Gaya Scienza

Biofictions (cont.)

The Street, the last and longer story of Colm Tóibín's most recent book, The Empty Family (Scriber, 2011, 277p), was a perfect read for a Valentine's Day's late evening... A touching love story between two Pakistani illegal workers in today's Barcelona. It is written in a flawless concise and economical style. I don't know how realistic it is, but it doesn't matter (to get a rawer vision of illegals' life watch Alejandro González Iñárritu's excellent new movie, Biutiful - incidentally also taking place in Barcelona...).

The first reviews of The Passages of H.M. (Jay Parini,Doubleday, 2010, 454p), a biofiction on Herman Melville, didn't encourage me to read it... Then I happened to stumble on John Sutherland's review in a recent Financial Times issue, and changed my mind:

What, then, does Jay Parini bring to this life that is not found in the biographies? His eminently readable narrative convincingly fills in hitherto dark places. What, for example, really went on during those paradisal months in the Marquesas? Parini hypothesises, equally convincingly, about the nature of Melville’s passionate friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne (the dedicatee of Moby-Dick) about which biography knows tantalisingly little. Most effectively, he creates (out of pure speculation) Mrs Melville’s story.
The Passages of Herman Melville will not replace the standard biographies; it will, however, add flesh to their bones. It’s very well done.

 

I have ordered the book and will take it with me for the few days I am planning to spend with my daughters in a ski resort...

 ***

By the way, for the lazy readers, these are the comments provided by David Callagher in his review of Vargas Llosa's own biofiction, El sueño del celta, I mentioned last week:

Vargas Llosa holds – it is, he believes, his “right as a novelist” to do so – that the diaries were written by Casement, but that he did not do all that he described in them; he was promiscuous, and had a compulsive need to pick up young men, though not with the frequency recorded in the diaries. So Vargas Llosa’s Casement sometimes records a recent sexual exploit, and sometimes a fantasy of what might have taken place. We see him trying to fight his compulsions, feeling disgust after a night out and embarking on long periods of abstinence. But we also see him happy when the sight of some athletic young man re-awakens his yearning. These are moments when Vargas Llosa is at his best; sexual duplicity is a recurring subject in his work.
His novelist’s conclusion about the diaries is plausible. Some of Casement’s sexual exploits took place in remote places in Africa and South America, where he would have had enemies spying on him. If the exploits had been as numerous as the diaries suggest, he would have been found out and denounced many times. When one of Casement’s sexual adventures is described by Vargas Llosa, we get a strong sense of risk; this is a public figure who picks up strange men in bars and public baths, sometimes going off with more than one.
Vargas Llosa comes to his conclusion about the Black Diaries slowly. At first, his Casement is ambivalent about them. When asked about them by his prison visitors, he changes the subject or claims he does not know what they are talking about. He thanks Fr Casey for not asking about “those filthy things which, apparently, they are saying about me”. He tells the priest that he will not heed Cardinal Bourne’s outrageous request that, before he becomes a Catholic, he should repent of all those “vile things the press is accusing me of”. But we also see Casement reminiscing – alone in his prison cell – about his first homosexual awakenings; how in Africa he felt free of the constraints of Victorian society; how that boy in Boma, with whom he went fishing, suddenly closed up on him. “Shutting his eyes, he tried to resurrect that scene of so many years ago: the surprise, the indescribable excitement . . . .” Little by little, over the course of the novel, we see Casement picking up more and more boys. Towards the end, he falls in love with Eivind Axel Christiensen, a Norwegian he picks up in New York in 1914, who travels with him to Germany. Christiansen was later to denounce him to the British – one instance where sex does real damage to Casement. Despite the betrayal, Vargas Llosa’s Casement has erotic dreams about Christiensen at Pentonville.

 

The Friendship which is Love

Two days after the California Supreme Court, shamefully revisiting its own ruling of last year, upheld Proposition 8, defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman, the 21st Lambda Literary Awards were announced Thursday evening during a ceremony in New York city.

Attendants began to gather for a cocktail at 6pm at the CUNY Graduate Center in Midtown Manhattan. Several famous faces could be spotted: Michelangelo Signorile, Sirius OutQ Talk Show's host, Martin Duberman whose Radical Acts - Collected Political Plays was among the LGBT Drama finalists, Edmund White, who seemed older and more overweight than I imagined, the team from the Oscar Wilde Bookstore who were to be awarded the Lambda Legacy Prize, Don Weise, tall and lean, visibly coming straight from his office with a black briefcase...

At 7pm we were invited to convene in the Proshansky Auditorium. Scott Nevins, the presenter, promised that the ceremony would be kept under control and not linger for hours like last year. He was a professional, after all.

A Pioneer Award went to Leslie Feinberg. Being very ill she could not be present, but she had written a long text that was read, very seriously, by a close friend. I must confess that I had not heard of Leslie Feinberg before. I must add that I am not interested in learning more about her after the long old-fashioned litany of hatred of capitalism and praise of communism we had to listen to. I had not heard anything like that in years, even in France. It was painful, in light of how gays are and were treated in communist countries...

