CHROMA

Review: Wilde Stories 2009: The Year's Best Gay Speculative Fiction

2009-12-12T05:38:00.003Z

Wilde Stories 2009: The Year's Best Gay Speculative Fiction
Edited by Steve Berman

Published by Lethe Press

Reviewed by Paul Kane

These eleven stories display a match made in heaven and, on occasion, consummated in hell: speculative / slipstream literature conflated with a queer/LGBT sensibility. Joel Lane’s Behind the Curtain, a skewered take on the vampire tale, is a case in point. Set amid a landscape of urban decay and environmental collapse, it has a protagonist intent on cruising for a bruising; or a bloodletting, anyway. Vampire romance, as a genre, is all the rage with adolescent girls at the minute; this story is a more carnal version of the form.

The most impressive piece of fiction is AKA St. Mark’s Place by Richard Bowes, though the ending is a bit perfunctory, mind. In essence, the story traces the relationship between three troubled souls - Judy, Ray and BD - from the mid-'60s to the early 1970s. Their relationship, a tangle of fate, is not so much a love triangle as a triangle of intimate complicity; and the most effective passages evoke the frisson of feeling that occurs when you notice properly who people are, how they see themselves. The clairvoyant element here adds a layer of mystery, but does not dispel the gloom of two take-home truths: families are ramshackle dwellings, unstable and insecure, is one; another: the abused will somehow tend to become abusers.

Another highlight of the collection is a tale entitled Bluff, by that formidably accomplished writer, L.A. Fields. His contribution touches on lust, longing, a little death (in the Elizabethan sense, natch) and maybe the larger one. Though a small example of what he can do, it is effective nonetheless.

Finally, to end, comments on a couple of other contributions. I’m Your Violence by Lee Thomas starts out as a police procedural in the vein of James Ellroy: a grisly sex murder, the leading turn an act of near-cannibalism. It then veers off in a weird (or an even weirder) direction but a fruitful one, with an interesting moral ambivalence at its core. As a writer, Thomas is a real find and his protagonist here, a detective by the name of Dean Kaiser, is surely too intriguing a character to be limited to a run-out in just one story. Echo by Peter Dube is different again, having a thread of subtle disquiet which evokes that dark genius Thomas Ligotti, or some of the rare fictions of Guy Davenport. It seemed to tell of a curious fate, yet was as much a meditation on memory and lost time. A strange, suggestive story.

Paul Kane lives and works in Manchester, England. Hewelcomes responses to his reviews and you can reach him at ludic@europe.com

Review: Fifty Gay and Lesbian Books Everybody Must Read

2009-12-09T10:59:00.007Z

Fifty Gay and Lesbian Books Everybody Must Read
Edited by Richard Canning

Published by Alyson Books

Reviewed by Max Fincher

‘Must read’ or ‘must do’ lists rouse my hackles, initially at least. My immediate feeling is: ‘Why must I?’ Why should I read this or that book in preference to another? Or one I have chosen to read or had recommended to me? It is similar to the mixed feelings you might experience being told to read certain ‘classic’ works of fiction at college or university, because they are somehow inherently ‘good for you’. We all know what is good for us (sometimes we even enjoy it) but we don’t always necessarily want to be good all the time. However, this collection of essays in no way attempts to persuade you why you must read these books along the arguments of their literariness, popularity or for self-improvement reasons; in fact, one or two of the essays argue against reading their choice. Instead, the reader is given very personal reflections by the contributors on the pleasures they have yet to discover. After putting off reading Moby Dick for years, I might now try reading the novel, as well as revisiting again, with a better understanding, Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood.

So Fifty Gay and Lesbian Books Everybody Must Read ‘...isn’t a canonical book’. As Richard Canning makes clear in his introduction, there is no overarching grand narrative that links the selections together according to some linear, developmental history. The range of books covered is not merely limited to novels either. Letters, diaries, poetry, and autobiography are included, and the essays span Plato, Gilgamesh and the Bible to contemporary fiction by Herve Guibert, Rebecca Brown and Matthew Sadler. This is not intended to be a comprehensive survey or history of gay literature in the manner of say Gregory Woods’s A History of Gay Literature, but is a highly subjective and personal choice of works by both new and established contemporary writers. There are gaps and holes between writers and periods and ‘the babble of gathered voices’, gaps that we can fill in if we choose. Inevitably, everyone will have their own ‘must read’ list. But as Canning says to focus on who is left out is to miss the point: ‘the value of this book not by what isn’t here, but by what is’ (p.xiv).

And for some readers there may be surprising omissions. Forster, Gide, Genet, Joe Orton, Armistead Maupin, Alan Hollingshurst and Sarah Waters are all absent. One aspect of this collection that makes it immensely readable and enjoyable, is that the essays are not consistently in the vein of classic biographical or literary-critical appreciations. Instead, many contributors offer subjective viewpoints, reminiscences and musings on the process of reading, the writers or describe how certain characters changed or affected them personally. Many essays read against established interpretations. For instance Robert Glück’s reads Edmund White’s, A Boy’s Own Story as a transgressive piece of fiction that argues against reading the novel as an example of ‘crossover’ literature with mainstream audiences. Regina Marler admits she doesn’t like Henry James’s The Bostonians, finding James’s characterisation of the latent lesbian attraction between the characters of Olive and Verena ‘mean-spirited’, ‘spiteful’ and ‘grotesque’.

Frequently, the essays are stylistically inventive, as in Kathy Acker’s appreciation of the fiction of William Burroughs. In addition, there are exciting cross-currents occurring between readers and writers, where sexuality is not a centrifugal point: straight and lesbian women read gay men’s writing, and (previously straight) and gay/bisexual men read straight women’s fiction. The essay by Mark Behr on The Color Purple is a shining example, and shows the power of fiction to both transform and connect people.

