And The Band Played On by Randy Shilts

This was a fascinating read -- both for its own sake as essentially the authoritative history of the politics and people behind the AIDS epidemic -- and also when viewed now, in mid-2023, through a COVID-tinted lens. 

The China Virus

If AIDS hadn’t ravaged its way through the homosexual population, it is very likely that we would have referred to it as “the African Virus,” since that is evidently where it originated. In the early years, that’s how many French doctors and scientists thought of it, finding America’s preoccupation with its homosexual victims confusing. “This was a disease that simply struck people, and it had to come from somewhere.” But the human need to blame and compartmentalize is just too strong.

Indeed, as we will see:

Yet the strange mix of taboos and newfound freedom had created a social climate that was wonderfully tailored for aggressive little viruses.

Face Diapers

Because more surprising, and more similar to our reaction to having to change our behaviors to protect ourselves against COVID-19, was the tiptoeing around and the outright rebellion against the safety measures needed to contain the AIDS virus.

Another point of conflict was over what to tell gay men. Larry [Kramer] was adamant that GMHC [(Gay Men’s Health Crisis)] should tell homosexuals exactly what the doctors were telling board members in private meetings -- to stop having sex. Or, if not to stop having sex altogether, at least to stop having the kind of sex that involved putting semen in another person’s body. Most of the board members were themselves fresh from the hot summers in Fire Island bushes and long nights at spacious Manhattan bathhouses, and they had a hard time putting down the activities they had spent most of the past decade pursuing. It seemed prudish to make judgments. In the GMHC newsletter issued in July [1982], the first nonscientific publication issued by any organization in the world on the year-old epidemic, various views of risk reduction were presented.

“A number of physicians, many of them gay as well, have advised their gay patients to moderate their sexual activity, to have fewer partners, and to have partners who are in good health,” went the toughest advice. “It is the number of sexual partners, not sex itself, that increases risk.”

Another story, by sociologist Marty Levine, however, sneered at such suggestions as “fallacious reasoning” and such advice as “panic … still washing over us.” Levine wrote that “278 cases out of a possible 11 million (gay men in America) hardly constitutes an epidemic.”

For its part, GMHC as a group decided that its job would be to give gay men the most up-to-date information about the epidemic and let them make their own decisions. This policy engendered another fierce debate between Larry Kramer and the other board members. “We don’t want to get into the business of telling people what to do in bed,” came the chorus against Larry. During an epidemic of a sexually transmitted disease, Larry thought, this was exactly what you did to save lives. He lost the arguments but remained convinced that the board ultimately would shift its position. The only question in his mind was how many people would die first.

It is fairly remarkable that it was evidently the gay community that were the rebels against the public health recommendations during the AIDS epidemic, with the ability to engage in sexual activities with whomever and whenever they chose baked so deeply into their identity that many, if not most, couldn’t conceive of life under such a behavioral restriction.

And of the defiant, none were perhaps as defiant as Gaetan Dugas -- the French-Canadian flight attendant who is often misidentified as Patient Zero in the AIDS epidemic.

Gaeten Dugas’s eyes flashed, but without their usual charm, when Selma Dritz bluntly told him he must stop going to the bathhouses. The hotline at the Kaposi’s Sarcoma Foundation was receiving repeated calls from people complaining of a man with a French accent who was having sex with people at various sex parlors and then calmly telling them he had gay cancer. It was one of the most repulsive things Dritz had heard in her nearly forty years in public health.

“It’s none of your goddamn business,” said Gaeten. “It’s my right to do what I want to do with my body.”

“It’s not your right to go out and give other people disease,” Dritz replied, keeping her professional calm. “Then you’re making decisions for their bodies, not yours.”

“It’s their duty to protect themselves,” said the airline steward. “They know what’s going on there. They’ve heard about this disease.”

Dritz tried to reason further but got nowhere.

“I’ve got it,” Gaeten said angrily. “They can get it too.”

Gaeten Dugas was not alone among AIDS patients at the bathhouses. Bobbi Campbell, who had made his self-avowed role as a KS Poster Boy into something of a crusade, was also going to bathhouses, although he denied having sex with people. Gay doctors had told Dritz that several other patients still went as well. The situation was intolerable, Dritz thought, and she had no doubt as to what she would like to do. There was only the question of whether it would stand up in court. These people should be locked up, particularly Gaeten. Dritz started talking to city attorneys to see what laws existed to empower such action.

It really puts an interesting light on the COVID-era mask-deniers. Dugas sounds exactly like them in the quotes above. It’s my body. 

There are real civil liberty issues here -- whether we’re talking about government-mandated confinement during the AIDS era or government-mandated mask wearing during COVID. But despite Dritz’s wishes, no such government-mandated actions ever took place during AIDS, and very limited actions took place during COVID. In most cases, we’re talking about medical advice based on a risk assessment that, at the time offered, seemed genuine. Yet I would wager that many of us would find Dugas’s actions reprehensible, while far fewer are troubled by the rebellion of the mask deniers. From my view, if one is a sociopath, then so is the other.

Gay Cancer

One of the most illuminating parts of Shilts’s work is the way the framing of AIDS as a “gay disease” drove so much of the personal and institutional responses to it. Of course, AIDS did not exclusively afflict gay men. In fact, in its early years, it was only when it afflicted a “normal” person -- through blood transfusion or some other vector -- that it seemed to get any news coverage. And that news coverage seemed to have an ulterior motive behind it.

The focus was on the men in the white coats, who were sure to speak innocuously. The stories were carefully written not to inspire panic, which might inflame homophobes, or dwell too much on the seamier sex histories of the gay victims, which might hurt the sensitivities of homosexuals. The pieces always ended on a note of optimism -- a breakthrough vaccine was just around the corner. Most importantly, the epidemic was only news when it was not killing homosexuals. In this sense, AIDS remained a fundamentally gay disease, newsworthy only by virtue of the fact that it sometimes hit people who weren’t gay, exceptions that tended to prove the rule.

This is what all the talk of “GRID” and “gay cancer” had helped accomplish in the early months of 1982; AIDS was a gay disease in the popular imagination, no matter who else got it. It would be viewed as much as a gay phenomenon as a medical phenomenon, even by gays themselves, although they were the last to admit it. And the fact that it was so thoroughly identified as a gay disease by the end of 1982 would have everything to do with how the government, the scientific establishment, health officials, and the gay community itself would deal -- and not deal -- with this plague.

The Tylenol Scare

This is one of the most striking contemporaneous comparisons between how the public weighed health risks during these times.

The discovery of cyanide in Tylenol capsules occurred in those same weeks of October 1982. The existence of the poisoned capsules, all found in the Chicago area, was first reported on October 1. The New York Times wrote a story on the Tylenol scare every day for the entire month of October and produced twenty-three more pieces in the two months after that. Four of the stories appeared on the front page. The poisoning received comparable coverage in media across the country, inspiring an immense government effort. Within days of the discovery of what proved to be the only cyanide-laced capsules, the Food and Drug Administration issued orders removing the drug from store shelves across the country. Federal, state, and local authorities were immediately on hand to coordinate efforts in states thousands of miles from where the tampered boxes appeared. No action was too extreme and no expense too great, they insisted, to save lives.

