Gaya Scienza

Mauriac's and Other New Biographies

Several new biographies, openly dealing with the homosexuality of their subject, have been published recently. I can recommend Mauriac's biography which is the only one I have read at this time. It has not been translated yet, though (if it is ever to be)... The book, very convincingly, revisits the writer's life and work in light of his homosexual longings. Mauriac's scholars have always downplayed this part of him, when they did not simply erased it. Jean Lacouture, in his biography, went as far as to make a girl of a boy loved by the writer in his youth... Coming from Mr. Lacouture, who has been wrong so many times, it is not a big surprise... Still.

John Adams writes in The New York Times (The Zen of Silence), of Begin Again - A Biography of John Cage (Kenneth Silverman, Alfred A. Knopf, 2010, 483p):

Begin Again is a much more nuanced picture of Cage’s personal life than has currently been available. Cage wrote a lot about himself, but, like his hero Thoreau, he maintained a Puritan opaqueness about his emotions even to the point of eventually saying that he hated them altogether. Silverman’s research reveals a much more colorful and at times stormy erotic life than Cage alludes to in his own writings. His first serious relationship as a college dropout was homosexual, but that ended when he met, instantly fell in love with and married Xenia Kashevaroff, 22 at the time and daughter of the Eastern Orthodox Russian-Greek archpriest of Alaska. Xenia, small, feisty and possessing what Cage described as a “barby” wit, appears to have been thoroughly comfortable with her erotic self. She was a talented artist, willing even to perform in her husband’s percussion ensembles. Edward Weston, who once photographed her in the nude, described her as “most delightfully unmoral, pagan.”

It’s disappointing to see Xenia disappear from the story, but when Cage meets the young Merce Cunningham, his future is decided. They will become partners, both as lovers and as collaborators, for the rest of Cage’s life, and Cage will devote himself tirelessly to the Cunningham company, composing and performing for its concerts and tours, endlessly raising money and over all acting as a kind of benevolent spirit. Theirs will be one of the most fertile creative partnerships in the history of the arts.

Jean-Luc Barré has published the second volume of his biography of François Mauriac (Fayard, 2010, 528p), covering the years from 1940 to his death in 1970. In Le Monde ("Mauriac a lutté contre le feu qu'il portait en lui") he is interviewed by Josyane Savigneau:

J'ai été le premier à lever ce tabou que tant d'autres se sont acharnés à maintenir. Les réactions ont été et demeurent si vives que je me dis qu'il fallait un certain courage pour le faire. Certains affirment : « Nous le savions déjà », mais sans jamais avoir osé le dire. D'autres ne voulaient surtout pas qu'on en parle. J'ai voulu rompre avec cette hypocrisie qui a fini par brouiller l'image de François Mauriac et fausser l'idée que l'on se fait de son oeuvre tout en le dépossédant de sa vérité intime. Ces présumés spécialistes ne me pardonnent pas de les obliger à revoir leur copie et à tenir compte d'une réalité qu'ils ont tout fait pour occulter. Si on ne comprend pas l'ambivalence et l'ambiguïté fondamentales de Mauriac, on a toutes les chances de passer à côté de son personnage. Il a beaucoup joué avec ses multiples facettes, soucieux de ne s'enfermer dans aucune sexualité particulière et de ne dépendre d'aucune catégorie.

(I was the first to lift the taboo that many others have worked hard to maintain. Reactions were and remain so vivid that I am led to believe that it took some courage to do it. Some say: "We already knew,” but never have dared to say. Others didn’t want it to be talked about. I wanted to break with the hypocrisy that ultimately blur the image of François Mauriac and distort the idea that we have of his work while depriving him from his intimate truth. These alleged experts do not forgive me for forcing them to review their copy and take into account a reality they did everything they could to hide. If you do not understand the fundamental ambivalence and ambiguity of Mauriac, you are likely to miss his character. He played a lot with his multiple facets, anxious not to be locked into any particular sexuality and not to rely on any category.)

 

Il suffit pourtant de lire sa correspondance intime, publiée par sa belle-fille, Caroline Mauriac, si révélatrice de l'extrême sensualité de cet homme, de ses tourments, de ses désirs, assouvis ou non. En raison de son éducation catholique, il a lutté toute sa vie contre ce feu qu'il portait en lui. Mais il savait aussi enfreindre les interdits. Il ne s'en est pas privé sur le plan social, politique et religieux. Pourquoi se serait-il restreint dans d'autres domaines ? Je publie un témoignage de Daniel Guérin qui révèle que le Mauriac de 40 ans, dont il a été l'ami intime, « pratiquait un petit peu ».