Herman Melville

Out of the fifty books chosen, I have read six: Horace Walpole’s Letters (only selections; reading all thirty-four volumes would take forever); Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited; James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room; Mary Renault’s The Persian Boy; Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges are Not the Only Fruit. For my Christmas holiday reading, I decided I would choose five books to read. Vestal McIntyre’s description of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick as ‘...a story bursting at its seams, assembled and sewn together as roughly as Frankenstein’s monster’ and Melville’s daring, experimental language intrigues me. I have shied away from modernist fiction, but perhaps Melville will engage me. Second on my list is Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian. Edmund White describes how Yourcenar’s had an unconventional upbringing, tutored by her father in Latin and Greek, and how she is ‘a philosophical writer with a deep and wide culture’. I am hoping to discover a brilliant historical fiction writer, to see how she portrays ‘one of the great same-sex love stories of all time’. Thirdly, I would like to read Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems. David Bergman has whetted my interest by describing Ginsberg’s curious mix of spirituality and explicit sexuality, his inclusive and embracing attitude to other people, and how the experience of reading his poems is like ‘holding the book and holding the man’. J.R. Ackerley’s autobiography, My Father and Myself, is, according to Andrew Holleran, ‘a wonderful comic portrait of people with an almost Dickensian cast’. I am anticipating from Holleran’s description something in the realm of Alan Bennett’s wonderfully observant character-sketches, Talking Heads, mixed with Kenneth Williams’ diary. Holleran’s description of Ackerley as ‘entertaining’, ‘acerbic’ and ‘never boring or monotonous’, suggests a pleasurable journey of exploration of a complex man’s relationship with his father and his own sexual feelings. Finally, I would like to read Andrew Holleran’s own novel, Dancer from the Dance, to submerge and lose myself in a heady era of ‘intense artifice’, the disco moment of the 1970s, and to discover perhaps the ‘first real novel of Gay Liberation’, which as Matias Viegener says is ‘a wild and unexpected fulfilment of Walt Whitman’s utopian call for the “love of comrades” to “sing the body electric”.

Reading the essays in this collection has opened my eyes to the diversity of voices and his(her)stories that are out there for us all to explore and experience. You may find your assumptions and expectations about a particular work or writer confirmed or overturned, but hopefully you will make new discoveries. I am hoping my own selections will be entertaining, challenging and informative, and that each will contain something that, in some small or large way, changes my own ‘certainties’. To this end, I would like to conclude with a quotation from Mark Behr’s essay on The Color Purple, as a coda for why everyone must read:

The Reader doubts, often. From book to book, his doubts multiply. The Reader believes that if more people were less certain more often, and tasted the emancipation that comes with doubt, there would be fewer wars and fewer hungry and unhappy and angry people in whose eyes he sees himself reflected.

Max Fincher wrote his PhD at King’s College London, a queer reading of late eighteenth-century Gothic fiction that was published as Queering Gothic Writing in the Romantic Age by Palgrave Macmillan (2007). He has taught part-time on eighteenth-century fiction and women’s writing, at both King’s College London and Royal Holloway, and is an occasional book reviewer for the TLS. He is currently writing his first novel, tentatively titled The Pretty Gentleman, a queer historical thriller set in the Regency art world.

Review: Ganymede Stories One

2009-12-02T03:18:00.002Z

Ganymede Stories One
edited by John Stahle

Published by Ganymede

Reviewed by Marc Bridle

This anthology brings together short stories published in the first six issues of Ganymede; and like all anthologies it is a hit-and-miss affair. But what sets it above many similar collections is both the quality of the writing and the audacity of its editors in establishing a new gay literary benchmark for anthologies of this kind. The (mostly) contemporary prose in these 200 pages is seen squarely in the context of a Nineteenth Century aesthetic, one that stretches from the horse-drawn hansoms of gas-lit London to the bloodshot-eyed edginess of modern day San Francisco and Paris.

From Andrew J. Peters’ adorably amusing gay fairytale, The Vain Prince, to Cyrus Cassells’ aphoristic Another Horse on Your Horse Ranch established principles of prose are overturned. Peters’ fairytale anti-hero, Adalbert, is rather like a queer Turandot, and his prose swaggers along like a drunken queen in a nightclub, the very antithesis of what a fairytale should be. The opposite are Cassells’ exquisitely drawn short paragraphs, dexterously poetic and dripping in color like a golden-tongued seraphim. Elsewhere you can clearly see an individual writer’s non-literary influences. B.R.Lyon’s As is, I aspires to the condition of music, as does Marc Andreottola’s Lots. What sets Andreottola’s story apart from others here is the filmic quality he brings to his narrative. Just as a filmmaker can focus on one image and make the viewer seem unsettled so does Andreottola: “All the entertainer could see was the thigh of the Stump, a strong meaty thigh. The thigh activated the entertainer somehow, like a switch. He felt like the thighs could crush him like a nutcracker.” On a completely different level, John Stahl’s brilliantly articulated Memories of Inexpression shows that evocative writing doesn’t need to be a dialogue. With Beckett-like precision Stahl’s prose bears the imprint of isolation and memory like few other pieces in this anthology.

Gay writing is universal and it is, therefore, good to see the Ljubljana-based writer Boris Pintar included in this anthology. Slavic Thicket: Two Stories, translated from the Slovene by Rawley Grau, is coruscating. Whether by design or by translation his writing positively reeks of scents; pissing is not so much about the act as it is about the smell. In fact, this is prose that assails the senses in every way: cocks are eye-balled, sniffed and licked; nostrils are there not just to smell the aphrodisiac of sex but to snort coke, poppers and glue. Paragraphs are long – but never over long – but their very tightness leaves one feeling rather as if one has been clubbed over the head. They are brutal. The only other story which comes close to this kind of semi-pornographic wasteland of spunk and hard fucks is Eric Karl Anderson’s Beauty Number Two.

There used to be a time when gay literature had one ubiquitous theme: HIV and AIDS (think especially of the works of Hervé Guibert or David Wojnarowicz) so it was astonishing to find that the acronym HIV appears twice and AIDS just once in this entire anthology, and even then in just one story: Beauty Number Two. Anderson is certainly neither quixotic nor passive about it (“I’ve had enough of this fucking AIDS death camp”) but neither is he remote from it (“He is HIV positive: each revelatory fact makes him more perfect in my fevered imagination”). And jostling with the poetry of Anderson’s prose is a veritable shopping list of modern-day triviality, from celebrity blow-jobs to branded underwear, all neatly bound together in a very Noughties framework of queer happiness.

Cyrus Cassells

Which is, I suppose, what Oscar Wilde and Robert Louis Stevenson might have been doing in the Nineteenth century. The inclusion of works by Wilde and Stevenson, taking up a full quarter of the pages here, strikes me as problematical, though it does underline the extent to which some recent gay writing has retrenched to a more inverted form of beauty. Neither author could be said to be a model for Dennis Cooper’s anti-queer deviancy, but I can see the partial influence of their aesthetic on some of the writers appearing earlier on in this collection. Stevenson’s The Adventure of the Hansom Cab is indeed evocative, but its links to anything gay are tenuous. It reminds me more of the subtle homoeroticism of a Mapplethorpe still life. Wilde’s Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime is more semi-comic than semi-erotic; it’s inclusion based on the assumption that it is a rarity amongst Oscar Wilde’s prose works is, I think, unfounded.

