Book Review: The Beauty of Men (Andrew Holleran)

As I’ve read The Beauty of Men over the past several months, I’ve been reading sections at our South Bay Writers Open Mic and commenting that “this book ought to be horribly depressing; but it’s so beautifully written that I keep reading.”
 

True—although it did take me awhile to finish.  I realized, after I got about halfway, that “nothing was happening.”  That’s a cliché, of course.  Peeved readers love to complain about how “nothing happens” in books like Kerouac’s On The Road.  But it seems to me, if writers are supposed to “show not tell,” then it isn’t a question of whether something “happens” or not.  It’s a question of whether the reader is being given an experience.  

I felt I was experiencing something in Holleran’s book.  With him, I always feel I’m experiencing something.  I may or may not like it—but that’s a separate question.

Lark, the protagonist in The Beauty of Men, has moved to Florida to care for his quadriplegic mother.  Behind him lies New York and the gay life of the late 1970s (portrayed in Holleran’s book Dancer from the Dance).

We share the experience of visiting the nursing home, and imagine what it must be like for his mother to have spent the last twelve years there.  And we experience what it is like for Lark to make his regular visits and to live now in Florida, after his endless partying in New York and the onset of the AIDS epidemic.  We’re carried back to those earlier times and we experience the deepening epidemic, which leads one to believe that “everyone is dying.”

Yet life goes on.  Lark hangs out by a boat ramp at an out-of-the-way lake, hoping to pick up men.  He does—and falls in love with a man who after one night refuses to have anything more to do with him.  Lark pines, Lark drives past the man’s home.  This goes on for a year.  Finally—around page 200 (spoiler!)—the man confronts him.

I love Holleran’s writing style.  This is what keeps me reading.  If you can read this without becoming depressed—and without insisting that something “happens,” this might be a good book for you.

Review: "An Englishman in New York"

Two watchings now of An Englishman in New York and I’m still processing what to make of it.  It isn’t straight-forward, at least for me.  The Naked Civil Servant, which dealt with Quentin Crisp’s life in England seems simpler, more funny.  Its sequel strikes me as more problematical, more ambiguous.  Of course, the story of a man growing old is bound to be different from the story of a man coming of age.  But the films also deal with different places and times.  New York is not London.  And the 1970s and 1980s are not the 1930s and 1940s.

For now, I just want to say a few things about the second film, the film about New York, share my initial reactions, and suggest some deeper issues.

With the BBC broadcast of The Naked Civil Servant, Quentin Crisp has become a celebrity.  He is invited to New York to speak.  This is around 1980.  Arriving in Manhattan, he immediately falls in love with it.  And New York seems to fall in love with him.  But not for long.  Crisp misjudges the growing AIDS epidemic.  Fearing that the straight world will once again saddle homosexuals as the bearers of disease, Crisp suggests that AIDS is just the latest “fad.”  His remarks spark outrage, event cancellations—and even threats of violence against him personally.

In the meantime, Crisp has been introduced to the New York gay scene, and been asked to leave a gay bar because he and his friend were not dressed in the “appropriate” garb—in this case, construction outfits, leather, or shirtless.  It’s a change for Crisp, who in England had always been bullied for not looking “straight.”  But this is New York after Stonewall.

Now, feeling like a relic of a bygone time, he meets Susana Ventura, aka Penny Arcade, who invites him to join in her performance art.  He is still relevant, she tells him, pointing out the prevalence of gay-on-gay discrimination, pointing out the rise of the commercialism of the “pink dollar,” decrying the party culture of body building and drug taking where deviation from the new gay “norm” means expulsion.  Crisp continues onstage into his eighties.

He has also met a young artist, Patrick Angus.  Crisp helps to win him some recognition, despite mainstream feedback that his paintings are “too gay” and “dirty.”  Angus lives long enough to see some success, before dying from complications of AIDS.

By the end of the film, Crisp has become an icon all over again.  He is now donating thousands to AIDS research.  Speaking at a gay club in Florida, he sums up his attitude towards life, urging people to ask themselves, “Is there anything inside that you have not yet unpacked?”  He dies having returned to England for a speaking tour.

That’s the outline.  Within this lie questions about the value of being yourself, being who you are; questions of how to behave when you are part of a despised minority.  What is the value of art and artifice for an individual?  What is the value of politeness and civility?  

