Gaya Scienza

Dorian Gray in its original text

2011-10-07T12:45:45-04:00

Antoine Deléry's biography of Peyrefitte (Roger Peyrefitte - Le sulfureux, H&O Éditions, 2011, 336p, in French) is not the most exciting book around. At least it's a quick read. One of its interests lies in the extensive quotations of Peyrefitte's public letter to François Mauriac after the famous columnist wrote a harsh paper on him after watching a documentary on the movie adaptation of Les amitiés particulières.

The Lettre ouverte à M. François Mauriac, prix Nobel, membre de l'Académie française, published by Arts on May 6th 1964, is nothing other than a public outing of Mauriac (as we would say today), supported by quite graphic allusions, like the mention of some love letters to Cocteau...

Qui êtes-vous mon cher maître? Un écrivain que nous admirons, mais un homme que nous ne pouvons plus supporter. Vous vous êtes impatronisé du rôle officiel de moralisateur, beaucoup moins pour défendre la morale que pour vous punir, aux dépends d’autrui, de votre pendant irresistible à l’immoralité. (Who are you my dear Master? A writer we admire, but a man that we can no longer stand. You have endorsed yourself with the official role of moralizing, much less to defend morality than to punish you, at the expense of others, for your irresistible inclination to immorality.)

Among the abundant book production of Peyrefitte chronicled in the biography, L'exilé de Capri, his fictionalized biography of Jacques d'Adelsward-Fersen, the founder of Akademos, the first homosexual journal in France, stands out. After a scandal involving boys in 1903 Fersen has to flee Paris for Capri where he lived until his death in 1923. A sad life. Apparently Peyrefitte's book includes an interesting painting of homosexual Paris in the early 20th century. Deléry claims that after L'exilé Peyrefitte's style will never again display the 'joyous irony and the cheerfulness' that characterized his earlier production.

The last part of the biography is dominated by what Deléry describes as the great love of Peyrefitte's life: Alain-Philippe, a young actor, had a minor role in the movie Les amitiés particulières. They met during a visit of the author to the shooting location. Alain-Philippe was 12 years old. Peyrefitte 57. Irronically, when Alain-Philippe grew up, after causing the financial ruin of Peyrefitte through dubious investments in the show business, he will marry Amanda Lear... Another sad story.

Philippe Jullian's biography of Oscar Wilde, first published in 1961 and recently reissued (Éditions Bartillat, 2011, 430p, in French), is another story. It is not as definitive as Richard Ellman's Oscar Wilde, nor as crisp as Neil McKenna's The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde. A very pleasant read, though, with a lively and mastered style. It made me want to read again The Portrait of Dorian Gray, especially in the scholarly edition recently provided by Nicholas Frankel (Harvard University Press, 2011, 296p), which features for the first time Wilde's original text, more explicit on the gay context than the previously known editions... According to Jullian,

Dorian Gray est, en somme, le premier roman pédérastique écrit depuis le Satiricon (...). Il faudra attendre vingts ans, avec la Mort à Venise, de Thomas Mann, pour trouver un beau livre aussi complètement homosexuel. (Dorian Gray is, in short, the first gay novel written since the Satyricon (...). It will take twenty years, with Death in Venise by Thomas Mann, to get a beautiful book, so thoroughly homosexual.)

A Marriage's Dark Box

2011-08-09T15:44:13-04:00

A Box of Darkness - The Story of a Marriage by Sally Ryder Brady (St. Martin's Press, 2011, 240p) is a strange, fascinating, book. And sad.

Sally and Upton have been married for 46 years when Upton suddenly dies. In the aftermath of his death Sally finds gay porn magazines and videos in his belongings... She is transported many years back, when, after 8 years of marriage and four children, one morning, after a night of heavy drinking and spending the night at a friend's place, Upton confessed that he had had sex with his friend, Edward.

After a lot of self-questioning and doubts, Sally ends up putting the incident on account of 'Edward drunken seduction,' and after Upton proclaiming: 'I give you my promise, it will never happen again. Never. I give you my word,' she seems to have forgotten it. Not to say that the marriage went uneventful. Upton, although charming and brilliant, was subject to temper tantrums and was an alcoholic, absorbed in his work, leaving Sally very much in charge of the family.

When she discovers the gay porn material, she writes,

I surrender to a flow of sorrows - first the self-pitying sorrow of a spurned lover; then the sorrow for the sex we'd only rarely shared the last fifteen years; and finally sorrow for Upton and the great burden of his secret. How could I have not known he was gay? Or did I know? What did I know? What did I know that I didn't know I knew until this minute?

But it is not simple. In writing her memoir Sally Ryder Brady tries to understand what her marriage meant. In the end, a futile exercise:

I could spend the rest of my life trying to understand Upton. But who among us can truly know what is in another's heart?

Sad finding, but so true... She nevertheless adds:

What I know is that Upton chose me and that he loved me. I think that is enough.