Nevertheless, their prominence in this collection doesn’t detract from the sheer overall quality of the writing elsewhere, which is uniformly of a high standard. The sharp-edged writing of these authors might have benefited from equally sharp writing to stand beside them – perhaps some Samuel R Delaney (unfamiliar to many, even in North America) or a translation of some of Pierre Guyotat’s Prostitution, for example. Production values are high, and similar in style to Ganymede’s quarterly journal. Lavish black and white photographs are interspersed throughout, including some of the authors - who tend for the most part to be an attractive bunch. A perfect stocking filler – or as Marc Andreottola might have put it in his story a “dirty black sock” filler.

Marc Bridle is a critic and writer. He is based in Vancouver and London.

Review: The Cinema of Sally Potter: A Politics of Love

2009-11-28T10:51:00.000Z

The Cinema of Sally Potter
By Sophie Mayer

Published by WallFlower Press

Reviewed by Dr Kate Ince

Despite the wide coverage Sally Potter’s films have received since her early experimental shorts and Thriller in 1979, Sophie Mayer’s The Cinema of Sally Potter: A Politics of Love is only the second full-length study of Potter’s career. It has arrived at almost the same moment as Potter’s sixth full-length feature Rage, which is no coincidence, since Mayer explains that her book was delayed by the announcement, during the summer of 2008, that Rage was complete and would be screening at the 2009 Berlin Film Festival. She has undoubtedly risen to the ‘exhilarating, if unnerving challenge’ (p.9) of weaving the film into her manuscript in limited time, though was aided in this (as in many areas) by interviews with Potter and contact with Potter’s production company, Adventure Pictures.

The dynamism and sheer energy of Potter’s 1970s work in performance, dance and Expanded Cinema (as well as of her career as a whole) has influenced the structure of Mayer’s book, whose fourteen sections alternate between close commentary and analysis of Potter’s six features and eight chapters named after the activities of Working, Moving, Colouring, Listening, Feeling, Loving and Becoming. The active force of these present participles matches and draws on the passionately positive kind of change and transformation to be found in so many of Potter’s narratives, encapsulated by critic Jackie Hatfield’s description of what the existential was for the ‘synesthetic, sensuous, experiential, live and time-based art called expanded cinema’, ‘a kind of becoming: for the artist through process, and for the audience through reception’ (p.77). Issues of sensuous experience and the effect on viewers’ bodies of films’ sensuality have been uppermost in critical writing about cinema during the 2000s, since the appearance of Laura Marks’ The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses (2000), and although Mayer’s book impresses more by the range of sources it draws upon than by their connectedness to one another, and she perhaps resorts after only a short while to using Marks’ key term ‘haptic’ rather loosely, she convincingly brings out Potter’s affinity with the existential-phenomenological notion of the ‘lived body’, as shown in a remark about how, in The Man Who Cried, Suzie’s songs resonate with the viewer’s bodily movements and gestures though an ‘associative “empathy”’ (p.148), and in her observation of ‘two contrasting strategies that ‘touch’ us haptically [in Potter’s films]: firstly, how performers use their bodies in ways that carry over from her live work; and secondly, her use of film forms such as the close-up and rhythmic editing shows us these bodies in motion’ (p.6). Mayer also picks up on the feminism implicit in this haptic visuality and pervasive embrace of sensuous experience, and particularly well when she defends Potter against the many criticisms made of her decision to play the fictional character ‘Sally’ of The Tango Lesson herself, by acknowledging that this choice stemmed from a certain narcissism, but insisting that ‘Potter and her eponymous character lay claim to a bodily autonomy and pleasure that confused male reviewers who ‘conflate[d] female autonomy and authorship with narcissism’’ (p.20).
The Cinema of Sally Potter: A Politics of Love is a lengthy book, in which Mayer sometimes seems to get so engrossed in her material that she forgets Potter altogether (for example when discussing colour in film on pp.106-7). More judicious editing might have been advisable, as well as some reinforcement of argumentation: although the latter is strong and convincing in ‘Listening’, it is much weaker in the Thriller chapter and some others. More than a touch of romanticization of bodily labour is detectable in ‘Working’, where Mayer describes labour as ‘graceful and received with gratitude’ (p.50), and picks out ‘work’s grace’ as a ‘revolutionary gesture’ (p.42). She can also be much less idealising about the positivity of Potter’s filmmaking, however, as in ‘Moving’, where she suggests the relevance to Potter’s work of the ‘truly ethical apprehension of beauty’ theorised by Elaine Scarry in On Beauty and Being Just (2006) (p.82). She deploys Maria Lugones’ notion of ‘world-travelling’ so suited to the international wanderings of Potter’s characters carefully, specifying that it is used by Lugones to mean travelling ‘into others’ worlds through performance’ (p.89) rather than any more literal tourist-style journeying. And there is nothing saccharine about the thesis of a ‘politics of love’ included in the book’s title, which Mayer seems to have developed from theorist of the postcolonial Michael Hardt, who is quoted asserting the centrality of ‘this political character’ to premodern notions of love such as Christian and Judaic notions of ‘a constitution of the community’ (p.25). There is no disguising that Mayer’s book is as much a deeply personal appreciation of Potter’s work and career as it is an academic study, but Mayer avows as much early on when she describes the transformative experience viewing Orlando at the age of fifteen was for her, and explains that her book is ‘about an ‘inner exchange’ between one viewer and the films’. Her book is obviously just as much a labour of love as Potter’s films, and she gives eloquent testimony to the ‘giant leap’ she feels responding to them to be, a leap into a shared and immersive space of fantasy (p.70). The most important reason for the greatness of Sally Potter’s cinema, she is ultimately arguing, is that it requires and teaches us to look in a new way, with a ‘loving eye’ (p.135) that encourages and instils a mutual regard between seer and seen. To look upon someone or something is no detached, disinterested activity, but a transformative and enabling act that can, to quote Celeste from The Gold Diggers, ‘chang[e] what is there’ (p.238).

Dr Kate Ince is Reader in French Film and Gender Studies at the University of Birmingham.

