(THE BOOK TALKS BACK)
“—I replay the scenes
from that movie The Past, starring not
Mr X playing opposite myself
but Endymion,
Narcissus, Patroclus, all the fellows
I have welcomed to the tiny duchy
of my bed—the world’s
only country entirely covered by
its flag.”
—Richard Howard, “‘Man Who Beat Up
Homosexuals Reported to Have AIDS’”
“Not everyone was a cardinal at the seafood barbecue, but nobody brought his wife.”
—Peter Robb, M
From the author’s diary:
Wrote first act flying back. Landed, slept, woke up, called Donald.
“Donald.”
“Jimmy, welcome back, sweetness—been wondering about you. You know, from the way your bags were packed, it looked like you were planning on staying for a long time.”
“I might have, in another life; but you know Los Angeles.”
“Indeed I do, and love it: so many people loitering about, all that lunching in public.”
“Listen, there was this message on the machine from Stuart Byron; did I know where Aubrey was. Is there some new crisis?”
“Once a Variety stringer, always a Variety. It’s the weatherman.”
“The weatherman.”
“That’s what I said, bub. While you were occupied out there on the coast—”
“Lunching in public.”
“Lunching in public. So Stuart calls announcing he’s in love with a weatherman—in Boston. Naturally, I thought: that Stuart, now a chic radical fairy, going and digging up the Last Weatherman. I simply assumed some leftover radical, and said to myself, Stuart is so archaic, and whoever knew any of the Weathermen were queer . . . but of course he was in love with a weath-er-man, a meteorologist! Jimmy, have you written anything?”
“The first act of a play, on the flight home.”
“A play set in an airplane. What about, a bumpy night?”
“No, no, the flight was smooth. I wrote the first act on the flight, in my seat. It’s about Richard Rouilard and Bette Davis, eloping together in the afterlife.”
“Darling, you didn’t tell me your friend had died. I’m sorry.”
“Oh, he didn’t, he hasn’t. It’s only an idea I had.”
“Really. Well, I must say you are beginning to exhibit the industrious energy of a Clyde Fitch, but tell me this, dear—and I don’t mean to pry—but you haven’t by chance been thinking of writing one—”
“About you, in the afterlife? Not the remotest chance. As a matter of fact, if it were going to be about us—”
“You call it Old Acquaintance. I am relieved. You in the Miriam Hopkins role, I presume.”
“Absolutely. Meanwhile, Richard [Corliss, editor-in-chief of Film Comment] has asked me to do a history of queer pornography from the Park-Miller days up to last week—on celluloid. I’d been lamenting the adoption of videotape. But you know, the material is pretty impalpable—in words.”
“Words of more than two syllables, yes indeed.”
“Donald, do you remember my Old Queer on the park bench?”
“Jimmy dear, the woods are full of one-night sensations. You mean, I take it, your archetype.”
“Yes, you remember, you played him once.”
“In Wilkes-Barre—will I ever forget it. How does it—”
“You played it in a reading, dear, in Westbeth. My plays, as you well know, are rather like television, nothing but auditions. How does it go? The Old Queer Fuck sits on the park bench and tells stories. Remember, somebody said it was very like Zoo Story.”
“And you were cut to the quick; it was nothing whatever—”
“Nothing whatever—although since that dear time whatever has come to—”
“Mean whatever. I know, dear, but just think what happened to weatherman.”
“You are a spiritual work of mercy.”
The Return of the Old Queer Fuck on the Park Bench:
Just back from California, that merry old Land of Oz just east of the Astral, the author wonders, has flying so high downwind through the American night’s four black spacious skies in a state of such high exhilaration that he was for over five hours enabled to view with the equanimity essential to the artist’s task the deaths of others, two others in particular, Bette Davis and Richard Rouilard, met some years apart but inseparable in his mind with the Colonial House (as it was when the façade was cream white trimmed in robin’s-egg blue), have him confusing the gift of the exalted state of first draft composition with the intoxicating if finally terrible gift of prophecy? He lay back and took a nap.
He dreamed for an interval about his eleven quick minutes of New York Fame. Nothing to do with a book, merely the four-week CBS (Studio 54) College Bowl run in May of ’62. The parties at the Waldorf, the Camp cavortings backstage, which really had amused the camera operators: Author striding onto the set for rehearsal, in manly-Dietrich (Marlene, not Fischer-Dieskau) silk dressing gown drag, white scarf flowing, declaring, “Max, that key light . . .”
