Rosalyn Drexler, One or Another, Dell Books, 1971.
The LA Times quote on the cover of "One or Another" says, "An infinite variety of sexual roles, a taboo area that most men would rather sweep under the carpet, the darkest dreams of wish-fulfillment and eroticism -- from voyeurism to group sex." And while this is accurate, it also sounds like a blurb for a typical early 1970s novel, deliberately "shocking" & gleefully hedonistic -- and while that's also accurate to an extent, it's so much more than that. A couple of years before Erica Jong's justly lauded "Fear of Flying", Rosalyn Drexler was exploring some of the same territory -- women & desire, fantasy, sexuality, politics, race, culture -- and in an even more fascinating, acerbic, stunning way.
Miss Drexler made a startling starlet debut with I Am the Beautiful Stranger (1965) and this is a second showy, hip, ingenue performance even though her first person heroine Melissa is 39. In short notations which reveal her indolent if hypermotor instability as she thinks (fantasizes) about M., her redbearded husband-teacher (in the New York City Public School system during its troubles) and J., one of his students. She's understandably bored with the cloddish, proprietary M. who writes letters persecuting black colleagues signed by a member of the National Rifle Association. She's equally un-understandably overcome by J. who is not only naive and reluctant, latently homosexual and schizoid, but has ""melancholy, glossy lips"" and ""genitals like the sego lily."" Miss Drexler brings all kinds of modish, liberated instant perceptions to this but one is impressed with very little except her heroine's sexual appetence. . . . One or Another. . . neither nor. -
Kirkus ReviewsShe had begun that exploration in her earlier "I am the Beautiful Stranger' -- also vital reading, I might add -- but in these pages, Drexler plunges into the emerging zeitgeist with ferocious intelligence & transgressive wit. Her narrator Melissa speaks in the present tense, writing in short bursts of prose that are both poetic & pungent, weaving her thoughts & feelings through the public & deeply personal events of the day, offering a dazzling, multi-faceted portrait of both mind & body determined to be whole & free -- to be a woman utterly unashamed -- and even more urgently, undefined by anyone but herself.
In a short 149 pages, Drexler encompasses a world changing by the second, bursting with new ideas & hungers & ambitions so long denied to half the human population ... and yet Melissa is always, before anything else, an individual, a distinct & singular person with her specific & particular life. Her story is a vibrant melding of flesh & philosophy, told in a complex but clear voice that demands to be heard. I haven't read a novel with this much immediacy, passion, and brains in a long time -- a striking accomplishment, most highly recommended! -
William Timothy Lukeman @ amazon.com
Rosalyn Drexler,
When TO SMITHEREENS was originally published in 1972, the
New York Review of Books said of it, "There's hope for literature yet." The novel, based on Drexler's life, chronicles the adventures of a lady wrestler named Rosa Carlo the Mexican Spitfire. Rosalyn Drexler was born in 1926 and her creative career has been long and varied, as she has written novels, essays, and plays as well as painted explosive images that rival the best work of the Pop-art generation.
Today it’s common for authors to play with reality, memory, and fiction in their writing, but it wasn’t always that way. In the genre of memoir, which evolved from autobiography, writers found refuge from nonfiction’s more inflexible building blocks—facts, for example. But the publishing industry hasn’t always allowed such shenanigans. In the past, memoirists who strayed too far into imagination—through composite characters, recreated events, or multiple points of view—found their books sidelined as fiction. Usually, writers had good reasons for taking that hit and did so to make an artistic point. Sometimes the point was well-founded; other times, ill-conceived. A good example of the latter is Rosalyn Drexler’s 1972 novel
To Smithereens, which loosely chronicles the author’s adventures as a lady wrestler: Rosa Carlo, the Mexican Spitfire.
