Undifferentiated Slime

Jane DeLynn​ last published a novel in 2002, when she was 56, but Semiotext(e) in the US and Divided in the UK have now reissued In Thrall (1982), her most personal work and, according to Colm Tóibín’s new introduction, ‘her masterpiece’. It’s set in the mid-1960s at a girls’ high school in Manhattan. Lynn, DeLynn’s narrator/alter ego, looks back from adulthood at her final year of school. She knows there is something wrong with her, that she is unhappy most of the time, and we know from the novel’s first line that she is ‘always getting crushes’ on her teachers, though she doesn’t consider this a problem per se: ‘The fact that these teachers were women didn’t bother me or my self-conscious Freudian friends very much.’ She has a succession of boyfriends who paw at her in dark cinemas and on her parents’ sofa, and is only half aware that her friends enjoy having this done to them. She fixates on her English teacher, Miss Maxfeld, an unmarried 37-year-old with a moustache and clunky brown shoes. To get Miss Maxfeld to notice her, Lynn writes self-aggrandising essays and swears in class. It works, but not in the way she expects. ‘You must be very unhappy,’ Miss Maxfeld says, having called her into her office. Instead of chastising Lynn, she invites her for tea at her house.

The first half of the novel follows the sometimes farcical development of their affair. Lynn is aware that, although they’re both Jewish, they come from different worlds: Miss Maxfeld’s father was a rabbi and her apartment, with its threadbare antique rugs and a screen dividing the living room from the bedroom, has a bohemian air. Lynn, whose mother favours matching armchairs and wall-to-wall carpeting, finds it all ‘disturbingly “LC”’, but is quickly schooled. The sofa, which ‘looked like the kind of couch you’d find on the street’, is ‘more than a hundred years old’; the mismatched cupboards are ‘pieces’ picked up at antique shops. Miss Maxfeld serves loose-leaf tea (‘my mother put bags in a cup,’ Lynn tells us) and plays Bach records (‘my parents’ music collection consisted mostly of … compendiums of “greatest hits”’). Lynn can’t understand why Miss Maxfeld is interested in spending time with her – not just because she is young and gauche, with a bad temper and foul mouth, but because she feels, she tells us, ‘nauseating’ and ‘degenerate’, unable to behave like a normal person, unsure even what a normal person is. When Miss Maxfeld tries to educate her, she can only ‘copy her expression, to see what she was seeing’; ‘I put on my “listening face” – it was like my “profound face” but more specifically oriented.’

Miss Maxfeld takes an axe to Lynn’s artificial self. ‘I can see through your head as if it were made of glass, right into the heart of your terrible misery,’ she says over tea. Lynn is thrilled to have been singled out, even though Miss Maxfeld’s judgments tend to be unflattering. ‘So I’m superficial and strange, and have idiotic expressions,’ Lynn responds at one point. ‘All in all, I guess I’m a real shit.’ She’s happy to be denigrated because she is convinced that her unhappiness defines her; ‘for the first time in my life, I felt understood.’ Miss Maxfeld’s combination of censure and indulgence has exactly the intended effect: Lynn is desperate for more. In the middle of the night, feverish with desire, she writes a letter:

Dear Miss Maxfeld,

Just in case you don’t know, I am in love with you. This has brought me grief, misery and the ‘contumely’ of my friends. What should I do about it? To kill myself is a coward’s way out (also I am very frightened of death!). Late at night when I can’t sleep I go over in my head the conversations we’ve had, trying to figure out how you feel about me. Sometimes I add things to them – the clever things I only thought of saying later, after you were gone … Probably you would fall in love with me if you knew the ‘real me’ – the witty one who says things at the right time.

The guilelessness of Lynn’s prose distances the writer of the letter from the narrator looking at her younger self. We’re invited to laugh along when Lynn writes: ‘I do know that I have no desire (or need) to shave my face the way lezbos often do.’ But even the teenage Lynn puts her emotions and experiences in inverted commas. She goes around in a haze, including in English class. ‘Miss Maxfeld’s words seemed trivial, but also like clues that only I could decipher, yet I didn’t feel like bothering: it seemed an unduly complicated way of getting to the heart of things.’ Walking over to her teacher’s apartment, she thinks to herself:

every step … seemed portentous, as if I were in a detective movie. I saw things in the pavement and gutter I didn’t usually see: the torso of a doll, a sealed and stamped envelope with the heel tread of a shoe on it, two pennies and a nickel. Yet it didn’t seem odd that these objects were there in such profusion: it seemed, had I ‘but world enough and time’, I would always notice them.

None of these objects is especially remarkable yet Lynn reads them as if they are clues: she is playing detective, trying to piece something together, albeit in an indirect sort of way. Her homosexual feelings, both acknowledged and resisted, are clues too: she looks at them sideways until they can’t be ignored any longer. When Miss Maxfeld kisses her on the lips, Lynn thinks: ‘it was only Reason which had been surprised … Intuition had known it was coming (or rather, when it had come, Intuition realised it had not been surprised).’ She briefly considers whether the kiss might have turned her into a lesbian, but instead decides: ‘Inside … I felt like one. In fact, I felt like I had felt like one my whole life. The only surprise was that I had not noticed this sooner.’

