I'm going to read from Against Joie de
Vivre from the first essay called, "Samson
and Delilah and the Kids."
It's a long essay so I can't read all of it,
but I'll read some of the early sections.
This essay came about because there
was a book called Congregation in which various essayists were
asked to take a different book of the Old Testament
and to write a personal essay about it.
I was asked to write, and I chose the book of Judges,
because it had the Samson and Delilah story.
And I thought that I might be able to do something with it.
So I wrote this essay in which I bring
in all kinds of different texts including my own experiences,
and make a stew out of it.
So without further ado "Samson, Delilah, and the Kids."
"I grew up in the era of the great Jewish lovers.
Samson and Delilah, David and Bathsheba, Solomon and Sheba
were burning up screens across the land.
I never managed to see David and Bathsheba
though I knew the coming attractions by heart,
because the movie industry and its wisdom decreed
that I was too young for this adulterous tale.
Inconsistently they let me into Samson and Delilah
when I was seven.
I still remember my excitement when I first
saw the poster announcing its imminent arrival
in our neighborhood.
See Samson battle a lion with his own hands,
see Samson tear down the temple of dagon,
see Delilah tame the strong man.
I was so crazy about movies that I
saw everything connected to them as a promise of happiness.
Lobby stills, newspaper ads on the entertainment pages,
and especially the 10 foot billboards
displayed outside the Commodore, where
giants held at bay an encircling, ungrounded chaos
of tempting panoramas.
My tolerance for celluloid had been built up
over the long Saturday matinees that my siblings and I attended
regularly and which included a double feature, seven cartoons,
newsreels, coming attractions, and a Flash Gordon or Hopalong
Cassidy serial.
Oh dark, dark, dark amid the blaze of noon,
says Milton in Samson Agonistes.
By the time we had stumbled onto the streets sated
with the blood of scalped cavalryman, the high balls
served by Veronica Lake, the dynamite set off
by a Bugs Bunny in drag, it was already dinnertime.
We would walk under the elevated train,
past the discount stores serving our ghetto in Williamsburg,
Brooklyn, past Stephen's bakery which
specializes in white icing, past the fish restaurant
with its grotesque lobster tank in the window,
past the tough shoeshine boys on the corner, past the synagogue
quickly and guiltily because it was Sabbath,
and make our way back to the tenement where
we lived, debating our favorite scenes all the while.
If you ask me what the Bible meant to me as a child,
I can tell you it signified two things.
Those awkwardly drawn comic strips
the Brooklyn Eagle would run next to Dick Tracy or Mary
Worth each Sunday, tales from the scriptures featuring stern
bearded patriarchs and women with pitchers
on their shoulders.
And the biblical spectacles we were constantly
told cost millions and had casts of thousands.
Whatever possessed Hollywood to turn out
all those biblical Roman clinkers throughout the 50s?
The postwar audience's abandonment of a neo realistic
aesthetic for the escapist anodynes of costumed bloodshed,
the advent of widescreen technologies that cried out
for spectacle, the more conservative political mood,
the irresistible formula of having one's cake, sin,
and eating it too, piety, the collapse of the studio system
and its replacement by international package deals ,
all must have contributed to the zenith of this ill-fated genre.
Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah, 1949,
was one of the first of the postwar biblical spectacles.
Watching a VCR tape of it some 35 years later,
I am struck by how dioramic and artificial,
if entertaining in a kitschy way, it looks now.
It's drama as stylized as kabuki,
its sets like an old World's Fair made
of endless lathe and temporary grandeur.
The virtues of the biblical epic which
DeMille had a large hand in shaping
were mainly to be found in art direction, costumes,
and special effects.
DeMille began in the silent era, and there
is an echo of Griffith's Babylonianism
in the idol-gargoyled Temple of Dagon.
Before the dawn of time, intones the narrator in the opening
shot, we see clouds and marching feet
and are treated to a little lecture about the struggle
between tyranny and freedom.
Biblical epics tended to be made after both world wars
when America as quote, leader of the free world,
unquote had a need to wrap itself
in the sanctimonious mantle of previous chosen peoples.
Curiously the word Jew is never mentioned in the DeMille film,
nor other words Hebrew or Israelite.