Republished this fall by Brooklyn Rail Books and Black Square Editions, Drexler’s novel opens in a darkened movie theatre as Rosa crushes the fingers of a man who is groping her thigh. The man, Paul, reveals himself as an art critic and lady wrestling enthusiast; before long, he and Rosa start a relationship. The opening scenes act out themes that become the novel’s central concerns: sex and sexism, eroticism and domination, play, curiosity, and violence. Perhaps most strikingly, these scenes begin a pattern of intimate moments acted out in communal spaces. This private-public dichotomy speaks to wrestling as a performance, or to any kind of art and its corresponding business. Plus, the trope gives the story some of its stranger moments, as when Paul allows several sets of disembodied hands to pleasure him during a public art exhibition:
My bare buttocks were swarmed upon with kisses and pinches. One hand…a human hand, free to grope me from the opening at the bottom of the box, snaked around and took my sex in its bare fist! I was terrified…what if there were hidden cameras?…what if the hand belonged to the male gender?…what if I enjoyed it?…I rigidly opposed the flood of pleasurable sensations which threatened to overcome me. I grabbed the loving hand to stop it…but found that I was helping it instead.
As disturbing as some of the book’s incidents appear, Drexler keeps the writing light-hearted throughout. Before long, Rosa and Paul decide to break into the wrestling industry—Rosa as a performer, Paul as a journalist who writes for Boots Jackson, a sleazy editor and publisher. Vivid personalities circle these two characters, waiting for their chance to join in the action. This ragtag bunch reads like realistic cartoons, and calls to mind other writers working in the 1970s (such as John Gardner or James Tillotson Whitehead); however, their over-the-top behavior doesn’t preclude Drexler from sometimes pivoting to show a more human, emotional side, as when Bobby Fox recounts the death of his daughter, a wrestler who died during a match against the fearsome Tommy J. Jukes.
You would have liked her, Rosa. She wasn’t anything like Verne Vavoom. She wasn’t wild. She didn’t have a mean streak in her. She was a sweetie pie, but that didn’t save her, because she didn’t pay attention to the health and safety rules of wrestling. Her name…Jane Bart Fox. Her age…eighteen. Cause of death…ruptured stomach. That’s what they told me, and I believed it, because she stuffed herself like a pig.
Bobby Fox’s voice, though, is just one of many. In the end,
To Smithereens assaults readers with many voices and styles—letters, limericks, film transcripts, faux journalism, and multiple first-person narrators—but in most cases the disparate forms don’t seem to serve the story. No conceit binds the techniques or pins the book together thematically; no logic dictates whether an event is told one way or another. The fragments do offer some insight into Rosa and Paul’s relationship, but the novel as a whole ends up lacking a cohesive structure. Despite these problems,
To Smithereens contains plenty of stiffs, squashes, and spots that bring the novel in for a clean finish. Drexler has written hundreds of beautiful sentences and detailed many unique situations; she’s an accomplished writer. However, it remains unclear why
To Smithereens has to exist as a novel and not, say, as true nonfiction. What does make-believe offer that’s more strange or terrifying than real life? The answer may be nothing at all, because there’s no formula for telling exactly how much of Drexler’s life experience translates to the page in
To Smithereens. It’s possible, if she had tried to sell the book as a fact-based autobiography, no one would have believed in the authenticity of the world she brings to life. -
Ben Pfeiffer
Visiting an old friend you haven’t seen in years can be fraught with trepidation. Is she still cogent? Has she grown lethargic and obese? Do you still have anything in common? Do her eyes still twinkle with mischief?
I’m happy to report Rosa Carlo, the Mexican Spitfire, is still in fighting trim, and every bit as relevant as she was in 1972 when
Rosalyn Drexler introduced her.
A new edition of
To Smithereens, the novel where we met Rosa and a startling cast of other fighting women who were known as lady wrestlers back then has been published by
Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions. The vivid cover is from one of Rosalyn’s paintings.
