“I must explain why it is that at night, in my own house
Even when no one’s asleep, I feel I must whisper.”
—Reed Whittemore, “Still Life”
“The waves broke on the shore.”
—Virginia Woolf, The Waves
Wherein the author encounters:
Fire Island: drag queens: The Little Revue at the Cherry Grove Playhouse (and reads Carlyle’s The Clothes Screen).
The “Goncourt Sisters” (recorders of scenes at the Grove and in the Pines).
Belvedere, the great house of Cherry Grove; its host His Whorishness, the Pontifex Maximus of Misrule, midnight mass, the sedia gestatoria and the flabelli (mopped from the Met production of Aida). Also: reenacted: the procession of the volto santo in Lucca.
The two Memory Theaters of the homosexual dispensation: the Cherry Lane on Commerce Street in Manhattan and the Playhouse at Cherry Grove.
And the waves’ resounding voices as they break on the shore.
“She was expelled, dear, for supporting the Queen’s oath against transubstantiation.” A comment on a performer who’d lately muscled his determined rag trade way into The Little Revue:
“Darling, I wouldn’t plonk down good Protestant money to watch that woman leave a damp stain.”
“She thought she was being so intellectual, backing up her predilections and tastes in slap and drag with citations from a groovy English celebrity mind, whereas all she was doing was wondering would they read her at Bemelmans Bar when she sashayed in with her escort, and toss her, body and soul, back into the street.”
“My dear, she thinks the eight-fold path is that maze of thicketed lanes between the Pines and the Grove known to the unenlightened as the Meat Rack.”
“Edith Wharton discovered what it means to be a happy woman when for the first time in her life, she couldn’t read. I have never been a happy woman.”
“Never in the onomasticon of places was ever a place so well named as Cherry Grove—and it doesn’t have what to do with trees, although ripe for the picking are words that spring to mind the minute that boat pulls out of the dock in Sayville.”
“He is extravagant in hose, the darling.”
“In how many outfits does the god appear!”
“To me it’s really amazingly simple: if a girl executes the gestures of happiness, she becomes happy.”
“What agreement?”
“The agreement to ignore the abyss, dear.”
“She is a hard and reckless rider to the hounds.”
“Cruelty, darling, is one of the oldest festive joys of mankind.”
“Any custom, dear, is better than no custom at all—and the same goes for customers. Society is and ever was threatened far less by man’s unbridled passions than by the prospect of paralysis attendant upon their suppression.”
“Nobody gets what they want, pet, on Fire Island, except the deer. Check the faces on the ferry on the way back: there ought to be a branch of the Department of Welfare with a passport photo apparatus to snap head shots on the Friday afternoon and again on the Sunday evening—before and after, as in the ads for AYDS, the reducing candy. The idea that candy can lead to weight reduction is no crazier than canonizing the idea that a weekend in Island Pines can lead to happiness. Never have I seen so much unavailing untold want, such fruitless longing as on the dance floor, along the meat rack and in the drugged hollows of Island Pines.”
“She’s in wardrobe, or in makeup, or in hair, or in retreat.”
“She lives in serene certainty of her entitlement to certain égards. She’ll have you know, for instance, she spent the whole of last summer in drag in Atlantic City, as one of Harry Hackney’s lobster waitresses—they’re a legend, darling—winning first prize in the Boardwalk Beauty Pageant. All in red—a lineup of a dozen lobsters with tits, arms encased in huge lobster claws. Is that a camp?”
“. . . striding up the gravel path, practically shouting, ‘No, I don’t know them at all, but people are always glad to show their house if it’s a really nice one.’”
“. . . a proposed adjustment to reciprocal procedure between the Sayville constabulary and the Grove vigilante committee.”
“Involving the exchange of, shall we say, stash.”
“The Sayville constabulary is, we find, in, under the circs, that understanding.”
“The borrowed light of the moon is light enough for Sissy.”
“Crashed to the floor in a faint. People made room—cleared a little space marked off by two hurricane lamps—and the dance went on, switching to the Madison, the lines on either side of the comatose heap—deciding she’d have wanted it that way.”
