Gaya Scienza

Edmund White's Life in New York

An interview with Edmund White on the occasion of the publication of City Boy (Bloomsbury, 2009, 298p), in the current issue of the Gay & Lesbian Review, is the best introduction to his new memoir. Here is an excerpt:

Michael Ehrhardt: Getting back to the subject of gay lit, you write about Christopher Isherwood. His novel A Single Man, published in 1964, is arguably one of the first openly gay novels that isn’t camp or tragic, as opposed to Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room or Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar. Would you agree?
EW: Giovanni’s Room is weird, because it’s written by a black man, but there are no black characters in it. I mean, it seems like the idea behind it is that men are desirable as long as they’re straight, but the minute they go to bed with you they become sisters, and therefore they’re bad, like trash, and all you can do is bump pussies with them. I remember when I came out in the 50’s that’s what people thought. And Baldwin just echoes that. Then there’s Vidal’s book, which is camp, with lots of campy dialogue.
ME: So, you’d agree that A Single Man was an early avatar of the positive gay novel?
EW: Yes, a hundred percent. And why was it so ahead of its time? I’d say because Isherwood was part of the original gay revolution in Berlin and actually lived in Magnus Hirschfeld’s house. Isherwood had tremendous class confidence, and he lived during the war years and afterwards in California, which is one of the great breeding grounds for modern homosexuality, and got all the fall-out of the GIs coming back from the war. Many GIs came out around that time. The army was a great breeding ground for modern homosexuality, because you had all these young men, who were far from home, who thought they would die any day, who were all thrown together in the barracks, so why not seize the moment? And a lot of those guys settled in the beach communities of California after the war, because they didn’t want to go back to Pittsburgh and get married to their childhood sweethearts.
ME: Isn’t that what a lot of the phobia is about “Don’t ask, don’t tell”?
EW: I think there is a lot of homosexuality in the Army. But I have a theory which you can agree or disagree with, that before homosexuality became so public, so vocal, and so politicized, there was a lot more casual action than there is now. I think that between AIDS and then the high profile of it, it discourages people from experimenting. I mean, I’m old enough to remember the old Mediterranean world of Greece, for instance, where almost any man, if you paid him something, was readily available.

City Boy has received mostly positive reviews. And rightly so. Despite some name-dropping and unnecessary gossips, White's memoir is full of memorable portraits, particularly those of James Merrill, Peggy Guggenheim and Susan Sontag. Many other famous, and less famous, characters appear through the pages which recount White's life in the 60s and the 70s, mainly in New York, the city where 'nothing lasts'. The memoir provides a lively description of gay life during these two critical decades, and the author portrays his sexual life very candidly. It is also the story of man becoming a writer. The books ends with the advent of AIDS, the publishing of White's (finally...) breakthrough novel A Boy's Own Story, and his departure for Paris in 1983...

2009.11.29

Lincoln (cont.); Gay Tennis Stars

Read the excellent paper by Lewis Gannett in the current issue of The Gay & Lesbian Review (A Double Standard in Lincoln Studies). It's a balanced summary of the controversy regarding Lincoln's attraction to men, including carnal attraction, not "those asexual 'romantic friendships' in vogue with certain scholars" (here we are again...). Very critical of Sean Wilentz's 'gargantuan (25,000-word) review-essay on Lincoln literature in the July 15, 2009, issue of The New Republic', he argues that, starting in the 1990's, 'Lincoln scholars relaxed evidentiary standards to accommodate a heterosexual story [Ann Rutledge] in order to ward off homo-romance stories [Joshua Speed]'.

***

A Terrible Splendor - Three Extraordinary Men, a World Poised for War, and the Greatest Tennis Match Ever Played (Marshall Jon Fisher, Crown Publishers, 2009, 321p) is an entertaining book, despite a few lengthy pages, ideal for a few days under the November Caribbean sun. It recounts one of the greatest tennis matches ever between American Don Budge and German Goettfried von Cramm in July 1937. US and Germany were tied 2-2 in the Davis Cup, and the fifth match was to decide who would play against a weakened England, and probably win the title.