Review: Beauty Salon by Mario Bellatin

2009-11-14T17:58:00.002Z

Beauty Salon
Mario Bellatin

Published by City Lights

Reviewed by Eric Karl Anderson

Whatever expectations about plot and character development you’ve come to expect from reading fiction should be left behind when reading Mexican novelist Mario Bellatin. One might pick up the novella Beauty Salon with its cover photo of empty pink chairs and hairdryers expecting a domestic female drama. Instead, we are introduced to the transvestite narrator who has transformed his beauty salon into a hospice or “terminal” (as he calls it) to care for the diseased homeless in the final stages of a terminal illness which has swept the globe and will soon obliterate this entire unnamed city. Rather than spend time ruminating on this mysterious plague, the narrator gives detailed accounts of the multiple kinds of fish he’s raised and how his care for them has been superseded by his duties to the dying patients he takes in. Intricate descriptions of the different kinds of exotic fish he’s raised are offered, but we are barely given any idea how the disease manifests itself with the patients of the terminal or the consequences of this plague to society. The effect of this is disconcerting and strangely moving revealing the degrees to which the narrator must emotionally distance himself from the world he inhabits.

Bellatin gives us a modern pared-down rendering of Samuel Butler’s satirical utopia Erewhon. Illness might as well be a crime in this sternly benevolent transvestite’s converted “Salon to the Stars” given the dingy beds, minimal food and lack of attention the patients who spend their final days in the terminal receive. Empathy is forsworn in favour of detached care. One patient who arrives even receives a beating from the narrator. Only men are allowed to have beds in the converted terminal; women are left to die in the street. Later on in the book, the narrator reflects how he mistakenly developed an emotional attachment to one of his very first patients. In conclusion to his debate about how the diseased should be cared for it becomes clear that their treatment is of little consequence given that this procession of dying men are all soon going to end up in similar anonymous graves.

Mario Bellatin

Bellatin is a writer who is likely to become just as well known for his behaviour in real life as for his often disturbingly bizarre prose. He frequently poses for photos wearing an array of elaborately-designed prosthetic arms given that he is missing most of his right arm and is playful in interviews, in one case inventing a Japanese writer with an enormous nose who he claims influenced his own writing. With his pared down style and conscious experimentation in prose, Bellatin shows an affinity to the Nouveau Roman and its focus on objects rather than the traditional elements of the novel. Bellatin seeks to portray fragments of experience rather than a coherent world. Characters aren’t defined by descriptions, but remain only as emotionally-charged glimmers in the narrator’s memory. Bellatin’s fiction is very fresh and invigorating if not always satisfying. The book closes with an impending sense of doom. The reader is left searching for the beauty in life like the narrator who looks for his remaining exotic fish hidden behind a film of algae which has coated the inside of the tank over a long period of time. You can barely see it, but you know its there.

Eric Karl Anderson is author of the novel Enough and has published work in various publications such as The Ontario Review, Ganymede Stories One and the anthologies From Boys to Men, Between Men 2 and 50 Gay and Lesbian Books Everyone Must Read.

Theatre Review: Primavera presents Origin of the Species

2009-11-07T01:18:00.000Z

Origin of the Species
Written by Bryony Lavery

Arcola Theatre, London
until November 21st 2009

Reviewed by Richard Canning

This is a seriously entertaining revival of a most intelligent and witty play. An early work of lesbian playwright Bryony Lavery, it’s a two-hander about Darwin’s theory of evolution, as the title suggests. This production, ably directed by Tom Littler and featuring excellent performances by Marjorie Yates as Molly and Clare-Hope Ashitey as Victoria, is thus also a timely treat, given the plethora of commemorations attending the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.

The drama draws on the true story of Louis and Mary Leakey’s pioneering 1950s and 60s anthropological research into the Olduvai Gorge region of Tanzania, the so-called ‘cradle of mankind’, named for the prehistoric human remains uncovered there. Its ‘homo habilis’ is a precursor of homo erectus, who in turn morphed into our present-day species, ‘homo sapiens’. Lavery has Molly, a bluff, elderly Yorkshirewoman, recounting her time joining the Leakey digs, from which she has brought back several skulls, as well as (and at this point the plot slightly awkwardly abandons all verisimilitude for fantasy) a complete skeleton, which reconstitutes itself as a wild young black woman, speechless embodiment of this earliest form of man. Molly names her “Victoria” – after her grandmother, though, naturally, there are colonial cadences too – and befriends the young woman (though there’s no hint of anything more than friendship and kinship), schooling her in the English language (which proves relatively straightforward) and native customs and perceptions (much trickier).

The challenge must be – within this poignant, fundamentally comic scenario – to avoid the semblance of colonialist instruction detracting from the true lessons emerging from the couple’s exchanges, which are colour-neutral. Clearly, given the play’s intentionally absurd premise, it may seem churlish to insist on the dangers of interpreting Molly’s often patronising tutelage too literally, and in colour- and culturally-sensitive terms. Generally, the play steers a sensitive course through this problem. But there are moments where it struggles to provide an oppositional voice to Molly’s articulation of how the “primitive” in front of her might, and indeed will, develop into a fully-fledged homo sapiens; a near insurmountable difficulty, given Victoria’s struggle to master speech. There is one moment, though, in the first half, where she inadvertently trumps Molly’s ready cultural assumptions. A few more such rhetorical reversals would have strengthened the play’s fundamental determination to question “civilised values” in the round.

Bryony Lavery

The other chief way in which the play suggests that mankind’s evolution has not been the straightforward flight towards achievement and liberty comes in its striking final moments. Molly celebrates the arrival of the New Year, and, given that the play has been conceived around the idea of the entire history of Earth being mapped onto a single year, wonders whether mankind can survive after the clocks strike. “Mankind”, of course, is itself a provocative term, given the play’s other prominent theme: the male-centred nature of recorded human history, anthropological and otherwise. Molly concedes that, when she first uncovered Victoria, she had been looking for a man, specifically, not a woman; yet her delight in her ward causes her to question all manner of man-dominant ideas. Her education, she reveals, had been entirely devoted to the mantra: “man – him - his”. Victoria counters by revealing that it had been woman who first learnt how to take and use fire – a critical moment, obviously, in the development of the species - not man, as is traditionally recorded in myth.

The man-bashing is sometimes a little unabashed, or at least somewhat “period” in feel, and one senses that the playwright might have longed to push the Molly-Victoria relationship further, since, as it stands, the role played by sexual instinct in mankind’s development, isn’t glanced at. Still, Origin of the Species remains a witty, smart treatment of some complex ideas. The commendable production at the Arcola feels fully evolved.

Richard Canning is a writer and academic, based in London. His latest book is the edited collection Fifty Gay and Lesbian Books Everybody Must Read (Alyson, 2009).

Call for Submissions: Read these Lips

2009-11-04T05:04:00.001Z

Read These Lips is a free e-book project dedicated to lesbian literature. In our fourth year, we are inviting submissions to our anthology series.

