You can buy Jonathan Bowden’s Pulp Fascism here.
4,529 words
Part 5 of 5
Edited by Greg Johnson and Peter Jacobi
In 1995, Jonathan Bowden self-published his Collected Works in 6 volumes (London: Avant-Garde, 1995), edited by Jürgen Schwartz, one of Bowden’s pen names. The six volumes comprise 27 distinct books, 12 of which had been previously published. Altogether, the Collected Works contain more than 2,600 pages of rare early Bowden.
Craze is the fourth book in volume 2. It was first published as a distinct book under Bowden’s name (London: Avant-Garde, 1993). We will publish it online in 5 instalments.
Craze is written as an interview, but there is little overall unity to the line of questioning, but broadly there are two foci: modern art and a lesbian couple Bowden knew.It is unclear who Bowden envisioned as his interviewer and his audience. He was writing over the heads of his peers to a potential future audience who could appreciate him. Let us hope he finally found it.
As usual, real people appear under pen names. In some cases, it is easy enough to guess who Bowden is talking about. For instance, Gaudier Louter-Finiscue of the Monday Club is Gregory Lauder-Frost. Given that Bowden had a penchant for peddling fictions about his own life as fact, it is probably prudent to treat everything in this book as fictional until proven otherwise.
Eventually, a fully annotated version of Craze will appear at the Jonathan Bowden Archive. It will then be followed by similar editions of the rest of the Collected Works, plus a couple more early volumes that were not included. — Greg Johnson
She [Eileen O’Shaugnessy] was like the type of woman who feels herself to be a psychic whore; a no-good, a woman who flits from man to man. Yet at the same time she retains a certain hunger for romance, for the prospect—no matter how distant—of the grand affair. In a sense she is a sort of woman who could be excited by a degree of amateur whoredom, particularly in relation to the breakup of a possible affair. This was something that she believed she was born virtually to triumph over. It was as if an ex-lover tried to palm her off on a new consort, with the promise that this time, unlike all the others, certainly unlike their torrid affair, the “John” would be paying for it. I have seen this sort of scenario before—it was a sort of redundant moment; a frigidity of force. When we remember that such women do not really know themselves, they only speak to themselves during a moment of high passion. When in actuality the moment of passion—of high drama (if not of ejaculating members)—only lasts for a moment. It gives them a hub or kernel; a centre, something which is not to be despised, only for a moment. In short, it is an inadvertence—it focuses them if only for a moment during the maelstrom of their lusts. Since such women only know themselves when they are being mysterious in relation to themselves. It is as if there is a form of collusion between the mystery inside and the mystery outside themselves. In a sense they look deeply into themselves in a momentary and fragmented way, almost like a test, a test of their own concentration. In that their ardour is too smooth, too questing and yet unquestioning for them to actually know what they want. If we take a totally different case, for example—if the characters are reversed—then it is an example of a man, a popular novelist perhaps, with a flagrant and perfect wife, who is attracted to street tramps, the lowest type of whore. It is as if—to ape the “High-life” and “Low-life” columns in The Spectator—the High is always attracted to the low in order to prove its difference from the other. In fact, it is proof how similar they actually are under the skin. Yet it is also a defence-mechanism as well—once one has touched base (in that way) it is impossible to fall any further.
In a sense she was the sort of woman who hung around bars. If she was not a bar-girl—then she was something which approximated to it. She was the sort who sat around bars, around the pink, fluorescent neon, the hot, tangerine flesh the blue light with the dust particles silhouetted in the corner. It was the sort of establishment where night followed day with depressing regularity. When in fact, of course, it was difficult to tell whether it was actually day or night—as one lay in a form of lagoon, a splendid nothingness, a tube of hollow meat, amidst the steel, the bar-stools, the flesh, always the flesh, the animated conversation which appeared to be going nowhere in particular. This was a world which resembled the expensive cocktails—the stingers—that were put together in such joints. When their colour was blue, pink—did I see a bit of green there, a momentary dash of ice-cream (?)—lavender and butterscotch, yellowing, turning white (if not off-white) in the process. This was something which always endeavoured to have a piece of melon, even a redundant prawn, certainly a cherry, floating amidst the harsh, tangy, alcoholic liquid.