The match happens in the context of the rise of the third Reich and the increasing persecution of Jews and homosexuals. The irony is that "the team playing for Nazi Germany, representing the highest ideals of Aryan athleticism and manliness, had a homosexual as its star and another - an American, to boot - as a coach." The coach was Bill Tilden, tennis's first idol, who dominated world tennis in the 20's, the star Goettfried von Cramm.

Fisher's descriptions of tennis matches somewhat reminded me of Witold Gombrowicz's Les envoûtés (The Possessed) which I read during the summer of 1977 when it was first published in French, serialized, in Le Monde. Also a nice read for under the sun...

2009.11.22

Larry Kramer on 'Retrograde' Books

The Gay & Lesbian Review, in its September - October issue, published a provocative paper by Larry Kramer, worth reading (Queer Theory's Heist of Our History). This is how it starts: "I do not understand why historians and academics, including many gay ones, refuse to believe that homosexuality has been pretty much the same since the beginning of human history, whether it was called homosexuality, sodomy, buggery, or had no name at all. Isn’t it time for us to put a stop to this nonsense that produces retrograde books." The piece, as stated in an author's note, is a compilation by the G&LR editor of two book reviews by Larry Kramer, previously posted on huffingtonpost.com and thedailybeast.com. The first book belongs to Kramer's 'retrograde category': The Overflowing of Friendship - Love between Men and the Creation of the American Republic, by Richard Godbeer, a professor of history and gender studies at the University of Miami (John Hopkins, 2009, 272p). Kramer's criticism is sharp. He adds: "Even Ron Chernow in Alexander Hamilton (2004) and James Gaines in For Liberty and Glory - Washington, Lafayette, and Their Revolutions (2007), in laying out all the intertwining relationships between Washington, Hamilton, Lafayette, and John Laurens (Hamilton's great love), admit that they could have all been having sex." And recommends reading "the great, pioneering, Boston-based gay historian Charley Shively" on Washington, Lincoln and Whitman... The second book receives a thumbs-up: "Charles Upchurch, an assistant professor of history at Florida State University, has spent ten years of his life researching Before Wilde: Sex between Men in Britain’s Age of Reform (University of California Press, 2009, 288p), and it shows." Kramer makes it a tempting read.

2009.11.15

Harold Norse's Obituary in the GLR

In the obituary of the poet Harold Norse, who died last June, in the September-October issue of The Gay & Lesbian Review Jim Nawrocki tells of Norse and his lover Chester Kallman meeting W.H. Auden in Brookling in the late 1930's: 'He always wanted me,' Norse later recalled fondly of his early acquaintance with Auden, 'but I could never be with anyone that old.' Norse must have been 22 when Auden was 31... Norse published his autobiography, Memoirs of a Bastard Angel, in 1989.

Back in the US with Lautréamont; Dumézil

The news were mixed last week, as I flied back to the US, still feeling exhausted by the flu that had delayed my return. The People of Maine had approved Question 1, repealing the state law enacted in May to legalize gay marriage, while in Washington Referendum 71, preserving a domestic partnership law providing the same rights as marriage, was approved. Barack Obama, a few days earlier, had announced the end of an absurd 22-year ban on travel to the US by people HIV positive.

I had taken with me the wonderful new edition of Lautréamont in La Pléiade, together with Jean-Jacques Lefrère's biography of Isidore Ducasse. Under the surprisingly warm sun of Connecticut, these past few days, I have been reading Les chants de Maldoror, an extraordinary epic poem on homosexual pursuit.

***

I, no doubt, read too quickly this passage from Didier Eribon in Retour à Reims:

Mes premières aspirations à l'écritures furent litéraires: je mis en route deux romans, auxquels je consacrais beaucoup de temps, entre le milieu et la fin des années 1980. Le premier projet s'inspirait de mes relations - et de mes conversations - avec Dumézil et Foucault. Je voulais y décrire trois générations de gays à travers une chaîne d'amitié. Trois époques, trois vies: marquées par des permanences et des changements. J'écrivis une centaine de pages. Un peu plus, peut-être. Jusqu'au moment où, peinant à progresser, je laissai cette liasse de feuillets dormir dans un placard. Je revenais de temps à autres à ce que j'appelais 'mon roman', imaginant que je réussirais un jour à le terminer. Las! Quand je lus The Swimming-Pool Library d'Alan Hollinghurst, dont le projet se rapprochait du mien, j'en admirai la maîtrise et mesurai le gouffre qui séparait mes ébauches d'une oeuvre aboutie: je jetai, au sens litéral, mon manuscrit à la poubelle.