Samson's people are referred to only as Danites,
in what may have been nervousness about anti-Semitism
during the McCarthy era.
Samson and Delilah boasted one of those international casts.
The star Hedy Lamarr spoke Viennese scented English.
Her leading man Victor Mature hailed from Kentucky,
and all the Philistine opponents of Judeo-Christianity
had, in the curious convention of such films, British accents.
A DeMille scholar told me--" there are DeMille scholars
by the way, "that the director had wanted
to make Samson and Delilah 10 years earlier,
but that he couldn't secure the financing.
By the time the deal had come together
with the actress he wanted, a certain freshness
had gone out of Lamarr.
She looked bruised by another decade's strain
of holding together her glamor, but
her worldly mocking Viennese air had some of Marlene Dietrich's
alluring melancholy, especially when
it came up against the younger, oafish, Victor Mature.
It was the old world seducing the new world yet again.
Hedy's basic Delilah costume consisted
of a sleeveless halter that stopped just below her breasts.
A long skirt usually with a slit to show off her nice legs
and anachronistically, a pair of pumps as well.
After she becomes a Bad Woman--" capitals, "she
is never seen without a feather duster plume, which
she which she waves around to make her points
and which is color coordinated to match her silver,
turquoise, rose, and sapphire gowns.
At times she seems to act mainly with her midriff, midriff
eroticism being a staple of these epics rendered
more piquant by the cold rule forbidding umbilicus on screen,
or with her eloquent shoulder blades
as she leans against a wall thrusting her breasts forward.
Even though she seems rather diminutive next to Mature,
she is altogether luscious with her upturned nose, saucy gazes,
and spit curls.
Mature's response was a supercilious sneer
like a country bumpkin who knows they're putting something
over on him but isn't sure what.
And hopes his cynicism will distract attention
from his slowness.
It was about this actor that David Thompson wrote memorably
if cruelly, quote, It is too easy to dismiss Victor Mature,
for he surpasses badness.
He's a strong man in the land of nine stone weaklings,
an incredible concoction of corned beef,
husky voice, and brilliantine.
A barely concealed sexual advertisement for soiled goods.
Remarkably, he is as much himself
in the cheerfully meretricious as the potentially
serious, unquote.
Here however he seems bewildered,
his eyes looked dead when he is called upon to say things
like you daughter of hell.
[LAUGHTER]
He wears a green leather jerkin that
leaves most of his chest uncovered,
and his broad body, by our more stringent
Schwarzenegger standards of muscular definition, looks fat.
Incidentally, there is nothing in the Bible
that says Samson was a brawny muscular person.
Since his strength came from God's spirit inhabiting him,
the theological point might have been better made
by casting Mickey Rooney or Arnold Stang.
[LAUGHTER]
Yet by that familiar phenomenon that
makes it difficult to picture a story's characters afterward,
except in the physical shape of the actors
who played them on screen, however miscast they may have
been, the past her prime Lamarr and the stalwart ham
Mature will always remain in my imagination.
The quintessential, the actual Samson and Delilah.
As a child I was a very forgiving moviegoer.
If a picture had one or two scenes that
excited my imagination, I would simply
evacuate the duller parts from consciousness
and concentrate on these privileged images carrying them
around like mental slides long afterward
and consulting them solidly in bad moments.
Such a scene was the destruction of the Philistine hall
in Samson and Delilah, where the pillars crumbled in sections
like gigantic white Tootsie Rolls.
For me Samson was essentially a Superman figure,
just as I would jump off a chair and pretend
to fly like the man of steel.
So I used to play a time, my hands together
and ripping the ropes off, eyes closed.
I would grip my grit my teeth and fantasize
pulling a building down by straining with all my might.
I had dreams of toppling PS11, breaking everything I hated
into rubble like the newsreels of bombed Berlin.
As it happened many blocks in Williamsburg
already looked that way, torn down
to make way for the future of Brooklyn, Queens Expressway.
I prayed to get back at everyone who
had humiliated me in one blow like poor Samson
the blind giant.
Not that I had so many enemies, but every child suffers
from powerlessness, bossed around by adults, older
brothers, classroom bullies.
There was one tormentor, Ronald, big for his age who used
to beat me up after school.