It may enhance your enjoyment of the novel—and appreciation of its astoundingly accomplished author—to know Rosalyn Drexler actually wrestled professionally as Rosa Carlo the Mexican Spitfire for a short time. It may further amp up the author’s awesome factor for you to know she hung out with the likes of
Andy Warhol,
Roy Lichtenstein, and
Tom Wesselmann and though less famous than her male counterparts, is considered among the top Pop Artists. As if that weren’t enough, she is also a well-regarded playwright, and award-winning writer on many fronts. She earned an Emmy for her contributions to a Lily Tomlin television special, Obies for three of her plays, and has written several novelizations, including Stallone’s
Rocky (as Julia Sorel
), in addition to her many novels. And the wonder woman isn’t done! At 85, she continues to paint, write, and struggle to find time for her relentless creativity.
At the time of first release of
To Smithereens, the
New York Times put Drexler in the company of
Joan Didion,
Doris Lessing,
Sue Kaufman (of the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, and author of
Diary of a Mad Housewife), and
Lois Gould, who also wrote about women’s lives.
Rosa was touted by critics as a female
Holden Caulfield, but I doubt anyone would make that analogy today. Rosa is more street smart, for starters, less concerned with phonies, more certain of her pronouncements. And despite her tentative longing for someone who loves her, her strength transcends physicality. She’s brazen and outspoken; readers rarely have to guess what she’s feeling. There’s a matter-of-factly-observed severed penis in the book’s second paragraph; we find out early on that Rosa prefers the term
cunt (“a hard word of one syllable: mean and sexy [it means business]”) to
pussy (“a cutesy-pie way of relating to a part of the body that is neither feline nor filled with stewed fruit . . . and it sustains a childish attitude toward sex”), and that she doesn’t “like the word
allowed! Not even the word
privileged.” Beyond the fearless raunch, and frequently inextricably tied to it, is an underlying humor, a quizzical shrug at the human condition. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, in the
New York Times,
once called Drexler the first Marx Sister.
Rosa’s gloriously named art critic boyfriend Paul Partch still alternately endears and reviles. Knowing now what I didn’t know my first reading about the multi-talented Drexler’s painting, and her own relationship with critics, Rosa’s complex involvement with Paul illuminates more than a dominatrix fantasy. You have to assume the author enjoyed writing Rosa’s limerick for Paul:
“There was a young man in the arts
Whose comments exploded like farts
When he turned to the West
People liked him the best
For improving the air in the arts.”
The only obstacles that threatened my complete immersion in the story this time around were the references that jerked me back to the seventies. But what’s an occasional
groovy or
fink or a few
hangups and
vibes when everything else is so
au courant? As playwright, novelist, and visual artist, Drexler has consistently been twenty years—or more—ahead of her time, creating characters and images on the leading edge of feminism. And you can bet she didn’t ask permission whenever she switched point of view mid-chapter. She just did it. And it worked.
It’s easy to imagine a new generation of young Rosas haunting the gritty movie houses and fast food dives of Manhattan, gargling Cokes, frequenting office buildings where the admonition, “Don’t use the elevator” doesn’t give them pause, carrying rolled up
Newsweeks to swat roaches in public toilets, and domesticating bare-bulb flats while they wait for life to swoop them up.
They may be sporting tats and piercings their older sisters didn’t, and be perpetually plugged in to devices that hadn’t yet been invented back then, but in magnitude of conflicting impulses—insecurity and moxie, aggression and timidity, spirituality and agnosticism, death and sex—Rosa and her successors could be twins. A few might even recite “Howl” together.
From Rosa’s opening depression, through her tangles with awakening intellect, to the brink of stardom and back, readers’ expectations will be blown
to smithereens, much as a “big explosion . . . God was the first Weatherman . . . from the big bang which blew everything to smithereens new planets formed.” We’re left with a constellation of unforgettable supporting characters in orbit around a resilient Rosa figuratively—and literally—flexing her muscles. -
Cheryl Olsen
Rosalyn Drexler, Three Novels, Verbivoracious Press, 2014.
