Death is almost never timely, even for the old.
On February 24, 1983, alone in his room in the Hotel Elysée in New York, seventy-one-year-old Tennessee Williams died after choking on the cap of his eyedrop bottle. He often held the cap in his teeth while applying his eyedrops; he must have inhaled the cap with his head tilted back. Williams would have laughed in delight over such an absurd death—if it had happened to someone else. More than one obituary quoted Blanche’s line from Streetcar: “You know what I shall die of? I shall die of eating an unwashed grape one day out on the ocean.”
A year and a half later, in August 1984, while visiting his friend Joanne Carson in Palm Springs, Truman Capote died in his sleep from “a multiple drug intoxication” complicated by liver disease. He was fifty-nine. A year earlier Gore Vidal had dropped his libel suit after Capote wrote a public letter of apology. Asked to comment on his death, Vidal shrugged and cited what had been said about the death of Elvis Presley: it was “a good career move.”
The deaths of Williams and Capote were oddly anticlimactic. They had both died as writers years ago and, in this sense, their deaths were almost posthumous. Williams had continued to write, yet his later plays are more manner than matter and never emotionally engaged. Capote had stopped writing altogether, but nobody knew that until his executors went through the desks and closets of his different homes, hunting for the rest of Answered Prayers. Nothing existed except the chapters published in Esquire.
The two men died just as the plague years began. The deaths of gay artists had not yet become commonplace.
“2,339 and Counting” was the title of Kramer’s October 1983 article, published as an ad in the Village Voice when the Voice refused to run it as an article. (Kramer wanted to reach a larger audience than he was reaching with the Native.) The numbers had doubled since the last article six months earlier. Of the sick, 945 were dead. In addition to the gay men, there were IV drug users, hemophiliacs, and a few Haitians. A nasty joke of the time went: What’s the hardest thing about being diagnosed with AIDS? Convincing your parents that you’re Haitian.
Famous people began to die of AIDS, yet they didn’t want the world to know what killed them. AIDS was like the dye on a biologist’s tissue sample identifying who was homosexual. The obituaries in the New York Times were routinely vague or said simply “heart failure”—but the heart always stops when a person expires. When Roy Cohn, the fiercely anti-Communist, fiercely closeted lawyer became sick in 1986, he did everything he could to keep his diagnosis a secret. Liberace died of AIDS in 1987 after claiming he was wasting away because of a watermelon diet. But one famous figure chose to be honest. Movie star Rock Hudson was visibly ill when he appeared with his former costar Doris Day on a television talk show in July 1985. He said he had the flu. But after ten days of attention and speculation by the press (and a quote from Armistead Maupin in the San Francisco Chronicle saying, yes, Hudson was gay), the actor told his spokesperson to tell the public what he had and who he was. For most of straight America, Rock Hudson was the first actual person they knew with AIDS. He died that October.
How does one write about an epidemic that is so public yet experienced so privately, almost secretly? The first major work appeared in the most public literary art, the theater. There were timely plays by Robert Chesley, Victor Bumbalo (Adam and the Experts) and others as well as those by Kramer and William Hoffman. But this highly public art was soon joined by the most private art, poetry.
Poetry offers a more personal and immediate response to experience than any other literary form. It does not require the machinery of plot and character, but can directly address intensely felt moments. The great poets of the First World War, Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, and Siegfried Sassoon, responded directly to the slaughterhouse of the trenches, writing about the war in the middle of the war, sometimes composing passages in the front lines. The cool, dry, bitter, matter-of-factness of “Dulce et Decorum Est” by Owen would find its counterpart in poems written by young Americans seventy years later. Take, for example, this passage:
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on bitter tongues…
Only the old-fashioned cadence indicates to most readers that this man is dying from poison gas and not from Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia.
Men and women immediately began to write poems about their friends, their lovers, and themselves, what they saw, what they feared, what they lost. Some of the writers were already famous, others on their way to fame, others barely outlived their first books. The work was published in little magazines, chapbooks, handmade brochures, and hardcover anthologies. Some poems make one think of Randall Jarrell’s description of bad poetry: “It is as if the writers had sent you their ripped-out arms and legs, with ‘This is a poem’ scrawled on them in lipstick.” Yet the best work describes these raw experiences so precisely and clearly that any reader can come away with a better understanding of the world.
Some of the strongest poems were little more than sharply observed snapshots of feeling. They did what journalism is supposed to do but rarely does, making alien experiences accessible. Has anyone ever written a better description of what it’s like to be sick with AIDS-related pneumonia than Melvin Dixon’s poem, “Heartbeats”? It’s a brutally simple poem, composed in double beats like a fist knocking at a door.