Isn't that a wise conclusion, after all?

Of Insdispensible things...

2011-08-02T15:24:17-04:00

Peter Parker is, also, very positive in his review of Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child, concluding: 'Beautifully written, ambitious in its scope and structure, confident in its execution, The Stranger's Child is a masterclass in the art of the novel.' (TLS, July 1) While The Band of Thebes writes: 'I've read the Hollinghurst, to be released here in October, and while you'll want to too, it is not so magnificent that you need to import it immediately from the UK.'

And Edmund White contrasts Verlaine’s with Rimbaud's recent translations: Poems Under Saturn (Poème saturniens, translated by Karl Kirchwey, Princeton University Press) from the former, Illuminations (translated by John Ashbery, Norton) from the latter, in the July 22 edition of the TLS. Of Illuminations, he writes: 'No one is better suited to translating this poetry than John Ashbery.' He concludes by using the words 'deft, accurate and above all beautiful.'

Maybe the FT weekend edition is not that indispensable after all, even if Rowley Leigh’s recipe of Spelt spaghetti with prawns, in the last issue, is rather inspiring...

Donald Strachey

2011-07-26T19:43:18-04:00

The Financial Times is easier to find in Miami than in my small town in Connecticut. I am - almost - enjoying reading again its Life and Arts section every Saturday since arriving here. Several weeks ago Alan Hollinghurst made it to the page 3 interview . Emily Stokes had lunch with the British author in a London vegetarian restaurant, but the conversation was boring and did not really make you want to read his last novel, The Stranger’s Child, recently published in the UK (we will get it in the US in the fall). Which, thankfully, was not the case with Jason Cowley’s review a few pages below: ‘A literary myth is unraveled in Alan Hollinghurst’s most ambitious novel.’

Ian Thomson’s incipit in his review of John Ashbery’s superb translation of Illuminations by Arthur Rimbaud:

Arthur Rimbaud, the 19th-century French poet, was a ferocious malcontent, who free-wheeled towards self-destruction with the help of hashish and quantities of alcohol, then renounced literature altogether for a life of vagabondage (sic) in Africa. In 1891, after (sic) a botched amputation for gangrene (sic), he came home to die in a hospital in Marseilles, aged 37.

is not a good start.

***

Richard Stevenson’s Death Trick, in addition to providing a good mystery, introduces us, step by step, to Donald Strachey. We are in Albany, NY, in 1979, backrooms are finding their way to the capital of the state, disco is king, coach is called tourist class and Donald is promiscuous... At 40, he lives in a rental on Morton and drives a Rabbit. We learn that he has a mustache and humor: ‘I went into the bathroom, showered, and shaved. I spotted a single white hair in my mustache, probe around and got a grip on it, and yanked it out. I checked my armpits, chest , and groin. No change below the neck yet. That was when you'd know it was for real.’
And also that he has been an ‘investigator for nearly fifteen years - army intelligence; the Robert Morgart Agency: four years on [his] own,’ but ‘was still learning.’ He was married for 7 years before divorcing 3 years earlier. Brigit, his ex-wife, is getting married again and her new husband is moving in with her. She needs the room where Stratchey has been keeping his books in their old house in Latham.
Timmy, with whom Donald spends the first evening in the novel asking questions in Albany's gay bars (and dancing), is his lover, but ‘we don't live together.’ They spend the first night of the novel in Timmy's apartment. We will learn later his full name, Timothy Callahan, and that he is three years younger than Strachey. They have known each other for two and a half years. Timmy is of Irish catholic ascent, 'pretty consistently repelled by the darker side of gay life. He wears Brooks Brothers suits to work for the state senate minority leader's office.’
The night before moving the books from Brigit's house Timmy and Strachey make love 'with a furious intensity that was reminiscent of the night [they] first met.' Next day Timmy helps Strachey move his books. Hugh Bigelow, Brigit's new husband, gives them a hand to load the U-Haul truck. When it is almost done Brigit and Strachey find themselves alone in the kitchen. Their way to really part:

She had not liked being a victim of my self-deception, and during the last years of our marriage, the malicious humor that was part of what has drawn us together in the first place had hardened into cruelty on both our parts. I hadn't liked being a victim of my self-deception either, and I often took it out on Brigit, who dished it right back. And now here we were, in character to the awful end.

I sipped my coffee and said, "There is an equality, a symmetry about Timmy's and my sexual relationship. It has balance. In seven years you never fucked me once."

She tightened like a fist. "Yes. And you must have fucked me twelve or fifteen times." She smiled, tight-lipped, the flesh around her lower jaw quivering.

Sex. It isn't everything in a relationship. But it's plenty.

Strachey quit smoking after meeting Timmy: ‘It had suddenly occurred to me that I want to live for a long, long time.’ If they don't live together, they share the keys to their homes. Strachey takes care of his body: in addition to removing white hairs in his mustache he exercises... When they stay home they play Scrabble... And they are still pretty much in love:

I’d always loved the sight of Timmy’s milk-white skin under the bluish glow of the streetlight outside my front window, and I was sitting there running my fingers over all the different parts of him.

