Tropic of Marvin

Oedipus killed his father and married his mother. The myth was adapted by Freud because it made practical sense. It’s really Darwinian when you come to think of it. The father must symbolically and literally be removed from power in order to make way for the son. In the case of Marvin Gaye, you had the Oedipus complex in reverse. Gaye was murdered by his own father, Marvin Sr. Many parents discountenance the idea that they might be competitive with their own children. It’s an unpleasant thought. Marvin Jr. was in fact killed with a .38 Smith & Wesson he’d given to his father--a fact that makes for an even more dizzying variation on the theme of oedipal rivalry. But it’s easy to see why any male would have felt competitive with a son like Marvin Gaye. He was the sexiest man dead or alive, sexier than Dumas pere or Hugo (who were famed womanizers), sexier than Wilt Chamberlain (who in his A View  From Above claimed he had slept with over 20,000 women), sexier than JFK, Jack Nicholson, De Niro, Pacino or Tom Cruise, and certainly sexier than current idols like Justin Timberlake, JZ, Ben Affleck or Brad Pitt. Take a look at the video of Sexual Healing. Can anything be sexier than this? Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer is one of the sexiest books of all time, but Miller’s words are no match for Marvin’s moves.

Saul Steinberg

Photo by  Inge Morath

Saul Steinberg was famous for his drawings, but according to Deborah Solomon’s review of the new Deirdre Bair biography, Steinberg often crossed the line (“Drawing the Line, and Crossing It,” NYT, 11/21/12) “As Bair reveals,” Solomon says, “his love life was a string of infidelities, and crabbiness was his default mode.” The review quotes Steinberg’s wife, Hedda Sterne, as saying, “In a way sex was his life. He deprived himself of true union because he was not ever in love.” Bair, according to Solomon, also describes how Steinberg’s indiscretions which included “the teenaged daughters of his dearest friends” were often excused because “his work was manifestly first rate, and talent tends to foster forgiveness.” Steinberg’s mixture of talent and promiscuity places him in a long line of Lotharios that include Victor Hugo and George Simenon in literature, John F. Kennedy and his father Joseph in politics, and Wilt Chamberlain, the basket ball player who claimed to have slept with over 20,000 women. And one wonders about the relationship between talent and sexuality. Did the talent occur because of the sexuality (with the sexuality being a manifestation of a certain ambition) or in spite of it? Or is hyper-sexuality the reward bestowed on certain narcissistic geniuses,whose insights into human behavior don’t include a keen understanding of the effect they may have on others? On the other hand, can we say that love is an overrated emotion and that one of the products of Steinberg’s highly developed sensibility was to know a good time when he saw it? Hedda Sterne, who died in 2011, was interesting in her own right, as the sole female member of the Irascible Eighteen a group of abstract expressionists which included Pollock and Rothko.

An Outline of Sexual History

The English writer David Lodge has written in a novel about H.G. Wells called A Man of Parts. Lodge wouldn’t have been true to his subject if he hadn’t painted the famed author as bedding everything in sight. Apparently Wells had the kind of charismatic intellect that made women forget any of that famed piece of psychobabblese known as boundaries, but Wells certainly didn’t stand alone. Cross the channel almost a century earlier and you’d find Hugo and cross it a few decades later and you’d find Georges Simenon, the human bunny. Bertrand Russell was man of peace, but he also was a swordsman. It’s always refreshing to know there are people like Wilt Chamberlain who reputedly slept with  l0,000 women and Catherine the Great who, according to myth, was a great stud in reverse and whose doomed relationship with a horse was harbinger of the partitioning of Berlin during the cold war. Sexual appetite when it reaches these gargantuan proportions has something in common with extreme Genius (Shakespeare) and Evil (Hitler). There is something almost spiritual about it that represents the departure of the soul from the body to the extent that the body begins to function soullessly and without the burdens of conscience. There are great talents like Chaucer, Rabelais and Henry Miller who have undertaken to imagine extraordinary feats of sexual prowess. However it’s one thing to write a dirty poem like Catullus and another to be Caligula himself.  The interesting thing about Wells was that he was of modest birth and had none of the entitlement that characterized the great dandies of the Edwardian period. The fact that he lacked the Sadian noblesse oblige makes him one impressive Lothario.