Introduction

for Robert Ready, who’ll always be my teacher

I didn’t set out to write this book. I didn’t set out to write a book at all, at least not this one. I was working on another novel entirely as my college senior thesis. My advisor on that project was also the teacher in the fiction workshops I was taking to complete my writing minor, and he told me in no uncertain terms that I wasn’t going to be submitting chapters from my thesis in his workshops. And so, while I churned out the requisite coming of age/coming out novel, I began writing a series of stories on the side, stories in which I drew on gay archetypes I’d encountered in books, plays, movies, and the news to create a collage of gay life in the late 1980s. The stories were topical but also unreal. I was a twenty-one-year-old college student, after all, with only borrowed knowledge of the lives I was describing. I wasn’t a hustler or a victim, let alone daddy or dandy, john or queen. I didn’t have AIDS and didn’t know anyone who did. Hell, I’d only had sex one time, an experience that could be described as perfunctory at best.

The stories that grew from this infertile soil sprang up in the margins of my brain while I worked on my “real” novel and waited for “real” life to start. I had no plan when I sat down to write the first, “Always and Forever,” and it wasn’t until I began a second (which didn’t make the final cut) that I hit on the conceit of reusing the names. Even that was an accident. I’d always had a hard time coming up with names for characters. I borrowed friends’ names, or scanned my bookshelves and pulled character or author names more or less at random: Martin came from Martin Luther King, Jr. (Why We Can’t Wait), John from a boy I had a crush on, Henry from Henry James (“The Pupil,” “The Real Thing”), Beatrice from Dante’s Inferno. Susan was the name of the last girl I ever made out with, and it was in her room that I began the second story. There were two books visible on her bookshelves: a biography of Jim Morrison and a book of his lyrics. I couldn’t stand The Doors and refused to acknowledge them, and I plugged along with an ever-growing cast of nameless characters, until finally the unsignified array of “he”s and “him”s and “she”s and “her”s grew too unwieldy and I borrowed from myself. “Always and Forever,” though only a month old, already felt like ancient history, yet even as I assigned its names to a set of new characters I could see the similarities between the two casts, especially its leads: an innocent boy, an experienced man, a desire that’s both mutual and exploitative, and grows in a world where women are cogs in men’s lives, necessary but almost invisible (“Blue Wet-Paint Columns,” the last story I wrote for the book, was an attempt to acknowledge that).

By the time I left Sue’s room I’d lost interest in the story but had begun to glimpse the shape of a larger project, one in which my inexperience could be generative rather than limiting. The desire to mix up my characters’ attributes and reassign them to different contexts was invigorating. “Transformations” was the first conscious attempt at what I was already calling “a Martin and John story,” and after that they rolled out of me at the rate of one or two a month. Still, they remained tangential to the novel I was working on, a game I was playing, an assignment I had to fulfill, and I didn’t take the time to wonder if there was anything more to them until after I’d turned in my thesis and realized now I had to write another book. I was terrified. I had no clue how to turn these stories into a book and no idea what else I might work on, and so, more by default than anything else, I kept churning out material in that first summer after college (“The Search for Water,” “Three Night Watchmen”) and as a first-year MFA student (“Driftwood,” “The Gilded Theater”). But the stories came more and more slowly as I realized I’d exhausted the possibilities of the conceit, or at any rate my ability to exploit it. By then I had a mess of a dozen stories, none of which was really finished, and no idea how to put them together. It was my friend Bruce who saved me, and saved the book. He suggested I try my hand at what were then called short shorts, and which later acquired the sexier name flash fiction. “Given This and Everything” was the result, then “Circumnavigation,” my first attempt at writing about AIDS, which in turn gave me the courage to write “Fucking Martin.” The short form was liberating to me, whose stories have always erred on the longish side (of the twenty or twenty-five short stories I’ve finished, probably two-thirds are 7,200 words long, plus or minus a thousand words). I liked the counterpoint of the longs and the shorts, although I still hadn’t hit on the (let’s face it) pretty simple idea of alternating them. When my agent began sending out the unfinished manuscript in 1991, the short shorts were still clumped together at the top of the pile, and it was only after I’d read them through that I realized they felt like a single narrative. In fact the editor who eventually bought the manuscript preferred them that way, and I had to convince him they’d make a more shapely book if they were spaced throughout. (“Let’s use italics!”) I remember dropping the term “frame narrative,” not because I’d conceived of the short shorts as a frame narrative but because “frame narrative” sounded intentional, intelligent. The truth is, I was so unsure of the strategy that I didn’t actually read the book in its final form until it was in galleys.

