The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered (25 page)

I continued to feverishly re-read favorite sections of
Sacred Lips of the Bronx
. I loved the furtive smooching, the proud outbursts of public handholding as Mike and Hector became a secret but very real couple. They went on dates and then they went on double dates with girls to keep their cover. They met one another’s parents. They explored sex with an ingénue earnestness I wanted to replicate. When I went to work, I would hide the book in the bottom of my sleeping bag because I didn’t want my roommate to know I was gay. I was thrilled by the temporary power we instill a “secret” with - -to better make it ours, to reverse shame from a noose to a whip. At night I would push it further down with my toes, conspiratorially considering the book contraband.

How a decade can change everything. I shed the sleeping bag and got my own place and a straight, male roommate (a Puerto Rican from the Bronx no less) who sussed out my sexuality with a shrug. I soon had too many gay novels to hide around the apartment and started putting them on shelves. The regret toward those years in the closet faded (the crowded pace of New York City is most unsuitable for the retention of such bulky grudges). One night, with tears burning my cheeks during the last act of
The Normal Heart
, Larry Kramer’s seminal drama about the onslaught of AIDS, I had a harsh, working epiphany: I had
always
been in the audience. So I started volunteering at the aforementioned Housing Works Bookstore, a nonprofit benefiting the homeless with HIV and AIDS. My writing strengthened. The necessity of this book formed.

And so I re-read
Sacred Lips of the Bronx
, now in full; ten years hadn’t rubbed away any magic from the book; the urban prose popped, the few bits that flagged, like the reoccurring ghost of Mike’s grandmother, did little to hinder my initial assessment that the novel is a good, solid work. But the fever of coming out had subsided; Jewish faith and folklore were more central to the book than I remembered, how the constancy of family made burgeoning sexuality all the more exacting. I’d forgotten Mike had a brother whose social rebellion provided a cover for Mike’s sexual one. I’d forgotten that Hector had a terrible secret. The chapters which concerned the older Mike, grappling with the politics of a modern plague and a cheating lover, still seemed to interrupt the narrative rather than complement it, but here I sensed a reality the author was facing and I was learning: lost love weighs heavier than lost time; as the older version of Mike thinks he sees Hector in a park, he is really straining for a simpler age, when his love was more real. I closed the book aware of the character’s mistake. When you want something as powerful and necessary as love, you don’t reach back, you reach forward.

2009: one of my New Year’s resolutions was to join facebook (I keep my resolutions easy). My boyfriend’s crazy about the site and I figured it was a great way to catch up with old friends. Douglas Sadownick’s name popped up early on in the
People You May Know
function. So of course I contacted him and learned that he teaches at Antioch University and is the Director of the first LGBT specialization in Clinical Psychology in the country. In researching this essay I located a New York Times article from 1994:
Coping: Growing up Gay in the Heart of the Bronx
, a short profile of the author in the year his novel was published. The article contained a surprising confession: Hector didn’t exist. While Mike found first love in the Bronx, in real life the young Sadownick never repeated any of his rendezvous with the boys he met on the Grand Concourse. “Hector in the book was a way for me to redeem what I see now as a lot of missed opportunities.”

How discourteous to contradict an author’s interpretations concerning his book, much less his own life, but Sadownick made that observation while still pretty young; the longing and unusual jealousy that
Sacred Lips of the Bronx
inspired dissipated once I kissed the right boy. What I had considered “missed opportunities” were simply the necessary preparations for the experiences that ended up counting the most. That rush to recapture what I had mistakenly considered lost had nearly cost me everything. The book at the bottom of my sleeping bag was in no way illicit but a rather splendid and sturdy diving board.

Dial Press, 1924

Even as a very young man Glenway Wescott (1901-1987) spoke as beautifully as he wrote. He was a distinguished writer and personality — the
New York Times
remembered him as “one of the last of the major expatriate American writers who lived in France in the 1920's and 30's.” Three of his four novels would be reprinted over the decades
.
When he stopped writing fiction, he remained a fine essayist and critic, and his posthumous
Continual Lessons
(1992) is one of the great gay journals. Syndicated columnist Liz Smith remembers him as a wonderful New York social figure. All this reflects who he was. But a big part of his story is in his first novel, the one that made his career possible, the one that ought to come back in print.