We seek multi-dimensional literary writings that speak the possibilities of lesbian lives. We feature popular genre as well as cross-genre works.

Submissions are open from 1 November 2009 to 31 January 2010. Please read our Submissions Guidelines and our previous anthologies for guidance.

Early expressions of interest are encouraged. Please direct all correspondence to submissions@readtheselips.com

Film Review: Greek Pete

2009-10-31T08:29:00.001Z

Greek Pete
dir. Andrew Haigh

Peccadillo Pictures DVD

Reviewed by Max Fincher

Greek Pete gives us a glimpse into the world of Pete, a very popular London-based escort who was voted best escort at the World Escort Awards in Los Angeles in 2008. A mix of documentary and fiction, we see the real personalities behind the profiles, and an original view of the escort world.

Pete admits, unsurprisingly enough, that he wants to make ‘as much money as possible’. We see how using Internet chat rooms and websites, and being London-based are essential to being successful. Included is footage of Pete fucking one client, participating in a threesome for a film and some erotic photographic shots of him acting out fetish fantasies involving boot sniffing. He gets through as many clients a week as he possibly can, even taking a call while tucking into his Xmas turkey dinner.

The film challenges any expectations or prejudgments the viewer may bring that the escort is to be pitied, condemned or seen as somehow having no feelings or the perception that they are unintelligent. Pete is perhaps smarter than the viewer gives him credit for as we can infer from Pete’s opening monologue to the film. He asks why we are watching. If our motivation is for voyeuristic reasons, this is ok, ‘as long as you pay me for it’. Good-looking, sexy and well-hung, Pete ticks all superficial boxes to be an escort. But there is something more to him as a person. And it is here that the film’s strength lies in showing us that Pete is more than just a good fuck or wank fantasy.

What emerges distinctly is that, despite his ambition, Pete comes across as very likeable and charming. Confident and articulate about being an escort, he clearly takes a pride in doing the job well, boasting that his many clients return to him repeatedly. One scene in particular shows him chatting with an accountant, describing how excited he is to be going to Los Angeles and the importance of having a work-ethic in life. At no point do we doubt that he takes his work seriously, but perhaps sometimes too seriously. The film at no point patronises him or us.

However, Pete’s matter-of-fact, self-aware attitude does make the viewer question whether Pete really wants to be an escort. There is a sense that something is missing. Particularly after the ‘high’ of being in the spotlight of the World Escort Awards. We see him watching himself alone in his apartment and calling up his friends to proudly tell them how happy he is. In an earlier monologue to the camera, he reflects somewhat regretfully on how he was surprised that his Mum doesn’t accept his ‘choice’ of career, and tells us that his father would be ‘ashamed’ of him. We are left to our own conclusions as to whether Pete is in the right job or not. He never indicates whether he enjoys his work or not. However, what emerges strongly is that he enjoys sharing stories and experiences with his friends and his new family. At times, his melancholy mood suggests that possibly his feelings about being an escort are more complex than they appear.

By contrast, Pete’s boyfriend (also an escort) whose screen name is LondonboyKai, appears withdrawn, vulnerable and more susceptible to his emotions. Dependent on Pete for somewhere to live, he dislikes Pete’s business interrupting their lives. We see a side of Pete that is less pleasant in his treatment of Kai who takes second place to his work. Kai is subject to Pete’s rules and his criticism of his drug dependency. The film draws our attention to the fact that there are darker sides to escorting. When he receives a call from someone in Vauxhall who asks whether Kai can take ‘hard fucking’, Kai says he can and agrees to do ‘G,K or C’ and golden showers. However, he laughs nervously while talking to the client. The film does not shy away from the fact that many escorts need so many clients to pay for their drug dependency. Pete is aware of the realities and dangers escorts face, including ‘gift-giving’ (the deliberate passing on HIV). He tells us that some of the younger boys will ‘say yes to anything’, and we are in fact left to wonder if Kai has in fact been abused in some way.

This honesty is moving and refreshing. The director, Andrew Haigh, commented that ‘I wanted the film to be truly authentic’ and that he wanted to ‘try and get closer to the reality and focus on the everyday nature of things, the nuts and bolts of the job, the real personalities behind the online profiles and magazine adverts’. Undoubtedly, this is achieved. We see that escorts have lives, histories and aspirations like any other person’s whose job does not define who they are.

Review: Ganymede Poets: One

2009-10-24T08:14:00.007Z

Ganymede Poets: One
Published by: Ganymede Books

Reviewed by Gregory Woods

I have been reading gay poetry anthologies in any language with which I’m familiar ever since I began to write a doctoral thesis on homo-erotic poetry in the mid-1970s. Not just anthologies from our own time, but also those from the distant past, put together for private collectors who wanted to read celebrations of their own erotic interests. This makes me, at once, both the best and worst person to review a new anthology. Best because I know the competition; worst because I’ve seen it all before.

Ganymede Poets is an anthology of the thirty-eight gay male poets who appeared in the first six issues of the New York gay literary magazine Ganymede. Like the magazine itself, the book is beautifully produced, lavishly illustrated with black and white photographs, all loosely related to the themes of the poetry.

Judging by their biographical notes, many of the poets collected here have postgraduate degrees in creative writing. The standard reaction to this, here in the UK, would be a kind of affected ridicule, spluttering along the lines that no decent writer needs to be taught how to write. Well, just tell yourself that when you next read a British anthology of gay poetry! If nothing else, at least these guys have read other poets. Most of them write what is called ‘free verse’, but it is informed free verse. Apart from a couple of non-American contributors, I think it’s safe to say that virtually all of them are familiar with the poems of William Carlos Williams; many with Ezra Pound and others. They know where to put the words on the page. They know the limits of their ‘freedom’. By contrast, generally speaking, most of the contributors of free verse to anthologies published in Britain seem never to have heard of Williams, let alone read him with any care. And that is not to mention Charles Olson or George Oppen or Louise Glück…

So what impresses me here, before we even begin on the content, is the quality of the verse. Christopher Gaskins, for instance, impresses me not so much for what he says as by the way he says it in lean, sinewy, unsentimental free verse. The same might be said of Matthew Hittinger’s syllabics and Jee Leong Koh’s disciplined, rhyming quatrains. And there are always individual lines to take one’s fancy: I did enjoy this sentence from R.J. Gibson’s ‘On Main Street’: ‘Like some classist / prat in a Forster novel with a boner for the help, you want a little trade’.