Breathe in. No air.
Black out. White rooms.
Head hot. Feet cold.
No work. Eat right.
CAT scan. Chin up.
No air. No air.
Thin blood. Sore lungs.
Mouth dry. Mind gone.
Six months? Three weeks?
Can’t eat. No air.
Today? Tonight?
It waits. For me.
Sweet heart. Don’t stop.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
Dixon was a teacher, poet and novelist, author of Trouble the Water, a promising first novel about growing up gay and black. He died of AIDS in 1992 at the age of forty-two.
Other poets wrote poems about the fear of AIDS. There were also poems about sex in the shadow of death and poems about survivor’s guilt. And there were elegies, many elegies.
James Merrill had finished The Changing Light at Sandover, his ambitious epic about life after death, in 1982, before the epidemic made itself fully felt. Yet the mammoth poem now took on new meaning for readers. As Edmund White said of the fictionalized Merrill character in his 1997 novel, The Farewell Symphony, “Now I understand why [he] had invented his dress-up party version of the afterlife…. It was a normal way of keeping the dead alive.”
Merrill wrote a memorial tribute in prose for his scholarly friend, David Kalstone, who died in 1986, describing how he scattered his remains in Long Island Sound: “In the sunlit current the white gravel of our friend fanned out, revolving once as if part of a dance, and was gone.” He followed with two elegies for Kalstone, including one that elaborates on the scattering of the ashes.
You are gone. You caught like a cold their airy
lust for essence. Now, in the furnace parched to
ten or twelve light handfuls, a mortal gravel
sifted through fingers…
In his cool, calm, quietly tender poems, Merrill never indicated that he himself had tested positive for the virus in 1986. He had his reasons for keeping it secret, including the fact his mother was still alive. (She was not happy when he talked frankly about being gay in his 1993 memoir, A Different Person.) The closest he came to making it public is a strangely intense, hallucinogenic poem, “Vol. XLIV, No. 3” where details under the microscope become electric fantasies.
Chains of gold tinsel, baubles of green fire
For the arterial branches—
Here at Microcosmics Illustrated, why,
Christmas goes on all year!
The poem then turns more serious.
Defenseless, the patrician cells await
Invasion by barbaric viruses,
Another sack of Rome.
A new age. Everything we dread.
When it was published, Merrill seemed to be talking only about the vague, generalized fear all gay men were feeling at the time, no matter what their health was.
His life with David Jackson had changed. They no longer shared their nights at the Ouija board; they were both seeing other men. They remained in touch, yet they didn’t always live together in their different homes in Stonington, Key West, and Athens.
Some of the strongest poems about AIDS were written by Thom Gunn, the English poet who had met Christopher Isherwood back in 1954. Another Brit who decided he was happier living in America, he followed his American boyfriend, Mike Kitay, to San Francisco, settling first on Russian Hill, where he was neighbors with Armistead Maupin, then buying a house in the Haight-Ashbury, where he lived with Kitay and various mutual friends for the next thirty-three years.
Cambridge-educated like his peer Ted Hughes Gunn enjoyed being in the city of the Beat poets, but their poetics never rubbed off on him. His life could be as anarchic as theirs—he stopped teaching for a few years so he could experiment with LSD—yet he loved old-fashioned form and meter. “Later I realized what I was doing,” he told an interviewer. “I was filtering the experiences of the infinite through the grid of the finite.” A lean, handsome man who wore leather jackets like Marlon Brando in The Wild One and was photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe, he also edited scholarly editions of Elizabethan verse. His own work grew more matter-of-factly gay, the Auden-like “you” of beloveds becoming actual male bedmates, the urban landscapes including an occasional gay bar or drag queen. He lost his fans, who feared he was writing too much “hippy silliness and self-regarding camp.” Then he wrote The Man with Night Sweats.
The book came out in 1992, but the poems were written between 1982 and 1988. The volume includes work that has nothing to do with AIDS, evocations of adolescence, flowers, and neighbors, but it was the AIDS poems, all in Part 4, that seized the attention of readers, gay and straight. They cover the whole gamut of the epidemic, addressing dying friends, personal fear, tainted desire, and grief. The title poem is about a man waking up from a fever dream covered in sweat, the night sweat that’s a symptom of either AIDS or fear—or both. (Gunn himself was HIV negative.) Just the titles of other poems speak volumes: “In Time of Plague,” “To a Dead Gym Owner,” “To a Dead Graduate Student,” “Terminal,” “Death’s Door.” Yet it is not a depressing book. Gunn remains calm and clear-eyed throughout, and his people remain complex and human even in the midst of illness.