When this woman could be momentarily excited by the prospect of a cash payment for sex. Yet at the same time, whilst giving herself with such abandonment when she felt it to be mercenary, she can delude herself into thinking it was real. True love. Of the sort which you read about in women’s magazines, Sunday supplements, and novels by Sally Beaumann. In the sense that women, whether sex industry workers or not (even in an amateur manner) can delude themselves as to the nature of the act. Women, after all, can produce life out of their own bodies—they are ultimately creative through a process of nurturing; of self-absorption, of fructification. When we remember that their insight—such as it is—is purely private. It moves inwards towards the heart of their being; towards the centre of what for them is the political process, namely themselves (the patter of tiny feet which they hear echoing in themselves). One only has to remember that the most arresting feminist political slogan is the personal is the political. Nevertheless, this sense of inferiority, of introversion, is interpreted by the male as a glorious excuse for laziness, for a lack of creativity outside of oneself, for a type of spiritual languor—a languor, of course, which the male finds particularly attractive, if not doubly arresting. When you have to remember that the man interprets the woman’s withdrawal; her pre-coital withdrawal (if you like), with a type of fascination, a deep, inner mysteriousness which it is not the man’s to grasp! Indeed, it is the woman’s prerogative—without it she soon ceases to be attractive for the average male. As a result, it is this underlying difference in appreciation and supplication—the fact that man can always return to the world; whereas the woman can always return to her world—which makes heterosexuality work. It is as if the most important book a woman will ever read is her own diary. While, on the other hand, the most important book a man will ever write is the work he creates for the others, the one which will be read out in the world, namely by his woman.
When we remember that a woman like this wanted to get into her sportscar, her own or somebody else’s, and careen through the backstreets, revving up the engine to a maximum decibel level—as the chassis of the car thundered with the turmoil of the drive, the incessant noise and thunder of the mean streets through which she passed. Up past de Beauvoir Town, Essex Road, screeching past Islington Green as she headed towards the Angel, if not King’s Cross, at full throttle. When ultimately she wanted to leave the car, the automobile which could turn on a sixpence. She wanted to vacate this vehicle, to pass on out from it, to move further up, to go on, always travelling, knowing more, not less, frightened and yet alone, inadequate—needing a man—and yet wanting to be by herself—as she stared at the whitewashed walls, the new dawn, the coming of a different age—as the sun streaked down touching the facade, the decayed portals of a nightclub on Dalston Junction. At a time when she wanted to let it come—the explosion—to let it come in relation to the white, dead light.
⁎
Anne and Isabella, for their part, could only retreat into a world which they had fashioned; a sado-masochistic world, a terrain which was abandoned and yet forlorn. In some respects it was an aesthetic—a purely self-created version of the back page advertisements in Skin 2 magazine; a minor devilment which they were excessively proud of. Yet at the same time they had little time for it; it left them disillusioned. Ultimately even this was not enough—it just proved to be dispiriting. When we remember that they were only programmatic up to a point; indeed, there was a degree to which they did not actually know what they were doing—they preferred to make it up as they went along (maybe they had no choice). It was as if they were conducting a minor league Omen upon themselves; the sort of autoerotic overkill which comes on pimply American teenagers when they spend too much time listening to heavy metal music. As a consequence Anne and Isabella had withdrawn not just from the world—that was too obvious, too much of a programmatic withdrawal; a type of involuntary or customary refusal; a type of semi-respectable refusenik status—when they wished to go much further afield, to go farther out; to excel in relation to a type of withdrawal—a type of pre-coital/post-coital act par excellence. Ultimately, however, they had to settle for second best—as almost everybody has to in such circumstances—and second best meant a withdrawal from themselves into interiority, sheer inwardness. Yet it was an external or outwards form of introversion, isolation that was borne without courage, a form of mock-suicide that expressed itself on the outside, like a canker worn on the outside of the flesh. This was something which connected—if only briefly—with the S&M jewellery, the