The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered (18 page)

Read
Time Remaining
— and McCourt’s other books — like in-stallments of the thinking gay man’s
Encyclopédie
. Absorb the crowded intensity of this novel: old movie plots, snippets of fine poetry (Schuyler! Auden! Ashbery!), situationist arguments, modern art, sassy banter on a midnight train, bad puns and brilliant ones. He helps explain the world, through a thousand little examples and citations. Maybe the texts won’t, in the end, point to the big answer, but, to let Odette have the last word, “All a body wants, really, is a little
emphasis
now and again.”

Houghton-Mifflin,
1994

Rick Whitaker

In 1988, while a music student at the University of Cincinnati, I decided to move to New York and become a writer. I got on a bus with a friend and in early September we arrived at Port Authority with less than $1,000 each, no prospects for work or shelter, no friends, just one contact (my friend’s, not mine), no portfolio. We stayed a night or two with the generous man my friend knew who lived in a small midtown studio, and we proceeded to make our way in the big city. Despite the difficulties and poverty, we managed. I worked my way slowly into the circle of writers around Gordon Lish, editor of
The Quarterly,
my favorite literary magazine, and eventually I studied with him and worked for him at the magazine and at Knopf publishers. My first friend in New York was Yannick Murphy, one of Lish’s students, whose 1987 book
Stories in Another Language
, was my favorite book. At the age of 21 or so, I began to see the kind of life I wanted. I did some writing and I read everything that appealed to me, and I developed a sensibility that seems to have been tied pretty inextricably to my being gay.

Mark Merlis’s
American Studies
is the novel that demonstrated more than any other, when I found it at the age of 26, that the kind of gay sensibility with which I found myself in sympathy could, at its most sophisticated, synthesize wit (a pair of bottoms are described as “two tunnels with no train”), intellect (the literary critic F.O. Matthiessen is the model for a character, and the writing rings with intelligence throughout), eroticism (the interplay between the narrator and his young hospital roommate is quintessentially sexy), and emotional depth in a story that’s riveting, memorable and fun. Merlis’s novel, published in 1994 (his first and best so far), is for me the literary achievement par excellence.

The narrator of
American Studies
, a low-level bureaucrat named Reeve, has been hospitalized after being badly beaten up by a man he’d brought home for an anonymous sexual encounter, the kind of nocturnal business for which he has a long-term yen: a rough scene with a blindfold and a tight belt around his wrists. (Reeve, at 62, has become accustomed to reluctantly paying for his usually acquiescent, if rough, young men.) He shares his hospital room with a beautiful blue-collar man in his twenties whose loose-fitting gown gives Reeve a few chances to glimpse bits of his flesh, his magnificent back, his perfect ass. This forced intimacy between the older man and the younger, and the plethora of associations it inspires, is one of the main tropes of the novel.

The other is Reeve’s long-ago close friendship with Tom Slater, a famous, much older professor at the unnamed university where Reeve pursued but never finished his PhD. Slater was a semi-closeted, mostly chaste übermentor to many a handsome, wholesome young student (Reeve remembers them as Slater’s “Wheaties eaters”), one of whom, Jimmy, became Slater’s amanuensis and companion in the year or so before Slater was exposed as a Communist and homosexual and shot himself. Slater, who was involved in a shadowy way with the Communist Party during the McCarthy years, lost his position after Jimmy complied with an official request from the university to reveal the nature of their relationship, which included some (distinctly mild) sex. Tom Slater is the character based to some extent on the real-life figure of F. O. Matthiessen, who was for many years a professor at Harvard, where he helped found the field of American Studies; he, similarly outed as both far-left-wing and gay, jumped from a window to his death in 1950.

(I recently asked Mark Merlis to confirm that he used Matthiessen as a close model for Slater. He replied with the happy news that
American Studies
will be back in print in early 2009. He declined to answer my question directly, referring me to the preface in the new edition — when it is published and available at bookstores).

