Richard Canning’s interviews may help change the way we regard the genre, which is often relegated to a place somewhere between journalism and public relations. In a culture that elevates individualism, formal completeness, and reproducibility, the interview’s collaborative, improvisational nature is understandably (but unfortunately) underappreciated. Yet in Richard Canning’s hands—or, more literally, through his microphone—the interview is raised to a high art, a kind of conversational jazz, that drove me to read on for hours, caught up in the drama of his dialogues.
Early on, Canning made two interrelated decisions that facilitated his task and won him the trust of authors who are usually rather guarded. First, he avoids personal questions; second, he wants to know about the artistic decisions that inform these writers’ works. In short, he takes his interviewees seriously as artists. Such an approach is surprisingly rare, especially with gay writers. At least it’s been my experience that interviewers, if they acknowledge that I am gay, are more interested in exploring my personal life than my artistry. The work seems secondary. One of the ways that gay authors have been ghettoized is by people overlooking their achievements as writers and viewing them as merely spokespersons for a social movement. This is understandable since writers like Edmund White, Armistead Maupin, John Rechy, and Larry Kramer have been public figures whose political involvement has sometimes overshadowed their work as writers. Indeed, many of these men come from an era when the most famous “out” gay men were writers—Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, or James Baldwin—whose lives frequently eclipsed the recognition of their artistic achievement. It is not surprising, therefore, that writers in these interviews sometimes seem a bit touchy about how their works are regarded as art, because their books have been so often treated not as fiction but reportage or social polemic, or—worse—as a form of free group therapy.
If I put great stress on Canning’s decision to address these men as artists, it is because this is so rare. Few before him have explored such basic questions as point of view, narrative pacing, or fictional structure. Even those who should know better have fallen into the trap of reading these works not as the complexly constructed imaginative art that they are (or aspire to be), but as transparent documentary or as a means to make people feel better about themselves. Bruce Bawer tells us in A Place at the Table that “the Gay Writer’s novel says: This is what it means to live as a homosexual man in a mostly heterosexual world that doesn’t understand or sympathize.”1 Because he expects gay writers to present a generalized view of the homosexual condition, Bawer attacks them for presenting lives that are “decidedly untrue of homosexuals in general,” as if they were writing sociology.2 David Leavitt has been no better. He thinks gay writers must present good role models for young readers, as though they were writing textbooks for some high school health class of the future. Leavitt attacks Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance because its “voyeuristic fixation with beauty that powers the novel . . . compels younger gay men who don’t know better to wonder if that’s all there is to the business of being gay.”3 It never occurs to Leavitt that Holleran is an adult who writes for adults, and that, of course, children who pick up his book—like a friend who, after reading Lawrence at fifteen, came to believe that all English gardeners were going to be as kinkily sexual as in Lady Chatterley’s Lover—will misunderstand what they read. Of course, in an age saturated by “infomercials” and news entertainment, it is sad to think that most people “don’t know any better” than to confuse fiction and its imaginative truth with reportage and its facticity.
Nor are academic readers necessarily better. Robert McRuer, in a turgidly written, jargon-filled tome, will castigate Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story for containing only two black characters—as though novels operated as equal-opportunity employers.4 Gay novelists have been expected to bear an enormous weight of social expectations. Without ever arguing against such pressures in his interviews, but by his very approach, Canning lets his interviewees be artists first—people whose work, if not independent of the culture, obeys not ideological or social imperatives, but the inner logic of form and language.
The best interviews are a form of drama in which character and ideas are simultaneously developed and revealed. I know several of the writers interviewed in this book, and I was delighted to hear their voices come alive for me in these pages: Edmund White, discussing the failure of Caracole and slowly turning it into his private success, or Andrew Holleran trying to interview the interviewer to deflect attention from himself. James Purdy’s impatience; Ethan Mordden’s self-assurance; Felice Picano’s expansiveness: all are captured here. And I heard voices of writers I wanted to know more about. After reading the interview with Patrick Gale, I had friends from England send the books that have not yet been published here in the United States because he sounded so smart, inviting, and, at the same time, challenging.
Again and again, Canning captures his subjects in characteristic moments that show us something we could never see in their art alone or in criticism about them. Some of the interviews are surprises. Armistead Maupin comes off as a very different person, far more serious and conscious of himself as an artist than I had imagined. Alan Hollinghurst seemed to be far less assured, less certain of direction than the narrators of his novels. It is gratifying for me to witness once again that people, when discussing ideas, nevertheless reveal their character, and that personal revelation is not necessary to give a sense of who is speaking. If these are little pieces of theater, they are Shaw not Ibsen. Sometimes, of course, the conflicts of these writers’ literary lives emerge. How could gossip be completely removed from such discussions? But Canning never lets it serve as the center of an interview and, more than likely, it becomes the avenue for a more profound discussion of what it means to be an artist, a gay artist, in the English-speaking world.