I would imagine ways to torture him, a new one each night
like Scheherazade.
As I grew older, I began to concoct more subtle revenge
fantasies, sometimes even letting my prisoner go.
Curiously, this reprieve gave me a greater frisson.
I enjoyed the idea of playing cat and mouse with my victim.
One day vicious, the next unexpectedly benevolent.
Control, restraint, sadism, creativity.
I was only a few years from eroticizing this fantasy
with a chivalric twist.
In sixth grade, I was attracted to a girl
with a Roman nose named Felicia, as were all the boys since she
already had the curves of a woman.
She was from a better family than ours.
Her father was a lawyer and she carried
herself rather heartily.
She thinks she's Cleopatra or Delilah,
we would say behind her back, because she
knew all the boys fancied her.
Secretly I imagined myself drawing daily closer
to the beautiful Felicia and impressing her
with my intelligence.
One afternoon when I tried to make friendly conversation,
she ridiculed me, saying that I wore
the same clothes, the same ugly sweater every day.
It was true, I had taken no notice of what I had on
and neither apparently had my parents.
After she had humiliated me I began
to have dreams in which Felicia would
knock on my door completely naked and defenseless.
Someone had stolen her clothing.
Not only did I not take advantage of the situation,
I would immediately throw a coat or blanket around her shoulders
and escort her home.
This chaperonage which would sometimes take us down
dank castle steps in which I would
have to protect our honor by sword fight.
Never did I ask her for so much as a kiss in payment,
though sometimes she would reward me
with a feast of kisses.
The closeness with which dreams of gallantry and revenge
were tangled in my brain must be why, even today when
I remember to act in a polite manner,
for instance, giving up my seat to a woman in the bus
and I'm thanked for being chivalrous,
I instantly feel a twinge of guilty conscience.
But then I am chronically guilt ridden about my virtuous side,
if you will.
You are always a good boy, my mother told me so often.
You, I never had to worry about.
Even as a baby before I had any choice in the matter
I was good.
When my mother was in the maternity ward
when all the other babies were wailing from the air raid
sirens, I quietly found her breast.
One of my earliest memories from about the age of 4
is of my older brother and younger sister
experimenting with matches.
They shouldn't be doing that I thought,
sure enough the kitchen curtain caught
fire there was smoke, flames.
My mother came home in the nick of time
and doused the fire with pots of water.
When it was over she demanded to know what had happened.
My brother and sister pointed fingers at each other.
I didn't do anything, I kept telling her, finally she said,
I know cookie, I know you didn't."
The question years later is, why didn't I do anything?
Why was I such a goody-goody?
Was I good because I chose to be or because I was too timid, too
programmed to do otherwise?
There were rewards for being the good boy,
but sometimes it came as a mixed blessing.
I was both my mother's favorite and the one
to whom she paid the least attention because I
didn't cause her trouble.
By nursery school I had already developed
a reputation for honesty.
Phillip never lies, my nursery teacher said.
My mother, pleased to hear it, nevertheless insisted healthily
every child lies.
Not Phillip, said this woman, whom I had clearly managed
to make fall in love with me.
One day not long thereafter, I was jumping up and down
on my parents' bed using their mattress as a trampoline.
I was no angel, I wanted to have a good time to break the rules,
to become an evil doer.
In mid jump I heard my mother coming.
What were you doing?
Were you jumping on my bed like I told you not to?
No, I protested.
I saw you do it, she exclaimed, don't fib to me.
Though I got a beating afterward,
we were both relieved.
He lies.
In Judges the story of Samson begins
with his mother's barrenness.
An angel appears to the wife of Manoah and tells her
she is going to have a son, but you
should drink no wine nor eat anything unclean, and quote,
no razor shall come upon his head,
for the boy shall be a Nazarite to God from birth,
and he shall begin to deliver Israel
from the hand of the Philistines, unquote.
She runs and tells her husband what the stranger has said
and Manoah gets the angel to repeat these instructions
a third time.
Then a puff of smoke, flames, and the couple
realizes that the stranger is indeed an angel of the Lord.
They fall on their faces to the ground.
This angelic visitation to a barren woman
is a recurrent biblical formula.
Only in the context of Judges with its dense narrative style,
why does the incident-- oh only in the context of Judges,
with a dense narrative style, does the incident's
leisurely redundancy surprise.
