Gaya Scienza

Jean Genet (1910 - 1986)

This Sunday Jean Genet would have been 100 years old. Several books have appeared on this occasion. His best biography remains Edmund White's Genet, published in 1993. The excellent volume by Albert Dichy and Pascal Fouché, Jean Genet, Matricule 192.102 - Chronique des années 1910-1944, has been updated and reissued. His first published work, written in prison in 1942, the beautiful poem Le condamné à mort, has recently been recorded, in the musical version created by Hélène Martin in the 60s, by Etienne Daho and Jeanne Moreau, and released by Naïve. It is a little gem, an extraordinary ode to homosexual love... to be enjoyed with red wine, by a warm fire place, while reading Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, Querelle de Brest or Journal du voleur...

But let's Get Back to Our Knitting...

While in the plane, returning from Paris, I caught up with some of the newspapers and magazines I had somewhat neglected... I used to always carefully select a good book for my trips. I still do it, but most of the time, between meals, sleeping and going through the recent press, I don't have time for a book... You never know, however: long delays are always a possibility, not to mention hijackings...

In the New York Times, on January 17th, Edmund White gave a very positive review of Concerning E. M. Forster (Frank Kermode, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009, 180p):

Sir Frank Kermode, who turned 90 last year, has written a subtle and fascinating book of criticism that obeys the delightful vagaries of rhythm more than the inflexibility of pattern.

Kermode makes neither too much nor too little of Forster’s homosexuality. He points out that Forster’s affection for an Indian student in England was what initially caused him to travel to India, a trip that eventually led to his finest novel. He also argues persuasively that Forster’s pleasure in writing his homosexual romantic novel, “Maurice,” which was published only posthumously, and in writing his gay short stories, some of which he destroyed as he went along, eclipsed the interest he’d taken in writing about heterosexual characters. If he stopped writing novels altogether for the 46 years between the publication of “A Passage to India” in 1924 and his death in 1970, it was partly because he was very comfortable financially (since his considerable royalties had topped off his inherited income) and partly because he was convinced he was not free to explore in print the only subject that now mattered to him.

I then found a short review by Mark Bostridge of a new crime book in last weekend Financial Times. I had read Mark Senderson's previous book, Wrong Rooms, published in 2003, "a moving memoir of his relationship with a young Australian called Drew, and of the loss of his lover from skin cancer," and liked it. His new book, Snow Hill (HarperCollins, 2010, 352p), not yet available in the US, is a thriller, looking worth a look:

Snow Hill can’t match the poignancy of Sanderson’s earlier work, nor is it trying to. It has a run-of-the-mill plot, but Sanderson enlivens it with elegant, unpretentious writing, a strong build-up of suspense and the portrayal of a central relationship between Johnny, the hot-shot reporter, and his old school buddy Matt Turner, a policeman from the City’s Snow Hill police station, which is both emotionally believable and intriguing.

Mark Bostridge points to the similarities and differences between Snow Hill and "Jake Arnott’s loose trilogy of 1960s-set novels, which mix gay life and gangsters", which I must admit I didn't know it.

In one of the last issues of the TLS in 2009, John Flower provides a very positive review of Jean-Luc Barré's biography of François Mauriac (Francois Mauriac - Biographie intime, Tome 1, 1885-1940, Fayard, 2009, 645p), the first to disclose his homosexual inclinations. The first volume, the only one published so far, is in fact dominated by this topic.

What the second volume of this “biographie intime” will reveal remains to be seen, but there is no doubt that the first constitutes a book that no student or specialist of Mauriac’s life and work can afford to be without.

After reading several articles on the fascinating recent book on American politics, Game Change - Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime (John Heileman and Mark Halperin, Harper, 2010, 464p), I was still hesitating to buy it (nothing gay about it). Until I read the first sentence in The Economist review of the book: "Game Change, the account by John Heileman and Mark Halperin of the 2008 American presidential race, is high-quality political porn."

By the way, I also read fairly good article by Margaret Talbot on Gay marriage in The New Yorker: A Risky Proposal, on Perry v. Schwarzenegger which just started in San Francisco.

