Myra Breckinridge

An American Epiphany

by Douglas Milburn

Invocation of the Muse
Yes, Myra. Who would have thought it? Not only is Randolph, your world-famous dental analyst, incredulous at the enormity of your accomplishment; so was much of the literate world when it was sprung on them even without the ballyhoo of a publicity campaign in 1968. For American (and therefore. Western, and therefore, world) civilization, it is a unique deed. Who would have dreamed that the manifest destiny of the experiment, America, so long misapprehended, should turn out to be, finally, sexual-political? That it should fall to America to face the final frontier within? That all the dilly-dallying about as we made our way across the continent should turn out to be a only crude externalized enactment of one of the major, internal resolutions-revolutions in the history of the species? What shade can I conjure from our past (or present) who might, in dumb pre-figuration, offer some consolation to us now captured and held fast by the powerful sweep of your vision, the awful depth of your insight, and the irresistible attractive force of your exemplary behavior?

Speak to us, Myra! Guide my hand where it will go, where it must go if the new American Resolution is to be won at last. Who can I turn to, if not you, Myra, erstwhile-benefactor, now benefactress? Surely not to Mark our Hermes, nor Herman our Prometheus, nor Emily our Cassandra, nor F. Scott our Apollo, nor Ernest our Aries, nor William our Pluto, nor Henry our Dionysius, nor Allen our Ganymede, nor even to Walt our Orpheus. No, your voice alone can I heed. Hollywood Hermaphrodite! You alone can still our trembling hearts as we face the unforgiving judgment of posterity, when (we still feel) we must measure ourselves by their behavior, our fathers', in that distant century and see how far short of the goals they set for us all we have in our fear fallen. My rationality, so finely honed on the now-tamed, brutally smoothed rocks of the continent, tells me no modern voice knows what we are to do now. But my heart says, Myra knows!

Myra knows! Myra knows! Myra .knows!

Speak, Myron/Myra, Hermes/Aphrodite, final apotheosis of homo sapiens! And I, last in the line of homo sapiens which began I think at Lascaux if not Olduvai, shall record your words, shall record words one last time.

So Myra turns out to be a kind of unblocked Stewart Brand (Stewart Brand being perhaps the most piquant living specimen of the traditional American tragic male figure; he begins his public life with the line, "We are as gods so we might as well start acting like it," and then in the best Yankee tradition of technological sublimation, the best he can do is create the Whole Earth Catalog). The goddess Myra visits her divine, implacable fury not on herself though but on Rusty Godowsky, the stand-in for all us males. A neat reversal of the earlier, Zeus-Semele liaison, but with the same result: both Rusty and Semele get it in the end.

Myra Breckinridge.
Myrabreckinrldge.
My rubrick in ridge.

Indeed Myra is god-like in her single-mindedness. In her awful purposefulness, in her sadistically playful manipulation of the mortals around her. The epiphany is even clearer in at least this respect in the movie: Michael Same inserts apocalyptic images of at appropriate moments— Myra's first meeting with Buck Loner = the killing of Jesse James; the rape = the atomic bomb, etc.

My rubber, heck, and ridge.

The American Pantheon:
MB/2 makes especially clear the extent to which the rate of change has accelerated. The Greek gods were good for at least a thousand years. But the American manhood mythos as deified, purveyed, and intensified by Hollywood has seen its pantheon rise and fall in one long generation—from The Great Train Robbery to MB/2. And this time the gods and goddesses are around to act out their own deaths, to attend their own wakes, to watch their own burials, to ponder the puzzling, mysterious reality of their own Götterdämmerung.

(Hopeful sign; not even the Greeks dared this kind of open assault on Olympus; and the Wagnerian siege was more propitiatory than genuinely apocalyptic.)

Mae West. The reviewers were horrified that the mummy should be resurrected from her twenty-one-inch, snow-filled coffin. As if she had ever died..... Have Bergman, Fellini, Truffaut, et al. once again so obscured our American child's eyes with the ancient European Golden Fleece of Intellect?

