Thursday, May 22, 2025

Southern Comfort by Barry N. Malzberg

It was as if—and I concede that I am now for the first time letting a certain mild mental imbalance shine through lustrously like rotting patches of a swamp in mid-moonlight—all of the shapes and events of the comprehensible universe had conspired to the exact point of placing me in the most terrible situation imaginable. I know full well—oh how I know it—that I am barely consequential enough to deserve such treatment and yet thus were my feelings gentlemen, thus were my emotions.
It has been a month since we read anything that might be described as porn (on April 15 we blogged about a Karl Edward Wagner story bubbling over with fetishistic sex, "Locked Away," as well as Kathe Koja's more sophisticated story about a dancer who has sex with low status men, "Pas de Deux") so maybe readers will forgive me if we indulge in some nasty erotic exploitation literature today.  I have a feeling this sex novel by our hero Barry N. Malzberg, Southern Comfort, which appeared in 1969 under the pen name Gerrold Watkins, can also serve as a component of the national conversation about race, a conversation I am told is "much-needed."  Well, let's get to it!  I have under different tabs on my screen an electronic version of the novel I believe produced in 2009 as well as a PDF scan of a 1972 paperback edition--the image at the left is of the cover of that printing.  These texts seem to be the same--the electronic text with misguided fidelity even reproduces the woefully common typos found in the PDF.   

Our narrator, Gerrold Watkins, is a Union spy during the American Civil War.  He has infiltrated Atlanta society and is having sex with Elizabeth, the nymphomaniac wife of a Confederate intelligence officer, Eric, in hopes she will drop some valuable information during their trysts.  The text of Southern Comfort consists of the spy's reports back to Washington, which for some reason include detailed descriptions of his sexual activities as well as his musings about how much he wants to have sex with a black woman ("a Negress" or "negress") even though he considers blacks to be members of a "damnable race" and finds black people "loathsome."

I agree with the libertarian purposes of the President's declaration but there must, after all, be limits to such things. I find them almost entirely loathsome. 

There are seven such reports covering four days.  Malzberg engages in only the most limited efforts to make any of the characters sound like they are living in the nineteenth century or hail from a specific region of this great nation of ours or a particular social class or anything like that--all the white characters talk like Malzberg characters generally do: they ramble, equivocate, ruminate in circles about their own psychologies and the fact that knowledge of the world is hard to come by and probably not useful even if you manage to acquire it.

“I certainly don't remember. Eric tells me so many things and they all go right outside of me. Who can keep up? Who knows what's going on anyway?"

.... 

“Well, I guess that it wouldn't do me any good even if I did know. After all, I'm only an unsuitable. I'll never know a thing about military tactics and it's all very depressing.”
(Watkins' cover while in Atlanta is that of a man who is medically unable to serve in the Confederate Army; this man, who demonstrates the ability to have three orgasms in fewer than three hours, strives to convince Elizabeth and others that he can't shoulder a pack and a musket and defend Atlanta from the Federals because, he tells people, he has a fainting disease that strikes at inappropriate times.  This is presented as a bogus story but Watkins does actually faint while having sex a few times.)

Like much of Malzberg's work, Southern Comfort is "recursive" or "meta" and is full of commentary and jokes about being a writer and the act of writing.  The second report ludicrously begins with a flashback in which Watkins describes his meeting with the intelligence chief who blackmailed him into taking this assignment--Watkins quotes the chief at length in a report destined to be read by this very chief.  The second report also includes a long scene describing Watkins having sex with a woman, Dorothy, who just comes into the narrator's hotel room, claiming to have been rented the room by mistake--this woman is a masochist who wants to be hurt, to be whipped with a belt, and we readers wonder if she is a Southern counterspy who already knows of Watkins' S&M proclivities.           

In the third report Watkins expresses his opinion that by having sex with Dorothy and describing it in his reports he may not be producing intelligence about Atlanta's defenses and Confederate troop movements, but something even more important--the very nature of the American South, which "evidentially, shall be with us forever.  Or at the very least for a very long time."  Dorothy sets up a date with him that coincides with a date he has already made with Elizabeth.  A dilemma!  Then Watkins out the window of his hotel room sees a riot, the men of Atlanta about to beat and maybe murder a young attractive black woman; Watkins rescues her and brings her to his hotel room.  