Investigators poured into Chicago to crack the mystery. More than 100 state, federal, and local agents worked the Illinois end of the case alone, filling twenty-six volumes with 11,500 pages of probe reports. The Food and Drug Administration had more than 1,100 employees testing 1.5 million similar capsules for evidence of poisoning, and chasing down every faint possibility of a victim of the new terror, according to the breathless news reports of the time. Tylenol’s parent company, Johnson & Johnson, estimated spending $100 million in the effort. Within five weeks, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued new regulations on tamper-resistant packaging to avert repetition of such a tragedy.

In the end, the millions of dollars for CDC Tylenol investigations yielded little beyond the probability that some lone crackpot had tampered with a few boxes of the pain reliever. No more cases of poisoning occurred beyond the first handful reported in early October. Yet the crisis showed how the government could spring into action, issue warnings, change regulations, and spend money, lots of money, when they thought the lives of Americans were at stake.

Altogether, seven people died from the cyanide-laced capsules; one other man in Yuba City, California, got sick, but it turned out he was faking it so he could collect damages from Johnson & Johnson.

By comparison, 634 Americans had been stricken with AIDS by October 5, 1982. Of these, 260 were dead. There was no rush to spend money, mobilize public health officials, or issue regulations that might save lives.

The institution that is supposed to be the public’s watchdog, the news media, had gasped a collective yawn over the story of dead and dying homosexuals. In New York City, where half the nation’s AIDS cases resided, The New York Times had written only three stories about the epidemic in 1981 and three more stories in all of 1982. None made the front page. Indeed, one could have lived in New York, or in most of the United States for that matter, and not even have been aware from the daily newspapers that an epidemic was happening, even while government doctors themselves were predicting that the scourge would wipe out the lives of tens of thousands.

It wasn’t just that people didn’t care -- the government and media institutions also didn’t care -- which helped transfer that apathy onto the people. The constant emphasis on homosexuals and the knee-jerk framing of AIDS as a “gay disease” was undoubtedly responsible for this outcome.

Blood Banks

But, of course, gay sex was not the only vector of AIDS transmission. When investigators tracked several AIDS cases to the national blood supply -- overseen largely by private company “blood banks” -- their reaction was stark when compared to the Tylenol scare.

They did not want to believe their industry could be involved in something as horrible as AIDS, so they had simply denied the problem existed. To a large extent, the same thing was happening in the gay community, [Harold] Jaffe knew, but the blood bankers were doctors and scientists of a sort. They were supposed to be rational and most had sworn to uphold the Hippocratic oath.

It didn’t seem to matter. Even after it was proven that AIDS could be and was being transmitted through blood transfusions, the industry did little to prevent it.

The newsletter of the American Association of Blood Banks gave the most telling report on the industry response… “[One facility would not test its blood for the AIDS virus], not because it would cost $10 million and defer six percent of donors, but because they don’t believe it would do anything to improve transfusions safety. ‘We’re not convinced that AIDS is transmitted by blood transfusion … the evidence is very shaky,’ said [Dr. Aaron] Kellner. None of the [blood industry] panel spoke out in favor of anti-core testing for AIDS.”

And even a specially empaneled FDA task force, led by Dr. Dennis Donohue, decided to skirt the issue.

Donohue later said that, given the task force membership, all efforts at initiating testing were doomed. Members were either in the blood industry or allied with blood interests. There were no members whose role was to protect the interest of the customers of these business executives. And, ultimately, that is how the eminent doctors who ran the nation’s blood banks behaved -- like business executives. Both the task force and the blood advisory committee were clubbish groups devoted to little more than protecting the interests of blood banks. Both voted in March [1984] to take no action on Donohue’s recommendation for hepatitis testing. That largely marked the end of the Food and Drug Administration’s meager effort to protect the nation’s blood supply from AIDS. When pressed later about why this agency forswore its mandated duty to guard the integrity of America’s blood, FDA spokesmen declined to comment.

Tony Fauci

But perhaps the most surprising part of the story -- especially when viewed through the lens of the COVID epidemic forty years later -- is the role played by Anthony Fauci.

As an AIDS clinician at the National Institutes of Health Hospital, Anthony Fauci was noted for his heroic efforts to save lives early in the epidemic. He had risen rapidly in the NIAID hierarchy and was deemed a major NIH expert on AIDS at the time the infamous JAMA editorial was published [which speculated on ways in which AIDS could spread to the “general” population]. Fauci quickly cast blame on a hysterical media for taking his comments “out of context.” After all, he had said only that the possibility of household transmission might raise all these scientific implications. The lay public did not understand the language of science, he pleaded. Science always dealt with hypotheticals; this did not mean he was saying that AIDS was spread through household contact. Moreover, the chief villain, he would accurately note, was the press office of the American Medical Association, which had so shamefully sensationalized the medical journal articles in an effort to draw attention to a journal that always found itself playing second fiddle to Science and the New England Journal of Medicine.

Fauci has evidently learned nothing in forty years -- as during COVID he was still talking “hypothetical” science to the public, and then blaming the news media when the public misinterpreted what he was saying. 

Although maybe we can cut Fauci some slack, since the forces he found himself up against during AIDS and again during COVID are as old as time itself.

In San Francisco, plague met politics. Instead of being confronted by a united authority with intelligent plans for defense, it found divided forces among which the question of its presence became the subject of factional dispute. There was open popular hostility to the work of the sanitarians, and war among the City, State and Federal Health authorities. … For a while the people were in the gravest danger and it seemed impossible to convey any adequate warnings to them.

That’s from a report from a Citizens’ Health Committee on Eradicating Bubonic Plague from San Francisco in 1907. Not believing what the authorities tell you, and washing all your thoughts and actions first through your factional allegiance and then your rational brain seems hardwired into the human animal.

Still, Fauci seems both phenomenally smart and phenomenally bad at this.

Several months later, this was followed by the announcement that Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, would become the associate NIH director for AIDS. It was not clear what difference the new title would make. Fauci remained NIAID director, a full-time job in itself, considering that the agency was supposed to administer, monitor, and plan for $310 million in AIDS studies alone in the next fiscal year. Fauci also continued to do immunological research at the NIH hospital. The piling up of responsibilities was in keeping with an NIH management mentality that seems to hold that billion-dollar AIDS programs should be run like a mom-and-pop store, with Dad stocking the shelves, running the cash register, and doing the books at night.

Not surprisingly, NIH management problems persisted, adding horrendous delays to even the simplest AIDS research projects. One planned CDC study on the effect of AZT on healthy people infected with the AIDS virus, for example, was delayed five months while the NIH bitterly fought for control of the research, insisting the NIH, not the CDC, should conduct the study. When the NIH won the turf battle, it refused to use the already prepared CDC protocol, and so the study waited two more months while a near-identical protocol was written by an NIH doctor. It took four months to find placebo tablets that looked like AZT; apparently, nobody had thought of this detail before it could delay the study. And then recruiting actual study subjects was delayed many months more while each hospital participating in the study submitted the protocol to their institutional review boards, some of which met only once every few months. A year and three months after the CDC had been ready to launch the study, fewer than one-half the study subjects had been enrolled in the NIH program. And this study, which might determine whether AZT could halt the almost-certain progression from HIV seropositivity to AIDS, was, everyone agreed, the most important piece of AIDS clinical research in the United States. Even more frightful stories accompanied attempts to move other drugs into clinical trials. When pressed, however, NIH officials, particularly Dr. Fauci, insisted that there were no internal problems. The NIH had all the staff and money it needed, he said, to conduct its research, which must be done in a manner that was ‘scientifically responsible.’