Regarding his tastes, he says: 'I'd always found effeminate men unappealing, but once when I'd made a crack to Brigit about "that faggy guy over there," she'd replied, "Faggy is as faggy does." Which missed the point by a mile but still left an impression on me. I tried to become more tolerant.'

At the end of the novel, when the mystery is solved, you suddenly realize that you know very little of Strachey’s physical appearance? Unless I missed something, besides his mustache, not much is provided... He is likened to Robert Mitchum and Sean Connery by Harold Snyder, the transvestite with whom he has a wild encounter in chap 14... He/She might not be objective, though.

By then Strachey moves in with Timmy, and they plan a vacation in Key West. The second volume in the series is On the Other Hand, Death. It was published in 1984.

Back to business

2011-07-17T22:18:40-04:00

The best at The Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, is the museum building itself. Well, maybe I am slightly exaggerating, but still... The new building, housing the world's most comprehensive collection by the late Spanish surrealist, according to the Michelin Green Guide, opened earlier this year. It overlooks Tampa Bay and is a clean, modern, construction. The first floor houses a small restaurant serving Spanish specialties, including a nice gazpacho that you can gulp down with a glass of cava....

What is disappointing in Dali's works is the lack of sensuality in his representation of bodies. Even his copper engravings for an illustrated edition of the Maldoror Songs fail to elicit any sensual emotion...

But suddenly two canvasses detach themselves from the rest, with their clear homoerotic images... The small Dos Adolecentes and the monumental Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus.

Well, I am back in South Florida. I have brought with me the whole series of the Donald Strachey mysteries that I intent to read in the order in which they were published. They have aged pretty well. In the Author's Note to Death Trick, the first title in the series that has recently been reissued by MLR Press, Richard Stevenson makes a direct reference to 'Joseph Hansen's pioneering Dave Brandstetter series.'

Death Trick, is set in ancient times - preAIDS - and was published in 1981.

New York, proudly, the 6th.

2011-06-25T23:49:31-04:00

Gabriel François

In the train

2011-04-28T13:15:39-04:00

In the train to New York for an evening at the Met, I stumble on this passage in Alex Ross's paper on Wagner's ring in the New Yorker (April 25):

"Laurence Dreyfus, in his revelatory new book 'Wagner and the Erotic Impulse' (Harvard), notes that the composer quickly became a beacon for advocates of sexual liberation, notably for early campaigners for homosexual rights. Any gay man or woman trapped in a sham marriage would have thrilled to Wotan'd line 'Unholy I deem the vow that binds unloving hearts.'"

Oh Lord!

Biofictions (cont.)

2011-02-15T23:27:41-05:00

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.

Casement's Black Diaries in Vargas Llosa's Last Novel

2011-02-06T17:04:53-05:00

Several weeks ago David Callagher, in the TLS, reviewed Mario Vargas Llosa's last novel, El sueño del celta (Alfaguara, 2010, 454p): "A magnificent addition to an oeuvre which the Swedish Academy have rightly distinguished." The historical novel is based on the live of the Irish revolutionary and explores his complex life and many of its contradictions.

The novel also inevitably considers Casement's sexuality and the question of whether he wrote the so-called Black Diaries found after his arrest, or whether they were a British forgery used to blacken his name.

Read the review, or the novel, for that matter, to get an answer...

John Cromer is Back!

2011-01-16T20:46:21-05:00

These past couple of days saw, in the British press, a firework of reviews of Cedilla, Adam Mars-Jones's sequel to Picrow, his outstanding previous novel.

From their titles, most seem positive. I did not read them. I am waiting for a copy of the book, just about to be published in the UK by Faber and Faber, and I want to enjoy it raw...

I am looking forward to it. This is the text on the front flap:

Cedilla continues the history of John Cromer ('adventures' sounds rather too hectic) begun by Pilcrow, described by the London Review of Books as 'peculiar, original, utterly idiosyncratic' and by the Sunday Times as 'truly exhilarating'.
John Cromer is the weakest hero in literature - unless he's one of the strongest. In Cedilla he launches himself into the wider world of mainstream education, and comes upon deeper joys, subtler setbacks. The tone and texture of the two books is similar, but their emotional worlds are very different. The slow unfolding of themes is perhaps closer to Indian classical music than the Western tradition - raga/saga, anyone?
This isn't an epic novel as such things are normally understood, to be sure. It contains no physical battles and the bare minimum of travel, yet surely it qualifies. None of the reviews of Picrow explicitly compared it to a coral reef made of a billion tiny Crunchie bars, but that was the drift of opinion. Page by page, Cedilla too provides unfailing pleasure. It's the book you can read between meals without ruining your appetite.

John Self's blog Asylum will feature an interview with Adam Mars-Jones soon. Keep posted.