Look, for example, at “Lament,” written about Gunn’s friend Allan Noseworthy. In four pages of rhyming or half-rhyming couplets, we follow a man into a hospital and stay with him until he dies. The Auden-like “you” is no longer coy.
A gust of morphine hid you. Back in sight
You breathed through a segmented tube, fat, white,
Jammed down your throat so that you could not speak…
A man struggles to keep his identity, his wit and curiosity, even with a breathing tube filling his mouth.
The clinical details of hospital life block out easy Victorian sentimentality. There is no death of Little Nell in this book. These are lean, tough poems, with no emotional fat. There is no straining for meaning either, although larger meanings sometimes come through. In “The Missing,” Gunn uses the loss of friends to talk about his circle and how friendship (and sex) opened into a larger community, “an unlimited embrace.” Walt Whitman’s “city of comrades” is updated to the 1980s and made more real and poignant by the fact that death is chipping away at it.
Critics who had grown lukewarm about Gunn rediscovered him and admired what he accomplished in The Man with Night Sweats. It really is an amazing book, each poem shining a fresh light on actual experience, the sum larger than the parts. As one straight critic wrote, “Gunn restores poetry to a centrality it has often seemed close to losing, by dealing in the context of a specific human catastrophe with the great themes of life and death, coherently, intelligently, memorably.”
Meanwhile the novelist Andrew Holleran was writing prose poems like little elegies. Dancer from the Dance had been a kind of elegy for impossible love. He feared there was nothing more to say about gay life, which may have been true for him—his second novel, Nights in Aruba, feels like eloquent leftovers from Dancer. Now, however, there was real cause for elegy. Holleran explored loss in a remarkable series of essays written for a monthly column in Christopher Street magazine, “New York Notebook.” He wrote his first column in 1983. A selection, Ground Zero, was published in 1988.
Each essay is beautifully written, constructed with recurring motifs and metaphors. They are learned and personal, mixing allusions to Proust and Greek mythology with medical facts and sexual grit. Holleran explored a broad range of topics: friendship, bathhouses, celibacy, porn theaters, George Santayana. His dazzling celebration of the comic playwright/actor Charles Ludlam, who died of AIDS in 1987, includes some of the best descriptions of camp drama ever written: “like a child running through the contents of his bedroom closet, putting on fake noses, mustaches, pulling out toy airplanes, little plastic gladiators, goldfish bowls, ray-guns, Cleopatra wigs, he always gave the impression of having assembled the particular play from a magic storeroom in which he kept, like some obsessed bag lady, every prop and character that two thousand years of Western history had washed up on the shores of a Long Island childhood.” Then Holleran ends the piece with a blanket declaration: “Not only is Charles Ludlam gone, it seems, so is humor. One can no longer make jokes about death. One can no longer make jokes at all—the curtain is down.”
AIDS crowded his mind and it brought down the curtain on everything. Even essays that aren’t about AIDS become essays about AIDS. An appreciation of Henry James includes Holleran imagining that the gay men filling the hospitals had all listened to Lambert Strether’s heartfelt speech from The Ambassadors, “Live, live all you can, it’s a mistake not to!”—as if James had brought on the disease.
Holleran moved to Gainesville, Florida, partly to look after his aging parents but also to flee the epidemic. Many people in the 1980s thought AIDS was a New York/San Francisco disease and they could escape it. But once out of New York, Holleran’s fears and accusations grew even darker and heavier:
AIDS destroys trust…. AIDS is a form of pollution; in this case, polluted blood and semen. We’ve spoiled even that. AIDS is a form of terrorism—sex becomes Paris the summer the bombs went off. Nobody goes. Like Central Park—empty at night because everyone’s afraid of muggers—homosexual life becomes a vast empty space from which everyone has withdrawn.
Holleran had always been melancholy, yet his chronic depression now served as a magnifying glass for the depression and fear that affected many gay men at this time. He was far from alone in feeling devastated, confused, and more than a little crazy.
But in addition to the elegies, a kind of counterelegy appeared, an appreciation of love and sex more tender than what had been written before the epidemic. A young poet, Mark Doty, would eventually write elegies, too, but his strongest early poems include warm, witty appreciations of the body written in defiance of the disease. Doty was born in 1953, grew up in Tennessee and Arizona, went to school in Iowa and Vermont, and spent most of his twenties married to a woman. They divorced, and he came out and moved to New York. His second collection, Bethlehem in Broad Daylight, includes a gorgeous tribute to a dirty movie house, “The Adonis Theater,” and a sweetly tender poem, “63rd Street Y,” where he compares the view of men from across the street to “a voyeur’s advent calendar”:
just the perfect feet and ankles
of the boy in the red-flushed room
are visible. I think he must be disappointed,
stirring a little, alone, and then
two other legs enter the rectangle of view,
moving toward his and twining with them,
one instep bending to stroke
the other’s calf. They make me happy,
these four limbs in effortless conversation…
AIDS remains offstage for most of his poems, but is acknowledged now and then. In “Tiara” (“Peter died in a paper tiara/cut from a book of princess paper dolls”), Doty answers the mourners who say their promiscuous friend had “asked for it.”