Rosalyn Drexler embarked upon a vibrant career as a pop artist, playwright, screenwriter, pseudonymous author, short-lived Mexican wrestler, and a writer of surreal, satirical, and beguiling comedic fictions, three of which are collected in this volume. Highly regarded by Norman Mailer, Gloria Steinem, Stanley Elkin, and Donald Barthelme, Drexler’s short fragmented novels have faded into relative obscurity alongside numerous postmodern or “avant-pop” writers, deserving of a fresh audience and to be read for their brilliant comedic energy and sharp satirical eye.
I am the Beautiful Stranger is a bold novel of teenage sexuality, familial dysfunction, and knotty self-awakening;
One or Another the darkly comic tale of collapsing marriage, infidelity, and racial unrest; and
The Cosmopolitan Girl explores the unlikely romance between a style-obsessed woman and her talking dog. These three novels represent Drexler’s exuberant and thoughtful prose style at its finest.
Rosalyn cites the following authors and individual works as among her formative influences: Nathanael West—Miss Lonelyhearts, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, A Cool Millions, The Day of the Locust; Franz Kafka—Complete Stories; Machado De Assis—Dom Casmurro; Terry Southern—The Magic Christian; Eugéne Ionesco; Honore de Balzac—Droll Tales; Maxim Gorky—My Childhood; S.J. Perelman; William Saroyan; Colette—Cheri and The Last of Cheri; Jack London—Call of the Wild, White Fang; Lewis Carroll; Nikolai Gogol—Collected Stories; Italo Svevo—As a Man Grows Older; Charles Dickens; Mark Twain; D.H. Lawrence; Mary Chesnut—A Diary From Dixie; Stanley Elkin; Edmund Wilson—The Twenties; Mikhail Sholokhov—Quiet Flows the Don; Camilo Jose Cela—Mrs. Caldwell Speaks to Her Son.
Rosalyn Drexler’s Noir Paintings
Rosalyn Drexler with John Yau
Rosalyn Drexler: Pop Artist, novelist, playwright and wrestler
Unwrapping a beautiful stranger : interview with and readings of Rosalyn Drexler
I am the Beautiful Stranger–Paintings of the ‘60s (review by John Yau)
Perhaps it is
because her most lasting accomplishment may turn out to be her
paintings that Rosalyn Drexler is now so very little known as a
writer of fiction. Although she did attract attention with her novels
in the 1970s, and her plays gained notice for their association with
the "theater of the ridiculous," a kind of variation on
theater of the absurd, it seems safe to say that for most current
readers and critics Rosalyn Drexler has almost no name recognition.
Perhaps the novels to an extent seem dated, their cultural references
and lingo too stuck in the 60s and 70s (although ultimately they are
not at all trying to "capture" their era in any direct
way). Or perhaps Drexler has simply been overshadowed by the already
established experimental writers of her time, most of whom are male,
even at a time when efforts are regularly made, by academics and
publishers, to maintain attention on neglected women writers.
Still, that little
effort has been made to refocus our attention on the fiction of
Rosalyn Drexler remains rather surprising, for her novels are indeed
singular achievements, adventurous works that are entirely worthy of
comparison with the other heterodox writing of the period that has
persisted in the cultural memory. Moreover, while Drexler's work is
not feminist in a directly political way, it most assuredly does
provide a representation of women and their circumstances that
feminist critics ought to find deeply resonant (something that could
be said about Drexler's paintings as well). And if many of the novels
do indeed reflect the social and cultural tendencies of their time,
they also use those tendencies to render more broadly and enduringly
relevant accounts of women freely expressing their own versions of
their lived experience and in the process freeing themselves of the
versions imposed by others.