When
The Apple of the Eye
(1924) appeared to universal good reviews, 23-year-old Wescott’s publisher gave him a small advance toward another novel. A generous female patron who loved the book gave him more — enough for Wescott and his lover Monroe Wheeler to join the expatriate writers in France. His second novel,
The Grandmothers
(1927), was a huge success and for a short time he was more famous than Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Later, he would remain a respected literary figure, with recurring moments of celebrity in the 1940s and 1960s, and he was blessed with a long and fortunate life. But it all began with a humble start.

A regional novel of the Midwest,
The Apple of the Eye
is written in beautiful lyrical prose, but it’s no dreamy Romantic story of the American heartland. Instead, it’s about the impoverished early-century midwest that Wescott knew on his father’s poor Wisconsin farm. It’s about the oppression of puritanism, which seems familiar to us nearly a century later. It’s about the cruelty of nature no less than its beauty. And the novel’s autobiographical character, Dan, is a farmboy obviously in love with a young farmhand who is dating his cousin.

All of the autobiographical material in the novel becomes obvious, but how Wescott came to put it into a novel is part of the story. He was first known as a poet. At age 16, he made it from Kewaskum, Wisconsin farm country to the University of Chicago on a scholarship. He was boarded in an attic room by distant relatives and had a weekly allowance of $3.50. Having barely gotten over a high school romance with a straight boy, he was worried about his sexuality, and intimidated by a large sprawling campus of athletes and more affluent students. But he was intimidating too. His professors couldn’t believe the amount of reading he had done, especially of contemporary playwrights worldwide. His literature teachers dealt with the teenager as a grad student. More importantly, he saw a notice one day that the campus Poetry Club was taking applications for new members. He wrote his first poems and submitted them. “It was just a trick,” he said. Sure, so is all writing of every kind. The impressive Poetry Club members were impressed. They included the important Imagist poet and critic Yvor Winters; his future wife, novelist Janet Lewis; Southern novelist Elizabeth Madox Roberts, 20 years their elder; and others. Janet Lewis remembered that when they heard Glenway’s speaking voice, they made him president, and at meetings he would read their poems aloud. But Winters was the real leader and a great influence.

Wescott nearly died from the Spanish Influenza of 1918. He dropped out of college but stayed connected with the Chicago poetry group, which included
Poetry
magazine editor Harriet Monroe, and patron Harriet Moody (widow of poet William Vaughan Moody), and he met major poets of the day. His own poems and book reviews began appearing in all the literary journals, and his new (lifelong) lover Monroe Wheeler printed a fancy chapbook of his poetry,
The Bitterns
. Wallace Stevens wrote, “It’s difficult to make poetry as sophisticated as this fly, but you certainly make it tremble and shake.”

In his early 20s, Wescott didn’t know which direction his talent would take him, but he was already making the transition from poet to prose writer. His long story “Bad Han” would become the opening five chapters of his first novel. The character Hannah Madoc was based on a real woman from his early Wisconsin years. Because the woman had worked in a bar and been a prostitute, she was an outcast in the farm community. But Wescott’s mother Grace, with a different notion of Christianity, was friendly and kind to her. And the woman became a kind of saint, living alone, tending to and healing farm animals, smoking a pipe, learning the power of herbs, and increasingly working as an extra hand, a midwife and a healer for the very people who condemned her. In the words of Wescott’s story, “To her simple eye nothing was degrading, nothing evil; everything formed a single difficult pure coil — moralless and pure. So she spoke more plainly and more strongly than other men and women, the faultless, the prosperous, or the strong.”