Notwithstanding, I had no recollection of any indication pointing to Dumézil's homosexuality in the book of interviews conducted by Eribon in 1987, nor in his biography of Michel Foucault published in 1989. But, in the course of Michel Foucault et ses contemporains (Fayard, 1994), Eribon, wrote:

L'amitié qui s'instaura entre Foucault et Dumézil à l'époque d'Uppsala a de quoi surprendre. Certes, Foucault n'était pas encore le philosophe engagé qu'il deviendra dans les années soixante-dix. Mais, tout de même, il était à peine sorti du parti communiste quand il fait la connaissance de celui qui le parrainait pour le poste d'Uppsala. De son côté, même s'il avait renoncé depuis longtemps à toute participation à la vie politique, Dumézil avait été, dans sa jeunesse, un proche de Maurras et de l'Action française. Foucault ne l'ignorait pas. Pourtant les différences d'âge et d'habitus politique ne firent pas obstacle: Foucault se prit de passion pour Dumézil. Encore faut-il préciser que, contrairement à ce que pourraient laisser croire les échos d'une insistante rumeur, leurs relations n'allèrent jamais au-delà d'un étroite amitié (note de bas de page: 'il ne s'est jamais rien passé entre nous', m'a dit Dumézil). Même s'il est bien évident que la complicité homosexuelle a joué un rôle déterminant dans la naissance et l'épanouissement de cette amitié.
Dumézil avait tendance à considérer ses amis comme les membres d'une confrérie masculine, une sorte de franc-maçonnerie (note de bas de page: C'est le mot qu'emploie Foucault dans une conversation rapportée par Claude Mauriac: il parle, à propos de Dumézil, de la 'franc-maçonnerie homosexuelle de sa jeunesse'. (Claude Mauriac, Le Temps accompli, Grasset, 1991)) Sans doute ce trait de caractère lui venait-il de la manière dont il lui avait fallu son homosexualité dans sa jeunesse, dans les années vingt, une époque où la répression et l'ostracisme étaient si brutaux que le secret était une nécessité subie, acceptée mais aussi retournée, parfois, en un mode d'être joyeux et ludique. La franc-maçonnerie homosexuelle, c'était l'envers de l'obligation d'avoir une double vie, la seule réponse possible à l'exclusion. (p125-126)

That's all folks!

2009.11.08

Hervé Guibert: La Pudeur ou l'Impudeur

I would have liked to tell you about the new edition of Lautréamont in La Pléiade, but I have been bedridden with the flu, not even able to fly back to the States, once more stuck in Paris... The only thing I could do these past few days was to listen to the radio or to the TV.

Between June 1990 and April 1991, Hervé Guibert filmed his life with a small camera, the last fights against the disease that will take his life in December 1991. He had learned in 1988 that he had AIDS. In 1990 he published À l'ami qui ne m'a pas sauvé la vie (To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, translation by Linda Coverdale, Macmillan, 1991) in which he told his story in a vivid style. In the book he also described the disease and the death of his friend Michel Foucault. À l'ami was an instant success and made Hervé Guibert famous.

The film, La Pudeur ou l'Impudeur, was first shown on the French TV on January 30, 1992, after Guibert's death, and has recently been released in DVD (BQHL éditions). It's a poignant document. The DVD also includes two interviews with Hervé Guibert: at Apostrophe in 1990 after the publication of À l'ami, which I mentioned two weeks ago, and at Ex Libris a year later after the publication of his next book, Le protocole compassionnel (The Compassion Protocol, translated by James Kirkup).

Guibert is a real writer. After listening to him you want to read his books, again.

2009.11.01