Certainly those
expressions are unconventional and often extreme. Drexler's
narratives have been described as "grotesque," but they
might simply be called "weird," which more appropriately
evokes their antic, less terror-fraught character. Her first novel, I
Am the Beautiful Stranger (1966), is perhaps the least strange but
also most disturbing, at once both extreme and recognizable in the
means by which it provokes an uneasy response. Upon the novel's
publication, comparisons were made to Catcher in the Rye, but while
it is not preposterous to regard the narrator of I Am the Beautiful
Stranger, Selma, as analogous to Holden Caulfield, at least insofar
as each of them is an impulsive adolescent encountering the
corruptions of the adult world, it is misleading to the extent it
suggests that Selma is mostly disgusted by this world, that her
primary objective is to escape such corruption. What makes this novel
disquieting--which its contemporaneous readers surely found it--is
that its protagonist often seems as eager to cultivate the wickedness
she recounts as evade it.
In this way I Am the
Beautiful Stranger seems less an episodic coming-of-age story in the
manner of Catcher in the Rye than a purposeful reconfiguration of the
form into one that can accommodate an adolescent girls' emotional
confusion, which, at least as depicted in this novel, is no less
strong than the adolescent boy's (and vice versa) but also more
capacious, more subject to conflicting impulses. If Selma is less
quick than Holden Caulfield to pronounce adults to be "phony,"
perhaps this is because she is more ambivalent about her own relation
to the adult world, not as unwilling as Holden to sully herself in
its imperfections. At the same time she is fully aware of the debased
behavior to which she is frequently subjected, she also affirms the
authentic sexual and emotional needs that are awakened in her as
well. Sharing a room with cousins on their wedding night, she hears
them having sex: "Becoming another white nun of solitude. I
crossed myself in mock Catholic, fingered my beads of sweat,
confessed confusion, and tried to sleep by practicing a sin that is
not a sin in my religion. It isn't even mentioned except about men,
and they're not supposed to spill their seed upon the ground. I'm
safe, I don't spill, and if I did I wouldn't cry."
Selma's progress
toward self-awareness is not without its psychological toll, however:
Wow, was I sad and
bad and mad! I slashed the outside of my hands with a razor. I made
deep criss-crosses in the flesh. A rehearsal of self-destruction?
There wasn't much blood because the lines were so fine. I scarred my
hands. It was easy to do because it didn't hurt. Even my brain was
numb. Afterwards I bought pancake makeup to cover the cuts.
Although many of
Selma's relationships with other people--specifically men—are
purely exploitive--with Uncle Mort, for example, who, while dancing
with her at the cousin's wedding, inserts his tongue in Selma's mouth
and "slid it around"—and clearly enough might send her on
a course of self-destruction, she does manage to achieve healthier
connections with some. At the novel's conclusion, Selma has a
boyfriend, Paul, and they are contemplating living together (even at
Selma's young age). It seems to be a "normal" relationship,
yet it is finally difficult to tell whether Selma's final words
signal she is emerging into self-possessed maturity or is still
captive to the damaging influences precipitating neediness her
narrative reveals: "What if I have to stay appealing every day?
When my panic is over I know just what I'll do: go south and make
myself a beauty. I'll return wrapped in tan like a carmallow. Then,
when Paul peels my wrapper off, the sweet taste of fresh Selma should
make him crave me forever."
Selma has an
abundant fantasy life, to the point that the reader must be cautious
in assuming that events she appears to be recounting are indeed drawn
from her actual experiences rather than the product of Selma's
imagining. Finally, however, it as "true" to Selma's
circumstances as an adolescent American girl growing up in the
environment she evokes to say her fantasies reflect the generally
abusive examples set by the adults around her as that she in fact
encountered a specific instance of such abuse. Something similar is
true of Drexler's second novel, One or Another (1970), although here
the circumstances of the protagonist have been reversed: Melissa, a
39-year-old woman who has become disillusioned with her marriage is
having an affair (or imagines having an affair) with a 17-year-old
high school student (her husband's student), himself a troubled boy
having difficulty facing the prospect of encroaching adulthood.
