William Butler Yeats once said that sex and death are the only things that can interest a serious mind. If that's the case, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler is one serious guy--and seriously clever. His last book, "Severance," was 62 short stories, told through the voices of recently severed heads. (Did you know that there's enough blood left in a severed head to sustain consciousness for one and a half minutes? Or that in that heightened state of emotion, we speak at about 160 words a minute? Each story was 240 words exactly--160 words times one and a half.) His latest, "Intercourse," which comes out next month, is about sex--but it's not erotica. It's the stream-of-consciousness inner monologues of coupling couples throughout history, largely based on actual period research. Walt Whitman? He did it with Oscar Wilde. Adolf Hitler and John F. Kennedy? They have only one degree of coital separation. "Even with the unusual couples in there, there is strong circumstantial evidence to show they've been together," says Butler, who read over 100 biographies and researched dozens of historical periods to get the people, places and tone of voice right. "These stories aren't about how the bodies are fitting together but about how we assess our lives and yearnings during the act." Butler listens in on Adam and Eve on a patch of earth cleared of thorns and thistles, and Sigmund Freud and his sister-in-law in a hotel in the Swiss Alps. We asked him to discuss some favorites. Excerpts:
Adolf Hitler and Inga Arvad
The place: Berlin, 1935. Hitler's office floor, during an interview with the 22-year-old Danish reporter. "It was a long session, and people speculated on the teeny bit that came out of it," says Butler. A year later, she was his date to the Berlin Olympics. The 46-year-old Hitler's thoughts: Jews, and the perfect Aryan mouse beneath him. Hers: his violet eyes. What's funny, says Butler, is the single degree of coital separation between Hitler and JFK: Arvad would hit the sack with the future president just seven years later, at the Fort Sumter Hotel in Charleston, S.C. Even funnier, says Butler, is that--unbeknownst to the residents of that hotel--there were mics hooked up to the steamy couple's room. On the other end? None other than J. Edgar Hoover, who, in 1946, would consummate with his associate director of the FBI, Clyde Tolson. "It's not a stretch that J Edgar Hoover's fantasies were of Jack," says Butler.
Robert F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe
It happened at the Santa Monica beach house of Kennedy's brother-in-law, in 1962. Ten minutes and counting, RFK, then the attorney general, compares himself to John: "I can hear her saying inside her head, Oh, General, yes, you are ever so much better in bed than the President." And Marilyn? She thinks about her life, her emptiness, "the nothing that I am." Says Butler, she's "trying to find a self, an identity with all these men."
Bill and Hillary Clinton
Late spring, 1971, in a rented beach house in Milford, Conn. Even in bed, 24-year-old law student Hillary has her eye on the prize, says Butler. "This had to be done eventually and the personal is political all right," she thinks. Bill, meanwhile, dreams of Coltrane, the sax--and of his bride-to-be: "She's smart and she's tough and I know she won't put up with certain things from me and I don't want to lose her but before she's done here I've got to figure out how to get on top."
Santa Claus and Elf Ingebirgitta
A back room of Santa's workshop, the North Pole, 2008: Butler even researched elf tradition for this one. Poor Mrs. Claus has turned a blind eye, and Santa's XXXmas wish is to ravish one of his elves without thinking of his wife. "I love metaphors," says Butler. "One of my favorites is that Mrs. Clause's hair is the color of Stockholm street slush, which really tells us how Santa is feeling about his marriage at the moment." Too bad for Santa, his elf--whose name is a piecing together of real elf names--is dreaming of the Easter Bunny.