Crisp had an oddly Calvinist attitude.  He said he didn’t believe in “rights.”  If everyone got what they deserved, he said, everyone would starve.  And he didn’t believe in an afterlife.  He made other controversial remarks in addition to the “AIDS fad” remark, but they aren’t covered in this film.

I plan a report, though, on the related documentary, Resident Alien.  Curiously, the documentary was released in 1990, when Crisp was still alive.  An Englishman in New York appeared in 2009, ten years after his death.  In some ways the film builds on the documentary.  Curious also is the interaction between Sting and his song/video (“An Englishman in New York”), and Crisp, and the documentary (in which Sting appears).   But more on that later.

Reading Holleran, Again

Just finished reading Andrew Holleran’s short novel (or is it a novella??) Grief.  I believe this is the third time I’ve read this book.  My first time was probably less than two years ago.  Clearly, I like this book.

 

But I continue to ask myself why I like it.  I don’t mean this is any unkind way.  Sometimes I like things in spite of strong annoyance about certain aspects of the work in question, things that simply antagonize me somehow.  The issue with Grief is nothing like that.  It’s a more technical writing issue.  I could almost feel it was my own flaw, and fault myself rather than the book; and maybe that is the truth.

I suppose the main uneasiness I feel is about the nature of this book itself.  What is it?  Is it a novel?  And does that even matter?

Generally, fiction is called a “novel” if it runs over 50,000 words—about 200 pages.  Grief comes in at 150.  I don’t have the statistics on other famous works of fiction, but I suspect quite a few famous “novels” come in under 50,000 words.  The Great Gatsby, in the editions I’ve seen, comes in slightly under 200 pages.

A novel often involves a fairly large cast of characters.  A Passage to India introduces around twenty characters just in the second chapter!  Yet something like The Stranger or The Immoralist contains a minimal number.  Indeed, Andre Gide, after writing multiple long works of fiction, called The Counterfeiters his “first novel.”  And Tolstoy called Anna Karenina his “first novel,” when he had already written War and Peace!  He didn’t know what to call War and Peace!

And I’m not sure what to call Grief.  But it’s beautifully written, and I enjoy reading and rereading it.  It’s a long monologue, involving the narrator and a few characters (fewer than ten, I’d say), as the narrator teaches a class at a Washington D.C. university and tries to get over his mother’s death.  Meanwhile he muses on his own life—that of an unattached, aging gay man at the end of the twentieth century—and the life of various famous Americans (Mary Tood Lincoln, Henry Adams) who were devastated by the deaths of loved ones; and his own friends who have been lost to AIDS.

Novels generally involve a plot.  I can’t put my fingers on a plot in Grief.  The narrator arrives in Washington, meets his landlord, walks around the city, reads about Lincoln and Adams, visits the mother of a friend who died of AIDS, discusses homosexuality and AIDS with students, finishes teaching, returns home.  Does this constitute a plot?  Do I care?

Frankly, I don’t.  I don’t care if this book runs “only” 150 pages.  I don’t care if the cast of characters is minimal.  I don’t care if not very much “happens.”

I love the mood of the book; I love the writing; I love the thoughtfulness.  Perhaps because I used to live relatively close to DC?  Perhaps because I’m a thoughtful, sometimes moody, person, who cares about relationships to family and friends and lovers?

I enjoy it; not everyone will.  Some people enjoy genre fiction; I enjoy this.  Whatever.

Postscript to The Naked Civil Servant

The Naked Civil Servant, the film based on the autobiography of Quentin Crisp, is lighthearted and inspiring.  It’s inspiring in part because it is lighthearted.  Crisp took a lot of heat for being who he was: An honest, open, "effeminate" homosexual, back in the 1930s in England, when homosexuality was a criminal offense. The way he tells his story, part of how he survived was through a lighthearted approach to his troubles—you don’t see much angst in this film.  He and his friend, the club-footed woman, do discuss suffering to some extent; but it’s brief.

It’s possible that the only way someone could survive the indignity of constant contempt was to be honest and whimsical.  This combination provides the charm to this film.

In preparing to watch the sequel, The Englishman in New York, it helps to consider a few questions implied by the first film.

What are the roles of sex, of love, of friendship, of compassion, in this film?