Why is the whole chapter of 25 verses wasted on this business?
Certainly no other judge is accorded
such preliminary buildup.
It is almost as though the whole book of Judges
were taking a breath before launching into the Samson
story.
In a way also the chapter lets us
know that before Samson is even born,
he is in God's debt, his body itself doesn't quite
belong to him.
It's a sacred weapon for God to inhabit with the spirit
when he so desires.
Moreover without any choice in the matter,
Samson has pledged to be an Israelite, one
who is consecrated, abstinent, separate from others, pure.
No wonder Samson acts bad, he is trying
to make a space for his own life inside the one already owed
to his parents and God.
So he indulges in skirt chasing.
All his troubles, but also all his heroic deeds
stem from whoring and womanizing.
He falls in love easily and it seems
purely on a physical basis.
Like Portnoy he is drawn to shiksas.
In our very first encounter with the adult Samson,
he has just seen a woman in Timnah,
the daughter of Philistines and wants her for a wife.
His parents object, Is there not a woman among the daughters
of your kinsmen or among all the people
that you must go to take a wife from the uncircumcised
Philistines?
But Samson said to his father, get her for me,
for she pleases me well.
Now this first time he is exonerated from blame
because the text immediately assures us
that Samson's romantic entanglement was
the doing of the Lord, who was seeking
an occasion against the Philistines.
Later in the Delilah episode, this cosmic alibi is withdrawn.
Samson will be made to stand completely alone
with his mistake.
[RECORDING INTERRUPTED BY A BEEP]
Everything in the Samson story happens twice, sometimes
thrice, repetitions establishes character patterns.
Thus if he had only let Delilah wheedle secret out of him
that would be one thing.
But before he go, he does so, he gives the woman of Timnah
the answer to his wedding riddle because she pressed him hard.
Samson is a man woman nag, for all his strength
he seems not to engender their full respect much
less their obedience.
They know how to plan his guilt with tears and reproaches.
You don't really love me or you tell me your secret.
To twist him around their fingers
and ultimately they betray him, not
only does the woman of Timnah broadcast
a little secret forcing Samson to pay everyone the betting
price, but she cuckolds Samson by giving herself
to his companion who had been his best man.
Delilah does even worse she ruins him.
Sandwiched between these two women
is the harlot of Gaza, who also endangers Samson
by keeping him occupied while his enemies surround his house.
He escapes by lifting the city gates on his shoulders,
but he is clearly tempting fate.
Samson also is a man who seems to enjoy
being self-righteously angry.
If you had not plowed with my heifer,
you would not have found out my riddle,
he tells the wedding guests, kills 30 men
and stomps off in hot anger.
Later when he returns to Timnah and finds
his wife has been given to another man,
he rejects the offer of marrying her younger sister.
This time he says, I shall be blameless in regard
to the Philistines, when I do them mischief.
Then he ties 300 foxes together, attaches lit torches on
between their tails, and lets them burn up all the Philistine
orchids and grain.
The Philistines retaliate by torching
his wife, who had already abandoned him and her father.
Samson retorts, if this is what you do,
I swear I'll be avenged upon you and after that I will quit.
And he smoked them hip and thigh with great slaughter.
The implication is that any destruction, however
disproportionate is justifiable if interpreted as retaliation.
No wonder Samson allows himself so often to be betrayed.
It frees him to do what he wants.
I grew up in a household where there was much
arguing and yelling, even hitting,
but it was necessary, as we learned
from imitating my mother, always to lay
a groundwork of self-righteousness
before any explosion.
I am only doing this to you because you
did x and y to me first.
Within the never ending chain of injured feelings
that is family history, it is not always
easy to find the beginning of a causal series, which
is why the person with the loudest voice or the longest
memory is generally able to make the best tit for tat.
My older brother Hal, whose voice is very strong,
was for a while the undisputed king of righteous explosions.
Fortunately, Hal would fulminate so long
on the heinousness of the wrong done him,
that it was possible to get out of the way
of any serious physical harm before he swung into action.
We were much more terrified of my father,
who was phlegmatic, quiet, and withdrawn for the most part.
But if he blew up, you had less than a second's warning.
