When Erotomania Strikes
 Morgan McGivern
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(8/04/2008) “The whole object of my existence is to wake up,” Francis Levy said recently, and his new novel is a real eye-opener. With its video of the crotch shot in “Basic Instinct” looping to the tune of the opening lines of “The Communist Manifesto,” Mr. Levy’s book blog gives something of a sense of its flavor.
The uberhorny heroes in “Erotomania: A Romance” are forced to move into a bunker when their waterbed workouts start to endanger the neighbors. They try to create an extrasexual life, at first by channeling their libidinal energy into art, but it simply gets steamier when they start rolling around on canvases and role-playing S&M, with James the Ab-Ex bad boy and Monica the trash-talking philistine.
“She let out a cry whose resonance I hadn’t heard since Stratford, Ontario, where the actress playing Jocasta in a production of ‘Oedipus Rex’ had let out an animal utterance that sent a shiver down my spine,” says James in a rare citation without a date of provenance.
Whether on Wainscott’s Main Street or on Gramercy Park, Mr. Levy wakes up each day by doing somersaults and standing on his head, followed by a strict regimen of writing and much more exercise. He rises at 6 on a typical Thursday in Manhattan. Once the blood has descended to his brain, he works out on a weight deck that stands, to his wife’s chagrin, in the middle of the living room.
Then he writes a poem and at the very least a paragraph of fiction, maybe for his next book, “The Kafka Studies Department,” a collection of stories he calls “emotional mysteries,” or the novel after that, “Seven Days in Rio,” about a sex tourist who gets waylaid at a psychoanalysts’ convention.
“My aim is like a workout — three elements each day,” he explained, the concept being to break the task down “to deal with the terror of writing and the recurrent fear of paralysis,” and the third element being a minimum of one paragraph of nonfiction or maybe more fiction. But first he needs to wrap up the first two “in time to get over to my karate class on 23rd Street.”
It’s two classes, actually, on Thursday: choreographed dojo at 7:30 and kumite, or sparring, at 8:30. Karate engenders “a realistic opinion of one’s self,” Mr. Levy said, by cutting it down to being “right-sized.” It’s “learning versus interpretation” — one practices with all due humility instead of showboating — which is what he learned to do (practice, that is) as a late bloomer “scoring zeros” on I.Q. tests who went on to Columbia and the Yale School of Drama.
After 17 years of karate (he attends seven classes per week), Mr. Levy, who is 61, has a third-degree black belt. “I also skip for 30 minutes on Monday and Wednesday, for 7 minutes on Saturday, and 15 minutes on Sunday (these two last precede spin classes),” he said in a follow-up e-mail from Eze on the French Riviera over the weekend.
He used to box — he called it the highest form of training — but quit after sustaining two concussions.
“Trying to be awake, trying to be energized” is his aim, he had said in Wainscott, in a house two doors down from where his mother spent her last days, “to feel access to facility and mastery.” He made allusions to Plato’s allegory of the cave and to enlightenment. “We’re all sort of sleepwalking,” he sort of explained.
At 9:20 Mr. Levy sits down to write another paragraph. (Many of his short works of fiction have appeared in The Star, including “The Metamorphosis” [2007], in which the narrator awakens to discover that his wife has turned into a Starbucks, and “A Tale of Redemption” [1995], in which a man lures an elephant from a prize parking spot in front of the East Hampton Cinema.)
(Alternatively, Mr. Levy might spend this time working on an academic essay like “Catricide, Matricide, and Magic: The Artist as Chimera,” which was published in Contemporary Psychoanalysis [2008] and chronicles, among other things, his sadomasochistic relationship with a cat.)
Before long, Mr. Levy is headed uptown for a 10:40 appointment with his psychoanalyst of 28 years, whom he sees four days a week. The doctor, a Viennese Freudian Mr. Levy calls Dr. K, practices in a town house the patient calls “ ‘The House on 92nd Street,’ after the vintage Nazi spy movie of the same name.”
“I had a difficult growing-up process,” he said. His father was a Depression-bred, “ferociously ambitious” real estate mogul — Mr. Levy cited Horatio Alger and Theodore Dreiser here — and his mother a leftist who loved literature and paintings and eventually had Parkinson’s.
“I had a very successful father who educated me right out of his ability to communicate with me and likewise a dreamy seductive mother who I idolized as a child.”
The situation had all the “makings of a psychosexual conflict,” the son said. For a period of time, “I was running into a lot of trouble in the two key areas Freud talked about: love and work.” Drinking had a lot to do with this, and Mr. Levy has not had one in over 21 years. “That in and of itself changed my life,” he said.
His career followed “a certain trajectory . . . for people like me” who had followed the humanities-strewn academic track he had. He was disappointed to learn after graduate school that literary artists leaned as much toward narcissism as humanity.