If Selma is groping
for her place in the adult world, at least as that place is defined
for young women of her time, Melissa has her place but, to say the
least, finds it wanting. One or Another was published as the women's
movement was just beginning to assert its own place in the American
cultural consciousness, so perhaps it is not surprising that in
Drexler's novel her protagonist rebels against her circumstances by
envisioning her independence as betrayal—taking his student as
lover and later forming a relationship with a black student her
husband has racially harassed—rather than literally leaving the
marriage to pursue her own course. Indeed, Melissa lives even more
resolutely inside her own head, condition she seems to affirm in the
novel's final lines, than did Selma, and the novel for which she
serves as narrator is even more firmly than Selma's a possibly
imagined construction, not an account of her literal actions.
It would not be
entirely accurate to call novels like I Am the Beautiful Stranger and
One or Another metafictional, since their effect depends on the
possibility we might take their actions as literal after all, that
they are fictions soliciting our suspension of disbelief, a disbelief
that is stretched but not ultimately broken. Even if we start asking
ourselves whether these two main characters might be unreliable
narrators freely engaging in fantasy and invention, that they are
doing so itself provides insight about them as autonomous characters
whose stories still have coherence, however discontinuous or
fragmentary. Certainly Drexler's novels are formally adventurous,
incorporating not just diary-like sections of direct exposition and
narration (most of the novels are primarily first-person narratives),
but also letters and notes, brief play-like passages of dialogue,
graphic illustrations, purported newspaper articles, and, in the
later novels, emails. (Art Does (Not) Exist (1996) also presents
transcripts of its protagonist's experimental videos.) Still, their
unorthodox methods seem intended as the appropriate artistic
strategies for conveying Drexler's eccentric, if unsettling, comic
vision of American life.
"Eccentric"
is an admittedly vague term to use in describing the prevailingly
comic tone and manner of Drexler's fiction, but its humor is not
exactly easy to classify. As a playwright, Drexler was sometimes
vaguely grouped with the "theater of the ridiculous"
movement of the 1960s associated with the director John Vaccaro, and
while her fiction may also have some affinities with the anarchic
qualities of this style of theatrical comedy, it is again more
singularly weird than recognizably campy. This weirdness does have a
lighter touch to it that also makes Drexler's work accord uneasily
with absurdism, as well as the Freudian underpinnings of surrealism,
and while this apparent lightness often enough partly conceals a
darker view of human behavior, Drexler's novels don't really depend
on the kind of jokiness or exploded logic characteristic of black
humor fiction. In her weaker books (Starburn, for example) the humor
can seem too calculated, overly mannered, but as a whole her novels
feature a kind of comedy that on the surface may seem blithely
tongue-in-cheek but upon further contemplation begins to take on a
more consequential gravity.
The same thing might
be said about Drexler's visual art, arguably about pop art in
general, to which Drexler's painting is most often referred. At first
glance, her paintings are colorful and cartoonish, created by using
pre-existing photographs—often from ads and graphic
illustrations—on and around which she applied paint. And indeed any
one of these paintings has an immediate sensory impact, the best ones
almost mesmerizing in their ostensible simplicity. But put it among
other of Drexler's canvases and the tacit, unobtrusive critique of
American predispositions and attitudes (especially toward women)
becomes, through implicit though indirect mockery, quite evident.
Neither Drexler's paintings nor her fiction could properly be called
satirical, since the impulse behind them is much more equivocal—at
the same time her images and narratives highlight the tackiness of
American culture, they also manage to give that tackiness an
aesthetically pleasing form—than directly critical and
prescriptive. The fiction, however, is more direct in presenting a
broadly comic perspective that at times is deliberately outrageous.