Matthew Hittinger

All the poets are somewhat overshadowed, as you might expect, by a selection of Daniel Mendelsohn’s translations from the Greek of Constantine Cavafy. But to read Matt Cogswell’s ‘How I Spent the Afternoon’ straight after Cavafy’s ‘Their Beginning’ (one of my favourite ‘gay poems’) is not conspicuously to move from a great poet to a mediocre one so much as to make a cultural shift from an absolute, classical belief in the power of art to memorialise its fleshly inspirations, to something much more tentative and speculative, an attempt to grasp the slippery pleasures of virtuality in the medium of solid print. In the end, the fundamental motivation is pretty much the same as Cavafy’s.

After so much talk of technique, I suppose it might make sense to give a clearer view of the experience of reading the book from cover to cover. (I never just dip into poetry books, whether multi-authored anthologies or single-authored collections.) There is more queer life between these covers than in virtually any gay novel you might care to name. The difference is that, here, you can’t rely on the infantile joys of passively listening to a linear narrative and waiting for what’s going to happen to happen. Here, a whole world of queerness will pass before your eyes (and through your ears) in a fragmented and contingent order (the authors are presented alphabetically), raucous with expressions of desire and longing, articulated by a range of voices, mostly young but otherwise pretty varied in attitude and background; and you will feel at times a part of it all, and at others apart from it all. Read it as a strangely irrational postmodern novel—with sexy pictures.

Gregory Woods is Professor of Gay and Lesbian Studies at Nottingham Trent University. His critical books include Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-eroticism and Modern Poetry (1987) and A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition (1998), both from Yale University Press. His poetry books are published by Carcanet Press. His website is www.gregorywoods.co.uk

Review: ANGELS OF ANARCHY: Women Artists and Surrealism

2009-10-21T15:15:00.002Z

Angels of Anarchy
Manchester Art Gallery
until 10 January 2010.

Reviewed by Sophie Mayer

For one moment, standing in the (suggestively) red velvet-lined gallery on the top floor of Manchester Art Gallery, it was like WWII had never happened. Not, perhaps, in any vastly significant way: it’s that, by exhibiting the work of women artists from the ‘teens to the 1970s together, Angels of Anarchy suggests a continuity uninterrupted by the scattering and decimation of European artists, or by the re-domestication of women in the US and UK in the 1950s. Instead, it places side-by-side the work of artists who, after the London-Paris heyday of Modernism, often worked in isolation from each other and from the mainstream art world. Sisterhood is powerful, and here the women interact through their strange and vibrantly erotic works.

The story of Surrealism, Cubism and all the other fun –isms of the 1920s has been told many times, but until the groundbreaking work of Bonnie Kime Scott, it was most often told as an Exquisite Corpse composed of famous men, with women as little more than the objects they passed between them. While Paris Was a Woman and Women of the Left Bank definitively marked the lesbian desire circulating in literary expat circles, the world of the visual arts – overshadowed by the overpowering figure (and sex drive) of Pablo Picasso – has remained far more straight and macho, with women artists often downgraded to helper or muse.
It’s certainly true that many of the artists in this exhibition were married to, or lovers of, male artists or writers such as Man Ray, Paul Éluard, Max Ernst and Yves Tanguy, often to more than one. It’s also true that they spent a great deal of time in each others’ company, as witnessed by Lee Miller’s extraordinary portraits of artists Dorothea Tanning, Nusch Éluard, Léonor Fini, Leonora Carrington, Valentine Penrose, Dora Maar, Eileen Agar and Meret Oppenheim. Miller, once Man Ray’s shadow, has been rehabilitated by Carolyn Burke’s biography and last year’s exhibition at the V&A – which didn’t include these photographs, significant both for their incredibly 21st century styling (Dora Maar’s alice band could be in this month’s Vogue, for whom Miller worked in the 1940s) and for the world of female friendship and aesthetic endeavour they suggest. There’s nothing overtly lesbian in the gazes or poses – unlike the work of Claude Cahun, which also feature extensively in the exhibition – but there is an intensity, a bodiliness, that suggests just how liberated these women were through another woman’s gaze.

Cahun, the radical genderqueer photographer whose story is beautifully told in Barbara Hammer’s documentary Lover Other, is not the only queer artist in the show; Frida Kahlo is represented rather beautifully by work that encompasses her bisexuality. There’s Diego y Frida 1929-1944, in which the two artists’ faces form a bi-gendered composite, but also by a short film shot by photographer Lola Alvarez Bravo (who also shot a number of powerful portraits of Kahlo that feature in the exhibition). Kahlo emerges from a dark room into daylight, where she kisses a young blonde woman (Tina Misrachi) on the ear, then follows her back into the room before shutting the French windows with an expression of desire and defiance. Once in the room, the two women engage in an eye-to-eye wordless conversation of extraordinary intimacy. One critic suggests that Misrachi represents Kahlo’s death but I think that’s over-reaching: there’s no need to assert a symbolic layer of meaning when the gestures and expressions speak so powerfully for themselves.
Elsewhere, symbolic meaning opens up the work to queer possibilities (Mimi Parent’s Maitresse, a whip made of two blonde braids! Francesca Woodman’s three kinds of melons! Léonor Fini’s painting of Leonora Carrington in a dark bedroom, wearing a black leather cuirass and scarlet boots! all those magnificently mixed-up Exquisite Corpse bodies!), not least in what’s probably my favourite objet of the show: Dorothea Tanning’s Pincushion to Serve as Fetish. In the catalogue photograph, it looks a lot like Free Willy, but there’s more than one organ pulsating amongst the black velvet and peach satin. For a start, the piece morphs as you walk around its glass case, flashing an orifice here and some cryptic chalk marks there. Silver pins glint like piercings against the velvet. It’s a brilliantly deadpan reworking of a domestic, feminised object, an unravelling of the double meaning of fetish (ritual object, like a voodoo doll, and Freudian sexual tic), a well-constructed craft object, and the single most lickable, strokable piece of art I’ve seen this year (well, since Roni Horn’s big pink sweetie/heart/cunt at Tate Modern).

No stroking allowed, of course, but the rich erotic energy of this show does make you wonder who might have been stroking who (or wanted to), and how that flow of desire might have lent its charge to the vivid and riveting display of female sexuality. Enter between the walls of red velvet and see for yourselves.

Sophie Mayer is a writer, editor and educator. Find out more at http://www.sophiemayer.net/

Exclusive Interview with Edmund White by Richard Canning

2009-10-17T07:47:00.013Z

New York City Boy: A Conversation with Edmund White, on the US publication of City Boy, 9th October 2009

By Richard Canning

Photo of Edmund White in Venice in 1974, with Alfred Corn (left) and David Kalstone (right)

RC: You open with a description of 70s New York: 'grungy, dangerous, bankrupt' but artistically in its zenith. That's pretty evidently meant to contrast with present-day Manhattan. Are there any major cities today which feel especially creative?