About being saluted on the opera line, and backstage by singers; being recognized on the New York streets; hearing himself discussed from the next booth at the Algonquin Bar, really a very It Should Happen to You kind of fame. This was made the more fatally blinding by the graduation-year crisis in a searing four-year passion, one kindled in the fall of ’58, nourished through four entire opera seasons, between himself and the quite heterosexual Other, during which a mutual love of the singing of Jussi Björling, a shared passion for J.S. Bach, for jazz, and for (him watching him) shooting pool, cemented what looked like a perdurable Platonic friendship (“Hah, hah, hah, Blanche!”) bursting forth in his stressed mind all over May, June—and any other woman unlucky enough to ask him to a prom or find his smoldering-sensitive manner (oh, brother) attractive—by a reckless reading of The Symposium, the Other’s Irish Greek-god build and profile, definitely Alcibiades material. All enhanced to the release of the film Compulsion, in which, as previously noted, Dean Stockwell and Bradford Dillman enacted the Leopold-Loeb Chicago murder of little Bobby Franks (who, it turned out, get this, had been deuxième choix after a boy in the same class who was home sick that day, one Billy Schon, later William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker. Plus tax).
Waking some hours later, he went out sur le motif, as Cézanne had directed, indeed finding through some rather extensive nocturnal field work, done in the very same place as a generation before, Madison Square Park (interestingly now only a four-block walk from home). There his archetype would come, and come again, at unappointed hours.
Whereupon in the days, weeks, months and years to come, with the Nietzschean idea of the eternal return returning, he would come to see the Old Queer Fuck as the Wizard of Oz, a kind of queer Joe Gould (to whose spell Joe Mitchell, himself still there up at The New Yorker, which had become his prison and his old hotel, had succumbed), certain flapping-denture mouths at the Everard Baths and the wizard from Captain Marvel still making with the shazams, even though there were no more crippled newsboys (although there did begin to appear a multitude of seeming equivalents).
“I make no formal distinction between the fact and fiction; my brief is ideation, and ideation is real.”
—The Old Queer Fuck (hereafter the Archetype)
And thus he spake:
“And speaking of the English classicists, it must be one of the supreme ironies of Culture that the end result of all the fantasies cherished by countless nineteenth-century Oxbridge pedophile onanists (wankers is what the sour boy tarts of Picadilly called them) who affected to embody for their time the life-transforming ideals of Hellas, who traveled to Greece in their droves to kneel in the sacred groves and nibble on the Moly, and under whose rubric the fabulously Irish but fatally sentimental Oscar Wilde went down in henna flames at Bow Street Court House and the Old Bailey, should turn out to be the White Party at South Beach.
“But what is this mystique of the dj, high priest of a new karaoke? Of course today’s queers, grooving not merely to the music but to the spin the particular star dj gives the music, were they to see videos of their forebears sitting in the dark hushed Byline Room watching Mabel Mercer playing with her silk handkerchief and whispering deathless wisdom into the microphone, must consider the whole spectacle by comparison paraplegic.
“I always despised the criminal chic Genet hawked. After all, good boys pretending to be bad can be art, as in the miraculous films of Joe Gage, but bad boys pretending to be good are just kitsch crapshooters and fakes. Anyway, the least of Joe Gage is far superior to Chant d’Amour, although that cigarette-smoke-exhaled-through-the-straw-stuck-through-the-hole-in-the-cellblock-wall thing was good. And really, who was not made hard in his seat and gooey while observing Vic Morrow and Gavin MacLeod in Deathwatch?
“In certain blue films—instance, Centurions of Rome, starring the late Eric Ryan and that divine queen who plays Caligula so exactly like Richard Nixon, you cannot help but get the point—art pornographjy reaches its gestural peak. When the augur reads the results of the come shots on the walls of the Baths of Caracalla. Not since Ramon Novarro in the 1925 Ben-Hur has such content-rich j.o. pay dirt been shoveled up.”
(A terrible occasion: the author’s last sighting in this time of Eric Ryan, a cachectic ruin, standing under terrible red and green Christmas lights at 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue just down from the Show Palace, scene of his former floor show triumphs, dressed quite unseasonably in a blue cashmere sweater, dungarees and what did seem to be Bruno Magli loafers slipped on over naked feet, looking at one of the Bible freaks’ signs—AIDS, AMERICAN INFERNAL SODOMITES DISTEMPER—and crying.)
“Driven livin’ as the Sunday preacher said.”
“Is art a lie? ‘What is truth?’ queried Pilate, washing his already spotless hands then turning on the hand dryer.
“And as for the past, and remembrance of same, well, while you’re remembering, and rearranging, it obviously is still the ongoing thing. Remembrance of Things Pluperfect might be a novelty—how’s that for paradox?
“Who is it, darling, calls AIDS death with knobs on?
“Sickness requires healers: the thaumaturge, the prophet, the wise man and the tyrant flourish as never before in The Life. ‘Nothing can save us that is possible: / We who must die demand a miracle.’ Old Wanker Wystan Auden wrote that, darling.”
“Darling, all things will be undone; remember, Mont Ségur just wasn’t.”
“I am in awe,” he declared, “of the power of male sex energy. I enjoy an intense session of self-affirming masturbation that lasts for hours, riding to the edge of Tantric bliss. The longer I do it, the more sex energy builds until I feel I am about to lose consciousness. It’s not just getting off, it is like an out-of-body experience, my whole being transported to a higher plane, definitely a religious experience. Now if I could just get paid to do this shit.”