Overheard at dawn at the meat rack:
“You begin early, my dear—or do you perhaps continue late?”
“I’m lookin’ for lark’s eggs, sister—got any?”
“All these little slime trails, darling—they were bright silver in the moonlight; they are not quite that now—do not betoken snails, much as the gourmet queens hereabouts do love to swallow the creatures . . . snails, that is.”
“You know, sister dear, you really are too clever for words.”
“So shut up, right?”
“Did I say that?”
“She said, ‘I said “my own merry little way,” not “my little Mary-Ann way.” He-whore cock sucker!’”
“So I said to Jimmy Baldwin, ‘Baby, you really hadda oughta get ovuh that terrible black Hamlet complex of yours—protestin’ vainly through the smart of hot tears how all Caucasians do inform against you—or else just sit yourself down and start writing converting ordinances like your papa preached.’”
“Miz Baldwin is a formidable, defiant woman—you could take her off pork chops and put her back on fatback and beans, she would ever retain her regal demeanor.”
“I love the silence of the morning here on the Island. Who was it said, under all speech that is good for anything lies a silence that is better.”
“Better—better for anything?”
“Virtually anything—anything but serious shopping, or getting a divorce.”
“I want to meet somebody both intense and mystical—very physically and compellingly so, yet with strong, charmed links to the unseen.”
“Caravaggio, of course, but did you know, dear, that Velázquez once went onstage in drag? Isn’t that divine?”
At Max Patrick’s beach house over in Island Pines. Max, the renowned Milton scholar with the apartment on Washington Square West. Big, crazy sixtyish redhead stripped down to his shorts, interviewing his students while plugged into the Relaxacisor machine, and reciting from Comus, voicing his unwillingness to play the lead and “deflower” Author. Then at his beach house over in Island Pines amending Paradise Lost:
“In this Paradise, baby, when a bright sleep falls on Adam, he’s bargained for no Eve.”
Max to Author QT:
“You find the cackle and quack out here bracing, I suppose—like the legendary salt air?”
“Well, speaking of the legendary Saltaire. . . .”
“Not this weekend, you little tart—in fact not this season. After I’ve engineered your debut in the PMLA. This weekend we take you to see the great Diane DeVors, starring in The Little Revue over in the Grove.”
Max is telling the author he must read the Thalia Rediviva of Henry Vaughan. Another academic guest whispers (for the host is more than a little deaf), “Max is quite irretrievably dirigiste, but a great-hearted old sodomite.”
Max advises the author to patch up the holes in his intellectual armor by tackling the Great Books and the Great Books Syntopicon (Vol I: From Angel to Love; Vol II: From Man to World). Author is grateful for a practical suggestion but, alas, is no scholar.
Conversation at cocktails (l’heure bleu-rose):
“—turns to me out of the blue, declaring, ‘Nemo potest personam,’ Seneca insists, ‘diu ferre fictum.’ ‘Seneca? Really?’ I replied—reflectively, y’know, the way I can over stingers—‘That does seem strange.’ Apparently, he never met a drag queen, which I suppose says something about the austerity of Latin tragedy. Perhaps one shouldn’t be too surprised; apparently Arthur Miller never has met one either.”
“Too many are being educated, in too much of a rush.”
“They can all fuck, and lots of them are pretty, but the time comes when they’ve got to be asked the really important question—do they play bridge?”
“Well, I know a few who will play on the bridge.”
“Me too—once you’ve gone through their little toll booth.”
“Which, if you hear them talking, they call the troll booth.”
“Really, can none of you women conceive of the notion that such motives might seem—might be—unworthy of souls whose lofty designs are concerned solely with things celestial?”
“It’s a sweet thought—like you find in fairy tales.”
“What you find in fairy tales in the principle of penalty.”
“Thank you, Marianne Moore.”
“The candles are listing, darling, the hot wax dripping all over.”
“Will you shut up!”
“Berenson said apropos looking, one moment is enough, if the concentration is absolute. He was, of course, absolutely full of shit—and a nasty woman into the bargain.”