aesthetic auto-mutliatory hardware that Anne’s artwork consisted of. This work had been started when she was a student either at the Central Polytechnic or St. Martin’s College of Art, and it had continued throughout the winding process of her withdrawal; her return to a womb-like state of impotence and genital frustration, not to say mental vacuity. This was a situation which resembled less the Satrean gloss on the pretentious concept of the situation—something in any event which he had copied from de Bord and Vaniegem (the real Situationists)—than dead meat resting in a formaldehyde tank. Since any attempt to trawl backwards, to remove yourself from the source of the action, to retreat from the fray and have nothing to do with it, is a defeat, a betrayal, an inadvertent catastrophe. It was as if both Anne and Isabella, particularly the former, had decided to die before they had actually taken the plunge into death—into a castration of the senses. There was a sort of metallic taste in the mouth, something which can be described as an oral taster, the degree to which even the tastebuds take on the attribute, on occasion, of pre-emptive slaughter. The sole question of any importance is this: how did sexuality intrude into the nature of Anne’s suicide (?)—her bid for destruction! Did it actually intrude at all, and if so what form did it take? I believe that these are the essential questions which have to be answered. Although it may prove impossible to answer any of these questions in the affirmative, let alone the negative, because they are essentially unanswerable—they broach things which are almost fictional in and of themselves. If Anne and Isabella did engage in acts of lesbian sadomasochism it was only out of a sense of relief; a relaxation of tension if only for a moment—something that held up or arrested the nature of their withdrawal. For such a form of withdrawal was a type of comedy—albeit a tragicomedy—something which should have been avoided and yet otherwise occurred. To prevent this slip into somnolence, however, involved a degree of force, a tincture of violence, something which could be done to the flesh to prevent its slumber. Hence the fact that various people flirt with S&M—a form of necrophilia as well as deicide—in order to feel anything, to get out of the pit in which human beings find themselves in when they are drained of emotion. When nothing seems to fit, at a time when teenage over-kill—suicide/homicide—seems to consist of an over-indulgent attitude towards Metallica and Megadeath.
Where the relationship that Anne and Isabella seemed to “enjoy” precluded the possibility of carnal abandonment in and of itself. Since Isabella was keenly domineering and possessive. Yet it was less a sadistic form of possession than a type of vouchsafed weakness trying to look strong. Indeed, from a distance Isabella seemed puissant; partly masculine and so forth. Yet in actuality she was weak, unresponsive, and riddled with the desire for a form of unrequited affection. All of which puts a spoke in the wheel of the idea (I’m afraid) that she could be sadistic and dominant, even murderous. No. I’m afraid it won’t wash. The truth of the matter is that if any violence had occurred then, first, it would have been discovered, and second, it would have been a desperate desire for contact on Isabella’s part as Anne retreated into silence. If you like, such an act was murder or attempted murder committed in order to save a life rather than end it. For in certain circumstances radical methods of resuscitation have to be used for those who are dying, even if the surgery is so radical it kills them.
Yet if sexuality did come into Anne’s suicide bid or desire for death then it was only an arrested moment—something which was bound not to occur given the fullness of time. In a sense it was merely a forced form of communication—like a lot of violence—and yet at the same time it was blind, ardent, full of itself. It became a sort of minor -league tragedy; an effortless monstrosity. For the whole purpose of lesbian sadomasochism, however, is an attempt to find the absent male. It is a forlorn journey which seeks a type of disembodied Priapus. In short, through the infliction of pain it goes in search of the absent male member, the disembodied male intelligence—since Sapphic adoration is incapable of providing itself with such a motif; such a token of triumph, that which casts its shadow (as well as its fluids) upon the water. You see, much feminist rhetoric—discourse if we are to use its own patter—is merely a form of worship at a deserted shrine, a shrine which it has become customary to mock and pour scorn on! When this is a shrine, a long-elongated structure which is merely a form of worship or adoration of the phallus—a type of monstrance or adornment. It is something which resembles the Egyptian sphinx but with a strange smile playing about the lips, a satisfied smile.
