“Couvade” is the ritual of an “expectant”
father sequestering himself as his wife is due to give birth, pantomiming the
birth process, mimicking a response to the birth pangs, and even sometimes
(reportedly) actually experiencing them. It has been reported in cultures worldwide,
though in our culture we don’t hear much about it. Perhaps it’s because fathers
are often present at births now, though in B.’s time that was less common. In
his day, you had an ersatz, comic form of couvade in the stereotype of the nervous
father pacing up and down the hospital hallways, making a nuisance of himself,
probably smoking nonstop and pulling now and then from a flask of bourbon tucked
in his pocket. There are still reports of sympathetic pregnancies on the parts
of fathers, of course. I know women who scoff openly, derisively, at such
nonsense, so maybe it’s best to let that sleeping dog lie. Sympathetic psychosomatic
hysteria be damned!
Here’s my version of the perfect Hell:
Stuff an infinite lineup of freezers with meat, have Mephistopheles throw the
switch on an Infernal power outage, and a week or so later, give me the task of
cleaning them out, one by one for eternity, while an endless loop of Frank
Sinatra tunes blare from fuzzed-out tinny speakers overhead. Sure, the stench
of the rotting meat would be bad enough, but it’s Ol’ Blue Eyes that has this rendition
of Perdition making my flesh crawl even as I imagine it. I simply do not get
why everybody thinks he’s so all-fired great. I’ve always thought Sinatra was a
total phony-baloney. The Rat Pack mystique does nothing for me. But I think my
conception of Sinatra really got poisoned by the film I stumbled into one
Saturday afternoon, that was just playing to itself on TV in the background
until it caught my attention. The film was called Lady in Cement. Sinatra’s character, Tony Rome, a hard-boiled
detective, is scuba diving in search of sunken treasure when he happens on a
beautiful dead blond woman under the water, in a bikini, of course, drowned and
with her feet encased in cement. This begins some sort of search for the
perpetrators, and organized crime is somehow implicated, on and on—cretinous
bullshit of the cheapest order. It’s the one scene that I actually stopped and
watched before I switched the set off that got me. A nude model, posing in an
artist’s studio. She needs a bathroom break. “Johnny, I gotta go to the
bathroom.” “Shut up and sit still,” says the artist. “But Johnny, I gotta go to the bathroom!” On like that for too long, until finally it’s Sinatra who
gives her permission to get off the
stool and visit the ladies room. It may be the most sordid, the most
infuriating thing I’ve ever seen in a film. The misogynistic derision is pretty
obvious, and I’ve run into individuals in my life with all manner of variation
on the same attitude. What especially insults my sensibility is that this was
put to film.
Mistakes get made in the decision
process of corporate filmmaking all the time. This was no mistake. This was consistent
and symptomatic of a deep, culturally embedded, institutionalized misogyny. It
didn’t even have anything to do with the plot. It was a scene of gratuitous
humiliation of a female character. It has its predecessors. My wife used to
like Doris Day movies when she was a kid, but when we watched them again, we
were stunned by the messages all of them carry: The perky, spunky blonde, like
some precocious child, eventually always gets shown her place, and if it takes
Rock Hudson to put her over his knee and spank her, then so much the better.
Lady in Cement has been relegated to the dumpster of our cultural
history, at least, where it belongs. It was made in 1968. It’s a bad movie. I
wouldn’t even want to recycle it. No one watches Doris Day movies anymore, for
the same reasons. These films pick up on and express something that, in
retrospect, has to appear shameful. We have other cultural shames in our past,
and Berryman comes down sometimes on the defensible side of them. DS 10, for
example, is such a great comment on one of those cultural disgraces, and it’s
the kind of thing that has kept me going. He walks a fine line on race in other
ways, but let’s keep that at bay.