Science, at least Dr. Fauci’s version of it, is not only never answerable to the people paying for it, it is also largely indecipherable. Because, of course, the story gets worse.

The issue exploded into a major embarrassment just weeks before the Stockholm conference, when U.S. Representative Ted Weiss called Fauci and other officials from the NIH and FDA to his oversight subcommittee, the site of so many revealed AIDS hearings in the early 1980s. Weiss put Fauci under oath, and only then did the truth about the NIH management problems come out. Under sharp questioning, Fauci admitted that the problems in getting aerosolized pentamidine into testing stemmed “almost exclusively” from the lack of staff at the NIH. In fact, under further interrogation, it turned out that Fauci had requested 127 staff positions to handle AIDS treatment protocols at the NIAID; the administration had granted him only 11 employees. When pressed by U.S. Representative Nancy Pelosi, the freshman legislator who had been elected to the seat of the late Representative Sala Burton of San Francisco, Fauci admitted that if he were ailing he would seek out aerosolized pentamidine himself, even if it meant he had to get it “in the street.”

The admission that the administration was still nickel-and-diming the NIH was damning enough. Even worse was the fact that it was Fauci who had spent much of the past year assuring reporters that the only barriers to AIDS treatments were unavoidable delays that were all in the interest of ‘responsible science.’ It was now clear that Fauci had spent much of the past year not telling the truth. What stunned congressmen even more was that the only way to get the NIH’s top-ranking AIDS official to admit the staffing shortfalls publicly was to put him under oath and, in effect, threaten him with penalty of perjury. It brought back all the murky memories of the deceitful health officials streaming to Congressional committees in 1982 and 1983 to insist that ‘government scientists have all the funds they need … no stone is being left unturned.’ Government scientists, it seemed, still were less interested in protecting the public health than in saying what the Reagan administration wanted them to say, even if it meant that thousands would die as a result.

A remarkable history … and a disturbing track record. It is exactly this kind of political shenanigans that inspired the title of Shilts’s book.

What remained most noteworthy about AIDS in America during 1987 and 1988 was how, in Congress, in the White House, at the National Institutes of Health, and in the media, very little had fundamentally changed. The band still played on.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Things Happen (1989)

I kept writing stories through my college years -- not for a class but just as a way to explore some ideas and develop a habit of writing. This may be one of the better ones from that period. 

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When Sam and I were in the fifth grade we used to play kickball on our school’s playground. It was the favorite game of us fifth graders, and every recess we would run out to the corner of the playground where the bright yellow lines of the kickball diamond were painted. I remember one game where Sam and I played on opposite teams. I was playing third base and Sam was up to bat. The pitcher rolled the red rubber ball across home plate and Sam gave it a good solid kick. The ball exploded off his foot and hit me square in the face. I fell down with a bloody nose and teary eyes.

Sam was my best friend. He ignored first base and ran over to me. He asked me if I was all right and said he was sorry at least a dozen times. The ball had hurt, and I would feel the pain for a long time, but I knew it wasn’t Sam’s fault. I told him I was all right and that he didn’t have to apologize or feel sorry about it. I think I told him that things happen.

That was a long time ago. Sam and I stayed best friends through middle and high school. But, after graduation, I went to Madison to study astronomy and Sam went to Eau Claire to study criminal justice. We kept in contact with letters and phone calls and we remained close. It was in our sophomore year that I took a bus trip to Eau Claire to visit him.

It was in cold November that I made this trip. I got into town late on Friday night and Sam picked me up at the bus depot. It was really good to see him again. We were laughing before we got back to the dorms.

At the dorms we had a few beers and watched some useless late night television. I met Sam’s roommate, Brian, and Sam’s new girlfriend, Laurie. Sam always had a new girlfriend for me to meet. My relationships with girls were never as frequent, but I used to think that they lasted longer and meant more.

I slept on the couch that night, after the television had been turned off and Laurie had gone home. I wanted to talk to Sam in the dark about girls, like we used to do when we were kids and I was sleeping over at his house. But with Brian sleeping there, it just didn’t seem like the thing to do.

Sam belonged to the karate club up there in Eau Claire and Saturday night they were having a party for members and their friends. Sam was really excited about it, and it seemed to be on his mind the whole day. We went over to the commons and shot some pool and then Sam took me on a tour of the campus. At the bookstore, I bought a UW-Eau Claire Blugolds sweatshirt. I still have it, I think, but it has shrunk and the logo has faded.

Sam and I had a good time that day, but it is not the time I spent with Sam that I want to talk about. Saturday night, at the karate party, I met a girl named Beth, and what happened with her is what I have come here to say.

Of all the people in the karate club, Sam had the nicest stereo, so he volunteered to bring it to the house for the party. We drove over there early with it and set it up behind the bar. We put the speakers in the corners of the living room and covered them with trash bags to keep people from spilling beer on them.

Sam spent most of the time that evening behind the bar, keeping an eye on his stereo. Since I really didn’t know anyone else at the party, I spent the night at the bar talking to Sam. Laurie was one of the first guests to arrive, and with her came Beth, a friend of hers from the dorms. I can’t say that Beth really caught my eye when I first saw her, because she didn’t. She was of medium height, with shoulder-length curly brown hair and brown eyes. Pretty, but certainly no knockout. We were introduced to each other and we said hello. We stood silently by while Laurie and Sam talked to each other, and then we said goodbye when Laurie excused Beth and herself to go mingle. At the time, I really didn’t think much of her. Sam normally pointed all good-looking single girls out to me anyway, and he was quiet about Beth. I figured she was either taken or gay. This was college, after all.

So I sat there at the bar, had a few beers, and helped Sam pick out what song to play next. It must’ve been two hours later when I turned around and saw Beth standing alone in the midst of a crowd of people. She wasn’t talking to anyone and no one was talking to her. She was just standing there. Maybe I was getting beer goggles, but I thought she looked better than I had remembered. She was just wearing a sweater and jeans, but I thought she looked really good in them. I began to fantasize about her.

Beth saw me staring at her and came over to the bar. When she got close enough I saw that her eyes were watering. But I also saw that she was drunk. I’d had four maybe five beers since the party started, and she looked like she had been matching me two for one. Before I could say anything, Sam asked her what was the matter. She never broke out into tears, but all the while she spoke, her eyes were red and wet, and she sniffled like she had a cold. She said that ten minutes ago she’d had a fight with her boyfriend and that he had left the party without her. She wanted to go home, but she lived in the dorms, and in November that was a long way away. Sam offered to drive her home after the party, but she said she didn’t want to hang around waiting for the beer to run out.

So I offered to walk her home. I’d like to think I did this just to be nice, just to lend a hand where one was needed. But after what I was thinking when I saw her in the middle of the living room, it’s hard for me to imagine I was ignorant of what might happen. But regardless, we got our coats and left the party together. I remember stepping outside and feeling the cold wind blow in my face. I was drunker than I thought, but that wind sobered me up some. I asked Beth if she was all right and she said she was cold. I put an arm around her and we started for the dorms.

To get there, we had to walk over a pedestrian bridge that spanned the Chippewa River. Sam had told me that, in the winter, the wind coming off the river caused some of the lowest wind chills in Wisconsin on that very bridge, and that night I could believe him. As I walked across that bridge with my arm around Beth’s shoulders and with her arm around my waist, I remember thinking about the fish who lived in the river. I began to wonder if they could feel the cold, and if they could, how they could stand to be in that freezing water. I wondered if they got scared each year when the surface froze over. If they were afraid because part of their liquid world had turned solid on them and they didn’t know why or what had caused it. I remember wondering if they thought it was somehow their fault the river had frozen. If they blamed themselves and felt sorry about it. I remember wondering if the fish down there could see Beth and me hurrying across the bridge and if they wondered where we were going.