“The truth is we’ve neglected to provide the proofs of ego and the protocols which fame demands, and it’s too late now. Our communal saga, auspicious enough in conception, teasing enough in detail and God knows hinged on myriad riveting references, is not sufficiently furnished with redeeming social value to be widely recounted in an age in which, increasingly, labels are worn on the outsides of garments. There’s no retrieval of days lost we know not how, and vows not kept are vows not kept forever. Nevertheless, one’s not a fool. Now that one’s old one finds it entertaining to rearrange for interviewers the facts of one’s life and ancestry. One has learned to shield oneself, reinventing oneself through one’s own disappearance.
“In one’s youth, walking into the light source to meet it head-on, the shadow falls behind, and one rarely if ever looks over one’s shoulder. Later, past the noontime of one’s life, the light falls from behind, casting one’s shadow in one’s path.
“Implications.”
“There are always implications; they are part and parcel of the trigger hypothesis and the inevitable result of invocations to labor and courage in the fulfillment of high designs. Always new questions to think about too—such as can it be possible after all that there is something that travels faster than light—thought, for instance?”
“In any event all one’s shiny keys will one day be taken from the place where one has left them, and all one’s cupboards opened and all the little things one wished no one to see will then be seen by one and all.
“And so, so what? You cheated; Mr. Big did likewise. You kept the Hope Diamond, he kept the cash. A lot of trouble for nothing—still you didn’t live in vain; there’s not a soul can fairly say you did.
“Amateur theatricals—still going on out in Cherry Grove, you know. This summer, a revival of Maugham’s Our Betters, retitled Our Bitters.”
[Author’s note: Queer fiction is done in bas-relief; the number of freestanding characters of distinction in it is very few. Burrough’s acid-head narrator in The Ticket That Exploded, Rechy’s anonymous hustler in City of Night, Joseph Caldwell’s hero in In Such Dark Places, David Plante’s Daniel Francoeur in the sculpted novel series chronicling his life, Sutherland in Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance, the great Designated Mouth (derived undoubtedly from Nightwood—and Matthew-Mighty-Grain-of-Salt Whoosiewhatsis) is certainly one, and Mister Friel in Nights in Aruba. Also, both characters in Christopher Davis’s beautiful Joseph and the Old Man, certainly the best piece of shorter gay fiction, and all the beaten broken boys in all the perfect novels of Dennis Cooper.]
The Archetype:
“Flannery O’Connor, a psycho-sexual cripple and devout Catholic possessed of a literary talent bordering on genius and given to the depiction of freaks was of course in the ’50s greatly revered by queer co-religionists and their chic sympathizers.
“I adore your friend’s Gaywyck. It’s even better than The Lord Won’t Mind, and it’s so written—and after all, was it not about time that strapping, brilliant, rich and gorgeous men stopped relating to one another sexually in terms of a barracks, a trench, a toilet or a football field, and started gushing praise and love all over one another in luxurious beds in luxurious apartments surrounded by beautiful things?
“NAMBLA, a shut-down shop-front, behind which nevertheless, one hears . . .”
[Author’s note: Pomosexuality. I call homosexual those male writers whose work so obviously betrays paranoid anxiety over treaties with the paternal introject as to render that concerning maternal treaties insignificant by comparison. I therefore nominate Herman Melville the most important American homosexual writer. His heterosexual counterpart is obviously Nathaniel Hawthorne.
| So: Homosexual | Heterosexual |
| Stephen Crane | Henry James |
| Ernest Hemingway | F. Scott Fitzgerald |
| William Faulkner | Sinclair Lewis |
| Eugene O’Neill | Theodore Dreiser |
| William Gaddis | J.D. Salinger |
| Harold Brodkey | John O’Hara |
| Tennessee Williams | John Steinbeck |
| Truman Capote | Gore Vidal (introject: America)] |
“Let’s put it this way, darling: there was more to Child’s than the pancakes.”
“I hog the mike, I know. Pure greed—the greed of an old spook in a hurry.”
“If you want to talk about paranoid, culture theorists are the enD: they believe not so much that God is talking to them, as that God is their Charlie McCarthy. If the Government and the Media were the world, and not merely a version of it for which the electorate—the notorious 47–49 percent or whatever it is together with the minions of Hollywood and Madison Avenue—are responsible for foisting on us . . . but they are not. ‘The world,’ as Wilfred Owen wrote in ‘The War God,’ ‘is The World, and not the slain nor the slayer, Amen.’”
“Of course Athens was neither Pericles nor Praxiteles nor Plato nor any of the tragic or comic poets either, no matter how we’ve been taught to believe. And we have no idea what Sparta was. Who’s to say it was nowhere, just because it has disappeared without a trace? If Japan and Europe had their way, so would the USA. Or is that paranoid?”