In rendering the dialogue of Melinda of Baltimore, Malzberg often drops the verb "to be" ("They crazy....They all crazy down here;" "What I doing with you in this room anyway?"), I guess so she sounds like a black person, but also setting up a scene in the fourth report which serves to push one of Malzberg's themes in the novel, that people are essentially the same across racial and geographic lines.  Of course, Malzberg is not suggesting that people are all good, but rather that they are all pretty reprehensible.

Watkins and Melinda have sex, and he admits to her he is a Northern spy who in civilian life is a professional philatelist.  Watkins includes in his report not only a blow-by-blow account of his sexual activities with Melinda but reproduces his description to her of the ins and outs of being a professional stamp collector.  Plus, we get some literary criticism that offers Malzberg a chance to lay some contemporary social commentary on us.  Here, and in a few other places, Watkins presents predictions of the future.  In this third report he suggests that in 19th-century America there is little explicit sex in literature because the as yet unconquered west of the continent provides people room to explore and to express themselves, but that in the 20th century, when American civilization and stability stretches from Atlantic to Pacific, people and writers will turn inward and explore themselves and especially their sexuality and explicit sex will become typical of popular literature.  In a later report Watkins seems to predict Hollywood and television:

The largest number of things we will do to one another in the decades ahead will come out of boredom. Boredom will be a commodity as basic and demanding as sexuality. There will have to be industries erected to minister to it, to satiate it but at the same time to leave enough of it left to explore the possibilities of titillation. Ah, America! America! America!

Dorothy arrives and a confrontation ensues when she sees Melinda; both women angrily leave Watkins, who goes to keep his date with Elizabeth.  

The fourth report begins with an interesting sequence that suggests Watkins is going native, is coming to see the point of view of white Southerners who fear blacks will wreak havoc if allowed to slip out of white control and is beginning to suspect that Northern refusal to allow secession is not the product of anti-racist idealism but rather of economic interests.  And while Watkins complains at length about the terrible heat in the South, he also suggests the South is the "last refuge of courtesy" and that the North, specifically New York, has been ruined by industrialization.  Southern Comfort is a pornographic book, but Malzberg uses it as an opportunity to say controversial things about social issues, race relations and sexual relations, to air, in the voice of a disreputable character, beliefs about society and in particular about women and black people, that Malzberg himself probably doesn't hold, or at least would not admit to holding, but which make the book shocking and/or thought-provoking.

Elizabeth has found out Watkins had sex with a black woman (she uses the dreaded "n-word," as do people again and again in this book) and laid a trap for him--her husband Eric is hiding in a closet and she tries to get Watkins to admit in Eric's hearing that he is a Union spy.  Suggesting that all women are really the same underneath, an angry Elizabeth begins speaking like Melinda, dropping those verbs ("You tell me, Mr. Watkins, what you had in mind. Why you rescuing niggers. Why you prancing around here looking for information. Why you always want to know about Eric. Y'hear? Tell me.”)  Women, of course, are all envious, jealous, manipulative, horny, and sneaky, a pack of liars who love to dominate others and love to be dominated, who seek to hurt others and maneuver men into inflicting pain and suffering pain while also craving to be hurt themselves.

Eric, as a spy himself who himself has had to deal with the troublemaker Elizabeth for twenty years, is more or less sympathetic to Watkins, and when Elizabeth keeps egging her husband on to beat up Watkins, Eric actually strikes Elizabeth.  Eric claims that all of Watkins' reports have been intercepted and not read in Washington but instead by Eric and other Confederate intelligence officers.  

Watkins expects to be arrested but Eric lets Watkins leave his house unmolested--nobody can get out of Atlanta anyway, the place is about to be under siege.  Watkins has so come to enjoy writing that he decides to keep on writing his reports, even though he doesn't know who is actually reading them.  At the start of the fifth report he suggests that these reports will be essential, even immortal, works of literature of inestimable value to the people of the future and be long remembered when most people have forgotten who Lincoln, Grant and Lee were.

The rest of the fifth report consists of a description of Watkins having sex with Melinda again and a disquisition on the role of pain in sexual intercourse.