Certainly in her
fiction Drexler is just as likely to seize on images and motifs from
popular culture as subjects. The best illustration of this perhaps is
her third novel, To Smithereens (1972), which features a lady
wrestler as protagonist and is perhaps her best known work of
fiction, largely it draws on Drexler's own experience as a wrestler
before she became established as an artist. As in many of the
paintings, here Drexler uses the iconography associated with this
figure from popular culture to evoke attitudes and beliefs about the
pervasive violence of American culture and the confused state of
relations between men and women. The latter is signaled in the
novel's first scene, narrated by Rosa (later to be proclaimed "Rosa
Carlo, the Mexican Spitfire"), who in a movie theater encounters
a "creep" in the next seat rubbing his hand on her thigh.
Rosa is duly annoyed, expressing her annoyance by lashing out at him,
yet after the movie agrees to have coffee with him and then goes to
his apartment, where soon she waits for him in the bedroom: "I
took off my clothes and lay on top of the blanket, still as death,
one arm dangling off the side of the mattress; I knew I looked
beautiful that way; soft, receptive, passively offering my body. . .
."
The creep is (once
again) named Paul, in this case an art critic, and he and Rosa are
soon a couple. But while in this scene Rosa chooses to be sexually
passive, throughout the novel she continues to exhibit both the
aggressiveness she displayed in the movie theater (and which
presumably she channels in her short career as a wrestler) and a more
conventional acceptance of gendered sexual roles. (When she decides
to try wrestling Rosa discovers a lesbian subculture among the women
wrestlers, but she does not take part.) Still, while Paul in a sense
is trying to exploit Rosa for his own enjoyment when he encourages
her to try wrestling, his efforts to control her cannot succeed, as
he himself acknowledges:
Rosa did not
conform to any idea I had conceived of her in advance. She related to
me with the same sense of immediacy and beauty that the artist
experiences in relation to her material. She was molding me on behalf
of the vast world of being she existed in; while I had foolishly
believed it was I who was shaping her.
The point of view in
To Smithereens alternates between Paul and Rosa (with the usual
additional interpolated documents), and this provides overall a
somewhat more detached perspective from which the reader can
contemplate the comic verbal collage Drexler has assembled, although
undoubtedly Rosa emerges from the novel a character as forceful as
Paul himself finds her. The novel does not really dwell much on
Rosa's actual time in the wrestling ring (only one match is recounted
at any length), preferring just to introduce us to the colorful
characters with whom Rosa interacts and to create a female character
who embodies in her life the "sense of immediacy and beauty that
the artist experiences in relation to her material" but has
perhaps not yet quite found the best "material" in which to
express it.
The Cosmopolitan
Girl (1974) is the last of the original series of novels that made
Drexler known as a writer as well as an artist. (It is available.
along with I Am The Beautiful Stranger and One or Another, in a
volume simply called Three Novels, published by Verbivoracious Press,
the only fiction by Drexler officially in print.) This might be
called Drexler's weirdest novel (an accomplishment in itself).
Certainly it is the most openly surreal, featuring a protagonist with
a talking dog, a dog she winds up marrying to boot. While this
blending of Kafka and Helen Gurley Brown is alternately kooky and
spooky, perhaps it also represents Drexler's most faithful
translation of the Pop sensibility characteristic of her paintings to
fiction, provoking equal parts disquiet, amusement, and something
like annoyance. It can be difficult to decide whether we should find
Helen Jones a sympathetic character just attempting to find happiness
in the big wide world, or an appalling freak. Perhaps she is both.
The media image of the Cosmo Girl becomes not exactly the object of
satire, nor is it celebrated as a fabulous icon of popular culture,
although certainly Drexler does occasionally have fun with it:
At home I walk
around with no clothes on at all (depending on whether the steam is
up). I do not bother to pull down the shade. If someone in the
building opposite wants to look, he's welcome. If someone doesn't
like it, that's his problem. I do what makes me feel good. . .but not
always. It's a hard rule to follow because sometimes I'm not sure
what does please me.