Joseph Morgenstern in Newsweek:
Mae West, playing a ghastly travesty of the travesty of womanhood she once played, has a Mae West face painted on the front of her head and moves to and fro like the Imperial Hotel during the 1923 Tokyo earthquake.

Ah, J.M. You forget that gods act (in all senses of the word) according to their own rules.

John Huston. His opening invitation to Myra at his acting academy— the lure of stardom—is the eulogy for the Star System = the American Pantheon. Almost wistfully Huston speaks the lines as if reading the copy from an old Pantheon recruiting poster. And as Huston is serving here as stand-in for the unapproachable, unassailable Zeus, the speech (together with the whole Buck Loner role) is also a eulogy for the Standard-received Behavioral Model for American Males.

Stanley Kauffmann in The New Republic:
John Huston plays the head of a Hollywood acting school and continues his long process of degradation.

Raquel Welch. As the current Aphrodite (end of the line). Who else could play the part? In Two Sisters Vidal tells of meeting Raquel at a French garden party; he comments that she was clearly born to play Myra.

The casting is not perfect, because there exist already long-standing vacancies in the Pantheon (awful intimation). To play Rusty we really need a young Rock Hudson, but he is nowhere in sight. And for Mary-Ann we similarly need a young Loretta Young. So we have to make do with unknowns and let the resident, established, and functioning deities carry the film.

The American Way of Business
Among other roles she assumes, the goddess Myra is the New Woman, playing the men's shitty and petty little (but nonetheless dangerous) games, the ones so astonishingly over-valued by Lionel Tiger and so incredibly well mimicked by Kate Millett. But Myra does not play them quite by the rules (unlike Kate Millett). Myra keeps mentioning the fact that in these business games nobody trusts anybody, even though the cardinal rule of the American Experiment (You pretend to trust everybody) is so skillfully followed by the older male players and so rarely mentioned that the naive newcomer to the game can very easily, as Buck might put it, get his ass chewed but good. Myra keeps mentioning the real fact of mutual distrust, much to everybody's discomfort. And neither Buck nor his lawyers, Flagler Sr. and Flagler Jr., can stand before such honesty.

Myra's divine mission is somewhat confused by two factors:
ONE: she has strong emotional ties to Myron and to Myron's violence (revenge!).
TWO: she is woman-but-not-woman (the source of her tragedy, finally).

After her destruction of Rusty, she becomes fixated on "the uterine mystery" (in the long passage above she calls it "the last mystery"), and she is drawn toward Mary-Ann (Rusty's now estranged fiancée) as inexorably as she had earlier been drawn toward Rusty. With this important difference: she could force Rusty to accept her on her own god-like terms because her aim was to overpower the American male, to rape him, to render him passive victim through the application of all necessary force. But Mary-Ann will accept her only on her own, woman's, terms. Mary-Ann, in repulsing Myra's advances in effect says: Me woman, you woman too, we no fuck.

And following the accident, Myra-become-Myron-again succumbs. And we learn that Myra had been maintaining her femininity only by means of a continuing series of hormone shots (hitherto unmentloned in her memoirs which were supposed to tell all—but then she also conceals from us the fact of the sex-change operation until page 235).

The accident interrupts the shots and Myra is soon Myron again, albeit still without a penis, but with a new mission:

From violence to humility: the course of the book, the course of the movie, the course of the nation, the course of homo sapiens.

Myra Knows Best
Myra not just as New Woman but as a major attempt at New Human? Interim stage perhaps? Surrounded by a world of pseudo-sex-practicing, flagellation-prone, marriage-bound creatures, she makes a valiant effort in both her verbal and non-verbal behavior to transcend the moribund mediocrities whom she encounters everywhere.

For example, an instance of her verbal behavior: her comments on movies are frequently brilliant. In MB/2 we get to watch Buck's reaction: he gets a look of blank, stupid confusion on his face every time he eavesdrops on her lectures. Letitia at least has some understanding of the commercial value of Myra's mind ("You have all the kinky angles that are in right now"). Rusty of course is totally turned off by her words—he needs Mary-Ann (who in Myra's judgment is mentally retarded) to satisfy his shaky masculine ego.