Asked for it—
when all he did was go down
into the salt tide
of wanting as much as he wanted,
giving himself over so drunk
or stoned it didn’t matter who,
though they were beautiful,
stampeding him into the simple,
ravishing music of their hurry.
I think heaven is perfect stasis
poised over realms of desire,
where dreaming and waking men lie
on the grass while wet horses
roam among them, huge fragments
of the music we die into
in the body’s paradise.
It’s a highly romantic celebration of sex, something that was badly needed at a time when so many people talked about promiscuity as a selfish, evil activity. Doty was not writing out of ignorance. His own partner, Wally Roberts, had recently tested positive for HIV.
The older writers didn’t always understand what was happening. In an interview in Playboy, Gore Vidal said he thought people were overreacting to AIDS. After all, he had grown up with syphilis in the years before penicillin; he was used to sexual diseases. Allen Ginsberg startled the audience at OutWrite, the gay literary conference, when he confessed he didn’t worry about AIDS since his sex life consisted chiefly of giving blowjobs to straight college boys.
But Christopher Isherwood understood. More accurately, he understood how little he knew. “I don’t feel I know nearly enough about the AIDS situation,” he told Armistead Maupin in 1985, when Maupin interviewed him and Don Bachardy for the Village Voice. “But these younger men who find they have it—some absolutely awful pressures begin to assert themselves. They’re told by their relatives that it’s a sort of punishment, that it’s dreadful and it’s God’s will and all that sort of thing. And I think they have to be very tough with themselves and decide which side they’re on.” Then he added, “You know, fuck God’s will. God’s will must be circumvented, if that’s what it is.”
Maupin interviewed Isherwood and Bachardy as a couple and they talked mostly about their life together. They no longer fought about outside boyfriends but fought instead about Bachardy’s driving—he was a terrible driver. They said they still slept tangled together in the same bed.
This was the last interview Isherwood would give. He had been diagnosed with prostate cancer, which he didn’t tell Maupin. Approaching death himself, he firmly rejected the glib judgments that people often make about illness and mortality.
Bachardy had been drawing pictures of Isherwood ever since he first studied art as a teenager. Beginning in August 1985, as his lover grew more ill, Bachardy drew him more steadily, constantly, obsessively. The pictures were in black acrylic on paper, the paint diluted to the consistency of ink and applied with different brushes. The images have the stark simplicity of Japanese ideograms fleshed out with washes of gray. The drawing sessions were intense and intimate—Bachardy drew his eighty-one-year-old lover both clothed and nude. Later published in a book with selections from Bachardy’s diary, Christopher Isherwood: Last Drawings, the pictures suggest a storyboard of dying, a comic strip of death. Stephen Spender called them “merciless and loving,” and Bachardy agreed. “The thought occurs to me,” Bachardy wrote in his diary, “am I so insistent about these sittings with Chris as a means of extending the time I have left with him…?” Isherwood would sign and date each picture.
He went into the hospital in October and the pictures stopped for three weeks. When he returned to their house in Santa Monica and the sessions resumed, his face was more gaunt and angular. More disturbing was his indifference to the artwork, he who had always been Bachardy’s biggest enthusiast. “Oh, the pain, the pain,” he grumbled whenever he moved. He stopped signing the pictures.
That December, Thom Gunn wrote a poem about his friend, “To Isherwood Dying,” where he compared Death to the young men whistling for girls outside Isherwood’s apartment in the opening pages of Goodbye to Berlin.
Isherwood died at home late in the morning on January 4, 1986. Bachardy had made six drawings of him the night before. After he expired, however, Bachardy continued to draw, unwilling to stop. He drew only the head now, from different angles, the sheet drawn up to his chin, a harrowing abstraction of sharp chin, big nostrils, and open eyes. “I started drawing Chris’s corpse at two o’clock and worked more or less steadily until [the doctor] came around nine…. Chris’s body spooks me because it already has so little to do with him.” The body was taken away to a medical school where it was dissected by students.
On the last page of A Single Man, Isherwood writes that the body is only trash after individual consciousness floats off to rejoin the ocean of consciousness. Christopher Isherwood was now part of that vast metaphysical ocean—and of a smaller ocean of books and readers.