Reeve, in his sick bed, is occupied by thoughts of Slater because Howard, Reeve’s gay friend, has brought Slater’s book,
The Invincible City
, along with
Daniel Deronda
, for Reeve to read while recovering. Slater’s book, a brilliant swerve by Merlis from Matthiessen’s
The American Renaissance
, is a long, erudite study of nineteenth-century American letters. Reeve has never been able to get through it, and he never does, but the book is nonetheless a potent symbol of achievement and power. Mathiessen’s
American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman
has achieved classic status for its power as a critical study of a great era for American writing. His book is assertive and accurate. He could be warmer and more amusing, but he is bona fide
emeritus
.

The opening paragraph of
American Studies
could be narrated from almost any time period imaginable. The prose marches elegantly along in an almost classical mode. It could be Achilles speaking, or Alexander the Great, or Whitman, or an aging dandy from an Andrew Holleran novel.

American Studies
itself is just “an inch or so short of indecency.” Reeve’s lust, and the lust of all the other characters in the book, is powerfully destructive and disreputable. Everyone is rebuked and forsaken, and worn out by the mad pursuit of un-intimate sex. Merlis is among the blackest of comedians in his description, woven into the narrative, of loneliness and depression. Reeve tries to keep up his amusing tone for us, but we know he has suffered and is suffering now. Both physically in pain and rather acutely depressed, Reeve is a lonely, unsuccessful gay man with nothing much to look forward to. It’s amazing he’s even bothered to write this story at all; the polished narrative seems to be the sole object and product of his ambition.

At first Reeve can’t see the boy clearly, lacking his eyeglasses. He imagines him with “contours from the memory of all other boys.” Just knowing the boy is there fills Reeve with “excitement and shame.” The wounded ephebe sports a baseball-size bandage on his thumb. He “spends much of the day just looking at it, cradling it mournfully in his intact hand.” Reeve is unsure at first, but feels the boy may possibly not yet have perceived his queerness; the tubes and bandages are his disguise, his “flame is shaded if not extinguished.”

The writing is sharp and insightful, as here when Reeve is caught staring: “He looks back at me, his eyes unreadable, nothing behind them. He isn’t really looking into me; the shades of cruelty that pass over his face are just the flickering blue light of the television. It is only in my imagination that straight men look right into me. “

The friendship between the young student Reeve and his mentor Slater was rife with friction and irreconcilable difference. Reeve is freely promiscuous; Slater is uptight and frigid. Reeve envies Slater his prestige and wealth (and the apartment that comes with his professorship); Slater Reeve’s youthful adventures and fun. Neither is prepared to enter fully into the other’s life. Reeve is too self-centered, Slater too proud and proper. Reeve dreams of and pursues sexual ecstasy while Slater is obsessed with an intellectual ideal that is sadly incompatible with mere sex. One day Reeve asks what Slater’s new book is about (he was just finishing
The Invincible City
).

When Slater makes a remark about Melville’s long-frustrated desire, Reeve confesses that “I was so young and self-centered, I took that as directed at me. I was starting to answer that I had been ready enough.” There’s a wide distance between the two: young Reeve is on the near side of sensuality, Slater on the far. Back in the novel’s present, with the now older Reeve hospitalized and besotted with his indifferent companion, the roles are reversed, and the young man’s self-centeredness reminds Reeve of his own. He understands, though he doesn’t quite admit, that he was a wholly inadequate friend and that Slater’s suicide was the final indication that the abyss between the two men was indeed unbridgeable.

Reeve is ambivalently grateful for his young companion in the hospital room, just as Slater was for Reeve’s company. Reeve is in the habit of seeking out companionship at almost any price, though his assignations are always unsatisfying and bereft of affection, let alone love. The tension between sordid — but potentially “sacred” — contact and lonely (but elegant) solitude is the overriding preoccupation of Merlis’s rigorous, irrepressible
American Studies
.

William Morrow,
1981

Jim Marks

Charles Nelson’s 1981 novel about a gay military medic in the Vietnam War is something of a conundrum. It’s not that it poses a riddle without a good answer, but rather that it is a puzzle whose pieces can be fit together in different ways.