Margot Hentoff in The New York Review of Books:
...there is the strangest sense of displacement. If the quintessential dominant woman, all teeth and breast and muscle (resembling no one so much as Joan Crawford), bent on the final humiliation of the male is really a man who develops a taste for women—well, as the kids say, it messes up your head.

The situation to be faced then is that the gods themselves are after all subject to change, to growth. Even the American God of Masculinity who has now appeared to us behind four masks: Huck, D.J. (in Mailer's Why Are We in Vietnam), Myron, and Myra.

D.J. is only Huck moved to suburbia, somewhat better educated, much more affluent, and considerably more exposed to the reality, the level of violence which the god comes to expect and demand of his male worshippers. And it all leads to D.J.'s brief, frightened touching of Tex's genitals under the arctic night sky, followed by panic and flight back to the orthodox masculine role: off to Vietnam, boy!

And Myra. Myra Breckinrldge is Huck Finn in drag, still fleeing Jim who is himself. The terror of loving any male, including oneself, is so great that Huck and D.J. can only become re-appear as Myra and resort at last to the ultimate self-mutilation (whack it off!) in order to come as close as possible to being female, since it's clearly all right for some women to love some men (Mom loved me as a child, however she may feel about me now). Becoming Myra, they go into the ultimate drag only to find that masculine violence is more than foreskin deep.

Of course the gods change. And, being gods, they delight in presiding over their own demise fully as much as they delight in all other phenomena. It is only mortals who have difficulty accepting change.

Brim? Cringe, dyke!

Have Thine Own Way, Goddess!
Myra violates Rusty cruelly, brutally, mercilessly. Both Huck and D.J. wanted and needed her to rape Rusty in that way (else how could she have done it at all?); but they, like her, must have writhed in post-coital anguish, for the violation turned out to be not just of Rusty but of self as well.

And Myra flees with the speed and force of unconscious compulsion (she can't even begin to figure out what's happening) from the violent self still surging within in spite of her self-castration, into a new, re-born Myron who—a final irony—is nothing if not a reproduction of Rusty before the rape. One of the revelations for Myra comes when Mary-Ann speaks of Rusty's gentleness:

The spirit of the monster Myra sought to slay passed, at the moment of its death, into her. And she is doomed to live out the life she took from Rusty. Myra and Mary-Ann: Mr. And Mrs. Myron Breckinridge, of The Farm.

Brigid Brophy in The Listener:
By the tragic inevitability that forms the   ironic skeleton of all great comedy, it is her [Myra's] own hubris that brings on her the accident whereby her transformation is undone. Myron is re-virilised and, by the same stroke, intellectually castrated. The end is nightmare, and by an Inspired reversal of the sci-fi conventions the nightmare consists in the triumph not of fantasy but of conformism. Myron marries the college boy's girl and lives suburbanly ever after. The way we actually live now is horror enough.

Big dice rank merry.
Mike I dig cranberry.

Watch What You Do with That Scalpel, Doc!
Myron's emasculation of himself is the last extreme of male self-hatred In the context of the continuing sexual role-games (suicide as the ultimate act of self-negation proceeds from the assumption that all roles will be stopped by the act). Myron by his act of self-mutilation says to the American God, "Take, eat. For this is my body and blood." His act = the essence of American reality as lived by males. Castration in one form or another (including, especially, the symbolic wound of circumcision) as the implicit price the god demands for continued approval. The only proper sacrifice to a god which demands murder (of self and of other) as the price of continued psychic integrity—we meet life on the god's brutal terms, which are the only terms we know, having been taught them since infant-hood.

Vidal, quoted by Paul Zimmerman in Newsweek:
"The fact that I do many different things is, to many people, a sign of frivolity. I'm not playing the role expected of a serious 'American' writer. My whole attack—my wit and irony-Is distasteful to Americans."