“On the Road all those Beat generation bums humping America in old jalopies chugging from coast to coast before the Interstate. Hunched in boxcars and flophouses and pads—how was it they put it—pulling wrists?”
“That was existentialism, wasn’t it?”
“No, existentialism came out of Paris, where everything happens and nothing is true. The opposition came from London—or Oxford and Cambridge, or all three. England, anyway, where nothing happened after the ’60s. It says everything that is true.”
After disco, the Madison.
“It’s so old, the Madison; when I recall it I see the phantoms of great hopes dancing in the mist—although they say Bobby Madison was named after it. Bobby Madison, in Power Tools and oh, my god, with Paul in Brother Load. Of course Eric Ryan was the king of kings—and Richard Locke is God the Father!”
“What about Fred Halsted?”
“Fred Halsted was wicked; many people say he worshiped the devil.”
“He did not, he worshiped Joseph Yale, they were a devoted couple—and Sex Garage and L.A. Plays Itself are in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection. When Joseph died, Fred couldn’t go on, and put a plastic bag over his head.”
Spurred on by that most industrious pawnbroker of literary criticism, Jacques Derrida (“If one calls bricolage the necessity of borrowing one’s concepts from the text of a heritage which is more or less coherent or ruined, it must be said that every discourse is bricoleur”). For the fragment, as it expands and becomes a new text is larger than the particle whence it originated.
Quiz Questions:
1. Even if it isn’t technically eavesdropping, does overhearing such information immediately reconstitute one as a decentralized subject?
2. Is one a decentralized subject if one has (a) not only no job, but (b) no succinct job description?
3. Can one be a decentralized subject if one is not even French?
Happily one can, if the ventriloquist is French—or even if he’s simply under French influence.
THE INCONGRUENCE OF JAMES AND RYAN
“Yes, get me an hour alone; take them off—I don’t care where; absorb, amuse, detain them; drown them, kill them if you will; so that I may just a little, all by myself, see where I am.”
—Henry James, The Wings of the Dove
“. . . Eric Ryan, darling—the most beautiful porn star of all time, whose story is a perfect illustration of the Mary Astor Career Trajectory:
“1. ‘Who’s Eric Ryan?’ (real name, et cetera, early appearances: Arch Brown’s’s Dynamite starring the then supreme Jack Wrangler, William Higgins’s The Boys of Venice and the breakthrough, Francis Ellie’s Centurions of Rome).
“2. ‘Get Eric Ryan’—the high roll of his career—including floor shows at the Follies Male Burlesque and the Show Palace and appearances in the early hours of the morning at the New St. Marks Baths—where he was worshiped in the steam room by literally dozens of delirious men tongue-washing every part of his body clean of every accumulated trace of semen, sweat and Angel Dust, washing his perfect feet with their ecstatic amyl-nitrate tears and swabbing them with their sopping late ’70s Hair-by-Kenneth manes.
“3. ‘Get an Eric Ryan Type.’ Career on the turn, ER starts turning up at the Broadway Baths in the afternoon and the Big Top—paying to get in like everybody else, and staging ‘Please worship me!’ scenes in the back room while the reverse images of his performances of former years are played out on the screen.
“4. ‘Who’s Eric Ryan?’ ER standing in the middle of winter on the northeast corner of 42nd and Eighth, only a few yards down from the Show Palace marquee, looking gaunt and hideous, his eyebrows all penciled in, dressed in what appeared to be the last articles of clothing in his possession: ripped and faded denims, dirty white Foot Locker tennis shoes.
“Everybody’s suddenly running around reading The Anatomy of Melancholy. The Anatomy of Melancholy indeed; what about the Melancholy of Anatomy? Is anybody thinking of that in this youth-obsessed country?”
[Author’s note: Michel Foucault in San Francisco (like Socrates, a pedophile warthog). From the École Normale to the fleshpots of Folsom. Killed in the bath like Marat, under the direction of the Marquis de Sade, but what was Charlotte Corday doing being that boy in a towel? (Brought it on himself, some theorists would say. Foucault’s man was the defiant answer to Michelet’s woman—cited by Barthes on On Revolution.)]
“How many Sundays is it since Pentecost?”
“Why?”
“I’ve been remembering Eddie West’s Pentecost sermon at the Dune Church back in the ’80s. He said it was an illusion—Eddie . . . death—that life itself was by definition eternal.
“‘The enemy lies waiting in the long grass,’ he said, ‘with his tales of death and despair,’ often disguised as oily compassion and that dangerous diagnosis, psychoneurosis, the “malicious animal magnetism” of twentieth-century apostasy—but it simply isn’t so. The gate of heaven is not a revolving stile. Too few there be, alas, that love God’s lore—which is to say the treasury of rich, embroidered tales in which his eternal wisdom abounds.
“‘But you do,’ he said. ‘You are made in the conspicuous image and likeness of God, who loves the focus of lonely wonder at the center of your being, the confusion of your inner vehemence. Biddable oafs, if the truth be known, bore him silly, however bound he is by self-prescription to care for them.’