A months-long affair grinds into motion, but it raises more questions than it answers. Brought up in the sheltered society of the Upper West Side, Lynn has no idea what lesbian sex entails. When it happens, shortly after their first kiss, it has the quality of a child’s nightmare, devoid of agency, dominated by an enormous bed and Miss Maxfeld’s ‘absurd’, pendulous breasts. ‘She took me by the hand, stood me up, and led me to the bedroom. I had to go unless I wanted to cause a scene.’ There is nothing sexy or even particularly tender about their trysts, which take place, as Lynn puts it, in ‘the Land of Undifferentiated Slime’. Meanwhile, she becomes preoccupied with what the affair means for her future. She imagines that accepting herself as a ‘lezbo’ will cause some kind of bodily alteration – ‘I wondered if Miss Maxfeld’s Kiss … had accelerated the development of my moustache, like a hormone’ – and pores over an early 20th-century treatise on ‘the intersexes’ to find out what further aberrances lie in store: ‘The memorandum established a quite abnormal development of the patient’s clitoris and the presence of a more than rudimentary scrotum, with one testicle plainly to be felt.’ Miss Maxfeld is thrust into the role of biology teacher as well as lover: ‘Don’t give me this crap! You sound just like my mother. Either I have a clitoris or not!’

Lynn’s disgust is not just self-directed. Almost everything described in the novel is repulsive. This is a world of greasy hair, overstuffed cushions, bad breath, bloodied sheets and hot milk dotted with ‘oily yellow beads’. Stuck in a cinema and unenthusiastically kissing a boy, Lynn wonders if he has been moved to tears by the film, but ‘then he pulled away, and I realised the moisture was snot, not tears.’ It takes another nine paragraphs for him to wipe his nose. Lynn is repelled by her ‘overweight’ mother and vulgar father, who fishes a chicken neck out of her soup and sucks on it. Even her older cousin Leonard, the ‘only classy person in my family outside of me’, covers his pimples with a thick layer of make-up. No one’s body escapes her scrutiny, least of all Miss Maxfeld’s: on the first page she is introduced through the ‘perspiration stains’ under her jacket, which the schoolgirls force her to expose by closing all the windows.

All this revulsion can seem antagonistic, but it’s driven by more complicated feelings. Unlike the teenage Lynn, we and the narrator know that disgust is not the only lens through which to perceive other people – that it is in fact a way of disengaging, of masking the pain of participating in the world. The book’s occasional flights of lyricism hint at a different way of being, as for example when Lynn is about to have sex with Miss Maxfeld for the first time:

The sky was filled with billions of people, each connected to each other in a myriad of ways, like a giant spiderweb occupying the whole visible and invisible world, and all of it leading to me, here on this bed, participating in this great sin, under the eyes of God, who was supposed to understand and forgive (or was it to exact retribution and vengeance?) … and yet I did not believe He (She) (It) could possibly care, one way or another, for it was all so unimportant, and She (He) (It) probably did not exist.

DeLynn expertly captures the details of teenage life in the 1960s, partly thanks to her ear for dialogue. Conversation makes up the majority of the book, and there is an accumulative realism, if not exactly enjoyment, to the way the exchanges repeat and pile up. She transcribes the rounds of half-hearted insults Lynn exchanges with her friends, the exhortations of her parents and the twittering monologues of her ‘maiden aunt’, Lou. (Lynn can’t decide if she’s a lesbian, too, or just stupid: she’s going out with a gay man who lives openly with his partner.) Even Miss Maxfeld becomes predictable, alternately educating Lynn about culture and art and warning her, fiercely, to keep their relationship a secret. Lynn’s one ambition, aside from sleeping with Miss Maxfeld, is to get into Radcliffe. But at the same time she knows she has no chance: ‘Radcliffe’ is a totem of escape, more a word than a place. No one, least of all Miss Maxfeld, has any doubt that Lynn will be rejected. ‘They don’t like to take too many girls from New York City,’ her mother says. ‘There’s a Jewish quota,’ Lynn adds.

When the inevitable happens and Radcliffe turns her down, Lynn blames Miss Maxfeld, who could have pulled some strings to help her get in but says it ‘wouldn’t have been ethical’. Lynn points out her hypocrisy: ‘It’s okay to commit sodomy with an innocent 16-year-old, but to help that same 16-year-old get into college, that’s not ethical?!’ For all Miss Maxfeld’s lofty talk, she is a pathetic figure, imploring Lynn not to spill the beans while failing to stop sleeping with her. (To add to Lynn’s confusion and loneliness, Miss Maxfeld has herself told someone – her best friend, a gay man who teaches at the school.) Mired in shame about the relationship, she resorts to mind games, cutting off Lynn’s protestations of eternal love with the gloomy prediction that she will run off as soon as she graduates: ‘You’ll leave me – the younger person always leaves the older. What could be more natural?’ In one of her moments of canniness, Lynn reflects on this:

I hadn’t been through it before and therefore couldn’t argue the point, but it seemed an unfair weapon to use. And yet, if she were right, why shouldn’t she use it? But I also had the suspicion, right or wrong, that she was really saying it to ensnare me further: after such prophecies, how could I leave her?

