Sex, truth and books: The apprenticeship of Alice Denham
By Wim Coleman August 29, 2008 San Miguel de Allende

Sleeping with Bad Boys is a provocative, titillating title to be sure. And the subtitle—A Juicy Tell-All of Literary New York in the Fifties and Sixties—adds to the steam. Sex sells and Alice Denham, a familiar figure in the San Miguel literary scene, doesn’t disappoint with this book.

But the title doesn’t tell the whole story, nor does it convey the book’s abiding value. Sleeping with Bad Boys is nothing less than an eyewitness account of the unfolding of an era. Denham’s personal memories of key writers frequently segue into keen literary criticism, while her travails as a woman author and model are firmly set against the bourgeoning feminist movement of the sixties. 

The cast list is jaw-dropping—James Dean, Marlon Brando, Hugh Hefner, James Jones, Philip Roth, Nelson Algren, Joseph Heller, William Gaddis, David Markson and Norman Mailer. No, Denham didn’t have sex with (quite) all of them and, if your prurient curiosity is getting the best of you, you’ll have to read the book. Suffice it to say that these vividly drawn characters play illuminating parts in Denham’s bildungsroman. Bad Boys relates a writer’s apprenticeship in those heady days when literature still mattered, when American readers waited with bated breath for the elusive “Great American Novel.”

Then as now, writers learned to support themselves while pursuing their craft, but options for women were limited. Denham hated modeling, especially scantily clothed or not at all, but it seemed a less time-consuming way to pay the bills than, say, shorthand. In 1956, she became the first and only woman to appear as a centerfold in Playboy and publish a short story in the same issue. 

It was a stunt, of course, calculated to attract publishers to Denham’s work. In that male-dominated age a woman writer had to think on her feet, for “it was conventional wisdom that no woman could write fiction with the scope of a man.” Denham remembers her male literary pals with affection, but she doesn’t write about them with unqualified nostalgia. 

To her, Mailer, Roth, Heller, Gaddis and their ilk were flawed men and flawed artists. “Alienation was the height of male literary chic,” she observes, “a refusal to reach out, disguised as inescapable human frailty. Each in his own cell, in solitary. I called it megalomania, suffocating self-love. Whereas ordinary men and women did manage to get close, to know and touch and relate. Even if they failed to make it last. What these hotsy male writers knew about love was nada.”

In Denham’s eyes, Katherine Anne Porter rose above those self-imposed limitations. Denham relates her tentative but moving friendship with the then-fading but still effervescent Southern short story writer. This passage sweetly captures the thrill a young artist feels when being treated as a peer by a genius. 

Otherwise, Denham’s literary heroes were usually separated from her by time or space. She adored the poetry of T.S. Eliot, responded eagerly to Bernard Shaw’s Life Force worship and especially idolized Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who “combined character, theme, action and plot movement all in one sentence. How I yearned, ached, to be able to do that.” Denham embraces Dostoyevsky’s spirit best when ruthlessly analyzing her own motives and shortcomings. 

Along those lines, much of Denham’s new book relates the writing and publication of her novel My Darling from the Lions, first printed in 1967 and recently reissued by Authors Guild Backinprint.com. One editor offered to show Denham how to make the book more “commercial.” Denham turned him down, angry and offended. “If a novel was considered commercial,” she explains, “that meant it was not literary. We serious writers disdained bestseller writers as a low breed. They were hacks, we were artists.” 

That was a false dichotomy, of course: “Later I realized I had turned down an opportunity to learn through arrogant youthful stupidity. Turned down a bird in hand for an empty bush. In those days we believed literature equals truth, commercial equals crap. We were smart-asses. Life changes.”

Life changed, indeed, during the sixties, with the rise of feminism, and Denham threw herself into the movement wholeheartedly. Her own experiences as a woman artist—and, yes, a sex object—convinced her of the imperative of advancing women’s rights. She wept with joy at the US Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision overturning state antiabortion laws, for she had personally endured the trauma of illegal abortion. 

Her searing description of one such abortion should be required reading for anyone who remains undecided on the issue of choice or the current slate of US presidential candidates. “The first pain scraped raw through me beyond pain,” she writes, “appalling my entire body, stretching its range of sensations to the unbearable. I was my own human sacrifice, killing part of myself to free the rest.”

Someday, the sex and gossip of Sleeping with Bad Boys will seem merely one facet in a rich, multifaceted narrative and Denham’s book will be widely recognized as the important document it is. But don’t wait till then to read it. Any college instructor teaching a survey course in American literature (or, for that matter, twentieth-century American culture in general) would be well advised to include it in the syllabus.

Wim Coleman is the co-author, with Pat Perrin, of the forthcoming novel Anna’s World, to be published in December by Chiron Books ( www.playsonideas.com ).

Are these hotcakes or bird books?

Audubon de México’s guide Birds of San Miguel de Allende: Walking through El Charco, Parque Landeta and Environs, is almost literally flying off the shelves around town—selling like hotcakes, you could say. The 50-peso booklet is available at the shop at El Charco del Ingenio and at La Tienda at the Biblioteca, as well as at La Conexión on the Libramiento and José Marín’s salon on Nunez, among other places.