“Nice speech, Eve—or Eddie, rather. There’s one girl who paid no attention to St. Paul or any of his silly admonitions.
“‘He happily assents to the fulfillment of your aspirations,’ he said, ‘albeit not unconditionally. There are limits to worldly things, to brands, content, services and access—so in the name of the very God who imagines you, govern yourselves accordingly—ein Mensch zu sein. The Ten Commandments are the Ten Commandments, darlings—not the ten suggestions!’
“That Eddie!
“‘It isn’t easy—we know that; there is much virtuoso wickedness in the world. Assaults and criminal damage are ever on the increase, although police have beguilingly attributed this to increased reporting. The world and its rulers are absolutely obsessed with info dominance, with deep-strike architecture, with asymetric competitors and all manner of dark knowledge.
“‘So keep your PIN a secret and never tell it to anyone; be cautious when giving your account numbers over the telephone. Such has life become in the Free Society. One might laugh out loud, would it do one any good—as it is it would likely serve only to bring on more suspicion. So opting for righteousness is rather like doing modern art; you have to deepen the game to be any good at all. It simply isn’t enough to keep your eye on the ball; in the immortal words of the great Babe Didrikson, you’ve got to loosen your girdle and really let the ball have it. As an Irish poet once put it to me, “We must record love’s mystery without claptrap, snatch out of time the passionate transitory.”’
“And waiter, I’ll have another old fashioned, please. Well, Eddie West surely knew all there was to know about passionate, transitory snatch.
“‘From time immemorial,’ he said—Eddie, that is, not the Irish poet, whoever he was—‘the enigmatic need for sensation has found a certain provisional satisfaction—has pitched its tent—in gaudy fashion, but its true home ground is in the end staked out solely by rigorous theological inquiry. Would the children of God squander an inestimable inheritance on politics? On late-breaking developments? Cast their patrimony to the trade winds? I don’t think so, as the children say today, or as my mother, God rest her soul, would put in, “In a pig’s eye!” In God’s plan there are no late-breaking developments. Put not your faith in princes.
“‘Rather, hold up your heaving shoulders, darlings, and emulating Shiva, dance—for although no incantation can ever compel the gods, many a song and dance has charmed them silly.’
“‘I cannot encourage spiritual democracy. The elect are not the elected—and you can say I said so. The beings of light exist in choir hierarchies, from angel to seraph, as do the colors of the rainbow from red on up to violet—and is not hierarchy as a concept more distinguished than the leveling effected by shallow spiritual liberation, which in the end always aims at disturbing the equilibrium of the exquisite? Assuredly.
“‘Who has not passed through the inferno of passion can never ascend Mount Purgatory to—what? No less a mind than Einstein put it this way: “Try and penetrate with our limited means,” he suggested, “the secrets of nature, and you will find that, beyond all the discernible concatenations there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable.” The veneration of that force, beyond anything we can comprehend, and not of the notoriously narcissistic no-brainer posed by poor Hamlet, is the question, my dears. Must we suppose repose, cradled in sad cypress for all eternity? Who says? Who says heaven is repose? Clearly the mystics don’t think so—not from what I’ve read of them—or any vapid disappearance into abeyance either. They seem to think it’s one endless orgasm, and here’s what I say to that: Hooray!’
“Eddie made those dowagers blush at their prayers, that’s the truth. They heard the hum of heavenly wires big time every time the maestro pitched that High Church woo.
“‘In any event, don’t worry about dying, darlings, it’s your birthday! Speaking for myself, as pants the hart for cooling streams, I can hardly wait—even if, as rumor would have it, heaven can—for I believe, you see, they are too long, the weeping and the laughter, the love, the desire, the hate. I do.
“‘Sigmund Freud—for whom I have the same degree of respect that I have for Mary Baker Eddy, abetted by the allure of a quirky sense of humor—joked that every night the sleeper abandons himself to death in high hopes of a dawn reprieve. I insist the time will come when, like me, you will become impatient with said reprieve!
“‘Well,’ he proclaimed, ‘the fact is, darlings, not a soul in this congregation has the remotest idea of the nature of the joys of the resurrection and the life to come in God. It can never have occurred to a single one of us, and of course, strictly speaking, it is never going to. It is the everlasting idea of us that is, as it has from all eternity, of which our time on earth is otherwise, occuring in all delight to God.’
“One old thing kept snoring through nearly the whole of the sermon that morning, only to come to life when Eddie invoked the Light of Eternity. Then later at lunch, she approached him and asked, ‘Excuse me, Canon West, but the Light of Eternity—do you happen to know the color of it?’ ‘Why, yes, my dear, I do. It’s blue—like your lovely hat.’”