After crossing the bridge we started up the hill that led to the dorms. I can’t say we talked about anything while we were out that night. I think we were both too cold and just wanted to get inside a heated building. When we finally got to her dorm, there was a moment when I paused before following her inside. She didn’t exactly invite me in, but I really didn’t think she would make me walk all the way back to the party without at least letting me warm up first. But the pause wasn’t long, and soon I found myself walking up the stairs and down the hall to her room.

We went inside, took off our coats, and sat down on her bed. She had a fairly typical dorm room, but without lofts. I thought that was really strange. Nearly every dorm room I’ve ever been in has had lofted beds, but the beds in her room sat squarely on the floor, against opposite walls, and made the room seem really cramped. I was feeling uncomfortable. Here I was, alone and drunk, in the room of a girl I barely knew, late at night. She told me her roommate had gone home for the weekend and then she asked me if I had a girlfriend. I said no. There was an awkward moment when we just looked at each other and the silence in the room got really loud.

I leaned over and kissed her on the lips. I don’t think I even thought about it, or had the usual worries about whether she really wanted me to do it. I just did it. She kissed me back, and it was not a thank-you-for-walking-me-home-hope-to-see-you-sometime kiss. It was a spend-the-night-with-me kiss. I’ve gotten a few of them in my life and they are not hard to mistake. She moaned in the back of her throat and began to move a hand up my thigh. I slipped my hands up under her sweater and unhooked her bra. I started to squeeze her breasts. Her nipples were hard, and I don’t think it was because she was still cold. She had placed her hand in my lap and she was rubbing it back and forth. She whispered in my ear what she wanted me to do and I began to do it.

Since that night, I’ve often thought about what happened between us, and even now, I am not sure what it meant. I don’t think I’ve ever really understood what it means to have sex with someone. It could mean so many different things. You see it represented in so many ways that I don’t think you can ever really be sure what sex is supposed to be. Sex could be the purest physical manifestation of love two people can share. Sex could be the swelling abdomen of the expectant mother and the smiling cheeks of the proud father. Sex could be painted thick on the television screen every twelve to fifteen minutes when the programming stops and the commercial begins. Sex could be the worm at the bottom of a six-dollar bottle of tequila. Sex could be in the adult bookstore, patiently waiting amongst the walls of glossy magazines and the racks of rubber toys. Sex could be the bar of soap, your left hand, and your imagination when you are alone and in the shower. Sex could be the fuck the coke-whore parcels out to the pusher to secure some of her candy. Sex could be the lollipop that is promised to the preschooler if she will only get into the blue sedan. Sex could be the fist of the rapist that beats the victim into bloody unconsciousness so she won’t scream or bite. Sex could be any one or all of these things. Or sex could be something else entirely. When you think about it, sex could be locked up in your parents’ bedroom, under the bed and afraid of the light.

I don’t know what it all means, or even what it meant that night with Beth. All I do know is that I had the best sex of my life that night, and that when it was over, with Beth lying in my arms, sleep has never come so gently or so peacefully.

In the morning, she crawled out of bed and I lay there and watched her move around the room. She put on a pink terrycloth bathrobe, grabbed a small blue basket filled with soap and shower stuff, and threw a towel over her shoulder just before she left. She shut the door and locked it. I folded my hands behind my head and looked at the crumpled pile of our clothes on the floor, where we’d thrown them the night before. I looked around at the rest of the room. Beth had half a dozen posters of unicorns on the walls. I hadn’t noticed them the night before. Her roommate had a couple of dopey-looking stuffed animals on her bed. The curtains were pink and frilly, definitely not dorm issue, and Beth had a small framed picture of what I took to be her family beside her alarm clock. Just looking around the room like that, I began to feel really uncomfortable lying naked under her blankets as I was. I felt exposed, as if someone was watching me, and did not like what they saw.

I got out of bed and started to put my clothes on. I was buttoning my jeans when the phone rang. I stopped and looked at it. On the second ring I answered it. Like the first kiss with Beth, it wasn’t something I thought about doing. It just happened. There was a man’s voice on the line and he wanted to talk to Beth. His voice was scratchy and he sounded as if someone had just shot his dog. I was about to tell him that she was in the shower when a little voice in my head sang out.

This is her boyfriend. This is the guy she had the fight with last night. This is the guy who probably loves her and who would wring your neck if he knew who you were and what you’ve done.

And then, before I could say anything, this little voice in my head said three little words into the phone. I know it was the voice and not me because I did not think of these words and I did not say them. I only heard them.

“Sorry, wrong number.”

There was a pause on the line and then the guy hung up. I put the receiver back in the cradle and quickly finished dressing. I was tying my shoelaces when Beth came back into the room. She was still wearing her bathrobe but now her hair was all wet. She smiled at me as she put her small blue basket away and hung up her towel. I told her I had to be going and she gave me a confused look. I told her I’d really enjoyed the night and she said she had, too. She asked me when I was leaving and I said as soon as possible because I had some things to do in Madison before class on Monday. I was beginning to feel like a heel just standing there and I think she began to sense that. I kissed her goodbye, but it wasn’t a real kiss. It wasn’t the kind of kiss I should have given her. It was just that she smelled so clean and I felt so dirty. I just couldn’t bring myself to really kiss her.

I went back to Sam’s dorm room, but he was still out at Laurie’s. Brian let me in and I went back to sleep on the couch. I woke up in the afternoon when Sam came back and I told him everything that had happened. I didn’t tell him everything I thought about it, or that it troubled me for a reason I wasn’t sure of, but I didn’t leave out much else. I think Sam could tell things weren’t quite right, though, because he didn’t joke about it or give me a hard time. He was my best friend. He only asked me if I had a good time. I said I thought I had. I’m not sure, but I think he also told me that things happen.

And now, I guess that that is all there is to say about it. I’ve never heard from nor seen Beth since that night, but I’ve come to grips with what happened between us. It was really nobody’s fault, it was just something that happened. For a long time I felt guilty about what I had done with her, but after a while I realized that I felt worse about lying to her boyfriend than I felt about sleeping with her. But even that, like getting hit in the face with a red rubber ball, or the Chippewa freezing over in the winter, was just something that happened.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

The House of the Dead by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

From the opening “note” in my paperback edition, written, I presume, by the translator, Constance Garnett, or perhaps the volume’s editor, Jenny Bak:

In ‘The House of the Dead’ (1862), Dostoyevsky presents a series of gripping character portraits based on his observations in the Siberian prison. This semi-autobiographical account of a “gentleman” condemned to hard labor for ten years explores the profound effects of confinement and servitude on his fellow prisoners, assembled from the farthest corners of Russia and forced to share their lives in the closest of quarters. Painfully accurate and stunningly rendered, the detached narration describes unflinchingly the grim life of the convicts -- those still desperate for hope and others already deadened by hopelessness -- with vivid realism. Considered a masterpiece of Russian literature, ‘The House of Dead’ is an example of Dostoyevsky at his finest.

Yeah. That.

If there is an overriding theme, it is something the narrator says early on regarding the conditions in which he and his fellow prisoners are forced to endure.