“Her proudest possession, Geoffrey Scott’s A History of Time, a slim volume, dear, bound in Moroccan vellum; exquisite, and very expensive.”
“I mean lesbians, darling, don’t hold a hot-flash candle to fag hags as lethal, lacerating Kundry mothers, devouring your anguish with cannibal zeal—into which scenario and praxis many vengeful queens, who behave as though they never had a dick at all, fall.
“In the immortal words of the final chorus of Oedipus Rex, recast for today, ‘Call no woman happy until he is dead.’ ‘So this is bliss,’ she whispers when, disengaging her compact mirror from its accustomed use, she slips it under those hated nostrils and sees no mist of breath ripple its surface.”
A Story of Fag Hag Revenge:
The john always took his tricks to Fire Island and confided everything to a certain fag hag whose apartment in the Village (on Bank Street) he used so as not to compromise his reputation with his doorman in Beekman Place, and on whose shoulder he always cried when the tricks would go off with younger or richer johns. Until one boy—a sixteen-year-old Italian originally from Jersey City—with whom he became completely besotted, peversely insisted on Asbury Park for the Roller Derby, Atlantic City in winter so he could be rolled up and down the boardwalk and go hear Lillian Roth at the Steel Pier.
That summer they took a place together in some Mafia-protected shore town. The fag hag he left behind at Cherry Grove got crazy drunk and unwittingly informed on him to an undercover cop trawling for gossip at Duffy’s. They nabbed the john and the kid coming back through the Holland Tunnel from Jersey and charged the john under the Mann Act (which caused an uproar on more than Beekman Place, mind you). The john went up the river, the boy went into fight training for the Golden Gloves, and the fag hag, after unsuccessfully taking a bottle of aspirin and slitting her wrists, was held in custody for misprision of a felony, and when released didn’t leave her apartment for a year except to go to Gristede’s. She became addicted to soap operas and talk shows and the Million Dollar Movie, then finally hitched up with the Met opera line, where she found forgiveness and salvation in the cult of Zinka Milanov.
The boy meanwhile chucked the Golden Gloves, ending up in Lincoln Hall, the reformatory run by the Christian Brothers up the Hudson, where he was completely turned around, went to Manhattan College and Fordham Law, and became a public prosecutor.
“And the john?”
Now, that’s a very interesting denouement. They found a body in that faggoty-50s penthouse apartment, sloshing around in a pink bath, with, I give you, the face eaten away—teeth and all. Two tiny scraps of gold gleaming at the bottom of the tub, like two funky earrings sunk in a pool of pink champagne.
All Cruella’s i-d—we called her that: Cruella de Bourbon, in that she was one mean drunk—present and accounted for in the bedroom, on the bed—which was the single piece of furniture in the place. Not stick or stone other than—absolutely. Zilch. And Tilly had had a lot of shit in that apartment—Tiffany, Baccarat, Lalique, a collection of Balenciaga frocks—a lot of shit.
The police called it a brutal Mafia rubout, but the true story was somewhat otherwise. The mob cut a deal—took half Tilly’s shit, put the rest in the hold of the Leonardo da Vinci, put Tilly—not in a Balenciaga but, we were told, in a Ceil Chapman get-up—called her the Principessa Trapani, and off she went to Genoa, where she disembarked, trained down to Rome and made straight for the Via Veneto.
Soon enough she was employed at Cinecittà, and if you take the trouble you can spot her in La Dolce Vita. It’s a heartwarming story.
“‘Well, what is truth?’ asked Pilate’s wife, plucking her arched eyebrows, in make-up at Cinecittà.”
Pollock was homosexual. All homosexual means is hung up on men. Pollock was as hung up on men, exactly, as de Kooning was hung up on women; anybody who doesn’t know that knows nothing. Whatever accommodating affectionate and social arrangements Pollock made do nothing whatever to cancel the central fact. That he loved and needed his wife was apparent.
“I never said Lee was a man; she wasn’t—but she very definitely was a guy.”
“As in guy rope.”