A Coda: Joe Le Sueur doing Meals on Wheels in East Hampton. A female therapist assigned to a local AIDS case: two ex-Universal ’50s contract players, antique dealers (“It was either open a shop or open a vein each!”) and long-time companions. Everybody who knew what a neighbor in the country was adored them both, and I got them put on my Meals on Wheels route (you see it: the hospital tray with covered dish, little single flower, brought in every early afternoon: evening meal being one of those megaton I.V. cocktails, part nutrition, part demolition nobody had a better idea than). This one cold winter afternoon, as he’d come in the kitchen door, the soon-to-be-survivor shouted in to the patient on the davenport, “Blanche, did I tell ya there are rats in the cellar?” By the time he reached the living room, there stood the stern and no doubt overworked therapist (remember Barbara Baxley at Raymond Massey’s bedside in East of Eden?) looking down at the patient, who had begun mock-whining,
“Mais je t’implore, mon amour, oui, je m’abîme.”
“Speak English, Blanche, will ya; we got company.”
“You wouldn’t treat me this way if I weren’t in this condition.”
And, of course the partner, whipping out a cigarette and lighting it, barked,
“But ya are, Blanche, ya are in that condition!”
“You are so cruel.”
“Just remember, Blanche, without me, you’d soon end up like Cecilia—living in filth, insisting she had her little angel in once a week to dust, whereas what she was trying to say was it had been a whole week and still no one had showed up with her Angel Dust”
“Oh, you are venemous when drunk—but who shall ’scape whipping?”
“Indeed I am cruel, aunt—I have been taught by masters.”
“Oh, that was divine, honey, did you tape it?”
“In stereo, my pet.”
“Delicious. I adore you.”
“And I you, love.”
The therapist, appalled, took the partner aside, whispering not low: did he not realize the end was not far off and no attempt at all that she could make out had been made at closure?
“Closure!” (Throws the cigarette down and grinds it out on an expensive [very] Kazakhstan rug and turning the color of real anger.) “You want closure, I’ll give you closure. Sewing first your mouth and then your snatch shut—I will leave your asshole, which has done all the talking around here for weeks, free to cry ‘Help!’ And if none of that corrects you, I will, I swear to Jesus, Joseph and Miss Mary God, bury you in the crypt you belong in, drive a stake through your vile heart and cover you with a concrete slab!”
And then (to Joe): “Tell me, darling, are vultures on your endangered species list? Because if so, I’m about to offend your principles!” Whereupon he dragged the poor woman to the front door, threw her coat and bag out onto the front porch, bellowing, unnecessarily Joe thought (but reasoned not the need), “And now get out!”
And when she did, he slammed the door, and turned back to the room.
“Closure!
“Oh, thank God,” was heard from the divan, “now what’s for lunch?” And the dying words of the patient. After some days of what seemed a coma, the eyes snap open suddenly and the voice comes clear.
“Shit, now I get it! Oh, well.”
And he falls back on the pillow, dead.
DRAWING TO A CONCLUSION
In the brief space of one volume we have condensed many different concepts, all of which go to make up the ground.
Tension, value (tones of gray), light, shade, compression.
Our language changes as new words are created to express new—
(Actually, darling, there are two schools of thought on that subject.)
Tension is the strain of things falling apart. That much is—
We have concentrated on the main aspects of the subject, leaving out less critical aspects.
Diagonal plan, dynamic in itself in spite of the evident fixedness of an apparently accidental composition.
Everyone knows that sometimes a good sketch, drawn casually but with a sure hand—
Sprezzatura.
Predicament, wherewithal, shades of limelight; how it got to be so.
Times, places, weather conditions and wardrobes.
What more, what more?
He might have taken the time to say something about Truth, Beauty and the Goodness of God.
But the time got away from him, so it seems.
Plus which he says there is no why—a metaphysical statement, having no relation perhaps to the facts of life as they are known to us, but nonetheless disquieting. No why?
Author walking, hearing voices, having visions? Tell it to the Marines.
Elaborate designs, grids, imaginary maps? Put it all in Bloomingdale’s window.
And yet, and yet.
If the stream of consciousness is what we’re all immersed in,
If riverrun past eveandadams truly,
Then sink or swim, or go away somewhere and read a novel,
With a beginning, a middle, an end, and make believe narrative solves something.
Put another way, the author has essayed the transcription of nothing more or less than a congeries of echoes, of years of overheard and vis-à-vis smart talk.
Did Narcissus ever come to love Echo? If so, that boy is alive today.
THE BOOK TALKS BACK
Having heard your story in bits and pieces . . . what of it, wonders the nerveless dark angel of age, guardian still, on the Lexington Avenue subway in late December 2002.
What did he do—what did he do wrong; indeed. (Such Were the Joys would hardly do for the book’s subtitle.)
Is there literary fascination in the clear recitation of the facts? Whatever the answer—yes, no, yes and no, now and then, that depends, whatever—Queer Street, although drawn as a rectilinear diagonal and not a meander, is unlikely, all said and done, to afford it.
To the question has any clear recitation of the facts ever proved genuinely persuasive, he answers no.