When it got dark we used all to be taken to the barracks, and to be locked up for the night. I always felt depressed at coming into our barrack-room from outside. It was a long, low-pitched, stuffy room, dimly lighted by tallow candles, full of a heavy stifling smell. I don’t understand now how I lived through ten years in it. I had three planks on the wooden platform; that was all I had to myself. On this wooden platform thirty men slept side by side in our room alone. In the winter we were locked up early; it was fully four hours before everyone was asleep. And before that -- noise, uproar, laughter, swearing, the clank of chains, smoke and grime, shaven heads, branded faces, ragged clothes, everything defiled and degraded. What cannot man live through! Man is a creature that can get accustomed to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him.

Man can get accustomed to anything. The book is a testimony in defense of that proposition. And, importantly, I think, that “getting accustomed” to things can work in multiple directions. For example, not only can man get accustomed to being flogged:

I wondered sometimes how it was that a man who had murdered his officer for a blow could lie down under a flogging with such resignation. He was sometimes flogged when he was caught smuggling vodka. Like all convicts without a trade he sometimes undertook to bring in vodka. But he lay down to be flogged, as it were with his own consent, that is, as though acknowledging that he deserved it; except for that, nothing would have induced him to lie down, he would have been killed first.

He can also, evidently, grow accustomed to flogging others:

I do not know how it is now, but in the recent past there were gentlemen who derived from the power of flogging their victims something that suggests the Marquis de Sade and the Marquise de Brinvilliers. I imagine there is something in this sensation which sends a thrill at once sweet and painful to the hearts of these gentlemen. There are people who are like tigers thristing for blood. Anyone who has once experienced this power, this unlimited mastery of the body, blood and soul of a fellow man made of the same clay as himself, a brother in the law of Christ -- anyone who has experienced the power and full licence to inflict the greatest humiliation upon another creature made in the image of God will unconsciously lose the mastery of his own sensations. Tyranny is a habit; it may develop, and it does develop at last, into a disease. I maintain that the very best of men may be coarsened and hardened into a brute by habit. Blood and power intoxicate; coarseness and depravity are developed; the mind and the heart are tolerant of the most abnormal things, till at last they come to relish them. The man and the citizen is lost for ever in the tyrant, and the return to human dignity, to repentance and regeneration becomes almost impossible. Moreover, the example, the possibility of such despotism, has a perverting influence on the whole of society: such power is temptation. Society, which looks indifferently on such a phenomenon, is already contaminated to its very foundations. In short, the right of corporal punishment given to one man over another is one of the sores of social life, one of the strongest forces destructive of every germ, every effort in society towards civic feeling, and a sufficient cause for its inevitable dissolution.

This may indeed be the great genius of this work. It is not its story or plot -- which frankly is thin to the point of being absent -- but it looks in these ways into the very soul of man.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Power (1989)

I kept writing stories through my college years -- not for a class but just as a way to explore some ideas and develop a habit of writing. This one feels more heavy-handed than most. 

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Before I start I want to say that I no longer know any of the people I’m going to talk about. They’re from a part of my life that’s forever gone and I doubt very much that I will ever learn what became of them. But that’s okay, because when I think about it, I realize that I really didn’t like these people from my past. Only one of them ever really taught me anything about how things are, and that lesson was taught so well that I neither need nor want a refresher course.

This thing happened back in 1978 when I was ten and in the fourth grade and we were still living in the suburbs. I had two good friends back then, both in the same grade with me and who both lived in my neighborhood. One was named Tony, and I think I liked him better. It’s hard to remember what it was that motivated you when you were ten years old. It’s even harder to remember what guided your emotions. Most of your memories come back to you as facts and they don’t bring with them explanations as to why they are the facts. I just know that I liked Tony much better than Shitface.

It was what my father called him. His real name was Scott. My father had gone to high school with Shitface’s father, and he said that his father was a shitface, too. When we were kids, I guess I called him Scott, but now the name just doesn’t seem to fit my memory. I can’t help but call him Shitface, too.

It was during the summer that this thing happened. It was early in the season, but my parents were already making plans for the move we would make in August. It was a wonderfully hot summer day, the kind you only have before you become a teenager. The heat was oppressive, and my friends and I were out relishing in it.

I spent the day away from home, out in the neighborhood with Tony and Shitface, like we used to do. Not really going anyplace special, just hanging around. We would get some kids that we did or didn’t know and play baseball in the side streets with a tennis ball and a softball bat, or play ball tag in someone’s backyard with a big rubber ball. It was a long day and it was getting dark when I started on my way home for dinner. Tony and Shitface had to walk with me for a while to get to their homes, and as a group we passed the house were Cissa lived.

Cissa was an older boy, about sixteen or seventeen, who lived with his father in a run-down house on the corner of 106th Street and Lawn Avenue. Cissa was his last name and that was what everybody called him. I don’t know about anyone else, but I sure never knew what his first name was.

Cissa’s yard was traditionally a cut-through yard. I don’t know what it is about little kids that keeps them from using the sidewalks. It certainly wasn’t to save any effort, because often climbing fences and running from dogs wore you out more than walking down the corner would. I can only say that there is something clandestine about it that kids love. There is something secret agent-ish about sneaking through someone’s yard who you know doesn’t want their yard sneaked through. Kids love it and I guess kids will always do it. Who knows, thirty or forty years from now it may be me who is shaking a fist at the latest generation of 007s to march through my bean seedlings.

We were cutting through Cissa’s yard when Shitface stopped and shouted some taunts into the open windows of the house. Cissa was usually home alone at this time of day, his father worked second shift at the lumberyard. I’ve never known what happened to Cissa’s mother, whether she was dead or divorced, or whether he ever even had a legal one. It sometimes scared me to think how little I knew back then. At any rate, Shitface’s taunts were meant for Cissa, and he was the only one who could have been home.

“Hey sissy sissy Cissa!” Shitface shouted. “Sissy sissy Cissa! What a fucking sissy!”

Tony immediately joined in on the taunt and their voices sliced through the summer heat like the wings of a hornet.

“Sissy sissy Cissa! Nothing but a silly fucking sissy!”

Had I been older, or a little more independent, I would have kept right on going, cutting between the bushes and Cissa’s garage and on home to some of my mother’s good cooking. But I was young and stupid, and I guess I felt like I needed to belong, to do everything my friends did no matter how spiteful or juvenile it was. I’m not blaming Tony and Shitface for what was about to happen to me, but I think it should be said that if I had been alone, or perhaps just with Tony, I’d have been on time for dinner that night.

But I added my shrill voice to the taunt as well. It was immature and I really didn’t know why Shitface was taunting Cissa in the first place, but I taunted him all the same.

“Sissy sissy Cissa! Stupid silly fucking sissy Cissa!”

It was then that the garage door suddenly rolled up on its track and Cissa rushed out. The three of us spun and froze in surprised terror. I remember looking at Cissa dashing out of the garage and I thought that I’d never seen anyone so angry in my life, not even my father after I’d punctured a tire on his gold Pontiac with a lawn dart. Cissa’s face was all red and his hands were hooked into claws.

Tony and Shitface ran. It was like one second they were there and the next second they weren’t. My brain screamed at my legs to run, but with Cissa bearing down on me, it seemed like hours before they responded. I was running down the driveway, watching my friends pull away from me across the street, when Cissa caught me.

“Tony! Help! He’s got me! Get my dad!”