In “Bad Han,” Hannah became old and eccentric in middle age. “Solitude in the form of anguish did not exist now; and sometimes the face of her lost boy lover appeared in her dreams.” In fact, the lost boy lover was Jule Bier, now a middle-aged farmer who lived with his wife and daughter nearby. In their youth, Jule had loved Hannah but her bad reputation in the Christian community was a problem and he married another. Yet, many years later, Jule was kind to Hannah. Sometimes he’d sit on her porch and they’d talk quietly or just look out at the fields and marshlands. Though she had her little farmhouse, sometimes she would stay all night in the woods and fields, or would sleep in the barn. “Once she found a herd of cattle on the brow of a hill, and lay down among them.” Finally, she had an accident and the country doctor knew that with her broken hip, broken leg and bad heart, nothing could be done. She took his hand to say goodbye. Her bed was pushed near a window so she could look outdoors to the changing fall colors. And the man who had been her only friend, Jule, came to share her last two days, lifting her, feeding her, giving her morphine.

By the time “Bad Han” was published in the January and February 1924 issues of
The Dial
, Wescott had continued writing fiction until he had a fully-drafted novel, as well as some short stories. He had moved east with Monroe Wheeler and was living in Greenwich Village in a front, second-floor apartment at 17 Christopher Street. The building is still there, next to the Oscar Wilde Bookshop. Their neighbor at nearby 14 Saint Luke’s Place, Marianne Moore, became a lifelong friend.

When the new book division of Dial Press published Wescott’s first novel that fall, novelist Sinclair Lewis offered the book jacket blurb: “I have finished with the greatest delight
The Apple of the Eye
. It seems to me to have something curiously like genius.” Dozens of glowing reviews followed. So did success and a decade of glamorous life in France.

What Wescott remembered was that Marianne Moore, who was editing
The Dial
magazine then, thought the novel shouldn’t be published. She thought Glenway should be paid for it — he and Monroe needed the money — but that the novel’s sexual content would ruin his budding career as a poet and critic. In fact, the publisher’s lawyers had suggested many deletions on the final proofs. And Wescott, seriously sick with the mumps in his little apartment, put all the deletions back into the text. He had earlier edited out some overblown romantic passages, but even in his early 20s he had a writer’s sense of what should stay.

There had been sexual content in the “Bad Han” chapters, but what followed went further. “Rosalia,” the five chapters of Part Two, is named for Jule Bier’s teenage daughter. But Jule also had a teenage nephew, Dan Strane, who lived on a nearby farm. Dan preferred visiting and helping out at his Uncle Jule’s farm, because his own father had no use for him. His father considered Dan a “moody, indolent creature — like a girl he thought — clinging to his mother, sarcastic and sensitive, a bundle of nerves.” Gaydar, anyone? Dan Strane was Wescott’s autobiographical character.

In fact, I should say here that I knew Wescott in his last years, wrote essays about his work and life, and eventually completed his biography (
Glenway Wescott Personally
, 2002). That included a decade of research visits to the Beinecke Library (Yale) and the Berg Collection (NY Public Library). But when Glenway was still around, I interviewed him and sometimes just asked a stray question that I thought was important. In his more famous works that followed, his autobiographical character was always Alwyn Tower. Although the answer was obvious, I once asked what no one else had: “Isn’t Dan Strane actually Alwyn Tower?” Glenway just said, “Of course.”

Dan’s early century schoolmates were rough farmboys, many of them German, and to them “his careful polite speech seemed an affectation.” One day, Dan saw the playground empty and when he looked in the woodshed, “all the boys were in there in a compact circle facing the center — an impenetrable mass of little backs, rigid with interest in something unseen.” Poor Marianne Moore — she was a great poet, but she couldn’t imagine any place in literature for a schoolboy circle jerk!

Rejected by his father and his schoolmates, Dan also felt oppressed by stifling Puritanism. He was sensual but knew nothing of sex. Then Mike Byron appeared. When Jule hired the 25-year-old farmhand, Dan was attracted to him and felt liberated by his worldliness. Mike had some experience in college and working for a newspaper. He taught Dan the facts of life. And when Dan was spouting some confused nonsense about Christian purity and duty, he was amazed when Mike replied, “In my opinion, everything is pure, everything is good that doesn’t hurt somebody else. Life is dull enough if we have all the fun there is.”