Men
The Lenny Bruce quote below comes from Clive James’ Cultural Amnesia, in which it is offered as part of a discussion of the romantically dissolute lifestyle of Peter Altenburg.
Considered by geniuses such as Robert Musil, Alfred Polgar, and Egon Friedell to be one of the great minds of fin de siecle Vienna, he was described by Franz Kafka as being able to discover “the splendors of this world like cigarette butts in the ashtrays of coffee houses.” He was witty, as well:
“There are only two things that can destroy a healthy man: love trouble, ambition, and financial catastrophe. And that’s already three things, and there are a lot more.”
His brilliance was accompanied by a complete inability to lead a stable, successful life, and he subsisted entirely on the charity of the literati and the kindness of his friends. He was also rakishly promiscuous, which leads James to write a bit about the relationship between sexual longing and romantic love:
“The saying goes that men play at love to get sex while women play at sex to get love. The second half of the antithesis is the more likely to be found interesting, because the first sounds closer to the truth… A lot of men will do a lot to get laid. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they play at love. It seems far more likely that love plays with them… [T]here can be no serious doubt, except from those who do not feel it, that the initial attraction of a man towards a woman is felt with the comprehensive force of a revelation. The sentimental view is not the romantic one, but the supposedly realistic one that love follows lust and grows through knowledge.”
James goes on to discuss Albert Camus:
“Men who fall in love easily should do the world the favor of not taking their passions personally. Above all they should do that favor to womankind. Albert Camus, in the week before he was killed, wrote to five different women and addressed each of them as the great love of his life. He probably meant it every time, but had long ago learned the dire consequences for those he adored of making them pay the emotional price for his laughably transferable fixation.”
The chapter is not simply diagnostic, but indeed contains some measure of advice for men subject to the monumental and revelatory flood of infatuation. James suggests that while knowledge of women and the world is useless because of the epiphanetic nature of these feelings’ onset, self-knowledge is helpful, if only to disabuse men of their silly belief in the lucidity of their thoughts.
