfect pairs who’re held together by a common dream…

Is that “common dream” the wishful fantasy of romantic love? Or the timeless hope of all artists to just make enough money to live without selling out? Both themes recur throughout the story. We’re not sure which would be better.

“No, no, no!” scream the editors. “SEX. REVOLUTION. VIOLENCE. The big stuff. All caps sweetheart. We can’t sell art, your friends, your crummy insights. Listen, angel, don’t you want to make a name for yourself?”

The story seemingly exhausts all its possibilities without somehow exhausting the reader, unlike much experimental fiction. Maybe the secret is it’s playful where many experimental stories are simply inscrutable. It feels closer to Orlando than Naked Lunch: more about the drag performance of identity than the grotesque depths of the subconscious. It’s also more pleasurable to read. The story goes that DeJong and Kathy Acker used to meet up for lunch and discuss punctuation and verb tenses. She cares about how words are stuck together. The prose is precise and fluid. It flows.

Much of this story was actually performed as monologues. (You can watch a performance from 1978 here.) It was mailed out as chapbooks- remember chain letters?- and even turned into a sort of radio play with an original Philip Glass composition. DeJong would go on to write the libretto for Glass’s opera Satyagraha. She has created audio and video installations and performance pieces, and several writings, and now we’re reintroduced to this novel that seems to be a great many other things at once. This is good; art should overflow its banks and exhaust all its possibilities.

And so, friends, what are YOU watching, reading, pondering, playing, or exhausting the possibilities of this weekend?