The Unmanly Art

Abstract

A few years ago, I went to hear Susan Sontag read from her work. Back then, I amassed autographed books and hoped for authors' insights. Desiring their status, I hoped contact with published authors, like scraps from a saint's hem, would fill me with inspiration. Writers must pass through this portal of illusion before they accomplish anything readable. This stage precedes the neophyte's eventual commitment to long hours, shades drawn to neighbors. Sontag read for an hour. Nothing moved me to scribble insights. I was daydreaming like a beach-goer, observing the crowd shifting in their collapsible chairs, until she started talking about baths - as part of her writing process. Sontag was a bath-taker! Ideas come to me in the tub, she confessed. Her creative impulses were induced by warm bath water. Finding them as difficult as soap to hold, she'd devised a strategy. force myself to write them down so I wouldn't lose them. Her revelation shocked me with its intimacy and familiarity. In my imagination, Sontag transmutated from the author onstage to the image of someone swatting bubbles to get at her pad. I can't help my free associations. I envisioned her antiquely ruminating, a full figure in a porcelain bath. She was clinging to an era when tubs stood on their feet. I recalled a photograph of a woman in a champagne bath during Prohibition. A throng of men pressed in to dip their glasses. Anne Boleyn, too, I remembered, carried on in a similar fashion. She'd irritated Henry VIII by inviting men to fill their goblets from her bath. Sontag had stumbled onto a brilliant connection, however. Water and inspiration, the ancient rite of ablution to achieve a spiritual connection, was well documented among the major religions. As a boy, I'd been sprinkled with enough holy water to understand the significance. Her routine made sense. Writing could be regarded as the outcome of a spiritual breakthrough - the writer shedding the commonplace, musing in a makeshift womb. It reminded me of a variation on the Jewish mikvah, the purification bath. But her public confession required courage, candor. How could anyone reveal this to a crowd of hundreds? Despite what shampoo advertising suggests, baths are personally sacred territory. The act is synonymous with locking doors. As far as I was concerned, no one was entitled to such personal data. I pictured the unwritten sign on my bathroom door: Let no therapist or in-law tear asunder the acts herein accomplished. This was a sore topic between my wife and me. I'm a bather, too. Secretly. I haven't figured out why, but I'm ashamed to admit that I like taking baths. It's illegitimate hygiene. Unless you're female, in bubbles and oil, scrubbing away at peanut butter and jelly or workplace innuendo. Twirling up your hair like Turkish towels. But men? Men shower. Diligently, with business-like efficiency, gregariously: in for as long as the job takes. In an age of microchips and faxes, we've no right to brood over steam. I bathe on weekend afternoons. I submerge myself for an hour, singing and gurgling like a blue whale. Once a writer friend phoned while I was under. My wife came into the bathroom to say, called...and I told her you'd call back when you got out of the tub. You told her I'm in the tub? I bullied. Why didn't you say I was in the shower? I slipped toward a towel, all tail and flippers, as though Katrina were coming right over to witness this. …