2010.01.24

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

Edmund White's Rimbaud

Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel (New York, Atlas & Co., 2008, 256 pp.) by Edmund White could have been a good book. It is, the more so, a disappointment... It's a 'digest version' of Rimbaud's life, as Richard Hell rightly puts it in the New York Times Review of Books. It's best selling point is that it's a quick read... Nothing new is revealed (but this is really not the point of the life series edited by James Atlas in which the book is published). Nothing except the mention of the short satirical sketch about Bismark published under a pseudonym in a local newspaper during the winter of 1970 and recently discovered... Not a big deal...

White provides a honest account of Rimbaud's life, understating, as far as I understood, that Rimbaud's relationship with Verlaine was his unique lifelong homosexual experience. He dismisses all hints pointing to other homosexual relationships... He even seems more prudent that Rimbaud's great biographer Jean-Jacques Lefrère...

Only the first chapter - a few pages - is a bit personal. White remembers how he discovered Rimbaud when he was  sixteen, in 1954. "As an unhappy gay adolescent, stifled by boredom and sexual frustration and paralyzed by self-hatred, I longed to run away to New York and make my mark as a writer; I identified completely with Rimbaud's desires to be free, to be published, to be sexual, to go to Paris."

Edmund White could have written a strongly personal book. Instead we are left with a dry, if politically correct, volume...

2008.10.19

Edmund White, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Edmund White's last book is puzzling. Hotel de Dream (Ecco, 2007) narrates the last weeks in the life of the American writer Stephen Crane (not to be confused with the gay poet Hart Crane). Having retreated to England with his wife Cora, to avoid gossip about her past as owner of the Florida bordello which provides the title of the novel, he is dying from tuberculosis at the age of twenty-eight. In his feverish state he remembers his days as a journalist in New York in the 1890s, when he met a boy prostitute who was been courted by a married man who ruined his life to wins the boy's love. He starts dictating a novel based on this story to Cora, The Painted Boy. This fictitious novel represents a large part of White's book. Although the circumstances of Crane's last days are based on facts, the encounter with the boy prostitute and the dictation of the novel are invented, based on some very doubtful biographic details reported after his death, as Edmund White explains in a short postface. "Crane is one of the classic American authors of the nineteenth century, along with Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and James, but in many ways he remains one of the most mysterious. Of course this very obscurity has provided me with the space necessary to invent. I have tried to imagine in this book what 'Flowers of Asphalt' (the title of the book which would have been chosen by Crane, according to the posthumous doubtful biographic information) might have been like, though not one word of it is extant. How would a heterosexual man who had wide human sympathies, an affection for prostitutes, a keen, compassionate curiosity about the poor and downtrodden, a terminal disease - how would such a man have responded to male homosexuality if he was confronted with it? How would he have thought about it in a era when homosexuals themselves were groping for explanations of their proclivities?" The character of Theodore Koch, the married man, is not very credible, at least at first view, which is the major flaw of the book. Cora is very successfully depicted, together with "Crane's literary milieu, the urban gay subculture of his time, and the relationship of a writer's experience to his fiction", as reports the New Yorker.

Edmund Wilson, the great literary critic of the 20th century, suggested the idea of an American Pléiade, which the Library of America has embarked on. Coincidentally, two volumes collecting his critics from the 20s through the 40s have just been published. Wilson did not have a high opinion of the post-Civil War literary world. During that period, he wrote, Stephen Crane "was a vortex of intensity in a generally stagnant sea."

***

Ahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, visiting New York last month for the United Nations General Assembly, was invited by Columbia University to give a speech and answer questions. The invitation generated a lot of controversy. In an unexpected turn around Newt Gringrich, the former Republican Speaker of the House, became the most ardent defender of gays rights, stating that the head of a state which executed homosexuals should not be given the opportunity to talk! The issue was raised by the moderator during the debate. "We do not have homosexuals in Iran" did he answer most seriously, eliciting a big laughter from the attendance, "Where did you get that from?"

Certainly there are no Iranian bars among the world top 50 best gay bars listed by Out magazine (October). One is in New Haven (Gotham Citi). Paris (Okawa, Le Raidd, L'Insolite and Le Queen) and New York (Therapy, Cubby Hole, NK and Splash) both have 4 bars listed, the largest number of any other city.

2007.10.07