We must, however, be sure that we don’t equate the person who emerges from these interviews as the “real” author. The face presented to us is yet another mask to put aside the authorial voice in their works. Nor should we be fooled into believing that what they say is necessarily true. I caught at least one bald-faced lie. The role of the imagination does not stop at the covers of these men’s books. It filters richly into the way they present themselves to us as authors. What Philip Lopate said about Mary McCarthy might well be said about several of these men: that their finest imaginative creation is themselves.
But if we see the interview as another stage on which authors can “perform themselves,” we will learn something about how they wish readers to see the relationship between their authorial personae and their narrative personae. I don’t mean to place these authors in some never-never land (a creation of an earlier homosexual writer), where they are untouched by the events of the material world. Indeed, more than some authors, their careers have been affected by the cultural attitudes toward homosexuality and its representation. To be sure, before the 1970s there had been “mainstream” gay fiction. James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room is one good example; Sanford Friedman’s Totempole is another. But, in general, fiction that dealt with homosexuality fell into one of three categories: pornography, problem novels, and “high” literature. Gide, Proust, and Thomas Mann could get away with writing about homosexuality because they were Europeans and thus had a certain license to speak of such decadent matters; and also because they were such highly celebrated authors (after all, two won the Nobel Prize for literature) that they were regarded as being beyond prurient interest. But even in the mid-eighties, editors were nervous about using such a term as “gay author” to describe Edmund White, Andrew Holleran, or David Plante, because they were afraid their journals would be sued for libel. An editor kept hounding me about an essay I wrote, asking over and over again how I could justify calling someone a “gay novelist,” until I blurted out: “I know. I slept with him.” She was then either legally satisfied or just too embarrassed to question me further.
Since then, however, there has been a remarkable change. The entity “gay literature” has established itself as a regular feature of the literary landscape—and worthy, as recently in the case of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, of prestigious awards. Gay fiction adopted no single strategy for responding to these cultural changes, but no writer could go unaffected by them. Canning’s interviews are themselves part of the cultural forces they comment upon. Indeed, part of their importance is how much they run against the tide of scholarly concerns. For unlike other literatures—Southern writing, Jewish writing, African-American writing—which have developed very rich bodies of supporting analytic and evaluative work, gay literature—especially contemporary gay literature—has not been so well served by academics. The major scholars, such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Wayne Koestenbaum, and Michael Warner, have mostly concentrated either on canonical works of literature or on nonliterary phenomena (opera, film, politics, philosophy). Alan Hollinghurst’s or Andrew Holleran’s novels have excited far less scholarly attention than The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The truly extraordinary cultural phenomenon of the burgeoning of gay literary production has gone relatively unexplored by the very people who are best trained to understand it. One must view these interviews as an important “intervention,” to use that fashionable term, in the cultural construction of queerness.
Of all the events that have shaped gay life, none has so dramatically altered it as the AIDS epidemic. Many of these men were sexually active and actively writing at what Andrew Holleran has called “Ground Zero”—the epidemic’s epicenter. All of these writers—to my knowledge—came out sexually (if not in print) before the appearance of AIDS, and they are witnesses of, as well as participants in, the changes it has wrought to the way we love now. Their own views of how best to represent the pain, suffering, and death that they have witnessed on a massive scale has changed over the years. Again and again, Canning brings the authors back to this crucial issue—not only because it constitutes the greatest artistic, political, and personal challenge of their lives as gay men, but also because in responding to it (or by not responding to it), they define themselves as gay writers. Homophobia may have created the category of “gay writer” as a way of containing such representations, but AIDS has been the event that makes such a category salient. Like Jews who must imaginatively and morally view the exodus from Egypt as an event that they personally experienced despite the intervening millennia, the gay man is a person who must imaginatively and morally view AIDS as something that has defined him directly. If nothing else, it is this crucial event that not only justifies the singling out of gay authors as a category but also demands that they speak.
David Bergman
1. Bruce Bawer, A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual in American Society (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), 198 (italics in original).
2. Bawer, A Place at the Table, 204.
3. David Leavitt, “Introduction” to David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell, eds., The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories (New York: Viking/Penguin, 1994), xv–xxviii (quotation from xix–xx).
4. Robert McRuer, The Queer Renaissance: Contemporary American Literature and the Reinvention of Lesbian and Gay Identities (New York: New York University Press, 1997).