The other Pioneer Award went to the three surviving members of the so called Violet Quill: Edmund White, Andrew Holleran and Felice Picano. There was a standing ovation.

Among the Literary Awards, divided among 22 categories, I regret that The Bishop's Daughter did not make it in the Bisexual category: Open - Love, Sex and Life in an Open Marriage by Jenny Block (Seal Press, 2008, 288p) was the winner. Neither Dishonorable Passions - Sodomy Laws in America 1861-2003 by William N. Eskridge Jr in the LGBT Nonfiction category: the winner was Loving the Difficult by the late Jane Rule (Hedgerow Press, 2008, 205p).

Interesting winners in other categories were: Criminal Intimacy - Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Intimacy, Regina Kunzel, University of Chicago Press , 2008, 352p (LGBT Studies), Edward Carpenter - A Life of Liberty and Love, Sheila Rowbotham, Verso Books, 2008, 548p (Gay Memoir/Biography), First you Fall, Scott Sherman, Alyson Books, 2008, 224p (Gay Mystery).

Scott Heim won the Gay Fiction Award for We Disappear (Harper Perennial, 2008, 320p). Dennis Cooper who read his name after unsealing the envelope looked thrilled.

***

Imre is the first American novel where homosexual characters end up finding love. It was privately published in 1906 under the pseudonym of Xavier Mayne by an American writer, Edward Prime-Stevenson. Only 500 copies were printed. Prime-Stevenson was born in 1858 in New Jersey. After studying Law at Columbia University he started writing for several magazines and became the music critic of The Independent, a popular periodical from New York. After the turn of the century he made Europe his residence, traveling constantly and living in hotels. He died in Lausanne in 1942. In 1908 he published, also under the name of Xavier Mayne, a thick treaty on homosexuality, The Intersexes. Only 125 copies were printed.

Imre's style is far from great, but the story and the psychological depiction of the two main characters, Oswald, the narrator, and Imre, the Magyar officer he befriends while in the Hungarian capital, provide a touching insight of what it was like to be a homosexual at the end of the nineteenth century in America and in Europe. Some themes, like Oswald's feelings, after he comes out to Imre, convinced that his friend is heterosexual, are very modern: "My heart so lightened that I was a new creature."

Imre was never published anew since the first edition of 1906, although there have been reprints. The novel is now available in a modern edition by James J. Gifford, a Professor of Humanities at Mohawk Valley Community College in Utica, NY, and the author of a previous study of American homosexual writing in the early twentieth century. Imre - A Memorandum, Edward Prime- Stevenson, edited by James J. Gifford (Broadview Press, 2003, 192p), is an excellent edition that should allow modern readers an easy access to this literary landmark. The text is revised, useful notes are provided, an introduction describes the context in which the novel was published and tells us what is known of Edward Prime-Stevenson's life. Several appendices include extracts of contemporaries writings on homosexuality, letters from Prime-Stevenson, and a review of the novel in French by André Raffalovich published in 1907.

A copy of the original edition of Imre was sold in April for $12,000 on AbeBooks.

***

Angel Gurría-Quintana writes in the Financial Times about Colm Tóibín's latest novel:

Brooklyn is a departure from earlier Tóibín novels such as The Story of the Night or The Blackwater Lightship, in which the articulation of gay identity seemed central. It was a theme that ran quietly, too, through his previous novel, The Master, a fictionalised account of Henry James's late years. Except for a seemingly gratuitous scene involving Eilis and her Italian-American work supervisor, homosexuality is not invoked here.

Yet...

2009.05.31

Fleet Week in New York City

The Fleet's In! (1934), Paul Cadmus, oil on canvas,
Navy Art Gallery, Washington Navy Yard

Outrage presents itself as a documentary on closeted gay politicians who work against the interests and freedoms of the LGBT community in today's America. The movie has been released two weeks ago in five theaters across the United States.

It is funny to see, again, Senator Larry Craig in Boise, Idaho, greet the press, under a beautiful sky, with the words: "thank you for coming out today"..., before stating: "I am not gay, and I have never been gay." It is moving to listen, again, Jim McGreevy, coming forward, his wife standing beside him not knowing what was happening to her, say: "I am a gay American." It is sad to watch Governor Charlie Crist getting married in Florida.

More generally, it is sad to watch all these closeted politicians, when nothing, today, justifies their remaining in the closet.

Kirby Dick, the director, interviewed by Gary Kramer in Gay City (Taking on the Closet) says: "I think the closet exists because people perceive there is something wrong - a liability - with being gay. I personally believe that they underestimate the power of coming out and being open and honest."

Outrage culminates with the story of Representative Jim Kolbe, telling of the happiness which submerged him when he came out, aged 54, in 1996, after being coerced into it by gay-rights advocate because he had voted in favor of the Defense of Marriage Act. Kolbe was successfully reelected several months later. As such, I found that the movie is more than anything else about the power of coming out.

Coming out today is not about activism. It does not mean that you define yourself by your sexuality, as it was during the post-Stonewall days. Today it's just a matter of honesty, transparency and well being.