Cissa tucked me under his arm and ran to the house with me. I’d never before that moment thought about how big a person Cissa was. To a ten-year-old, any seventeen-year-old would seem big, but Cissa was massive for his age. If he’d actually gone to the high school he was supposedly enrolled in, I’m sure he would’ve made one hell of an offensive lineman.

I continued to scream and tried to squirm out of his grasp. I was usually pretty good at that. When I wrestled with my father, it would seem that I could always squirm enough to break his holds. But Cissa held me tightly. I began to get the feeling that my father had been letting me go. Cissa carried me into his house and down the steps to the basement. He threw me on a musty blue sofa that was set against the cold stone wall. I bounced off it and tried to run past him and up the stairs but he tossed me back onto the sofa. I stayed there this time. I stopped screaming. I’d long since stopped shouting words or anything coherent; I’d decayed into pure howls of panic. But I stopped doing even that because Cissa wasn’t doing anything to me. He was just standing there, glaring at me and guarding the stairs.

With the end of my cries, an uneasy silence settled down with the dust in the basement. I was still scared. Perhaps now more so than before. Cissa had me trapped down in his basement and there was no way I was getting out unless he let me out. I stood up and looked around. The furnace sat silently in one corner and a green felt pool table sat in the darkness, covered with dusty boxes, folded lawn chairs, and spattered drop clothes. The only light was the sixty watt bulb at the top of the stairs and the shadows looked like they were about to leap out of the corners and smother me. There was a chill down there, and after the heat of the afternoon sun, it made me feel faint.

Cissa took a menacing step towards me. “You name’s Kevin, ain’t it?”

I nodded my head quickly.

Cissa punched me in the face. He hit me right beside my nose, under my left eye, and I fell backward onto the sofa. I’d never really been punched in the face before that day. My father had slapped me when I’d been bad, but he’d never punched me. You see it all the time in those old western movies and it always sounds like a handclap or the crack of a whip. That may be how it sounds when you punch someone else, but when it’s you that gets punched, it doesn’t sound like that at all. It’s like how your voice sounds different to you when you hear it on a tape recorder. When you speak, you hear it through your skull as well as your ears. Your skull vibrates a little and it muffles the sound. That’s what happens when you get punched, except that it’s not just sound waves that makes your skull vibrate. The western movie handclap decays into a dull thud and you’re glad your vision goes black so you can’t see how pathetic you look.

“Well, Kevin,” Cissa said. “I’m going to do you a favor. I’m going to teach you something it took me a long time to learn for myself.”

I was barely listening to him. My head was reeling and the pain was beginning to set in. I put a hand over my eyes and began to moan.

“Shut up a listen to me,” Cissa said.

I began to cry.

Cissa grabbed me by the shirtfront and hauled me off the sofa. He started to shake me and told me to shut up again. I wrenched free of his grasp and sat down, stifling my sobs.

“You are right now completely under my control,” Cissa said. “That is a fact. I have trapped you down here in my basement and I am able to do anything I want with you. There is nothing that can stop me from beating the shit out of you right now, and you know this. How does that make you feel?”

I said nothing.

“I’ll tell you how that makes you feel. You feel weak, helpless, and worst of all, controlled. And that’s what makes you mad. You’re burning up right now with your hatred of me, and only because I’ve shown you that you don’t have all the freedom you thought you had. Am I right?”

“Yes,” I said through clenched teeth.

“Good,” Cissa said. “The way you feel right now is the way I’ve felt growing up with my father. The power I have over you is the same power my father had over me. He laid down the law, and I was to follow it to the letter or he would beat the crap out of me. Anytime I did something he considered wrong, or against his wishes, or was disrespectful to him, he would beat me bloody and throw me down here in the basement for punishment. He did this until I learned what I’m about to teach you.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“That you don’t fuck with people who have power over you. I used to hate my dad so much that I’d purposely do things to piss him off. Disobey him. Talk back. Things like that. I’d do these things and he’d beat me worse and worse every time. Then I decided that what I was doing was stupid. Let the old man have his way. I was sick of being kicked around. So I started doing what he told me to do. I fixed his meals. I washed his car. I cut the grass. And guess what? Things changed. Things got better. He stopped beating me, and he started to give me a little freedom.”

Cissa paused. He looked at me for a long time and the side of my face began to throb.

“Last night,” Cissa said, “my father came home after work really drunk. It isn’t something he does much, but it happens sometimes. When he does, I usually stay out of his way. He’s really irritable when he’s drunk. But last night, I was up watching cable when he came in. He started accusing me of taking his car for joyrides or some shit like that, I couldn’t really understand him. I was trying to calm him down and tell him I didn’t know what he was talking about when he hit me. He took me completely by surprise with that. He hadn’t hit me in over a year. He hit me with a good rap to the side of the head.

“Kevin, I looked inside myself last night and I saw someone who had done a lot of growing in the past year. I saw someone who wasn’t bucking the system. Someone who was doing his best to get along without being abused or hurt. Someone who was being hit not because he deserved it, but because his father had gotten drunk and was pissed off about something his kid hadn’t done. I also saw someone who had a little power of his own.

“I punched my father in the teeth last night and he fell on his ass just like you did. He sat on the kitchen floor for a long time just rubbing his jaw and muttering to himself. Eventually he got up and left. I haven’t seen him since last night. He’s probably shacked up with one of his bitches, but I honestly wouldn’t care if he was lying dead in a ditch somewhere.”

Cissa drifted off into silence. He was staring at me but I don’t think he was seeing me. His eyes were a glassy blank. He suddenly shook his head and blinked a few times.

“Do you know what I’m trying to say?”

My face was pounding. “I don’t know.”

“I’m trying to say that in this world there are people who are going to control your life whether you fight back or not. If you are always rebelling against them, they are going to stifle you more and more until you are buried so deep that you will never get out. The only way to beat them is to play their game by their rules, and bide your time until you find yourself in a position to turn the tables. Then you act, and act fast.”

I was ten. I know I didn’t understand everything that Cissa was trying to tell me. But I’ve remembered his words, and now that I’ve become a man, I see that Cissa knew what he was talking about. I walk around town and I see all the protesters and the radicals out picketing and marching and shouting with the idea that they are accomplishing something. It doesn’t matter what they’re against or who they are. All they’re saying to those in power is, here we are, we’re the ones you have to watch out for, we’re the radicals. And those in power simply close their fist more tightly around that group of people, crushing the ones slippery enough to squeeze through their fingers with the heel of their other hand. But, as I said, I was ten. I just wanted to go home.

“Do you understand?” Cissa asked.

I felt the rising welt on my face. “I think so. Can I go now?”

Cissa moved away from the stairs. “All right, you can go home. Run right home and tell your dad everything I did to you down here. Or if that isn’t bad enough, make a few things up. Forget everything I said and have your dad call the cops. Maybe I’ll spend a night in the detention center, maybe I won’t. Either way, it’s not going to change what I just said.”

I looked at Cissa for a long time, trying to figure out what I should do. He had hit me, sure, but I think I realized that I had had it coming. Maybe not as much as Shitface or even Tony had it coming, but I had it coming all the same. I walked slowly to the stairs, expecting Cissa to stop me at every step. When I got to the bottom stair, I stopped.

“I’ll tell my dad I fell off Tony’s bike.”

“Good.”

“Why did you tell me all this?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Cissa said. “You’re not like those other two. They’re going to go through their whole lives fighting authority, and never for any better reason than because they are too fucking thickheaded to accept that the world will go on just fine without them.”

I looked at the blood that had dripped onto my shirt. “You didn’t have to hit me.”