It’s been awhile since we’ve had an up-to-date guide to local birds in English (the Spanish version will be ready soon, too) and it seems as if it’s what everyone has been waiting for—even the stay-at-homes, because many of these birds can easily be found in private gardens, or right outside your door.

Birds of San Miguel features pictures and descriptions of the 60 most common birds in our area. It follows the plan originally conceived by Fen Taylor for viewing birds in the Charco. The beautiful photos are by Wayne Colony, with a new text by Susan Colony. It’s a small book that you can fold up and put in your pocket for a bird walk (but big enough to be readable and to see the bird pictures). Audubon always has them for sale at their monthly birdwalks (usually the third Sunday of each month), too, and they seem to sell out regularly, surprising no one. Those birds just can’t hide anymore!

Book Fever
By Marcia Loy

Expanding horizons

A taste for books is the pleasure and glory of my life. I would not exchange it for the riches of the Indies.

—Gibbon

Several years ago I picked up a book called Starting from Scratch by Rita Mae Brown. It was about writing, which I’ve been known to attempt from time to time. In it she included a list of books, old and modern, all aspiring writers should read. I think the first book on the list was Beowulf. I remembered having to read Beowulf in high school. I found it tedious, boring and unrelated in any way to my life, which in those days meant trying to get John R. to ask me out (he never did.) But I like Rita Mae and I trusted her judgment, so I took myself off to the library and came home with a copy of Beowulf. I sat down and started reading. I found it tedious, boring and unrelated to my desire to have Jon V. ask me out (he did!). I think I abandoned Rita Mae’s list. Thank goodness I don’t react that way to all the classics.

In my first two columns on the classics, I cited English authors. Today let’s expand our horizons to Germany, France and the US. These three books were published between 1927 and 1928.

Steppenwolf, Herman Hesse, 1927. Harry Haller is the Steppenwolf of Nobel Prize-winning author Herman Hesse. This is one of the most extraordinary books I’ve read. It’s a strange book about a strange, troubled man. Worth the journey.

Excerpt: Ah, but it is hard to find this track of the divine in the midst of this life we lead, in this besotted humdrum age of spiritual blindness, with its architecture, its business, its politics, its men! How could I fail to be a lone wolf, and an uncouth hermit, as I did not share one of its aims nor understand one of its pleasures? I cannot remain for long in either theater or picture-house. I can scarcely read a paper, seldom a modern book. I cannot understand what pleasures and joys they are that drive people to the over-crowded railways and hotels, into the packed cafés with the suffocating and oppressive music, to the Bars and variety entertainments, to World Exhibitions, to the Corsos. I cannot understand nor share these joys, though they are within my reach, for which thousands of others strive. On the other hand, what happens to me in my rare hours of joy, what for me is bliss and life and ecstasy and exaltation, the world in general seeks at most in imagination; in life it finds it absurd. And in fact, if the world is right, if this music of the cafés, these mass enjoyments and these Americanized men who are pleased with so little are right, then I am wrong, I am crazy. I am in truth the Steppenwolf that I often call myself; that beast astray who finds neither home nor joy nor nourishment in a world that is strange and incomprehensible to him.

Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust, 1928. Is there an author more delightful than Proust? I admit I was a little afraid to read him, having heard he was a “modern” writer. I thought he’d be difficult to read. I didn’t expect to encounter a book with phrases to take my breath away. Swann’s Way is the first of the seven novels that comprise A Remembrance of Things Past. Proust began writing when he was confined to his bed in ill health, around 1908, and died in 1922.

The final three volumes were published after his death.

Excerpt: Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray...had any existence for me, when one day in winter, as I came home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called ‘petite madeleines,’ which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim’s shell... . No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place... . And once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-flowers which my aunt used to give me...immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre to attach itself to the little pavilion, opening on to the garden, which had been built out behind it...so in that 
moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thorton Wilder, 1927. I read this book at my mother’s urging, when I was in high school and remembered liking it. Last year my former book club and I re-read it. We were surprised at how well it’s held up. The story takes place in eighteenth-century Peru when a bridge collapses, killing five people. After we read about the bridge falling, we learn about the people who died. Wilder was a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright (The Skin of Our Teeth and Our Town) but this novel made his reputation.

Excerpt: [The Marquesa de Montemayor] was the daughter of a cloth merchant who had acquired the money and the hatred of the Limeans within a stone’s-throw of the Plaza. Her childhood was unhappy; she was ugly; she stuttered; her mother persecuted her with sarcasms in an effort to arouse some social charms and forced her to go about the town in a veritable harness of jewels. She lived alone and she thought alone. Many suitors presented themselves, but as long as she could she fought against the convention of her time and was determined to remain single. There were hysterical scenes with her mother, recriminations, screams and slamming of doors. 

Next week Book Fever looks at three modern American classics. Happy reading. 

Marcia Loy is a member of the steering committee of the Authors’ Sala and a volunteer at the Biblioteca Pública. She can be contacted at marciabookfever@hotmail.com.