At first Mr. Levy wrote reviews, literary essays, and leisure pieces for publications like The New Republic (his first was on Archie Bunker) and The New York Times Book Review and Arts and Leisure Section.
His short stories, criticism, essays, humor, and poetry have also been published in The Washington Post, Penthouse, Architectural Digest, The Journal of Irreproducible Results, TV Guide, and The Quarterly. His wife, Hallie Cohen, a painter and head of the art department at Marymont Manhattan College (people inquire if she is the model for Monica of the insatiable appetite), illustrated his contributions to The Village Voice.
Ultimately Mr. Levy found that his heart lay, not in writing criticism, but in “architecture” — being able to create a world of his own and spending a good deal of time within it (Joseph Heller, even a realist like Balzac).
“I enjoy it when I’m writing. I can fashion a world the way I want it,” he said, adding (Mark Twain) that it’s nice to be in a profession where you get paid for doing something you like.
In addition to writing, exercising, and managing his late father’s real estate holdings as well as a homeless program, called Safe Haven, that Mr. Levy initiated under the auspices of his parents’ foundation, he is a co-director of the Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination.
Operating out of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute in Manhattan, the center stages talks, poetry, jazz, music, and film series that weave together neuroscience, psychoanalysis, and the humanities. It is named for Philoctetes, a mythical character (Sophocles, Edmund Wilson) with a repulsive wound who provides the bow that wins the Trojan War — and thus represents “art as a way of transcending trauma” or “insight over pathology.”
In the past the center has tackled such topics as “Traffic Congestion, Chaos Theory, and Imagination” and “Divided Society, Divided Self,” a roundtable on sectarian civil wars moderated by Dan Rather. Its board members include psychoanalysts, neuroscientists, and Laurie Anderson, the performance artist.
The center’s co-director is Ed Nersessian, a psychoanalyst, who was in France with Mr. Levy this week. There they were hashing out the details of an upcoming series of roundtables on human sexuality, one of them, about marital sex, called “Mating in Captivity.”
The cover of “Erotomania,” incidentally, bears a photo of two bobonos copulating in the missionary position. “They are said to be “our closest primate relatives,” an introductory note explains, and flout the previously held notion that “face-to-face sex was uniquely human.”
“Have you ever seen the famed surrealist film ‘Chien Andalou’ made by Dali and Bunuel?” Mr. Levy wrote from Eze. “Analysis is a little like that and so is ‘Erotomania.’ ”
“There,” he continued, “my two characters are walking ids who develop personalities. They are exemplifications of evolution on an ontogenic basis to the extent that they move from animal to what we call man in one lifetime instead of over the life of a species.” (In the case of James and Monica, the evolutionary path makes a pit stop at Sam’s Club.)
Returning home from his session with Dr. K by noon, Mr. Levy proceeds next to a cubicle at the Writers Room on Lower Broadway, where he sets to work, revising or experimenting with new projects, until 6:15 p.m., and where there is, he said, “a collective unconscious, an eroticism floating in the air.”
He likened artistic creation to an animal urge: In “Erotomania,” in fact, Monica is diagnosed with hypergraphia satyriasis, which — if such a malady existed — would translate to something like nymphomania paired with a temporal-lobe-inspired compulsion to write.
“Writers are like psychotics,” Mr. Levy said, “every day they enter a very frightening world.” In fact, they need to let go of the ratiocinative mind; as in psychoanalysis, one has to let go of one’s hold on reality.
“I write the way I attend therapeutic sessions,” Mr. Levy explained. “The lesson of therapy was this: that if I made the same appointment with my unconscious on a daily basis I would in fact have a discussion that was going on in spite of myself or any of my resistances.”
Keeping a strict writing regimen allows him to enter “a dangerous world” in a disciplined manner as well as keeping performance anxiety (Dustin Hoffman, Woody Allen) at bay. Some days, he said, he has hypergraphia, and other days he has hypographia.
His regimen “may seem harsh,” he said, “but for me it is liberating because it allows me to perform my life. It removes the debilitating depression I wake up with every day and increases my level of awareness.”
“It keeps me focused on a series of tasks, essentially moments in which I generate great intensity, but this intensity has nothing to do with the romantic notion of inspiration. It is again all a practice, all rather monastic, all based on enormous repetition.”
He acknowledged, however, that as he gets older he may someday have to find a different strategy, since he relies “on a certain hyperactivity . . . predicated on a certain energy level.”
“Jack LaLanne is apparently 93 and still exercising. I tell that to my wife,” Mr. Levy said.
“Erotomania,” which was released by Two Dollar Radio on Friday and is Mr. Levy’s debut novel, has already earned praise from The Los Angeles Times and Publishers Weekly, as well as laudatory cover blurbs from Daphne Merkin and Barney Rosset, among others.