This one—I don’t know. It begins
with “I bring you tidings of great joy” which is of course from the Gospel of
Luke, spoken by the angels announcing Jesus’s birth to the shepherds. I wonder
if B. isn’t rather quoting Linus from the Charlie Brown Christmas special, but
no matter. Either way, the meaning is clear enough. (Linus’s reading of Luke is
among the most beautiful and moving moments American television has ever produced
anyway.) B.’s son has been born. (In real life, his son was born in 1956, and
his daughters in 1962 and 1965, so I think the poem might be a dream. Also, no
matter.) But the key line in the first stanza: “Henry is delivered.” My first reaction?
Uh-oh. You’ve got to be kidding me. Does
this not seem like a bit of an egocentric pronouncement? Henry has been delivered? Of what?
Well, okay, he’s worried about his wife and baby, and when they’re pronounced
safe and healthy, there’s a relief involved. Me: Not quite buying it here. But I
do get the second stanza—fathers as ancillary to the birth process, a bit
player. I was present when my son was born, and except for him by and by, I was
the only male in the delivery room. Two doctors, three or four nurses running
in and out, mom, and the prevailing atmosphere from all these busy professional
women presiding over a very difficult birth was, You may stay here, but keep
the hell out of the way. Well, no problem with that. I was completely out of my
depth and sensible enough to admit it. They all handled the crisis like the pros
they were. Finally they handed me my newborn son, I looked into his face and thought,
Oh my God! It’s my Aunt Lola!
It’s the third stanza here that
takes such a weird turn. Henry has made it through his own egotistical (seems
to me) couvade; it’s egotistical because it places emphasis on him. The couvade
can possibly be seen as a sympathetic response to labor, but I rather think it’s
a means of focusing everything that accompanies birth—struggle, pain, and
especially the accolades that follow a successful birth—onto the father, at the
expense of the mother. And that falls right in line with the misogyny I’ve been
worrying about. John Stuart Mill wrote an essay called “On the Subjection of
Women” where he wonders what has given rise to the subjugation of women. He
thinks about men’s early response to women through their mothers and writes, “He
sees that she is superior to him, and believes that, notwithstanding her
superiority, he is entitled to command and she is bound to obey. What must be
the effect on his character, of this lesson?” Men are thrown into an
existential bind from the beginning, according to him. And the observance of the
elemental importance of childbirth later on only reinforces the bind. In other
words, everything in my world shows me that women are to be subject to my
command, yet my observations seem to show that she is superior in many
important ways. The response to the conundrum is to resent that which causes
it. I think there are probably some issues with Mills’s thesis, but give him
some credit. He wrote that in 1856. One would like to think that by 1966, or
so, some progress in questioning the root-level assumptions that Mills makes,
and that carry forward, might have been undertaken. Not yet for everybody. The growing
pressure of feminism, a revolution of sorts, as I touched on a day or two ago, would
give rise to a counter-pressure. Humiliate her. Do violence. But don’t let her
think she’s getting her way. And in the case of this couvade business, steal
her thunder. Take the accolades and make them yours, not because you deserve
them, but because you think you should deserve them.
And the castrating business, and
prying the severed “dongs” along with her teeth from her mouth with a crowbar? Whew.
That’s difficult, difficult stuff to contemplate. Well, at least the agony of
the couvade is better than that other ritual he comes up with, where women
will, you know, do that thing they’ll do if you just relax long enough to let
them…
Oh, horse hockey! Why even mention
it? I got fed up with the castration business before, and who on earth are these people anyway who are so
insecure in their manhood that they fear castration and do violence as a kind
of pre-emptive defense against the fantasies they’re so terrified of?
It’s bigger than our intrepid,
cowering poet, I’ll say that much. Kerouac’s On the Road is full of condescension toward women, a few of
Hemingway’s utterances, like “The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber”, are
inexcusable, and the post-war literary landscape, especially, is full of this
stuff. And then there’s Hollywood. And the Rat Pack. It’s the counterforce, in
action, isn’t it? Eventually, feminism in its next wave made some strides, and I hope
I can say that it has influenced my conception for the better regarding what it
means to have been born a man. So, I have trouble seeing this poem as anything other
than a shining monument, one of many similar cultural artifacts, to a broad,
deep, male-gendered cowardice.
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