“If you want to put it that way, I’ll co-sign.”
“The queer artist of genius has always made the figure 8 the hard way: two fours. The drip and the poured painting was, you understand, the apotheosis of masturbation.”
“Well, all that is over—all that abstraction. Faces are back.”
“But, darling, have you never seen the face in ‘Full Fathom Five’? Look hard and you can’t miss it: a vulnerable, haunted, sensitive, face—male of course—bespectacled. Nails Pollock. And you know, really, Pollock was always painting depositions—abstract depositions . . . as in from the cross.”
“Exactly. So that a title like ‘Distressed Queen’ will make its way directly to my innermost heart; it is simply another way of saying ‘Weeping Mary,’ and that’s that.”
“It’s terribly relaxin’ list’nin’ to you dear, gettin’ the highbrow lowdown. One knows just how Mae West feels having Freud read to her by Theodor Adorno out on the veranda in Santa Monica.”
“I dream’t I dwelt in marble halls, darling, only to wake up in a Formica toilet.”
“Anyway, what’s there to say about life—thanks for the memory?”
“Until the semantic field of the word queer has been circumscribed—”
“The correlation between the sense of time suspension in the orgasm and the idea of eternity is attested in all major religions.”
“George Herbert, who so unforgettably likened swaddling clothes to winding cloths, said when boys go first to bed, they step into their voluntary graves. Now let me be.”
“‘A thing of beauty is a boy forever,’ said Carlo Van Vechten, right in my living room—of course I’m not so silly as to suppose he didn’t say it elsewhere too, but I’ve got it on tape!”
“A beautiful boy is like a dry-cell battery, in which the captive energy is restless under the casing—restlessness producing a raging galvanic attraction—”
“To make the love muscle of a dead frog twitch.”
“A leg muscle, darling, I believe—but it’s a gay thought.”
“—as impossible to resist and as potentially dangerous as the hot, persistent arcing of sparks across a gap between two split wires. The history of the human race fairly swarms with examples of intelligent and learned men, forbidding, stately heroes who dreamed wild dreams of flight and transformation, of exaltation and escape, only to become transfixed and brought thuddingly to earth by the ensorcelling energy in a boy’s glance—exquisite product of the intricate computational cranial circuitry that controls the manipulation of captive objects, formerly known as the soul. The holy King David proved one such willing victim of the condensing properties of a boy’s eyes when he took unto himself and onto his satin whoopee cushion the beautiful young Jonathan.”
A discussion by elders on the beach about giving QT a Camp name. Everybody had a Camp name, most often conferred on the recipient but sometimes self-proclaimed
“I call myself Phoebe.”
“And why not.”
At Belvedere, the manciple manages the guest list (and a history of the Camp names).
Camp names were always supposed to have an edge, as when Auden dubbed Chester Kallman and James Schuyler “Fiordiligi” and “Dorabella” after the fickle sisters in Cosí fan tutte. Often the recipient was less than happy with his name. Schuyler said that anyone who had the impertinence to call him Dorabella in his later years would get slugged—and people believed him.
One old queen of mystical gnostic bent summed the practice up thus:
“Sigmund Freud, dear, by way of his Oedipus complex, divined a pivotal dilemma among the heterosexuals he analyzed, which Lévi-Strauss has lately made much of. They actually could not reconcile the idea of birth from one parent with the idea of birth from two parents. Well, we at heart have no belief in birth from any parents at all. We give birth to one another as magical siblings, darling, and to the next generation as both uncles and aunts—including the very important fixing of Camp names. We are the originators, the inhabitants and the inheritors of our own myth.
“Our naming practice echoes Adam’s—note, dear, Eve named no names—and the history of it is indeed a pathetic text, which serves to remind us forcefully of the primordial sadness of the Divine Names, or archetypes, anguished in the expectation of beings who will name them—that is, make them manifest in the world, together with the divine compassion of the Nameless Supreme, who knows that all naming is the seal of death.”
“It certainly was in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee.”
“Has anybody except me, I wonder, realized that in all probability Camp comes from the theories of Maxime de Camp?”