(It is barely necessary to read his private correspondence, published by his daughter-in-law, Caroline Mauriac, so revealing of the extreme sensuality of this man, of his torments, his desires, fulfilled or not. Because of his Catholic upbringing, he fought all his life against this fire he had in him. But he also knew how to break taboos, whether social, political or religious. Why wouldn’t he break taboos in other areas too? I publish a testimony from Daniel Guérin who discloses that 40-years old Mauriac, his intimate friend, "practiced a little bit.")

Reviewing Grant Wood's biography by R. Tripp Evans (Alfred A. Knopf, 2010, 402p) in The New York Times, Deborah Solomon (Gothic American) writes:

In interviews and profiles, Wood was inevitably described as a “shy bachelor,” and Evans states confidently in his introduction that the artist “spent most of his life masking — not always successfully — his homosexuality.” But a man who stifles his desires to the point of near extinction cannot accurately be called gay, and by the end of the book the reader has no idea whether Wood was ever intimate with a man. Affairs are hinted at, but the author is unable to document them; Wood himself claimed to be innocent of carnal satisfactions. One of his friends is quoted in the book recalling a night when Wood seems to have confessed to being chastely asexual, which is not implausible.

Hero - The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia by Michael Korda (Harper, 2010, 762p) is different. Or so it seems. In her review in the NYT, Janet Maslin (Lawrence: Fresh Look at Warrior of Desert), states that in the book "the familiar voices of biographers like John E. Mack (who took a psychiatric look at Lawrence), Richard Aldington (who took a nastily debunking one) and those seeking a covert homosexual subtext in Lawrence’s story are echoed in Mr. Korda’s prose." How deep does Mr. Korda dig in discussing Lawrence's homosexuality remains to be seen. I am looking forward to reading his book during the holidays.

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

Still in Paris: Herbart, Mauriac

I have had to extend my stay in Paris for a few days. I know, what a pain... I used the opportunity of these stolen days to read through the volumes of Pierre Herbart still in my library. Le Promeneur has recently published En URSS: 1936 which was out of print. It must be read together with Ligne de force, the more personal memoir published many years later in 1958, where, in his beautiful dry style, Herbart discloses the reasons behind his sudden departure from the USSR in 1936: he had fallen in love with a young man, N., and was afraid of endangering him. He had discovered that in the Country of Socialism, "Homosexuals redeem themselves by reading Marx in concentration camps." In fact he had, lucidly, become disillusioned with the regime, writing at the beginning of En URSS : 1936: "We can now no more defend the USSR without lying and without knowing that we are lying." When he left, he made N. believe he would return. N. wrote several letters to him: "But I could not answer. The slightest note could put N. at risk of loosing his freedom, or could even cost him his life. I felt as if I were repeatedly hitting with a stick a wounded bird that would not die. Eventually, there was silence..." Pierre Herbart has been unduly neglected by the literary criticism. His short, concise memoirs (L'Âge d'or, Souvenirs imaginaires and La ligne de force) are among the great books of the twentieth century. They deserve an English translation...

François Mauriac is the exact opposite of Pierre Herbart. Jean, François Mauriac's second son, was, for more than 30 years, a journalist for the French news agency AFP. He was assigned to covering Charles de Gaulle. Most of the book he wrote with historian Jean-Luc Barré in the form of an interview, Le Général et le journaliste (Paris, Fayard, 2008), is dedicated to his recollections of the great statesman. In the first chapter however he discusses his youth under the shadow of his father ("Une jeunesse mauriacienne"). Jean-Luc Barré, who is writing a biography of F. Mauriac, points out that the famous author liked to be surrounded by young men and wonders whether... "François Mauriac fancied the company of young men. Homosexual, my father? No, certainly not in the sense used in reference to Gide, Cocteau, Jouhandeau or Montherlant ." "He certainly felt friendship, affection, tenderness, even passion for some of these young men. He would suffer." "To tell you the truth we have lived by his side without really understanding François Mauriac. It is unbelievable, isn't it? Only after his death, when his letters were published, when some of his notes were made available, the assessment of the real nature of his homosexuality was possible." "François Mauriac did not need to fight against his sex, but against his heart." "He felt he had to hide his feelings because of religion, his family, his stubborn provincial milieu, his reputation. But let's not regret it: without this true internal drama, never would François Mauriac have been capable of writing the burning, bleak, panting, tragic novels he has written." To be continued...

2008.06.01