The truth of the matter was that Anne and Isabella never got properly started on these particular hijinks. When one comes to think about it there would always have been a certain reluctance, something to hold them back, to deny them the realization of their aim. If you like, they were too decadent to try; to fastidious to even want to. Each of them preferred the prospect of the act—rather than its negation—to anything they could otherwise think through. Although they were certainly afflicted with what we might call a sado-masochistic metaphysic; a Skin 2 armoury of delivery and response—together with the glorification of ugliness (of satanic power)—a sort of pessimism in relation to the beauty of form. Yet they did not wish to push the thing too far. Indeed, in some respects they were actually people of little consequence—despite these climactic events—and they remained autodidacts, arrivistes at the edge of their own consciousness, amateurs. In some respects what could be said about them was less important than the sum of its parts—the fact that they flirted with the nature of their own destruction. But it was just that—a flirtation! It was something which could not be considered too profound a gesture—at least not until Anne made the final gesture, what well could prove to be her final gesture, with the mercury in her hand. So ultimately the catwoman-like extremities; the sado-masochistic garments—entrapments of steel and fibre; rubber and gloss—became superfluous. They were no longer needed, in the sense that the female costumes (à la the first series of The Avengers featuring Dianne Rigg) were found to be an encumbrance, so much excess baggage—in other words, they were not required. Indeed, all one can truly remember about Anne and Isabella is the fact that the traditional masculine female invert—the traditional lesbian—had a florid and overly effeminate mother. This was the type of woman who is clown-like, almost naïve in the degree to which she extends a type of post-menopausal sexuality. She was a woman whose hair is dyed black only to offset the whiteness of the skin, if not the strained flesh around the eyes, the mouth—the ruby-wax mouth—and the neck. It is as if the truly effeminate mother—the almost rancidly effeminate mother—is there as a daily affront (if not counterpoint) to the masculinity of her daughter—a daughter who asserted her masculinity, her difference every day, through a facility with mathematics—with science and logic, on the one hand—and a certain physical urging of the flesh, on the other.
All of which reminds me of a lesbian I once knew—a woman who almost married my primary school teacher (it’s a small world)—and whose mother was a skinny Colette, a somewhat rancid, overblown, blowsy, and yet sentimental woman. She was an individual who tried to say—with her appearance—that she was approaching her fortieth birthday, when in actuality she was almost sixty-five years of age. She hid it behind red lipstick—itself the colour of blood—and jet-black hair dye. So that she resembled a type of macabre dolly, a satanic barbie doll, an inversion of the fetish of the flesh.
All of which impinges on at least the image of a certain type of lesbian sadomasochism—a certain infraction of the barbie-doll metaphysic—something that resembles a cross between The Queen Mother on Acid and Peter O’Donnell’s Modesty Blaise. Where Modesty Blaise, like Wonder Woman and a whole range of feminine heroes in popular fiction, is a type of pulp extravaganza, a woman who is not really a woman, an individual who disports herself with close-fitting gestures of the flesh. When such considerations are (1) male fantasies—schoolboy fetishes—dressed up in a particular way and (2) they represent a certain congealed, masochistic and yet assertive element of the flesh—an arrogant curvaciousness. When feminine sadomasochism, particularly when it is inverted, although not necessarily, is something to write home about, depending on the nature of your interest in it. It is essentially a matter of the distended flesh; curved, prehensile—lacking in tactility and tone and yet expressing itself without self-consciousness. Such a phenomenon involves working through the nature of its own ardour, the susceptibility of its own pain, its own character and point of reference. When such a thing is a type of abstracted wrath—but it is the sort of anger—the arrested passion—that does not necessarily know itself. It prefers to act as if such things were not at issue, as if this was a type of momentary spasm—a mixture of jism and after-care—something which can be immediately forgotten. Yet female masochism involves mastery over a particular moment—the forgetfulness of a particular type of misplaced rage—the degree to which the feminine eyelid hungers for the lash. In some senses it is a type of arrested violence, even a hostility to men which is turned outward upon the victim—also the plenipotentiary of male rage—and it can resemble a passive outrage, a passive revenge on the male sex. Also, the mainstream or Freudian—more accurately, neo-Freudian—interpretation can be taken on board, where a woman who fears penetration—the livid and yet blighted aspect of the penis—can convert this desire for lust into a personal blight, a massacre of the flesh. It is as if non-penetrative sex, at least in part, is based on a form of luscious insecurity, of displacement and abandonment of form—the degree to which the blue/purple eyelid remains open at a distance of a few yards from the absence of the nature of the thrust.
The truth about homosexual sadomasochism, at least its female form, is that it is primarily due to the desire to find the absent male—in short, it is a hunt for the absent Priapus. Whereby the heterosexual equivalent—insofar as there is any equivalence—had to do with the cultivation of a certain style—a type of myth-making in relation to the flesh. When the flesh is always resistant to the prospect of change, to a necessary act which mitigates against the nature of the human. At a time when human beings hunger after new past-times with which to indulge themselves—new conceits, rigmaroles, or anagrams for the flesh—what could be said to remain from such a sweeping consideration of the flesh.
