’60s of the soul

THE BOSTON PHOENIX

BY DANIEL LEVINSON

ALTHEA (the Divorce of Adam and Eve), by Juan Alonso

For Juan Alonso, the’60s began in 1953. At least that is the year X.J. Muldoon, practitioner of “Magical Scholarship” and narrator of [i]Althea[/i], regards as a touchstone, an emotional haven just before our psyches were buffeted by collective madness. As scholars stumble over each other to record the period’s ultimate significance, Alonso pursues cultural history from a different perspective. The’60s themselves hardly appear in [i]Althea[/i]. Alonso is a spiritual historian, stalking the external upheavals from the inside, reconstructing the subtle personal disturbances which were only later recognized as the beginnings of a radical dislocation of national life. 1953—the critical year in both [i]Althea[/i] and a previous Alonso novel, [i]The Passion of Robert Bronson[/i]. The two books also share several major characters, similar metaphorical conceits and the same general theme. [i]Bronson[/i], though, states boldly what [i]Althea’s[/i] seamless textural density only suggests. The earlier work describes the last years of a famous New England poet, a chronicle that dovetails into the passing of “the last Now England age” and culminates in “the full banality of the spiritual and political direction of the sixties.” [i]Bronson[/i] introduces Magical Scholarship, through which Professor Muldoon harnesses the divine power of paranoia (the final option of an alienated humanist brooding in isolation) to reveal the crucial psychological changes that ushered in the era. [i]Althea[/i] is less stridently polemical than [i]Bronson[/i] and concerns nothing so grandiose as the triumph of a utopian “let it all hang out” ethos over a pessimistic, Puritan ethic. What it grapples with, though, may be more important in the long run. [i]Althea[/i] is a novel about love. Perhaps it does not portend the death of romantic passion, but it certainly observes the demise of those time- honored myths that support it. “Every book about America.” says Muldoon in [i]Bronson[/i], “should begin in Boston.” Alonso graduated from Harvard, as did Muldoon, and teaches in the Boston area, as does Muldoon. And [i]Althea[/i] does begin in Boston, with Muldoon back in, yep, 1953, as a dilatory graduate student. He has not yet discovered Magical Scholarship, but its motive force, paranoia is an uncontrolled, all-controlling power dictating Muldoon’s unsure course. It strikes first by emanating a brilliant, indescribable “Light” from a psychiatric patient of Muldoon’s best friend, Dr. Mel Fish. The glow convinces Muldoon that “Unseen and Mysterious Forces” are trying to communicate with him. The Light’s eerie, human warmth draws Muldoon into the, tragic life of one of Mel’s most difficult patients, a pathologically independent woman named Althea. While Muldoon’s spiritual self is occupied chasing the Light, his more physical self is being chased by “Norma the Nice.” At least she was Norma the Nice, bright Cantabrigian ex-grad student housewife, until she suddenly began asking Muldoon to read her short stories and to help her recapture her femininity. Remembering Mel’s “Anima Theory” which assumes a man is best understood through the women he chooses, Muldoon can’t tell who he is because he does not know who Norma is. Eroticism confuses friendship. And because she was both ‘a nice girl’ and somebody else’s model wife, she was a restful oasis for me in terms of sexual tensions. I believe I could have taken her to a baseball game, for example and enjoyed the game. Meanwhile, Althea’s Light has grown darker and Muldoon’s visions correspondingly more terrifying. Althea is fighting desperately to salvage a pure sense of self, free from contamination by human contact. Muldoon senses that her “inner darkness,” her human capacity to refuse that very humanity, is a disturbing mirror of mankind that others must deny. When Althea’s obsession turns up in Norma’s short stories and Muldoon’s premonitions of disaster are realized by Althea’s brutal murder of an egotistical lover who has penetrated her protective shield, literary creation, dream images and narrative, “fact” become strands of a disconcertingly real, tapestry—woven, of course by the Unseen and Mysterious Forces. [i]Althea[/i] begins with Muldoon pronouncing, “I have never liked women…To me, women have been the opposite of people.” By which he means that it is impossible for men to perceive women except as distorted by male fantasy. In Alonso’s kaleidoscopic vision the identities of all his characters oscillate wildly depending upon which myth, which fantasy or idealization, is guiding the perception. [i]Althea[/i] is truly a mythic novel, yet it does not propagate myths—it exorcises them. Larger-than-life truths appear not so we can act on them or with them but so we can understand how they act on us. [i]Althea[/i] is present at the creation of those collective fantasies of the’60s that have fatally intervened in the determination of individual identity and interpersonal relations. What Alonso calls the divorce of Adam and Eve is the collision of “male literary fantasies” with newly discovered “female literary fantasies,” a collision that threatens the already tottering relationships of men and women with utter collapse. Alonso’s great achievement is to have captured the entire process in a slow-motion instant replay that allows us to see all the infractions, all the painful, demoralizing cheap shots both sides have employed while mystifying themselves and each other.