The Cosmopolitan
Girl can be regarded as the completion of an initial quartet of
singular but aesthetically consistent novels that introduce both a
thematically and formally complex literary practice Drexler continues
to pursue in her later fiction but that probably is carried out most
successfully in these four novels. Unquestionably it would be
warranted to claim Drexler's project as part of post-60s feminism,
but the women characters in these novels are neither unequivocal
champions of equality nor emblematic figures exemplifying the
inherent virtues of their gender. Ultimately each of these characters
is emblematic only of herself, although together they do have enough
similarities that they collectively comprise a kind of Drexlerian
prototype: autonomous, but not without a lingering dependency,
self-aware but also at times willfully capricious.
These qualities can
certainly be seen in the protagonists of Starburn (1979), Drexler's
next novel written under her own name (following on a series of
"novelizations" of screenplays—most notably, Rocky—using
the pen name "Julia Sorel"), as well as Art Does (Not)
Exist. The first concerns the travails of Jenni Love, punk rock
singer, who stands accused of murdering a music critic (she is
innocent of the charge), while the second focuses on Julia Maraini, a
video artist trying to revive her career. Both characters are
assertive, self-directed artists who nevertheless make poor decisions
and find themselves in predicaments they must scramble to overcome.
Both novels as well follow The Cosmopolitan Girl in assimilating the
surreal, in the case of Starburn through a sci-fi subplot involving
alien abduction, and in Art Does (Not) Exist through scenes featuring
talking skeletons. Of these two novels, Art Does (Not) Exist is the
most successful, the closest to equaling the early novels, perhaps
because the subject more strongly engages Drexler's own experiences,
while Starburn seems somewhat awkwardly sensationalized.
Bad Guy (1982) and
Vulgar Lives (2007) may be Drexler's least characteristic novels,
although ultimately they are not necessarily less revealing of her
intentions or her lasting achievements as a writer of fiction. Both
novels seem more austere in subject (although not without their
moments of absurdity), less formally frenetic (although by no means
straightforwardly conventional). While the ostensible protagonist of
each is its female narrator, the real protagonist in both might be
the male figure on which the narrator's account focuses, although
perhaps it is most accurate to describe both books as explorations of
these women's capacity to sustain themselves in a male-centered world
without losing either their dignity or literally their sanity. Bad
Guy especially seems an almost sobering account of its main
character—an experimental therapist—and her ultimately failed
effort both to help a delinquent boy and to have her professional
reputation affirmed, while Vulgar Lives addresses a more charged
subject—incest—but in applying Drexler's signature fragmented
collage method to its protagonist's dissociating mental state the
novel actually produces a formal structure that more nearly functions
as a recognizably unified objective correlative.
Nevertheless, all of
Rosalyn Drexler's fiction is readily identifiable as the work of a
distinctive sensibility, one that in her early fiction revealed
itself as unabashed in its iconoclasm and that Drexler has maintained
throughout her work as a novelist with a truly remarkable constancy,
despite the fact that most of her books have been indefensibly
ignored by critics (among whom I am myself until now obviously
included). This neglect can't be rectified until more of her work is
again in print, of course, and this would be a worthy project for any
independent press willing to perform such a service for American
fiction. Then the effort to properly assess Rosalyn Drexler's place
in the efflorescence of innovative fiction in post-WWII American
literature could begin. - Daniel Green
https://www.thereadingexperience.net/critics_progress_readings/2022/06/the-fortunes-of-experimental-fiction-.html
Rosalyn Drexler's books include
I Am a Beautiful Stranger,
Bad Guy,
Art Does (Not!) Exist, VULGAR LIVES, TO SMITHEREENS, and the forthcoming
Tree Man: A Tough Situation. Drexler has won countless awards including a Primetime Emmy award for Best Writing in Comedy-Variety, Variety or Music in 1974 for her work on
Lily (1973), several Obies, and a Guggenheim fellowship. Her paintings are in major American museums, such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; she has showed at PaceWildenstein, and her work has been hailed across the world for its character and wit. Long before a younger generation began working in different mediums, Drexler painted and wrote with trenchant intelligence and insight.