Nevertheless, heterosexual sadomasochism always involves the reinforcement of a certain style, a particular flourish, the degree to which the curvaciousness of the woman is exaggerated. It is a type of phantasy—albeit 69 or 21 in position—a refusal to deposit anything else before liberal humanism, a type of sexuality which enthrals itself in relation to the nature of pain, dispossession. When I think one of the cardinal points about this type of sexuality is the fact that it is concerned with depression, with a lack of optimism about the nature of the human. It is also a redesignation of various masculine and feminine energies; a type of sexual reconstitution—whereby penetration is replaced by laceration, by a cauterising of the flesh rather than the spirit. It is a process which falls sheer; an abandonment—something to be otherwise disprivileged by a particular act, a taste for non-penetrative ardour, sheer style. Hence we see its connexion—if only at one remove—with the politics of the Right; more accurately, a type of political lexicography which measures itself in relation to its own lust, its own potential for a certain form of redundant grace. When the Right is deeply anti-Utopian in spirit, concerned with pleasure and pain, dissemination and the reality of bodily fluids—penetrativeness. If you like, the Right—particularly the radical right—is far more concerned with sexuality, far more sexual, explicit and superficial in the profound sense, namely in a manner which is concerned with the politics of the surface, a type of destructiveness. Whereas the Left, on the other hand, always seems to be more asexual, more hostile to the erotic—save when it is chastising the Christian moralism of the mainstream right. In short, the Left erects theory in lieu of the explicitness of sex.
When there is nothing that upsets mainstream feminist theory more than a man giving a woman a good shafting!
The whole point to remember is the explicitness of a particular urge, a type of feminine abandonment which is at once bored, fatigued, finely nuanced and bound never to truly know itself. It is if you like (and no pun intended) on a hiding to nothing.
Question: How do these ideas of yours relate to the concept of “decadence” portrayed in Norman Mailer’s The Deer Park?
Answer: Well, there are two types of decadence in many respects. First, there is the idea of something which is enforced, engrained something that necessarily looks forward to a type of articulated will. This is something that inevitably sees sexuality as a process of abandonment within certain stylistic limits, certain limitations as to form if not content. Indeed, such a process had a relation to enforced Crowleyanity; to a type of power or mastery which grows outwards from the individual, in relation to particular lines of force—mortal terror—that one understands to be ever-present, timelessly necessary.
Question: Why Crowleyanity (?)—isn’t that a discredited post-Edwardian cult?
Answer: To a certain extent, yes. But it was only Edwardian in relation to a heightened individualism—a vogue made famous by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Stirner, the early Barrès, London, Redbeard, and others—during the first decade of this century. Yet I meant the term Crowleyanite to mean the idea of the “leftwing” path within the Occult; the Lefthand, sinister and dexterous, if not ambidexterous. Although I am not an occultist in any sense, I merely refer to the fact that Crowley believed in the idea that the mind could be opened up to new experiences, new inferences and patterns of identity as a result of acts of force, main-line gestures.
Whereas the “decadence”—if we can describe it as such—of a novel like The Deer Park, on the other hand, is merely the abandonment, the empty carousal, of a liberal society gone awry. In this novel, Mailer’s third in actual fact, he depicts a group or troupe of actors in a near-Hollywood resort, Desert D’or, (a crude synonym for Palm Beach), being tasteless, bored, and bitter-sweet with one another. In a situation where the bars are ripe, the conversation plentiful, if meaningless, and the players—sundry Hollywood celebrities and their hangers-on—are left free to drink, fornicate, swap partners, dabble in drugs, and generally cut a meaningless swathe through their days. These are days in which night and day, the darkness and the bright lights, seem reversed—in an inglorious travelogue around the Palm Beach bars and nightclubs—the orange sofas and blue lights; the blue sofas with orange lights, together with the tanks of ugly, oriental fish (replete with pink castles lit from behind in green strobe-light flashes)—all of which amounts to a belletristic version of Jacqueline Susann’s The Valley of the Dolls, as Mailer puts his barbiturate-soaked desperadoes through their paces. In a sense Desert D’or resembles the hidden morality of the American film community. It was a scenario which congressional investigation, McCarthy, saccharine anti-Vietnam War protests, and even the paradoxes of the “straight edge” could not quantify. It was the degree to which the hidden morality behind the films that have flooded the world was: too tired to rut—too complacent to talk about it properly.