The sixth and penultimate report is cataclysmic.  (The epigraph to this blogpost is taken from this report.)  Melinda reveals that she is a prostitute who came from Baltimore to Atlanta not to help relatives as she has been saying, but to work at a party.  At the same time, the Union forces are close enough that gunfire can be heard and the city is in chaos.  We get an interesting character study of the owner of the hotel, a terribly obese racist, and his righthand man, a giant black man who backs up the boss no matter how racist the boss's dialogue.  Watkins hints that these men may be gay lovers.  The sixth report ends with a bombshell, Watkins' confession that he has murdered Melinda.

Throughout the novel there have been hints of some dire event in Philadelphia in the narrator's past; it is this event which gave the Union intelligence services leverage with which to blackmail Watkins.  In the final report Watkins describes this episode, his accidental killing of a prostitute while in a frenzy during a sadomasochist sex session.  Then he describes his murder of Melinda in detail; furthering the novel's theme that accurate information is hard to come by and when acquired can cause trouble, Watkins killed her because she revealed her true profession and reason for being in Atlanta--both she and her murderer would have been better off if she had continued her deception.  Union troops take the city while Watkins is writing, and he completes his transformation into a Southerner, preparing to shoot it out with Union soldiers who are investigating the hotel.  (One of the themes of the novel is the suggestion that Northerners are no better than Southerners.)  We readers presume he is killed.

(It is hard not to see similarities between Southern Comfort and a stereotypical Lovecraftian story--a narrator of questionable mental stability learns a terrible truth that destroys him and he puts the last touches on a memoir moments before he is killed.)

Having summarized this bit of pornography and tried to interpret its more intellectual strands, we come to the question of whether I can recommend Southern Comfort.  As a devoted Malzberg fan, of course I found reading it worthwhile, but I can also say it moves at a decent pace, has a sort of conventional plot structure with foreshadowing in the beginning and twists at the end, and is never boring or frustratingly confusing.  The sex in Malzberg's work is often sad or disgusting, but the sex in Southern Comfort is meant to be arousing, and seeks to appeal to various fetishes--we've got interracial sex, whipping and general sado-masochist activity (there's lots of biting), name calling, and lots of business involving the breasts and nipples.  The jokes I found generally funny; particularly amusing is Watkins' commentary on his own writing, which he ludicrously finds outstanding ("my style alone seems to be rising to a kind of thorough-going professionalism...my ability to see into the very core of purposes is astonishing...I have evinced superb narrative gifts...") and leads to him planning to become a novelist after the war and lamenting that he hadn't devoted his life to literature.

And then we have the book's ideas.  Obviously you should avoid Southern Comfort if you find explicit sex offensive or if seeing the "n-word" a hundred times, seeing women portrayed as masochistic jerks or hearing unpatriotic theories about the motives behind the Union effort to retain the Southern states is going to hurt your feelings.  But Malzberg's depiction of Watkins' equivocal and hypocritical attitudes towards African-Americans is perhaps interesting.  I suspect here we have an artifact that reflects the psychological tensions endured by many urban liberals of 1969, the complex and painful sensibilities of people who were ideologically committed to and/or vocally supported civil rights policies, social welfare spending and affirmative action, but whose direct personal contact with urban crime and/or events like the 1968 Ocean Hill-Brownsville teachers' strike may have caused them to, if only inwardly, question those commitments and that rhetorical support.  Watkins asserts that he believes in equality, and he does rescue a black woman from a violent mob, but at the same time he has a lot of misgivings about black people and when he interacts with them directly he responds to them in ways that are irrational and passionate rather than logical or intellectual and are fundamentally selfish and exploitative.  It is easy to say the socially approved thing and to assert idealistic beliefs, but not so easy to overcome your own prejudices and to put ideals into action if you fear such action will compromise your safety or comfort.  Whatever Watkins says, his actions are fundamentally selfish, and maybe Malzberg is hinting that white people's professed beliefs about black people and how they should be treated, and how they actually behave when interacting with African-Americans, are essentially determined by the pursuit of self-interest, be it defined rationally or irrationally, and that this is equally true in 1969 and 1864.

Have no doubt we will return to Malzberg in the future, but first it is back to the World War II era and Weird Tales.

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