When my father got physical, the slaps and punches
came hard and fast, as in a street fight.
He had powerful bony hands, and sharp elbows,
and in anger he seemed to lose control with white spittle
foaming at his mouth like a mad dog
or at least that was how it looked to us as children.
Curiously, he always tried to get out of spanking us,
he had no heart for premeditated disciplining,
leaving such beatings to my mother.
She would take out her ironing cord, a black and white fabric
switch, which we thought of as a live creature.
What was interesting about the way
she beat us was that she would herself grunt and make
awful faces each time she picked up her arm.
You had enough? she would demand after each blow.
Going to try that again?
It was a dialogue, we were supposed
to respond correctly so that she would know when to quit.
My brother would take his punishment like a man,
howling only when he was in pain.
I was more of a faker.
Very early I caught on that it was all symbolic.
And I would scream and carry on from the first hand raise,
so that you would let me go with next to nothing.
My sister Molly however, would laugh in my mother's face.
Would giggle or hum a tune to herself, refusing
to concede even when I could see tears welling in her eyes,
until finally my mother would stop baffled,
her arm exhausted.
I'm struggling to find the pattern between all
these pieces.
I have the sense that the Samson story and my family story
touch in odd ways.
I tried to put the stencil of one over the other.
And while they occasionally overlapped, just as often
the connection seems farfetched.
Nonetheless I am convinced that the center of both
is a mystery of power relations between men and women.
I start to write, how did it come about
that I started mistrusting women or thought
they would betray me?
But then I pause.
Do I really?
Aren't I often less guarded around
women than I am with men?
Well let us say that a part of me
still fears or hopes that women are treacherous creatures.
I know that growing up, watching the unhappiness
between my parents, watching my mother disparage
my father every day, and my father
refuse to let her go, made me cautious
toward the opposite sex.
Then too, my mother was very insecure as a young woman.
We would climb into her lap and she would suddenly
push us away saying, don't start that Mommy I love you crap,
you're only doing--
being lovey dovey because you want something out of me.
Okay, what is it this time?
An ice cream?
A quarter?
Naturally I learned to be skeptical of affection,
almost to want a barbed hurt to accompany love.
As for my father, he had been treated wretchedly
by his stepmother who put him to work all the time.
So he was both desperate for maternal warmth and suspicious
of any feminine softness.
When these two hurt, insecure people,
the black sheep of both their middle class families,
came together to live in poverty and raise their own family,
the results were not pretty.
My parents had a bookcase which held a few hardcovers
and a library of pocketbooks, whose flimsy, browning
pages would crack if you bent down the corners.
I can still picture those cellophane peeling covers
with their kangaroo logo, the illustrations of busty
available looking women or hard bodied men,
or solemn sensitive looking Negroes with titles like,
Intruder in the Dust, Appointment
in Samarra, Tobacco Road, Studs Lonigan, Strange Fruit, Good
Night Sweet Prince, The Great Gatsby, The Sound and the Fury.
Father brought home all the books.
It was his responsibility.
Though mother chafed at everything else
in the marriage, she still permitted him at the time
to be her intellectual mentor.
I have often wondered on what basis he made his selections.
He'd only had one term of night college,
dropping out because he fell asleep in class
after a full day in the factory.
And I never saw him read book reviews.
He seemed all the same to have a nose for decent literature.
He was one of those autodidacts in the depression generation
for whose guidance the inexpensive editions
of Everyman, Modern Library, and Pocketbooks,
seemed intentionally designed out of some bygone assumption
that the working man should or must be educated
to the best in human thought.
My father had an odd respect for the power of good fiction,
especially when it was able to mirror uncannily the conflicts
in his own life.
He would often Marvel at Kafka's story
The Judgment, in which the patriarch tells his son
to jump off a bridge, obviously, because his father,
my grandfather had treated him like dirt.
He never stopped praising The Brothers Karamazov,
which had the status of the Bible in Brooklyn at the time.
Again, I suspect its patricidal theme excited him more
than Dostoevsky's philosophy.
He did dip into one philosopher, Schopenhauer,
and would occasionally read aloud
one of the gloomy German's misogynistic aphorisms.
These were usually to the effect that women
had no capacity for ideas that their only cleverness was
in tricking men to perpetuate the species.
