Helen the Obscure
by ALEX CARNEVALE
On her twelfth birthday, Helen Lawrenson's mother told her that she had never wanted a child. She informed her young daughter she had tried everything she could to end that pregnancy: hot mustard baths, huge castor oil doses, enemas, riding horseback, skipping rope. Even falling down stairs.
Helen's mother cried every time she heard Christmas carols.
Helen copied in her diary that quote from Wilde's De Profundis: "I have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me. The silence, the solitude, the shame - each and all of these things I have to transform into a spiritual experience."
at age twelve
When she lost her virginity at 19, she contracted syphilis. After her treatment, she was never once sick again in her life. Instead Helen would have many abortions of her own, including three in a single year. Or at least that is the claim in her marvelous, forgotten memoir Stranger at the Party. I have always prided myself on being able to tell exaggeration from the truth, but Helen Lawrenson made them indistinguishable in her own work.
Stranger at the Party is full of such revelations:
Even my erotic dreams had a literary tinge. I never dreamed of Rudolph Valentino or Clark Gable. Not me. My all-time favorite is the night I dreamed that President Franklin D. Roosevelt went down on me in celebration of his having been elected for a third term. When it was over, we lay on the bed, side by side, smoking - he with a long ebony cigaret holder, I with a short ivory one - and talking, but not of sex or politics. In the dream he said, "What was the first book you ever read?" "The Sunbonnet Babies," I replied.
The idea that women were nothing before the revolution is severely misguided at best, outright sexist at worst. Born in 1907, Helen knew from her first moments that she was the center of all subjectivity, and she determined to prove this at length. (Her grandmother told her not to read Jude the Obscure, it was "a dirty book.")
Helen entered Vassar like it was Oz. "Certainly my standards were higher in those years than they have ever been," she suggests, and it is not the only time she is both funny and sad at once. Helen took a job doing all kinds of writing for Hearst newspapers, where she was willing to take advice from anyone, given that she did not have to accept it then and there. "One of my fellow reporters said to me early on, 'Don't rush around like a fart in a mitten. The idea is to do your job but never act like you take it seriously.'"
with Bernard Baruch
She had first learned about sex from a wayward aunt, who had described it in some detail and revealed that everyone did it, "even Lillian Gish." She dated around some when her job afforded it, but struggled to find meaning in it. She wrote in her diary
I can never mix for long in the fluid exchange of social life. Every once in a while I must withdraw from it and revert to watching. My mind is always standing off and criticizing, seeing myself act, hearing myself talk even watching myself think. Sometimes I have wished that I could feel in an experience, in a relationship, the ecstasy of the moment, aureoled with an ironic consciousness of what went before and what would come after. The trouble is that I want to have that intellectual detachment and also at the same time completely to submerge myself in unself-conscious emotion, drench my ego in feeling, render it momentarily impossible, for it to hover in the air, observing coldly the material me.
She never found this, even when she fucked the most famous rabbi in America.
with Nast
Then Helen met magazine publisher Condé Nast. Their relationship was not aesthetically pleasing on most levels. At 5'9" and losing most of his hair, Nast possessed wonderful posture and never carried cash on him. He said he would not lie to Helen, and she reports that he never got angry with her. "Above all else," Helen writes, "he was a man who loved women. This austere-looking, sedate, fastidious, impeccably-mannered, dignified man, treated with deference by everyone, was perhaps the most deeply sensual person I have ever known. To put it bluntly, he was cunt-crazy. He loved to taste it, smell it, feel it, look at it, above all, fuck it.... It was his primary interest in life, and he pursued it with wholehearted, shockproof, uninhibited enthusiasm."
She claims he never traded anything for sex, although "there were also those who truly liked him for himself, not for his name or worldly position." Helen was hired at Vanity Fair because no person who currently worked there could have been considered any kind of expert on the arts. When Nast interviewed her for the position, he concluded the meeting by commenting, "Even if you don't get the job, perhaps we could have dinner sometime." Her salary was twenty-five dollars a week.
She disliked the magazine at first, along with the ignorance of those who edited it. "It's a mechanized wit, all triviality," she writes in Stranger at the Party. "These people and their friends don't seem to know what is going on in the world, except in their own rarefied purlieus." She had her first date with Nast later that year. He didn't touch her, and had his chauffer drop her off near her apartment on West 3rd. "Tell me, madam, do people actually live down here?" Nast's driver asked her.
Eventually Nast suggested she marry him, using the following words: "We get along together so well and I love you very much." She declined half-because of his backwards political views and also because she was not in love with the man. When Helen had her first childe, Nast sent roses for the mother and a dress of organdy for the baby, "trimmed with real Valenciennes and a pink satin bow." Some people will always be grateful for how you treated them.
with her husband Jack
She met her husband Jack in the trade union movement, and in her book she claims he was the love of her life. They shared all the same views, Helen tells her readers, in such a maniacal tone I was eventually convinced that this was the least important thing two people could have in common.
Stranger at the Party makes a show of pointing out of how indiscriminating Helen's travails in love were when it came to race. A convict named Bumpy (you don't want to know the reason he is called this) occupies an entire chapter, and Helen concludes that he was "ahead of his time." She also had a thing with the sculptor Isamu Noguchi, and any number of Irish men, though she complained of her husband's drinking.
Even being the complete center of all subjectivity has a shelf-life.
Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.
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