Break gin? Dry crime.

Myron's act is mythic in that it is the ultimate clarification, explication of what males do all the time: the violence they perpetrate seemingly on others, even in the most extraordinarily warped guises of helpfulness (Vietnam), is at bottom self-destructive and results not only in impotence and in a very real loss of any kind of sexual vitality but in a living death.

Creak bin, dry grime.

Intellectual Blather
Myra-become-Myron-again, having pushed sexual roles as prescribed by the society to their last limit and having failed (she destroys Rusty and she destroys herself) is forced to the, for her, humiliating and, for us, extraordinary conclusion that "nothing is what it seems and what nothing seems is false." It is a position of total relativism without the life-sustaining underpinnings of oriental/mystical relativism. It is the purest form of the relativism which pervades and characterizes American pragmatism.

In a more inclusive sense, referring to behavior other than sex-role behavior, it seems that the chief rule implicit in the behavior of Renaissance man, with the final intensification occurring in American man, has been:

Push the obvious to the limit and see what happens. Or put another way:

Assume as rigorously as possible that things are as they seem to the rational mind, then act exclusively on the conclusions thus acquired.

Clearly positivistic science is based on this assumption. The entire methodological orthodoxy of scientific theory and experiment is based on it. If experimental results are not reproducible, the experiment is assumed to be invalid—the "validity" or "invalidity" of all other events being ignored. We call the theory "science," the behavior "technology," and the result "progress."

In philosophy, the rule appears as skepticism: God is clearly dead because she is not visibly alive the way the obvious living creatures around us are alive.

In management (both corporate and governmental) the rule appears in the guise of pragmatism: assume the other guy or the other nation is out to get your ass because it is obviously a dog-eat-dog world.

In art the rule appears in the form of irony, ranging from the arbitrariness of aleatory art to the self-mockery of pop art.

Myra's (& Our) Tragedy
Myra Breckinrldge is Renaissance man at the end of his rationalistic tether. A study in the final evil of symbol-manipulative finitude. Faust copped out with his bloody dike-building. Myra makes it (almost) by pressing on to the point of dyke-destruction.

Faust is "saved" only because he stops short of the final limit, only because to the end he is still mumbling about in the subjunctive—Ich möchte wohl sagen, verweile doch...("I might actually say to this moment, tarry awhile..."). Myra falls and falls permanently because she hurtles right past the subjunctive— "if there is a god on the human scale..."—into the reality-reflection of the unhesitating, doubt-free indicative: "....I am she."

The world Myra finds awaiting her, her presumed Eden, the world beckoning at the end of her behavior proceeding consistently and rigorously from the assumption that things are what they seem, is precisely the same world from which she originally fled: Myron at the end is re-playing his father's life, just as his father had re-played his grandfather's life, etc., and MaryAnn is re-playing her mother's life and so on. It is a closed system.

What Myra took to be transcendental behavior turns out to be only the vigorous effort need, to come full circle in the closed system of symbol-manipulative finitude, to discover that if one exploits the final possibilities of a civilization which assumes that things are what they seem, one arrives back at the starting place (perhaps minus a body-part or two). The end of the road is the beginning of the road is the end of the road.

Myra Breckinridge is the lovely monster standing guard at the entrance and exit to the maze of History. Not Aphrodite, but Minotaur, she. Old Eve—and Old Adam. Catherine Earnshaw and Gerald Critch. Greer Garson and Humphrey Bogart. Isolde and Parzifal. The Fury which Jake Horner is fleeing and which Ahab is seeking.

Her extreme, destructive behavior the last argument of hubris-ridden western man: the fly's desperate, last-gasp attack on the maddeningly clear but impervious walls of the fly-bottle of symbol-manipulation. Her mutilated body is individually all our mutilated bodies—our circumcised penises, our hysterectomied uteruses. Her mutilated body, societally our brutally sublimated culture: she rapes Rusty, and Rusty is raped with the huge eternal erection of the Washington Monument while above him sways the pair of enormous, synthetic Astrodome-breasts.