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...

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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.

 

Summer Books and The Washington Post

I came upon a great blog a few days ago. I don't remember how I found it, but what a great blog! Its focus is gay literature. Earlier this month Band of Thebes reported the amazing comments made by Dennis Drabelle, one of the World Books editors of The Washington Post. Asked to list new gay books he would recommend for summer reading, he provides the following answer:

Does it have to be a new gay book? Not many of these are being published anymore, mostly, I think, because the great gay storyline -- coming out -- isn't such a big deal anymore and has been done to death. But here's a classic you may not have read: Michael Campbell's Lord Dismiss Us, set in an English boarding school. You can find used copies online, and it's well worth doing. A masterpiece!

I thought it was an April's fool, or another kind of joke, for that matter. But it's no joke. You can check. If, at least, he had named a good book of the past, he would have been half forgiven... But Lord Dismiss Us does not seem to fit that category.

My list of summer books includes the second installment of the Frank Coffin Mysteries, Mating Season (Jon Loomis, Minotaur Books, 2009, 304p), set in Provincetown, which has been sitting on my coffee table since April, as well as Ardent Spirit the third volume of his autobiography by prolific author Reynolds Price (Scribner, 2009, 416p), the coming of age story of a young man and a writer. The book was recently reviewed in the NYRB (Sensual in the South) by Edmund White who writes:

Ardent Spirits is an innovation in that it seems to be the first time that Reynolds Price has acknowledged his homosexuality in print. In his fiction and poetry he has touched on homosexuality as a theme, but lightly and seldom at length. In his 1995 novel, The Promise of Rest, a male character comes home to die of AIDS. In Good Hearts (1988) Wesley Beavers (like Mayor Giuliani) takes refuge from a bad marriage with a gay male friend. In Tongues of Angels (1990) a summer camp experience between a boy and a counselor (never openly expressed sexually) forms a bond between the two men. In several poems there is a Housman-like lyricism about the beauty of young men's bodies.
As a writer who wants to be read by his friends and relatives and neighbors, Price has never been explicit about his own desires and has seldom touched on queer life. Bu his deep sensuality, which he freely acknowledges, has worked its way into all his evocations of heterosexuality and his Tiresias-like double vision of the two sexes. It would certainly be crudely reductive to suggest that he could have written better if he'd been more open about his own homosexuality. All on can say is that if he'd been less closeted his fiction might have been as effervescent as his new memoir and perhaps just as insouciant.

I also always like to revisit a classic during summer. This year it will be Redburn, one of Melville's early novels.

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In the Masterpiece - Anatomy of a Classic series in Saturday's Wall Street Journal, Ms. Dobrzynski describes the 'Alexander Sarcophagus,' discovered in the mid-1800s in Sidon, and now at the Archaeological Museum of Istanbul (and not, at the British Museum, as erroneously posted previously). Despite its name it is generally considered as carved for Abdalonymos who was made Sidon's king by Alexander. Mentioning the second most prominent figures, after Alexander, appearing in its friezes she refers to Hephaestion as "Alexander's close friend from Macedonia." Come on, Ms. Dobrzynski, a little effort on this Gay Pride week-end celebrating the 40th anniversary of Stonewall...

Don't miss Frank Rich's excellent column published Sunday in the New York Times, 40 Years Later, Still Second-Class Americans. It ends with these words:

Gay Americans aren’t just another political special interest group. They are Americans who are actively discriminated against by federal laws. If the president is to properly honor the memory of Stonewall, he should get up to speed on what happened there 40 years ago, when courageous kids who had nothing, not even a public acknowledgment of their existence, stood up to make history happen in the least likely of places.

2009.06.28

Bits and Pieces

Andrew Sullivan has written an important short piece on gay marriage in the September issue of Atlantic Monthly (My Big Fat Straight Wedding): reflecting on California's Supreme Court May 15 ruling legalizing same-sex marriage and on his own recent marriage, he argues that "in matters outside the bedroom, American culture and law are at last acknowledging that there is no difference between homosexuals and heterosexuals." In other words, homosexuals are becoming mainstream. In 2005 Sullivan published an essay in the New Republic entitled The End of Gay Culture: Assimilation and its meaning, a stimulating and clear-sighted paper on the evolution of gay identity over the past thirty years. The New York Time published last week in its Modern Love column a text by Bob Morris on his own experience with gay marriage: "Being gay and single is becoming the new smoking," he writes. Meanwhile, in its weddings/celebrations section gay marriage announcements are becoming more and more common, involving more and more individuals from mainstream America: executives, lawyers, professors, etc.

For the Thrill of it (Simon Baatz, New York, Harper, 2008, 560 pp.) is a very comprehensive and fascinating account of the 1924 infamous murder of 14 year-old Bobby Franks in Chicago. Publishers Weekly provides the following summary: "In 1924, Nathan Leopold, 19, and Richard Loeb, 18, both intellectually precocious scions of wealthy Jewish Chicago families, kidnapped and brutally murdered 14-year-old Bobby Franks in an attempt to commit the perfect crime. Historian Baatz, of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, replays the crime (on which Meyer Levin's 1956 novel Compulsion was based) from the killers' point of view, detailing their intense, often sexual, relationship that culminated in the murder. But they left a crucial piece of evidence and eventually confessed to the murder. Clarence Darrow cleverly had the boys plead guilty to avoid a trial, and the legendary defense attorney went head to head with State's Attorney Robert Crowe in a sentencing hearing before Judge John Caverly. Both sides trotted out psychiatrists to testify whether Leopold and Loeb were mentally ill. Darrow's gamble paid off in life sentences. Loeb was murdered in prison in 1936; Leopold was eventually paroled in 1958. Baatz gives an acute portrait of the two murderers bound together in a web of fantasy, but his heavy reliance on novelistic techniques (there!—he had done it) and meandering pacing prevent this from being as convincing as his exhaustive research deserves." The New York Times (Murder Most Rational and Confounding) and the Wall Street Journal (Low Deeds and High IQ) published very positive reviews. The crime probably provided the source for Hitchcock's 1948 movie Rope, and forms the basis of Tom Kalin's 1992 excellent movie Swoon, now available in dvd.

Tristan Garcia's first novel La meilleure part des hommes (Paris, Gallimard, 305 pp.) is a 'roman à clés' set in the Paris gay community during the 80s. Published in the prestigious Collection Blanche by Gallimard it has been hailed as one of the outstanding novels of this 'rentrée litéraire' by Le Monde ("C'était notre foutue libération des moeurs", August 29th 2008).

I discovered last week-end, while reading a local newspaper in The Pines, that Billy Budd, Melville's work with the clearest homosexual overtone, was written in Fire Island... Harry Havemeyer who published Fire Island's Surf Hotel and other Hostelries on Fire Island's Beaches in the Nineteenth Century (Mattituck, N.Y., Amereon House, 2006. Illustrations, maps, bibliography, and index, 178 pp.) believes Herman Melville wrote much of it while vacationing at the Surf Hotel, one of the first hotels in the island, on its western tip... What an irony!

2008.08.31