We know this argument: writing in a literary and not in a documentary way.
Queer Street addresses the author of Queer Street (in strictest confidence):
So you take perverse pleasure in pulverizing the patho-logics of trusted response, do you, darling? What is it you said yourself—or was that you pretending to be one of the Voices or one of the Voices pretending to be you (and so what?)—gay gown.
Or, recalling with unmixed delight Gore Vidal’s once advising James Baldwin he could not be both Martin Luther King and Bette Davis, can you really envision yourself, merely on the say of even so keen an observer as Richard Rouilard, as both James Joyce and Bette Midler?
Are you so burdened, darling, with the overwhelming paternity of modernism?
Hutcheon’s Typology of Textual Narcissism: covert = overt/ diegetic = linguistic. Truth lies.
Prigogine’s Dissipative Structures Theory.
Can the boy getting over himself get over himself getting—
Been there, done that, got the T-shirt, rent it in two, kneeling on the ground, roaring Stellla! They shrieked with laughter—only one among them, Miss Dean, to wit, reacted in terror. “W-w-when you get like that you’re d-dangerous.” You know, don’t you, she kept Mace spray in that chic little purse.
And Truth, Beauty and the Goodness of God are there somewhere in the notes—cross-identified with the yearning female element in collision with the ill-defined male trace.
And the city revealed itself: the matter of prose romance. New York will be a wonderful place, they all would say, if they ever finish building it.
And he should attempt to come to conclusions?
Identity and the Masks of Enclosure. Narcissism and Dissembling in the Usurper. Extrusion from the Tribe. The Fluidity and Porosity of Texts prior to Canonization. Written on the Wind.
A life, all told, crowded with incident, semi-veiled in secrecy (and only that, apparently: at one point hadn’t his mother declared, “You can’t shock me, you know—I read The Well of Loneliness and all the rest of it; we all did back in the twenties”). And as for exposure, his obsession with Salome . . . although as was pointed out at the time, Ljuba Welitsch didn’t dance, Rita Hayworth most certainly did. He’d dance.
“Meanwhile, pipe down, there are people trying to die in here!”
—a Voice in the Night at the Everard Baths
“Die, die, my darlings—we’re going to breakfast.”
(That was Youth with its reckless exuberance when all things were possible pursued by Age where we are now looking back at . . .)
—William Gaddis, Agape Agape
And after breakfast they walked out of the Everard. Turning east, into the rising sun, they made for the Lexington Avenue subway.
LEO LERMAN: A DEATH
Leo Lerman lying in state in his bedroom at the Osborne, listening in at a fabulous matinee he wouldn’t have missed for the world, while outside it was August.
“Intestate—Leo? That’s impossible, he—”
“In state . . . in state.”
“Oh . . . yes.”
“Positively pharaonic, isn’t it.”
“Ironic—why? It’s exactly what Leo—”
“Ironic! I-ronic—”
“Oh, sorry. Everybody’s whispering, that’s—”
“We’re all failng, darling—getting on. Age comes, the body withers.”
“That body lying there looks like it’s about to sit up.”
“And hum a tune?”
“A Gershwin tune . . . how about him.”
Veronica Geng: But what did Leo Lerman do exactly?
Author: He did everything exactly.
Geng: Hmmm.
Author: No, that’s the point; he was about exactly.
“Tell me your dream,” Leo would say, sitting there in his study at the Osborne, diagonally across from Carnegie Hall, one of the great rooms in private New York, like the habitat of the richest Russian in the world. “In my dream I’m the richest Russian in the world, traveling in a private railway car from St. Petersburg to Venice for Carnevale, then to Monte for the season.” A room the richest Russian in the world—one with necessarily English tastes—would have had installed in his apartments in Petersburg, and at the same time of course reminiscent of the library on a great ocean liner, say the Berengaria: gorgeous burled-wood paneling and filled to the ceiling with first editions. “Sit on that chair, like they do on French television . . . on Le Divan.” (The compère, posing as a shrink, always had the guest sprawl full-frontal on le divan—the analyst’s couch—to do some free-associating, bean-spilling, provocative bead-reading concerning other’s foibles. The author said they ought to have the show in NYC, and he would go on and tell about himself sleeping under the Names Project quilt.)
So after the death of Harry Blair, Leo became the author’s Virgil.
And the author would tell Leo time and again that if Manhattan was, as he, Leo, always said, a great luxury ocean liner, then he, the author, was a stowaway. He could, using his father’s waterfront connections, get on board easily and stay there, coming out (in so many words) from under his hiding place in the lifeboats only in the evening, when the security was lax—never daring to promenade in the afternoons on deck—and commute up to first, as later you could in the last of the great vessels, the France, through the chapel, and meet the swells . . . and on and on like that.