EW: I've just spent two months in Madrid, which seems vibrant and alive, full of young people who inhabit the center and who stay up all night, a gay life that is flourishing... New York seems to have lost its edge.

RC: By page two, you're hanging around, hoping to bump into Susan Sontag or Paul Goodman, author of the journal Five Years, a big deal in its day for its openness about his bisexuality and erotic adventures. The contrast in subsequent reputations of this pair is rather poignant, isn't it? As you point out, Goodman is scarcely recalled today, and almost never read. I wondered if, in the seventies, when the "newness" of gay art and culture and writing was so obvious, you remember having some sense of the people and works that would last? And, in the thirty years that have followed, have those instincts clarified or changed much?

EW: I think I thought that Sontag's reputation would last because she had so much integrity, was so high-minded and so uncompromising - and because every line she wrote contained a unit of thought. I think I was right. Though people might gibe about those very qualities now, nevertheless she remains a beacon of high culture and seriousness. I also felt that John Ashbery and Elizabeth Bishop and James Merrill were all making lasting contributions, though to my surprise Bishop has nosed her way to the front, and Merrill is now in third position. So I guess I'd say I could spot a winner but couldn't predict the order of celebrity they would eventually assume.

RC: One of your first lovers then, Stan, you describe as having a 'classic' look of beauty which was 'generally acknowledged.' Rather cleverly, I thought, you don't describe him in too much physical detail; the reader can then supply his or her own version of that classical beauty. Do you accept that these things are culturally specific, even as they feel universal, eternal or classic?

EW: I guess we all prize virility, even a joli-laideur now, more than we did back then. Stan had a John Barrymore kind of classical handsomeness that would still be appropriate to a marble statue.

RC: You confess in the book to having been politically apathetic: You also imply that this apathy was widely shared; that nobody thought of there being a gay community or society. Would you say that artists in particular shied away from political engagement? And how much do you think AIDS would change all of this? (After all, you co-founded GMHC).

EW: I felt generally alienated from the culture and its ideals. I was terribly cynical and astounded that people got so worked up over a "little thing" like Watergate or Chappaquidick, or even cheating over Twenty Questions. I assumed everyone was cheating all the time. This cynicism and a complete sense of disaffection and disabuse kept me away from politics in any form. Larry Kramer sort of shamed me into joining (and eventually heading) GMHC, but I was happy to duck out as soon as possible. Partly I had an artist's fear of unnecessary and time-consuming entanglements that other people could do just as well or better.

RC: One of the best things about the book is its tender, considered account of long-term friendships, which 'feed the spirit' - in particular, through the examples of Marilyn Schaefer, still with us, and David Kalstone, who died. Perhaps this is a topic which fits uneasily in fiction, since its very constancy risks being undramatic; it's easier to think of fiction bringing to life dramatically the experience, say, of the betrayal of friendship. Were you aware of this book offering the chance to document such friendships, finally?

EW: It seems to me that many people count relatives and mates as their best friends. Some people are extremely attached to childhood friends. I suppose the chance of meeting people later in life and cultivating an intense friendship with them is rare - and perhaps gays, with their (previous) lack of interest in family life and marriage, were best suited for developing these intense friendships later in life (even if "later" is defined as occurring in one’s twenties or thirties).

RC: You describe escaping to Puerto Rico with Stan for holidays, and sexual release there. I suppose it goes without saying that racial politics in gay culture has changed a lot, in the last thirty years. Would you comment? And do you worry about how you represent the racially other in your writings?

EW: Of course there is rather a "colonial" sound to my Puerto Rican adventures, but I think most Blacks and Puerto Ricans, for instance, would rather be loved and admired for the wrong reasons than ignored altogether. Anyway, City Boy is quite clear about the moment it is concentrating on. It would be ahistorical to attribute to my narrator attitudes that didn't come into being till much later.

RC: I loved the comment that gay "intellectuals" in the seventies found that, through their learning, they simply had more evidence arguing against their own existence - they could 'torment' themselves 'with extra zeal' with Freudian ideas. On the other hand, extensive reading in literature has often been described as liberating, particularly at this time, for its offering of role models in fiction and so on, if not always positive ones. Did you encounter, let's say, untutored gay men whose self-understanding seemed more positive and mature than others', in Manhattan in the seventies? And were the books with gay themes that people devoured appreciated, would you say, for featuring gay content at all, or (especially) for featuring positive gay storylines?

EW: I think I was thinking of "non-intellectuals" who weren't aware of Freud's prejudices against homosexuality as a form of character disorder or infantilism. They were the lucky ones because they didn't dwell on all the ways in which they were "sick." I wasn't (as you suggest) thinking about those who were versed or unversed in gay literature written by gays. It's true that if all you'd read was Giovanni's Room or Death in Venice or even Proust, you'd come away with a strange view of gay experience. On the other hand, Andre Gide's journals were nourishing because he seemed a self-respecting man with far-flung interests.

RC: You mention revering writers such as Elizabeth Bowen and Graham Greene, considered to have rather unelevated prose styles; 'readable' authors, as well as Henry Green, whose prose is somewhat more challenging, surely. Your own fiction has often been viewed as split into two camps – the ‘readable' autofictional works, and the more baroque, stylised novels such as Forgetting Elena, Nocturnes and Caracole. Would it be fair, by now, after Fanny and Hotel de Dream, to argue that the 'readability' has won out in your case?

EW: I suppose I lost interest in the degree to which prose seemed "experimental." What interested me in Graham Greene was the extremely subtle use of figurative language (he's really the best in the business for similes and metaphors). With Bowen it was the easy way in which she could embed apothems in her running narrative, something I've carefully emulated, though it gives a "moralistic" and slightly old-fashioned tone to the writing. Henry Green is a comic genius and his seemingly rattle-brain (but actually very scheming) women are hilarious, and his idiosyncratic use of dialogue is dazzling. I also like his way of letting a sinister subplot slowly emerge. I agree with Ian McEwan that these are writers who've been upstaged in literary history by more obvious experimentalists such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, though Bowen and Green are better than Woolf.

RC: You make a true, and rather comic observation: that gay men always feel too old, wherever they are, whatever they are doing. It's poignant, because at first that sounds like a terrible curse or imposition. But once you've appreciated the truth of it, it could become liberating, no? Particularly for... a relatively senior gay man... (Coughs).

