Stockholm Sindrome (Sic)

What I remember most about the Atlas Bookstore, a dusty dumping ground for old paperbacks I frequented when I was in high school, was how every title that wasn’t A Texan Looks at Lyndon seemed to be I Am Curious (Yellow).

The Atlas was a huge storefront space in a low-rent stretch of Walker Avenue in Greensboro, North Carolina. It shared its block with a couple of dive bars and was across the street from a third dive bar and a dingy supermarket. You could find Shakespeare and Dickens at the Atlas, but most patrons, frankly, came for the smut. In fact, the incongruous thing about the place was the absence of window treatments, which streamed the premises with daylight. This not only highlighted every speck of dust and mildewed book jacket, but ill-served the purposes of the almost exclusively male clientele. Walk into the Atlas at any given time and you’d see a smattering of men staring dully into pink-covered books with titles like Horny Housewives and The Postman Always Cums Twice, and teenagers like me listlessly leafing through Steinbecks and Hemingways while stealing glances at racier material.

But then, the Atlas and its environs weren’t anyplace you’d really expect to encounter respectable members of society, so its patrons never seemed to mind being thrust into the spotlight, as it were. But I did. I was so nervous and self-conscious in those days that I’d play the Hemingway game even though nobody gave a crap what I was reading (or pretending to read). That included the cashier, who typically himself was absorbed in a novel pulsating with such action verbs as, well “pulsating.”

The pink-covered books were sequestered in their own section, and thus inaccessible to the easily shamed such as me. Still, that left me the rest of the store. The books were loosely separated by genre, but many were misplaced. And re-shelving was infrequent, to put it charitably. This meant that even within the store’s vaguely homogenous neighborhoods—history books, romance novels, honest-to-God literature—one always could find outliers.

Nine times out of 10, the misfit book seemed to be A Texan Looks at Lyndon. Subtitled “A Study in Illegitimate Power” and written by one J Evetts Haley, it had been a huge bestseller in 1964 but by 12 or 14 years later merely was the biggest cumulative log in the raging fire hazard that was the Atlas Bookstore. In fact, I needed Internet help this week to so much as bring back the author’s name, and I hadn’t known until that moment that the book ever had sold well—let alone that J Evetts Haley, who died in 1995, had run for Texas governor in 1956 on a segregationist platform. All I knew of Haley from my Atlas days was that a million copies of his book for some reason had been lowered by dump truck into a forlorn retail establishment in North Carolina’s Piedmont Triad.

Honestly, I don’t think in all my visits to the Atlas I so much as opened A Texan Looks at Lyndon. Although Johnson’s presidency hardly was ancient history in the mid-to-late 1970s, by that time Johnson’s alleged crimes against America had been superseded by Richard Nixon’s very real ones. And Nixon’s offenses had succeeded in accomplishing what Haley couldn’t quite pull off with LBJ—getting a sitting president booted from office. To the extent that I gave Haley’s book any thought at all, it seemed little more than an irrelevant historical artifact. Mostly, it simply was an inexplicably prolific fact of Atlas life. For years afterward, A Texan Looks at Lyndon would be shorthand among my male peers for “omnipresent uselessness.” (It thus would prove an apt descriptor for such 1970s phenomena as Gerald Ford’s Whip Inflation Now campaign and, later, Jimmy Carter’s presidency.)

Anyway, if nine of every 10 books outside the Atlas’s smut section seemed to be J Evetts Haley’s invective against LBJ, the remaining book often turned out to I Am Curious (Yellow). That was the name of Swedish director Vilgot Sjoman’s best-known film. It had been released in 1967—first in Europe and later in the US—and hailed by many critics as daring and groundbreaking.

What, you hadn’t known I’d been a budding cineaste at that age? Maybe it would help if shared a description from Amazon.com. Noting that yellow is a primary color of the Swedish flag, Amazon calls I Am Curious (Yellow) a “radical fusion of film and life” that “tapped into the political, social, and psychosexual condition” of a nation that was “on the eve of worldwide cultural revolution.”

Oh, then there’s this: “The book (or film outline) contains beautiful yet erotic B&W stills from the movie itself.”

I imagine now you fully appreciate my teenage interest in what Amazon describes as “an envelope-pushing event” in cinematic history. Explicit pictures! And lots of them! From a trailblazingly frank movie that I now know prompted an obscenity case in this country that rallied acclaimed novelist, civil libertarian and naked lady aficionado Norman Mailer to its cause.

Not that I’ve ever, to this day, seen the film. But I must say, it was groundbreaking for me, too. That “film outline” that found its way to paperback, and later to the Atlas, definitely opened my eyes to some “radical fusions,” let’s just say. “Erotic”? That wasn’t a word I employed then. But, hot? Yes. Or, as the Swedes say, “Ja.”

Memories of that place and time came streaming back to me—not unlike dust-illuminating sunlight into the old Atlas—earlier this week when I spotted a link to an obituary. “Lena Nyman—Star of I Am Curious Films”, it read. I clicked on the link and found out a lot I hadn’t known about the woman I’d seen nude decades ago but never had met, and the film that had spawned a book, that in turn had inspired my unrequited desire to visit and perhaps relocate to Scandinavia.

Lena Nyman, still craggily attractive in a 2006 photo, had been 66 when she’d passed away on February 4, the New York Times chronicled, having succumbed in Stockholm to “a long illness.” She’d had a distinguished career that had encompassed more than 50 Swedish films and television shows, including Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata in 1978. But she’d always been best known for an early role as “an intensely serious young woman who wanders Stockholm as an amateur reporter, raising questions about mores that seem to her to have calcified Swedish life.” The obituary continued, “She asks people if Sweden really is a classless society and badgers union officials about why the labor movement is so conservative.”

This was, of course, I Am Curious (Yellow) that was being described. I had two thoughts when I read those lines. One was that American porn of that general era had been comparatively shallow—I doubt Marilyn Chambers quizzed any union officials about their commitment to social justice once she got them Behind the Green Door. My other thought was that I could just imagine Lena’s energetic interviewing techniques resulting in incredible, um, access.

I learned that I Am Curious (Yellow) had been made for $160,000 but netted $5 million in its first six months on US screens in 1969, after the hype-stoking publicity of the obscenity case. I read that legendary Times film critic Vincent Canby had pronounced the sex scenes to be “so unaffectedly frank as to be non-pornographic.”

That’s not the way I remember them, Vince. At least as they’d appeared, frozen in black and white, in the pages of a series of battered paperbacks I’d examined over a period of years with my own journalistic intensity.

There’d been a follow-up film, I Am Curious (Blue), in 1968—blue being the other color of the Swedish flag. The Times described it as “almost a reprise.” Thinking about that, I had to admire Lena the reporter’s dogged determination to take even deeper her crusade to free a nation of its sexual shackles. And yes, I kind of wondered if there’d been a Blue book. And, if so, why it couldn’t have found its way to the Atlas and displaced at least a few copies of A Texan Looks at Lyndon?

Anyway, here’s to Lena Nyman. Thanks for the memories, and rest in peace. And here’s to the Atlas, as well. Appropriately enough, after years of befouling paperback books and young minds, it effectively washed its mouth out with soap. It became a laundromat.