Authors & After Words

Paul McComas’ second novel, Planet of the Dates, is a well-written exploration of the sorrows of male puberty including first love, early lust, a broken promise of fidelity and a critical fall from grace and honor in 1980 Milwaukee. Virginal Phil Corcoran, sixteen going on seventeen, wants more than mere sex – he wants a girlfriend, on whom he cheats. This novel made me wonder just how we are to comprehend this critical phase of male development in this day and age.

Well then, to Mother Nature, sexuality is purely the means through which we propagate our species. That imperative undergirds a second imperative. Lacking the hierarchical accommodation to alpha males among other primates, human males are compelled to spread their genes to all possible points of the compass. This is instinctual but it has been tempered throughout our history by cautionary social constraints expressed through myth, tradition, taboo, and even sometimes common sense.

In Greek mythology, for example, the gods Aphrodite and Ares are engaged in an illicit affair, she being married to Hephaestus, the lame god of smithery and art, but he gets his revenge. He catches the lovers in flagrante delicto, casts an inescapable net over them whereupon they suffer the ridicule of their divine peers. Moral: Sex makes fools of us all. This penchant for heedless liaisons drives the Iliad. Remember Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world? Even though she is married to hapless Menaleus, King of Sparta, Aphrodite – eager to win a divine beauty contest – offers her as a bribe to Paris, a randy adolescent prince of Troy. Thanks to his raging hormones, he easily suppresses what little reason his young brain can muster and elopes homeward with his prize only to lead all of Troy into disaster.

Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet presents a different situation. Left to themselves, these “star-crossed” lovers are careful to legitimize their newly blooming passion with marriage. Their tragedy comes out of the flux of social and political powers beyond their control. In this case, the lovers have it right; they could save their world but, tragically, their world refuses to be saved.

During the Restoration (1660-1688) there was a rather problematic reaction against Puritanism. The court of Charles II was more than a little licentious, but with a caution. One could engage in almost any liaison possible but only so long as one decorated one’s lust with proper poetry. In reaction to these shenanigans, eighteenth century comic writers presented clever, intelligent women achieving proper unions by maintaining their virtue. Henry Fielding turned that formula inside out by making his protagonist a male, namely Tom Jones. Struggling through a wicked world to maintain his innocence and constancy, young Jones eventually wins his first love, along with a nice fortune.

From the Renaissance through the Restoration then, sex and love were matters of tragic defeat through the wickedness of the world or comic triumph through luck, guile, and wit in the face of that same world. In either case, virtue was highly valued because its triumph served social stability; its defeat served only chaos.
The Romantic movement introduced a whole new vision of sex and love. It appeared in 1774 as a slender little book written by a young Wolfgang von Goethe. An overnight success, The Sorrows of Young Werther tells the story of an alienated and narcissistic youth suffering an impossible love affair, which leads to his suicide. This pivotal book introduced the purely romantic love story and with it the “coming of age” novel. Denial was a crucial element in the Romantic imagination for the body was seen as rank and evil, the soul as pure and good. Love needed to be pure as well yet, in the language of Romantic love, the physical truth was always revealed. Observe young Werther’s own confession:

Author Paul McComas.

I am afraid of myself! Is not my love for her of the purest, most holy, and most brotherly nature? Has my soul ever been sullied by a single sensual desire? […And yet, t]his night – I tremble at the avowal – I held her in my arms, locked in a close embrace: I pressed her to my bosom, and covered with countless kisses those dear lips which murmured in reply soft protestations of love. My sight became confused by the delicious intoxication of her eyes. Heavens! Is it sinful to revel again in such happiness, to recall once more those moments with intense delight? Charlotte! Charlotte! I am lost! My senses are bewildered, my recollection is confused, mine eyes are bathed in tears – I am ill; and yet I am well – I wish for nothing – I have no desires – it were better I were gone.

Consider McComas’ young hero, Phil Corcoran in a similar moment of self-revelation. Young Corcoran finds the girl of his dreams and swears fidelity to her when she leaves Milwaukee for a month to attend a drama camp in New York City. Once she is gone, he quickly gets deeply involved with another girl. Filled with guilt, he goes all the way to New York to redeem his faithlessness, only to discover his preferred beloved coming out of the Statue of Liberty in the arms of another boy:

There in Liberty’s fast-creeping shadow I fell, near-naked, to my knees. “All along,” I managed…then trailed into silence as the tears began to swell. I shook my head; I grimaced and squirmed. I was a castaway, a wretched refugee; I was a huddled mass, yearning to breathe free. Behind me, waves lapped at the island’s rocky shore, while in front of me towered the great copper Lady who had opened herself and let me inside – as, I now knew, Stef would never do. I pounded my fists into the ground. “God damn,” I sobbed from low in my throat – from the lowest point of my soul. “Oh, God damn it all to hell!”

In summary then, regarding adolescent love and sexuality we have:
1. Biological imperatives.
2. A classical literary tradition that reflects these imperatives with significant caveats.
3. A Renaissance tradition that shows us how the mechanisms of control are frequently and tragically undone by social chaos.
4. A comic tradition that celebrates the triumph of innocence and constancy over the forces of social chaos.
5. A Romantic tradition that subverts these experiences in favor of individual feelings and emotions over and above reason and chaos, even unto death.
6. A modernity that fosters, at the expense of personal restraint, delusions of Romantic egoism that can only collapse in the face of the even-handed equilibrium of reality.

Are we then to believe that contemporary adolescent males are pre-destined to follow Eros into the dream fields of Elysium and offer themselves up as Aphrodite’s acolytes, only to languish narcissistically – until something better comes along…like every other generation? Boys, boys, why not take heed from the Classics, learn control from the Renaissance, wit from the Eighteenth Century, and then shuck all that neo-Romantic twaddle and just grow up literarily cool?

Paul McComas will be appearing at The Peninsula Bookman in Fish Creek on Wednesday, July 30 at 7 pm to read selections from his latest novel, Planet of the Dates. Copies of the book will be available for purchase and autograph signing.