At several points in the film, Quentin professes never to have experienced love; of course, he’s speaking of conventional love:  Between man and woman.  But it’s not clear whether Quentin experiences love towards anyone.  His first sexual experiences are as a male prostitute.  He and his clients get sex, and he gets money.  What might a gay man expect to get at that time?

He has relationships with four men in the course of the film:  The first is a man known only as Thumbnails (his thumbnails are somehow misshaped).  But Crisp claims this love was never sexual.  The second is a civil servant.  This is sexual, but not terribly exciting.  The third is a large man known as Barn Door, who after knowing Quentin awhile, declares they should sleep together; then, after another while, declares they should stop.  The fourth is a Polish man who has spent some years in a mental institution and is “sexual, but impotent.”  Not a very fulfilling list.

He has platonic friendships with several women:  The club-footed woman, who eventually becomes a nun; the wife of the Pole; a ballet teacher who is his landlady for a while.  These connections seem deeper than the relationships with the men, though non-sexual.

Friendship runs deep in this film.  Quentin is a friend of the Pole long before they are lovers.  He is friends with both the Pole and his wife.  The Pole later divorces the wife and marries the club-footed woman.  Crisp remains friends with all of them.  He is loyal to them, and they are loyal to him.  At perhaps the climax of the film, when Crisp is arrested for soliciting (many years after giving up prostitution), his friends proclaim his good character in court and he is found not guilty.

Crisp is compassionate as well.  In his relationships with men, it is always the other man who initiates the connection.  When questioned about his relationship with the Pole, he declares:  “Love is never closing your hand, not even to the unlovable.”

Looking forward to the film’s sequel, one might also consider the role of fantasy and make-believe in Crisp’s life.  At the beginning of The Naked Civil Servant, Crisp suggests a central image might be him playing dress-up as a young boy.  Certainly part of his endurance came from his refusal to concede to anyone that he was doing anything wrong.

But how does a world of wit and fantasy confront the dark realities of AIDS?  This becomes a major theme of the sequel.

Review: "The Jane Street Girls" (2 of 2)

But—I lose my way in this section.  In the first part of the book, I could barely keep straight the film director, his household, and the expatriate Americans Phil hung around with in Italy.  In the last part, I’m completely lost.  Boyfriends, potential boyfriends, work associates—all these people weaving in and out of focus during parties and other social engagements…I can’t track them all.  Maybe I could, with another reading.  I’ve read this book twice now, and I’ve enjoyed it twice; but something bothers me about it; I can’t quite put my finger on it.

It seems I lose the forest for the trees.  I remember individual trees from the first reading.  I remember, for example, some of the more spectacular events from Phil’s magazine job.  I remember some of Phil’s more spectacular romantic episodes.  Last night, soaking in a hot tub and expecting to read five or ten pages before going to bed, I sailed right on through to the ending, though it was after midnight.  I remembered reading the book the first time—and being confused then; not at the actual ending, but at the events leading up to it, a series of romantic disappointments and blunders.

The book itself ends on a memorable note.  First, like Edmund White’s The Beautiful Room Is Empty, this story ends with a more or less first-hand account of the Stonewall Riots (“Insurrection?”)  in 1969—the birth of the modern American Gay Rights Movement.  Phil is there, walking through Greenwich Village with a friend—but high on LSD and both of them feeling that they must be hallucinating the police and the riot vans.  The next morning, they realize it was no hallucination.  And out they go, to participate in history.

But in a coda to the main narrative, the book jumps forward over a decade to the disappearance of a man once interested in Phil, the death of another friend due to AIDS—and the general bitter melancholy of those times.  What else has happened to Phil over this decade?  We don’t know.

I understand that Men Who Loved Me is actually the middle book of a trilogy.  By chance it is the book available at my local library.  It would be interesting to read the entire set and see how it compares to Edmund White’s autobiographical novels.  Both Picano and White were members of the Violet Quill gay writing group of the early 1980s.  They’re both well-educated and cultured; they’re about the same age and both grew up in the conservative times when it wasn’t safe to be open about being gay; when you could be imprisoned or committed for it, in fact.

Whatever we think of their writing style or the characters they describe, we still owe them.  They had the courage and persistence to figure out how to write positively about being gay when there were precious few models for that sort of thing.  They forged the path out of necessity.