In a way my entire career has proceeded along these lines, each successive book a way of saying No, no, I got it wrong last time, this is what I really mean to say. I came up with the idea for The Law of Enclosures long before I finished Martin and John, but it was only after the latter was published that I decided to turn its heterosexual protagonists into a new version of John’s parents, who got short shrift in this book, just as I didn’t come up with the idea of adding an account of my own parents’ lives to Law until I saw the way readers misjudged them based on what I’d written in Martin and John. There were ideas for other books too, including the kernels of Now It’s Time to Say Goodbye and The Garden of Lost and Found, but linking them to Martin and John and The Law of Enclosures helped me shape them, not so much by dictating a form or content as by limiting the bewildering myriad of possibilities that confronts every writer at the beginning of a new project. I was vain enough to think of these books as a series, and even gave them a really, really terrible title, Seven Days and Nights of My Soul (although honestly, it was less a title than the name of the folder where I kept them on my computer). Later I came up with Gospel Harmonies, which is a good title, but my God, it creates some expectations, doesn’t it? Supposedly there’ll be two more novels in the series, followed by a final book of short stories called Without Measuring Things How Can You Say What You’ve Lost? Its seven stories are meant to recast the first six books based on my (future) understanding of them, then cap everything with a coda inspired by Bernard’s final soliloquy in The Waves (“Now to sum it up . . .”). The form of WMTHCYSWYL? mimics Martin and John and its title is cribbed from that very first short short, “Given This and Everything.” Martin and John came out when I was twenty-five. I’m fifty now, which means my first novel is somehow as old as I was when I published it. (Believe me when I tell you I have no idea how that happened.) March 1993: Bill Clinton was just a couple of months into his first term, which is another way of saying that the twelve-year nightmare of the Reagan-Bush era had finally come to an end, and, though we didn’t know it, we were just a few years away from the first major medical breakthrough in the fight against AIDS. Throw in the digital revolution and the dot-com bubble, and the darkness of the late ’80s and early ’90s was already starting to feel like a distant memory by the time my second novel came out in 1996. What I’m trying to say is that shortly after I published Martin and John I started to think of it as a kind of existential portrait in which homophobia and the AIDS crisis served as vessels for the grief I felt at the loss of my mother, who died when I was three, before I was able to understand who she was or what it meant that she was gone from my life. As the years passed, however, I came to see that, whatever their origins, my fears, sadness, and desires mirrored those of a lot of other people who’d survived a particularly desperate moment in American history. And this is the generosity of art. Not to the reader (or not just to the reader), but to the writer. Art points out that we know more than we think we do, if we’re willing to do a little digging, spend a little time, maybe risk a little more exposure than we want to. By which I mean that when I revisit Martin and John now I’m not reminded of my mother, I’m reminded of the late eighties and early nineties, of all the friends I lost to AIDS (and all the ones that are still here), of my first earnest but generally clumsy attempts at sex and love and, yes, writing.

But the person I was then, like the moment itself, is gone. The Dale Peck who wrote this book seems as different from who I am now as the successions of Johns who populate its pages, and I’m less and less tempted to look for him when I revisit the text. If that sounds like a particularly middle-aged sentiment, I won’t argue. Around fifty the mirror starts to tell you that you’re not going to be around forever, and it’s time to focus on what matters. No doubt in another twenty-five years, when I’m drowning in the nostalgia of my dotage, I’ll feel differently, but for now I’m happy to relinquish control of this book to its readers. Like I said, it’s twenty-five, and though I still find that hard to believe (where did the time go?) I know it’s time to let it make its own way in the world.

 

Dale Peck

(July 2018)