“You’re right,” Cissa said. “But I did it anyway.”

I turned and ran up the stairs.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

The Titan by Theodore Dreiser

If you’re following along, you know that I am slowly reading all of Dreiser’s fiction in chronological order -- the first author I have consciously done this for. First came Sister Carrie, published in 1900, then Jennie Gerhardt, published in 1911, and then The Financier, published in 1912.

The Titan, published in 1914, is actually the second part of a longer novel that Dreiser wrote, and then subsequently split into the two separate titles -- The Financier and The Titan. Both, therefore, feature Frank Algernon Cowperwood as their protagonists, The Titan picking up just a few years after the end of The Financier, when Frank is released from the penitentiary where he was housed at the end of previous volume.

All Is Permitted

The Titan explores the same general theme as The Financier, with Frank as its very embodiment.

The impediments that can arise to baffle a great and swelling career are strange and various. In some instances all the cross waves of life must be cut by the strong swimmer. With other personalities there is a chance, or force, that happily allies itself with them; or they quite unconsciously ally themselves with it, and find that there is a tide that bears them on. Divine will? Not necessarily. There is no understanding of it. Guardian spirits? There are many who so believe, to their utter undoing. (Witness Macbeth.) An unconscious drift in the direction of right, virtue, duty? These are banners of mortal manufacture. Nothing is proved; all is permitted.

All is permitted. Frank is an amoral character, believing himself unbound by the religious, cultural, and social customs that constrain the others that he seeks to conquer in business and in love.

Especially in love, as much of The Titan is consumed by a series of Frank’s philandering affairs. Sex with women he desires is his right as one of the special men who are not bound by anything beyond their own ambition.

The difficulty with this situation, as with all such where an individual ventures thus buccaneeringly on the sea of sex, is the possibility of those storms which result from misplaced confidence, and from our built-up system of ethics relating to property in women. To Cowperwood, however, who was a law unto himself, who knew no law except such as might be imposed upon him by his lack of ability to think, this possibility of entanglement, wrath, rage, pain, offered no particular obstacle. It was not at all certain that any such thing would follow. Where the average man might have found one such liaison difficult to manage, Cowperwood, as we have seen, had previously entered on several such affairs almost simultaneously; and now he had ventured on yet another; in the last instance with a much greater feeling and enthusiasm.

A Girl of Sixteen

Throughout this long series of affairs he maintains his relationship with his wife Aileen, a woman he married only after beginning a long affair with her while married to yet someone else. In The Financier, I spent a lot of time trying to compare Aileen Cowperwood (nee Butler) to one of Dreiser’s previous female protagonists -- either Carrie Meeber or Jennie Gerhardt -- but the comparison never really stuck, and it sticks even less in The Titan. Carrie and Jennie were young women whom powerful men desired -- and Aileen was certainly this through much of The Financier. But in The Titan, her flower is dying in the garden of desires that Frank is tending, and she is not such a fool as to not realize it.

The psychology of the human animal, when confronted by these tangles, these ripping tides of the heart, has little to do with so-called reason or logic. It is amazing how in the face of passion and the affections and the changing face of life all plans and theories by which we guide ourselves fall to the ground. Here was Aileen talking bravely at the time she invaded Mrs. Lillian Cowperwood’s domain of the necessity of “her Frank” finding a woman suitable to his needs, tastes, abilities, but now that the possibility of another woman equally or possibly better suited to him was looming in the offing -- although she had no idea who it might be -- she could not reason in the same way. Her ox, God wot, was the one that was being gored. What if he should find someone whom he could want more than he did her? Dear heaven, how terrible that would be! What would she do? she asked herself thoughtfully. She lapsed into the blues one afternoon -- almost cried -- she could scarcely say why. Another time she thought of all the terrible things she would do, how difficult she would make it for any other women who invaded her preserves. However, she was not sure. Would she declare war if she discovered another? She knew she would eventually; and yet she knew, too, that if she did, and Cowperwood were set in his passion, thoroughly alienated, it would do no good. It would be terrible, but what could she do to win him back? That was the issue. 

The small vignettes from Aileen’s perspective are fascinating, and worth further study. She knows “her Frank” quite well, after all, and knowing how he is, she is acutely aware of why he is always chasing, chasing, chasing what he desires. What, after all, and even recognizing the central role that his relationship to her plays in his success and happiness, is there to stop him?

Eventually, she does confront him, and his response is quite characteristic.

“Aileen,” he said finally, coming up behind her, “can’t you and I talk this thing over peacefully now? You don’t want to do anything that you’ll be sorry for. I don’t want you to. I’m sorry. You don’t really believe that I’ve ceased to love you, do you? I haven’t, you know. This thing isn’t as bad as it looks. I should think you would have a little more sympathy with me after all we have been through together. You haven’t any real evidence of wrongdoing on which to base any such outburst as this.”

“Oh, haven’t I?” she exclaimed, turning from the mirror, where, sorrowfully and bitterly, she was smoothing her red-gold hair. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes red. Just now she seemed as remarkable to him as she had seemed that first day, years ago, when in a red cape he had seen her, a girl of sixteen, running up the steps of her father’s house in Philadelphia. She was so wonderful then. It mellowed his mood toward her.

“That’s all you know about it, you liar!” she declared. “It’s little you know what I know. I haven’t had detectives on your trail for weeks for nothing. You sneak! You’d like to smooth around now and find out what I know. Well, I know enough, let me tell you that. You won’t fool me any longer with your Rita Sohlbergs and your Antoinette Nowaks and your apartments and your houses of assignation. I know what you are, you brute! And after all your protestation of love for me! Ugh!”

She turned fiercely to her task while Cowperwood stared at her, touched by her passion, moved by her force. It was fine to see what a dramatic animal she was -- really worthy of him in many ways.

“Aileen,” he said softly, hoping still to ingratiate himself by degrees, “please don’t be so bitter toward me. Haven’t you any understanding of how life works -- any sympathy with it? I thought you were more generous, more tender. I’m not so bad.”

He eyed her thoughtfully, tenderly, hoping to move her through her love for him.

In the scene, it doesn’t work, Aileen raging at him more and more until she begins to throw things, throwing the jewels and necklaces he had given her back in his face, and then locking herself in the bedroom, out of his reach. And through it all, Frank is bemused, confused, and strangely aroused by her passion. Doesn’t she understand ‘how life works’?

A Poison Flower

But something does unmoor Frank. It begins when he discovers one of the women he seduces -- Stephanie Platow -- has in turn deceived him by carrying on another affair with an artist and poet -- Forbes Gurney. In a climactic scene, Frank discovers them in flagrante in the very apartment that Frank has rented for his own dalliances with Stephanie.

At his rough, firm cough they sprang up -- Gurney to a hiding position behind a curtain, Stephanie to one of concealment behind draperies on the couch. She could not speak, and could scarcely believe that her eyes did not deceive her. Gurney, masculine and defiant, but by no means well composed demanded: “Who are you? What do you want here?” Cowperwood replied very simply and smilingly: “Not very much. Perhaps Miss Platow there will tell you.” He nodded in her direction.

Stephanie, fixed by his cold, examining eye, shrank nervously, ignoring Gurney entirely. The latter perceived on the instant that he had a previous liaison to deal with -- an angry and outraged lover -- and he was not prepared to act either wisely or well.