***

Which brings me to Colm Tóibín. The great Irish novelist was recently interviewed by Alex Witchel in the New York Times Magazine just as his latest novel, Brooklyn (Scribner, 2009, 272p), was being released. It is a very good paper (His Irish Diaspora).

Brooklyn, which is his sixth novel, is relatively short, concise, the writing is simple, precise, powerful. It starts relatively slowly, but the tension rises progressively. There is no gay character in the story, set in the fifties. Some of the issues, Eilis, the lonely main character, faces, though, are very similar to the ones a young gay man could have faced in the same era: isolation, difficulty to get advice, to confide, indecision on how to direct one's own life, between conventions and the unknown... Eilis's distant mother and absent father are reminiscent of Tóibín's own youth, as is the town from where she comes, Enniscorthy, where he grew up.

Witchel writes of Tóibín who is 53:

He never told his mother he was gay. "She asked my sister, Was I happy? and my sister said, ‘Your mother wants to know if you’re happy.’ I said, ‘Yes, tell her I’m very happy.’ I think that’s an Irish thing. That American thing of coming out to the whole world and the big party, that never caught on in Ireland the same way."

***

Don Wiese, one of the most knowledgeable editors of gay literature, who was recently appointed at the head of Alyson Books, the largest GLBT publishing company, is interviewed by Natalie Hope McDonald in the current issue of The Gay & Lesbian Review. Before joining Alyson, Wiese, a veteran editor... although only in his forties, launched a line of GLBT books at Carroll & Graf, a mainstream publisher.

We're often told 'gay literature is dead' and 'no one reads,' usually by failed writers looking to justify their difficult circumstances. As a publisher, I see this differently.

Read the article if you want to know more on how Don Wiese sees the future of gay literature and publishing, as we look forward to the Lambda Literary Awards Ceremony on May 28, 2009 in New York City. Leslie Feinberg, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, and Edmund White will be this year’s recipients of the Lambda Literary Foundation's Pioneer Award.

2009.05.24

Masters

Last Thursday was a beautiful day, the first - short lived - summer day of the year, with temperatures reaching the seventies. In the train on my way to the City my eyes were caught by a short article in a recent issue of The New Yorker: "Do not miss 'Chimneys and Towers: Charles Demuth's Late Paintings of Lancaster,' at the Whitney, a small, pure, gladdening exhibition of major work by the rhapsodic and droll American modernist who died of diabetes in 1935, at the age of fifty-one." I am not in chimneys or towers really, but my curiosity was awaken by this curious sentence. A few other words in the article convinced me to visit the exhibition later in the day, as nothing required my prompt return home: homoerotic watercolors, another gay avant-gardist, Hart Crane, Walt Whitman. It was a superb discovery! I will come back to it. But if you want to see it before it closes you must do so before April 28th.

***

Several weeks ago the TLS published a review of the second volume of Sheldon M. Novick's Henry James biography (Henry James: The Mature Master, Random House, 2007). Peter Brooks, the reviewer, is a professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University and published last year a study on James.

Novick's first volume on James (Henry James: The Young Master, Random House, 1996) attracted some criticism by previous James biographers because of the sexual episodes he recreated using indirect evidence from James's novels and journals. He seems to have listened to these critics and is more prudent in his new volume.

Peter Brooks supports Novick's attempt, in contrast to his predecessors who were "squeamish about James's evidently homoerotic imagination," to "restaure sexuality to a central place" in his work. He does not entice his reader, though, to read this new biography which "provokes the reflection that James has not yet had the biographer he needs and deserves."

"While other masters of the Modernism he so much prepared and initiated have evoked answering spirits - Richard Ellmann for Joyce, Hermione Lee for Virginia Woolf, Jean-Yves Tadié for Proust - the inner James remains enigmatic and largely unanalysed. It is by no mean simply a matter of his sex life (or lack of it) but rather, the core components of his imagination. Some critics have come closer than the biographers, and Colm Toibin's novel, The Master, while accepting rather too much of Novick's 'evidence', offers a remarkable inner portrait of the novelist."

Too bad. I followed Professor Brooks' advice and read the novel by the great Irish writer (The Master, Picador, 2004) which I had missed when it was published and did not regret it... It's a beautiful book, full of restrained British humor, if this can be said of an Irish work, and a perfect introduction to Henry James whose mystery remains...

***

In the New York Times earlier this week (Disease That Allowed Torrents of Creativity, Sandra Blakeslee, April 8th 2008) I discovered that Bolero, one of the most famous music of our times, has been composed while Ravel, in 1928, aged 53, was suffering from the early stages of a rare disease called frontotemporal dementia. This is what claims Dr. Bruce Miller, a neurologist and the director of the Memory and Aging Center at the University of California, San Francisco. He co-authored Unravelling Boléro: progressive aphasia, transmodal creativity and the right posterior neocortex, an article published last December in the professional journal Brain.

"Bolero is an exercise in compulsivity, structure and perseveration, Dr. Miller said. It builds without a key change until the 326th bar. Then it accelerates into a collapsing finale."

We are, after all, not much...

2008.04.13