My mother gave an odd credence to this theory
by boasting that she had seduced my father into siring us,
finagling away the contraception I suppose,
since he hadn't really wanted children.
Four time she tricked him?
Whether true or not it was her way of making us
feel indebted to her and opposed to him.
In any event, Schopenhauer's bon mots
were his single means of answering Mother's nagging.
My father was one of those dependable Jewish working
men of his generation, who reguarded
housework or any physical task around the house as anathema.
In his case the phobia may have been increased because
of his chore-filled childhood.
He would not lift a finger around the house
if it killed him, my mother would say.
It was she who had to bang the nails, unstick the windows,
lay the linoleum, complaining while my father sat,
the soul of passivity, reading a book on napping.
It enraged her partly because she
had to go to work too and partly because my father was
so able-bodied.
As a young man he was tall, wiry, and very strong
like Samson.
In this factory he could lift huge bales,
at carnivals he would ring the bell,
he triumphed at arm wrestling, yet
he became a weakling as soon as he arrived home.
His kryptonite was family life.
If my mother said something sarcastic to him like,
why don't you get off your bony ass and do something?
Or what do I need you for?
You're not married to me, you're married
to your easy chair and the goddamn ball game,
he would merely sink deeper into a defeated shrug,
but I believe that behind his stoical resigned mask
there raced a fierce misogyny.
What I would call the Blue Angel, Of Human Bondage
plot, the educated or sensitive man
who is dragged down by a coarse sluggish vixen,
had a peculiar vogue with my father's generation.
One of the books he often tell it to us
was Ludwig Lewisohn's novel The Tyranny of Sex.
When I was 16 and still a virgin,
I read it naturally to find out what was in store.
It's lumpy post-recession naturalist style disappointed
me, and I remember feeling the author was
weighing the scales a bit too unfairly against the wife.
Nevertheless, the luridly compelling story
remained with me.
A man becomes attracted to a woman, wants to sleep with her,
and the next thing he knows, he is married, cuckolded, in debt,
his dreams for himself have flown out the window,
his wife has become a slattern, no longer even attractive,
a nagging shrew.
In short, women as swamp, quicksand.
Given the atmosphere in my home, I
found the Sampson and Delilah story
the most natural in the world.
Already I had imbibed from my father
his sense of sexuality as a nightmarish tyranny
robbing a man of his strength.
Just as I had absorbed from my mother
a rebellious, defiantly flirtatious,
erotic appetite for life.
My mother had bought a piano and she practiced her songs on it,
preparing for the far off day when she would become
a professional entertainer.
She sang mostly torch songs, the kind Helen Morgan made famous.
The Man I Love, Just My Bill, I Must
Try to Make the Man Love Me, Bewitched Bothered
and Bewildered, I Want a Sunday Kind of Love.
With her pretty, tremulous voice she
would pour all her yearning and disappointment
into these bittersweet verses.
The message was unmistakable even to a little kid.
She was not happy with my father.
She was still looking for something better for romance.
I love to listen to her practice,
glancing over her shoulder at the rising and falling
syllables of the sheet music.
All day in elementary school her songs
would go around in my head.
At recess I would play tag or punchball
to the rhythms of her longing.
One day when it was too rainy to go outside,
the teacher herded us into the auditorium
and staged an impromptu talent show.
Each child was urged to perform in front
of the combined second and third grades.
There were rampant cases of stage fright,
some kids thought to entertain then giggled
and hid their faces, others came on
and rattled through a comic ditty or a radio jingle so fast
you couldn't make out the words.
I wanted to sing.
I faced a group, and hearing my mother's semi trained voice
in my ears, I let her guide me through the melody.
Someday he'll come along, the man
I love, and he'll be big and strong, the man I love.
I could sense the teachers snickering,
trading looks that said, we know how
this one's going to turn out.
My classmates started laughing.
I realized too late that the song was for a girl,
they would think me a sissy.
I had no choice but to finish.
At least I could try to sing on key and with feeling
as my mother did, maybe if I did I would seduce them
into liking it.
When the last contestant was finished
the teachers awarded me first prize, a comic book.
I, part Delilah, wondered if I would ever become a real man."
And I'll stop here.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]