It might seem strange to suggest that
The Boy who Picked the Bullets Up
abounds in complexity since at first glance it appears straightforward. It follows a year (August 1966-July 1967) in the life of ex-Detroit Tiger farm team baseball infielder Kurt Strom, from his initial training to be a medic in Boston through the stages of his military career with occasional detours into family life. Big (six foot three, two hundred and five pounds), good-looking Kurt has an infinite relish for sex with other men, and usually encounters few difficulties in gratifying his urges.

His experience in Vietnam has two markedly different stages. In his initial deployments he works both at a large military hospital and as the medic stationed with a battalion of marines in the front line jungle. These initial deployments paint a
Catch-22
picture of military life combined with sometimes gruesomely graphic images of maimed bodies in the hospital and in the field. In his last major deployment he is stationed in a remote village as part of an early version of the pacification strategy designed to win “the hearts and minds” of the local population. The soldiers’ efforts initially appear successful; however the operation ends in disaster when their compound is overrun by the Viet Cong. Kurt has a harrowing escape which he barely survives. There is a brief coda in which Kurt is once again wounded and then spirals down in a combination of drug addiction and sexual abuse, ending ambiguously on the road.

Its narrative technique gives the book charm and complexity.
The Boy who Picked the Bullets Up
is an epistolary novel, a series of letters home. Dorothy Allison has noted that the gay novel is a novel of character and this technique allows Nelson to paint Kurt’s character through his own voice. At times jaunty, often ribald, with an off beat sense of humor, Kurt can wax serious and philosophical. In addition to sex, his great passion is reading and he presents himself as the company’s egghead oddball when he’s not demonstrating his athletic prowess. While he is a generally engaging, sympathetic character, he shows his Southern upbringing with an ugly racist streak and can at times come across as crudely misogynistic.

Kurt communicates with multiple correspondents, primarily his grandmother (somewhat confusingly addressed as “Mom”); Arch, a former teammate from his baseball days; Chloe, a female cousin roughly his age; and Paul, a gay college professor friend. For each, Kurt adopts a slightly different persona, tone and subject matter, although all but “Mom” get his sign-off “Relentlessly, Kurt.” Writing “Mom” and Chloe, Kurt tends to focus on his complicated family back in Louisiana; with Arch he’ll reminisce about their team days while Paul gets raunchy accounts laced with literary allusions (the novel takes its title from a poem by Arthur Rimbaud; other poems by Rimbaud preface the individual sections of the novel and the grim, disillusioned jauntiness of the decadent poet presides over the entire text). Occasionally Kurt will describe the same event to two different recipients. For instance, a light hearted thank you note to Chloe for a Christmas gift of rum, in which he sardonically mentions Mom’s gift of binoculars — “Binoculars! The better, I suppose, to see this fucking country” — is followed by a more respectful thank you to Mom: “That’s a dandy pair of binoculars. I look through them everywhichaways and am the envy of the compound.” The overall effect is akin to the multiple perspectives Cubist painters flattened out onto their canvasses, presenting Kurt’s personalities as they emerge in his interactions with the world.

Yet there is something curious about telling this story using an epistolary technique. The founding narrative of the first epistolary novels published in 18
^th
century England (Samuel Richardson’s
Pamela
and
Clarissa
) was the story of a young woman imprisoned and struggling to gain her freedom while retaining her honor. It is not hard to see how this antique story telling device can find a new lease on life in, say, Alice Walker’s
The Color Purple
. But that is not the sort of story Charles Nelson is telling. His hero’s episodic adventures are more in the line of Henry Fielding’s picaresque
Tom Jones
. Far from being a tale born of confinement, the picaresque novel’s central story is that of a young man who ventures out into the world where through his encounters and romances, he eventually discovers his true identity. In a sense, then, the technique and the narrative could be thought to work at cross purposes, where one stealthily undermines the other.