Leo said everybody brought up in Queens felt like that; he had too, in Elmhurst and at Newtown High School (“in the same graduating class with Risë Stevens—Risë Steenberg she was. I was in the senior play of course; played Orsino in Twelfth Night—had the most gorgeous legs”). The thing was to get over it. As long as we were born within the city limits—and as in our cases could look up and see the fabulous skyline looming in the west—we’d fulfilled Euripides’s first requirement for a happy life: nativity in a great city—the great city.
So, Purgatory as anteroom: Leo’s gorgeous wake. The World and its Mother going in to the viewing (“Fran is here to see you, dear”) and coming back out to the living room to talk. Author reminded that the wake used to be nearly a commonplace occurrence in Irish homes before 1950. Unusual for a Jewish man; for Jews, sitting shiva is always after the burial.
Leo lying snug as a bug in a rug at home—and Maria Callas, who was indeed Leo’s dear friend, would, were she alive, be looking at him and wondering perhaps why all New York did not tremble before him as Rome did before Scarpia; quite the opposite, he was their guide to the higher regions.
Dead as a doornail, yet dreaming of Venice and of his corner suite at the Gritti, overlooking the Grand Canal. Dreaming of Carnevale and the (perhaps after all consequent) plague, but also (strangely like some Christian) of the Redentore and of that surpassingly beautiful theater on the stage of which Callas had first stunned the world, La Fenice, the Phoenix, rising from its ashes time and again.
Finally, the memorial service at the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The empty chair, the fedora, the scarf, all spotlighted, as befitted a star. Speeches by the great and the good (so-called, ironically, by edgy New York voices) and on the soundtrack Mariettaslied from Erich Korngold’s masterpiece, Die Tote Stadt.
The author upon exiting made his way through the Egyptian rooms:
Imagine after all carrying on with authority in the Leo tradition—the beard (whiskers, not some chic, compliant, slightly racy woman), the cane, the magisterial, forbidding-yet-inviting demeanor.
Whereupon what?
Only connect.
To what, to whom?
Give it . . . something—but whatever else, don’t give it a rest. The battalion of the valiant won’t; not even now that the Supreme Court has reversed Bowers v. Hardwick.
All right—George Trow and Micheál Mac Liammóir.
Elaborate—only just sufficiently.
George (W.S.) Trow because of City in the Mist, a neglected masterpiece of the New York School (itself inexplicably disregarded) and because Leo said what he loved about reading Trow was the free and willing espousal, the patient endurance, of a peculiar American loneliness. Micheál Mac Liammóir because, apart from the fact he played both Hamlet and Oscar Wilde (the equivalent of James Baldwin’s attempt to be both Martin Luther King and Bette Davis) and invented Orson Welles for Dublin, he was of that metropolis the very kind of arbiter Wizard of Oz (being, after all, a North London Jew called Alfred Wilmot giving all along the best impersonation of an Irishman ever seen, heard, touched-tasted-or-handled) that Leo Lerman from Elmhurst was for Manhattan.
Nearly finished; something more—but keep your eye on the time.
Duly noted—for instance?
A little something transcendent.
(That word again—he has never even known what it means.)
He’d once mentioned the Mac Liammóir connection to Leo, who guffawed, replying, “My dear, if I’d had Mac Liammóir’s talent, I’d have sung Scawpia opposite Maria down there on 39th Street, instead of gasping for breath in a box—and that made two of us at least if you remember, me in the box and Maria onstage.”
“You’re really not like Mac Liammóir, you know; you tell the truth.”
“I’m lazy, my dear—a good liar has to keep track, and I simply couldn’t be bothered.”
“You know, if I thought I could, I might try to—”
“Pick up the torch?”
“Yes.”
“After I’ve—well, now that you’ve stopped going around lighting everybody’s cigarettes, which could be called a kind of practice, you might decide to do something along those lines.”
“Thing is, I can’t ever imagine myself as the world’s richest Russian.”
“Of course you can; all you have to do is stop imagining you’re really Prince Myshkin. You know, when my mother died, Gray and I went out to Elmhurst to collect her things. When we opened this one closet in the bedroom, out poured a lifetime’s worth—an avalanche—of junk jewelry. It was a camp!”
“I’ve never carried any kind of torch at all that mattered, except perhaps on the page.”
“Then that’s your role. Console yourself my dear, and take courage; nothing’s ever really been accomplished by an American that can match what’s been done here on the page. That’s what American loneliness is all about, isn’t it.”
In the Egyptian Room, a place he’d been haunting since childhood in search of his own Shazam.
The oldest Egyptian hieroglyph for the Truth has a slant or an edge on it, a hacking or cutting edge; thus from down the canonical ages (it would so seem) was the truth an ethical utility. And beauty a formal, pleasing, vain and useless bale of goods.
Be that as it may, why was Leo’s face suddenly right there, carved on that mummy case? (Author would have sworn to it; must be what they mean when they talk about the imagination.)
Jesting Pilate: And what is truth?
Stella Adler: Truth, dahling? Truth is in the circumstances, always—and Hamlet is not a guy like you.
Slow curtain . . . the end.