In the event, Lynn doesn’t have to make a choice, because when she gets home after this conversation she finds her parents sobbing at the dinner table. Cousin Leonard has ratted her out. This needs some explaining. Some months earlier, rooting around in the room Leonard used when he stayed with them, Lynn found something unnamed, ‘an object I thought I recognised, though I had never seen one in person but only read about it in books’. This, along with the make-up, his rainbow of shirt colours, the ‘35 ties’ and ‘42 pairs of shoes’, leads Lynn to suspect that Leonard, too, is gay. Later, finding her secret too much, she confides in him: ‘It’s all right … I’m a homosexual too. I’ve been having this affair with my English teacher.’ Leonard is furious, not about her confession but about her assumption: ‘Does a Harris tweed look to you like the clothing of a sissy? Or a handmade shirt from the best tailor in London?’ Perhaps to forestall Lynn telling her family about her suspicions, or perhaps because he is genuinely concerned (though he does a good job of hiding it), Leonard reveals her affair.

After a comically histrionic scene, Lynn persuades her parents not to report Miss Maxfeld to the New York City Board of Education, but promises never to see her again. Her parents suggest some European travel and a course of hormone shots. Before leaving, she sneaks out for one last rendezvous. Finally, after so much forced irony interspersed with tortured emotion, Lynn is free to take in her surroundings, and Miss Maxfeld, at leisure:

I was bored and uncomfortable and began to wonder what I thought I’d been missing these past weeks: This conversation about furniture was no different from one I might have with Aunt Lou … Was this all that love was, an attempt to lend conversation an interest it wouldn’t ordinarily have? For days I had languished in my room, and now I wished I were walking free and unfettered in the park.

The end of the novel is not exactly hopeful – Lynn knows that her suffering ‘could never end, for it was not just her, or our disease, or my parents’ discovery of it … but the misery of my entire life’. But there is, in the midst of the hypnotic power of Miss Maxfeld’s final long speech, ‘self-enclosed, whole and complete, utterly enthralling’, a creeping sense of the outside world, of a door opening onto the future – a door the narrator doesn’t let us through. She doesn’t tell us what happens to Lynn after she leaves Miss Maxfeld’s for the final time. But DeLynn herself did tell us, after a fashion, in Don Juan in the Village (1991) and Leash (2002), the two novels that form a loose trilogy with In Thrall, as well as in interviews and her autobiographical writing, which confirm how close the story was to her life. ‘Miss Maxfeld’ was a real person, though DeLynn’s parents never found out about her, and they stayed in touch for at least a few years after DeLynn left school. She got an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (‘biggest drug drop between Chicago and Denver’) and was taught by Elizabeth Hardwick, who called her first attempt at a novel ‘the most disgusting book I’ve ever read’. Lynn is right that she will never ‘marry a handsome young man and live in Scarsdale’; instead, DeLynn entered, in hesitant stages, into lesbian life in New York – meetings of the Daughters of Bilitis, pick-ups in bars, coke and marijuana, ‘waifs’ and bulldykes.

In a recent interview,​  DeLynn said that In Thrall is ‘almost a historical novel now’. Strictly speaking, it was already one in 1982. Books written in the recent past and set in the almost-as-recent past feel quaint and faintly embarrassing, like Grease. It’s hard to know if Lynn’s astounding ignorance and her parents’ TV-perfect 1960s manners – a martini for father, Scotch for mother – are realistic or parodic, or (more likely) a mixture of the two. DeLynn thinks the novel should have been reissued alongside Don Juan in the Village and Leash, but those books – the first a series of short stories about a writer drifting through the gay bars of New York, Ibiza, Key West and San Juan, the second the brutal chronicle of an anonymised sadomasochistic relationship – lack In Thrall’s charm. The excitement of what is unspoken, what might be found out, what lies in store, is exchanged in the later books for a repetitive will-she-won’t-she, in which the worst outcome is rejection and the best is an underwhelming hook-up. The disgust DeLynn evokes in all her descriptions of sex (and there are many in the later novels) gets old, too. It’s hard not to sympathise with the reviewer who complained that the ‘banal philosophising’ of Don Juan in the Village made her feel ‘like a bartender with a single customer and a long night ahead’. In an essay DeLynn contributed to A Woman like That: Lesbian and Bisexual Writers Tell Their Coming-Out Stories (1999), she wrote about her struggle as a teen to try to ‘act straight’:

These efforts, nerve-racking and exhausting as they were, forced me to sharpen my powers of observation and interpretation (always useful for a writer) … With the increasing acceptance of ‘gayness’ – perhaps as opposed to ‘queerness’ – in America, such deconstruction of ordinary behaviour is increasingly unnecessary, to what I am sure will be (if it not already is) the detriment of our art, our insights and culture; an unpopular position, certainly, but this is what happens when repressive regimes disappear.

I wish she had heeded her own warning, but at least we have In Thrall.