“Mr. Gurney,” said Cowperwood complacently, after staring at Stephanie grimly and scorching her with his scorn, “I have no concern with you, and do not propose to do anything to disturb you or Miss Platow after a very few moments. I am not here without reason. This young woman has been steadily deceiving me. She has lied to me frequently, and pretended an innocence which I did not believe. Tonight she told me she was to be at a lawn party on the West Side. She has been my mistress for months. I have given her money, jewelry, whatever she wanted. Those jade earrings, by the way, are one of my gifts.” He nodded cheerfully in Stephanie’s direction. “I have come here simply to prove to her that she cannot lie to me anymore. Heretofore, every time I have accused her of things like this she has cried and lied. I do not know how much you know of her, or how fond you are of her. I merely wish her, not you, to know” -- and he turned and stared at Stephanie -- “that the day of her lying to me is over.”

He seems a man very much in control here, but the effect of her treachery on him is more evident moments later, when he is alone, outside the apartment, and fleeing.

Cowperwood paid no heed. Out he went through the dark hall and down the stairs. For once the lure of a beautiful, enigmatic, immoral, and promiscuous woman -- poison flower though she was -- was haunting him.

“D----- her!” he exclaimed. “D----- the little beast, anyhow! The -----! The -----!” He used terms so hard, so vile, so sad, all because he knew for once what it was to love and lose -- to want ardently in his way and not to have -- now or ever after. He was determined that his path and that of Stephanie Platow should never be allowed to cross again.

The tables have turned. For the first time in his life, Frank Algernon Cowperwood, is not the alpha in a sex relationship -- and it not just unmoors him, it forces him to re-evaluate his own compulsions and what is really at their root.

Just One Ideal Thing In This World

During this journey he redoubles his focus on the success of his business interests. It is apparent to both the reader and to Frank himself that his conquests in this area and his sex conquests are cut from the same amoral cloth. And it is in these financial schemes and pursuits -- again, like in The Financier, described by Dreiser in more detail than is needed -- that he approaches, but is frequently denied, the pinnacle of both ambitions. 

It is curious how that first and most potent tendency of the human mind, ambition, becomes finally dominating. Here was Cowperwood at fifty-seven, rich beyond the wildest dream of the average man, celebrated in a local and in some respects a national way, who was nevertheless feeling that by no means had his true aims been achieved. He was not yet all-powerful as were divers eastern magnates, or even these four or five magnificently moneyed men here in Chicago, who, by plodding thought and labor in many dreary fields such as Cowperwood himself frequently scorned, had reaped tremendous and uncontended profits. How was it, he asked himself, that his path had almost constantly been strewn with stormy opposition and threatened calamity? Was it due to his private immorality? Other men were immoral; the mass, despite religious dogma and folderol theory imposed from the top, was generally so. Was it not rather due to his inability to control without dominating personally -- without standing out fully and clearly in the sight of all men? Sometimes he thought so. The humdrum conventional world could not brook his daring, his insouciance, his constant desire to call a spade a spade. His genial sufficiency was  taunt and a mockery to many. The hard implication of his eye was dreaded by the weaker as fire is feared by a burned child. Dissembling enough, he was not sufficiently oily and make-believe. Well, come what might, he did not need to be or mean to be so, and there the game must lie; but he had not by any means attained the height of his ambition. He was not looked upon as a money prince. He could not rank as yet with the magnates of the East -- the serried Sequoias of Wall Street. Until he could stand with these men, until he could have a magnificent mansion, acknowledged as such by all, until he could have a world-famous gallery, Berenice, millions -- what did it avail?

Berenice is Berenice Fleming, the adult but much younger-than-Frank daughter of a socialite with whom Frank grows close in his travels and business dealings. And it is his quest for her, for her ideal beauty, that he begins to build these monuments in New York City and begins to measure himself against the fame and fortunes of that island empire. In the above passage we see Frank examining both himself and his ambition, trying desperately to understand what it is and what it is that will allow him to attain it.

And he is growing increasingly aware of the large number of years that have passed and the smaller number that are still yet to come. He is jealous of Berenice’s younger paramours, including one named Braxmar.

Berenice was so beautiful in a storm of diaphanous, clinging garments. He stared at them from an adjacent room, where he pretended to be reading, and sighed. Alas, how were his cunning and foresight -- even his -- to overcome the drift of life itself? How was he to make himself appealing to youth? Braxmar had the years, the color, the bearing. Berenice seemed tonight, as she prepared to leave, to be fairly seething with youth, hope, gaiety. He arose after a few moments, and giving business as an excuse, hurried away. But it was only to sit in his own rooms in a neighboring hotel and meditate. The logic of the ordinary man under such circumstances, compounded of the age-old notions of chivalry, self-sacrifice, duty to higher impulses, and the like, would have been to step aside in favor of youth, to give convention its day, and retire in favor of morality and virtue. Cowperwood saw things in no such moralistic or altruistic light. “I satisfy myself,” had ever been his motto, and under that, however much he might sympathize with Berenice in love or with love itself, he was not content to withdraw until he was sure that the end of hope for him had really come. 

Frank is more introspective here than almost ever before, really digging into what it is he desires and, more importantly, why. At one point, he tries to explain himself to Berenice, using his series of serious relationships with women as his pretext.

“Let me tell you a little something about my life, will you? It won’t take long. I was born in Philadelphia. My family had always belonged there. I have been in the banking and street-railway business all my life. My first wife was a Presbyterian girl, religious, conventional. She was older than I by six or seven years. I was happy for a while -- five or six years. We had two children -- both still living. Then I met my present wife. She was younger than myself -- at least ten years, and very good-looking. She was in some respects more intelligent than my first wife -- at least less conventional, more generous, I thought. I fell in love with her, and when I eventually left Philadelphia I got a divorce and married her. I was greatly in love with her at the time. I thought she was an ideal mate for me, and I still think she has many qualities which make her attractive. But my own ideals in regard to women have all the time been slowly changing. I have come to see, through various experiments, that she is not the ideal woman for me at all. She does not understand me. I don’t pretend to understand myself, but it has occurred to me that there might be a woman somewhere who would understand me better than I understand myself, who would see the things that I don’t see about myself, and would like me, anyhow. I might as well tell you that I have been a lover of women always. There is just one ideal thing in this world to me, and that is the woman that I would like to have.”

But it’s not really women that Frank desires. It is only something that they represent. There is one moment of clarity where he comes to understand the real object of his seemingly unquenchable desire.

What, after all, were life, wealth, fame, if you couldn’t have the woman you wanted -- love, that indefinable, unnamable coddling of the spirit which the strongest almost more than the weakest crave? At last he saw clearly, as within a chalicelike nimbus, that the ultimate end of fame, power, vigor was beauty, and that beauty was a compound of the taste, the emotion, the innate culture, passion, and creams of a woman like Berenice Fleming. That was it: that was IT. And beyond were nothing save crumbling age, darkness, silence.

It is crazy interesting to me that Frank Cowperwood should come to this final conclusion at the end of The Titan. There is a third book in the Cowperwood trilogy, what is sometimes called the Trilogy of Desire. It is called The Stoic, but it is not the next novel that Dreiser wrote. The Stoic was written late in Dreiser’s life, and would not be published until after his death in 1945. No, Dreiser’s next novel after The Titan was called The Genius. At the time of writing this blog post, I have not yet read The Stoic, but I have read The Genius, and I know that it is all about the pursuit of beauty -- of female beauty, of artistic beauty, of platonic beauty itself -- almost to the exclusion of all else. 

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.