The Diary of a Rapist. Evan S. Connell
paraded before the mirror. . . .” Earl is filled with thoughts of revenge, violation, getting back at women for what they have done to him. “I could tie her to the bed. Then carve away! Yes, see how she likes it. Or shove in a broomstick—a bird on a spit! That would serve her right for what she’s done to me.”
On Washington’s birthday he spots the beauty queen, “The Whore of Babylon.” “Then that bitch in the bathing suit climbed up on the stage wearing a cardboard crown & carrying a scepter, went parading back and forth to show off her tits. No shame. No modesty. . . . She looked to me like one of those professional sluts from Hollywood. If she isn’t the symbol of American rottenness, what is?”
The madness is building; on March 18th, he strikes Bianca. “Tonight all of a sudden I stood up at the table and without a single word of explanation slapped B across the mouth. She’d been talking while I was trying to think, that’s why she was punished. However I was only the instrument—decision to punish her wasn’t made by me because I don’t recall drawing back my arm—it moved by itself exactly as though pulled by a string. I was helpless to prevent it, could only watch.”
On July 4th, Independence Day, the day he presumably rapes the beauty queen, his diary is silent. He reappears, waiting to be caught, and goes on to say that “the Devil is supposed to have a forked penis so he can commit sodomy and fornication simultaneously, yet we build gods in the image of ourselves because it’s implausible to do otherwise, consequently there’s no reason for me to feel upset. How can one already worn out by this corrupt world understand Incorruption?”
In a recent interview with Greg Bottoms in Bookforum, Connell talked about Diary:
It started when I read in the newspaper about a beauty queen who had been raped on two different occasions by the same man. Both rapes occurred under almost identical circumstances, but after the second time he drove her home. He wanted to make sure she got home safely. And he thought—I am convinced—that if she truly understood him, when she realized that he was a nice man, they could become properly acquainted, have lunch together, visit the zoo together, get married, and live happily ever after. I suspect that only in America could anyone be so deluded. Only in America, addled by the Puritan legacy.
Only in America. I maintain a view of post-World War II American fiction in which one sees the distinct and prickly seeds of entitlement, greed, frustration, disappointment, the fear of failure, rage at the need to keep up all blooming in direct response to a period of prosperity, social and economic expansion, and the spread of American Dream and Great Society ideology.
The Diary of a Rapist, originally published in 1966, is a deeply American novel, located somewhere between Nabokov’s Lolita and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. Like Lolita and Psycho it relies on the narrator’s entries, his registration of himself as witness to his own life—as if to say to the reader, please don’t forget me, lest I forget myself. And in all three one wonders about the split between reality and fantasy, how much is actually happening—in deed and/or in thought.
There is a flatness to Earl Summerfield, an absenting or disassociation of self, which perhaps allows his violent behavior to cross the barrier from thought into reality. In these splintered diary fragments Connell builds a convincing portrait that holds up well over time. It is as modern and terrifying a novel now as it was in 1966.
We have continued to consume this foul reporting, this “news”—if you can call it that—as a kind of perverse/erotic fish food addictively sprinkled onto our breakfast cereals; we eat it staring, numb, at the superbright colors of the flat-screen television, cruising through the hundreds of channels, nonstop twenty-four-hour news, real cop shows, fake cop shows. . . . We have by now so confused reality and fantasy, our sense of the moral and the criminal, that we are often hard-pressed to tell the difference. The questions raised by Connell have become all the more prescient. What in fact are we consuming—are we eating ourselves alive?
—A. M. HOMES
JANUARY 1
Last night Bianca shook me awake and told me to stop grinding my teeth. Nothing gives her more satisfaction than to humiliate me.
So one year ends, another begins.
JANUARY 2
This afternoon on the way home from work saw three women fighting in the street. One had fallen to her knees, clothing pulled to rags. The others were jerking at her hair, hitting her furiously across the back with awkwardly closed fists. How clumsy women are! Shrieks and cries, a circle of attentive men. There’s a sort of dreadful augury in the birdcall screams of women.
JANUARY 3
Violence! Violence! Had scarcely left the Bureau when I saw a man struck by a taxi—no accident. The driver noticed him start across the street, I’m sure of it, and am sure there was time enough to stop the cab. Instead, what?
A chance for revenge! How many of us wouldn’t do the same? Yes, when that moment comes—that one instant when we’ve got the power either to love or hate, with nothing in between, how often do we hesitate? I know the answer. Day after day we’re humiliated, so why not seize the chance? Why not?
Well, don’t think about it, just do your work. Stay out of trouble. Anyway, who knows whether Love exists? It could be that Hate is the only reality. He that seeketh, findeth. Maybe. I’ve looked for some kind of love long enough but what have I found? Strokes of revenge, back and forth, regular as a metronome, that’s what I’ve found. So now I ask just to be let alone. I’m willing to do my work, not much else interests me because there’s not much to look forward to.
Bravo! Bravo for Earl Summerfield!—he’s quite a man. Yes, get home a few minutes before your wife, rush around the apartment flinging up your hands and shouting, grin at yourself in the mirror, practice a few vulgar gestures, then as soon as you hear the elevator stop you grab the newspaper and sit down and compose your features so Bianca always comes in to find the husband she expects. Bravo, Earl, yes indeed, you’re quite a man.
Well, maybe I’m too hard on myself. I doubt if other men are much better—a few, I suppose, but most of us are terrified. Scared to death of losing our job, getting in trouble with the bank, letting somebody make a fool of us. Usually it’s some woman. Stiff as a dead halibut if one of them looks at us cross-eyed. The truth is I’m really no weaker than the next, not a bit & if it wasn’t for Bianca I’d have been able to make something out of myself by this time. She’s ruined everything. There’s no limit to what I might have done by now. She knows it, too. I guess it gives her some sort of pleasure.
JANUARY 4
Friday. This noon at lunch Magnus confides that he’s discovered an extremely rare paperweight. Wipes his nose, coughs, peeps around & finally lets me in on the secret. “Not many ah uh persons realize how val-val-valuable uh certain paperweights can be!” Looked at the spots of grease on his necktie & tried not to grin. Oh? Is that so? How much do you think you can get for it? Then naturally he started backing off. Wasn’t sure, explained that it depended on the rarity and so forth. Claimed something called a “yellow overlay” brought $7,000. Maybe it did, I’m no authority on paperweights, but even if it did what’s that got to do with Magnus? He’s not going to find one that’s worth anything. What he found was just an odd piece of brass and that’s all he’s ever going to find. A molded lump of brass in a McAllister junk shop. I’ll bet he paid more than it’s worth. Why does he keep on searching? Why can’t he admit the truth? Why does he want to deceive himself? Mucking around at the bottom of the lake. If anything he’s lower and poorer and worse off than I am. Why doesn’t he admit it?
JANUARY 5
Rain. Most of my holiday