EW: Yes, it is liberating to put all that worrying behind one. Now I have a Spanish boyfriend who appreciates me because I have white hair and I'm chubby - I'm his type! I never would have guessed that when I was young. When I look at the photo Alfred Corn just sent of me when I was thirty-four, I remember I hated my looks then, and thought I was ugly, though in fact I was quite presentable.

RC: I wanted to ask if there's anywhere in the US you could imagine living today, outside Manhattan? City Boy seems to suggest not. You spent a period in San Francisco, and even that didn’t work out...

EW: I always get this lonely forlorn feeling in other American cities, though I do like to spend a month a year in Key West, and could easily spend more time if I had the money or opportunity. It might be fun to teach for a semester in New Orleans or Austin, but otherwise I'm not too tempted by other cities, especially since I don't drive.

RC: There's a provocative moment, where you describe the 'three great geniuses of the twentieth century' as 'Stravinsky, Nabokov and Balanchine.' I laughed, because it follows a comment about New Yorkers at that time being 'still obsessed with a hierarchy of the arts and the idea of the Pure.' So, here's another hierarchy! I don't expect you to back down. But it's intriguing that you linked these three because of their imperial Russian ancestry, their time in France and their later careers in America... Could you say something more about what you mean here by 'genius', or about the way this succession of transplants may have informed it?

EW: All three of these geniuses are Romantics, or at least are addicts of beauty and a certain dreamy vision of beauty. But at the same time all three are witty and crisp and decidedly "modern." Balanchine, in his big white ballets like Symphony in C, or Nabokov in the love passages in Lolita and Stravinsky in the romantic grandeur of The Fire Bird... In these works, we feel the grandeur and scope of Imperial Russia. But all three could be very angular and witty as well - Stravinsky in Jeu de Cartes, Balanchine in Agon, Nabokov in Pale Fire. And all three are always renewing themselves - Nabokov in his very late Look at the Harlequins! (which is a delicious parody of autofiction and its coarsest preconceptions), Balanchine in a big story-telling ballet such as Don Quixote (precisely the opposite of everything he'd otherwise stood for) and Stravinsky in his late, twelve-tone scores such as Dumbarton Oaks. I think all three were "light" and flexible and unsentimental, though very romantic because of their years of contact with French culture.

RC: I can't have been the only person waiting for your take on Susan Sontag, which turns out to be very balanced, and nuanced. You've space for her good qualities ('protective and generous', etc.). On the other hand, I wondered about some of the apparently neutral observations: 'Susan was also like a queen in that she had a full life, largely ceremonious'; 'Her genius was in saying the obvious in a strong and dramatic manner.' This one, though, took the biscuit for humour: 'She should have been given the Nobel Prize. That would have made her nicer.' Ouch! Could you reflect on the uses of humour in the memoir form? Have you erred, ever, or been misinterpreted in the way you've laughed about people from your past, or your interactions with them?

EW: Of course the people I write about and their friends are never happy. James Grauerholz just wrote a pretty wounded e-mail to me about my treatment of him and William Burroughs. He thinks I failed to see their love for each other. He also thinks I didn't really "get" Burroughs. Craig Seligmann, who wrote a book about Sontag and Pauline Kael, said I was trashing Sontag, which shocked him since I'd already attacked her in Caracole. So I guess we should ask the victims of my humor what they think. I, of course, think I was pretty even-handed. I was determined to be objective or at least fair about Sontag...
RC: The book ends with AIDS, which, once again, introduces the essential nature of human friendship. It's a logical close, and leads to your departing for Paris, which you've sketched a little already (in Sketches from Memory, also published as Our Paris). It also brings us to the present, in that we know that the author of City Boy is now ensconced in Chelsea. Where do you go from here? It feels as if this may have drained the pool of material for memoir, at least for now. Do you have a fictional project in mind?

EW: I'm a hundred pages into a novel about a straight man and a gay man who are best friends. I'll follow them through three decades. Then I'd like to do a memoir about Paris in the 1980s. And eventually a memoir about my nephew, Keith Fleming, who committed suicide last spring, and his mother, my sister, whom I've almost never written about.

RC: So much to look forward to. Thanks so much for your time.

City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s appears from Bloomsbury in the UK on 4th January 2010. Richard Canning has known Edmund White for over fifteen years. He interviewed White for his first book, Gay Fiction Speaks (Columbia University Press, 2000), and included his story ‘The Painted Boy’ in the anthology of gay fiction Between Men, as well as the story ‘An Oracle’ in an anthology of fiction about AIDS, Vital Signs (both Carroll and Graf, 2007). White has also contributed an essay on Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memories of Hadrian to Canning’s latest collection, 50 Gay and Lesbian Books Everybody Must Read (Alyson, 2009). In the same book, White’s novel A Boy’s Own Story is discussed by San Franciscan author Robert Gluck. This year, Canning has also seen the publication of a second gay fiction anthology, Between Men 2 (Alyson), and a brief biography of E. M. Forster (Hesperus, November), following his first, on Oscar Wilde (Hesperus, 2008). He can be contacted at r.canning68@googlemail.com.

Film Review: The Celluloid Closet

2009-10-14T07:14:00.009Z

The Celluloid Closet

dir. Robert Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman

Reviewed by Max Fincher

The re-release of The Celluloid Closet, originally screened in 1995 on Channel 4, is based on Vito Russo’s groundbreaking study, The Celluloid Closet (published in 1981, and reissued in 1987). One might ask whether we need to be reminded of Hollywood’s history of predominantly stereotypical and negative portrayals of gay and lesbian people, at this particular moment, given the success of independent queer film making. Nevertheless, this history warns gay film makers and audiences against complacency.

Russo’s study was one example of a self-conscious attempt by many gay and lesbian writers and academics in the late 1970s and early 1980s to reclaim gay identities and histories as their own. Several studies in film, literary criticism, history and sociology revealed hidden histories of gay life and identities that were often denied or simply invisible in the presence of an institutionalised version of history, always heterosexual. Watching this documentary again, we are reminded of how sophisticated gay and queer representation has become since the mid-1980s. But we are also reminded how Hollywood can still blows bubbles of homophobia to audiences through the veil of comedy, in for example films like Bruno, even if we overlook its irony.

In fact, comedy is a film and television genre where gay men still often find themselves predominantly (mis)represented. There is a lack of serious drama about gay lives and/or history. As Lilly Tomlin, the narrator, explains, ‘homosexuals on screen either inspired fear, pity or were to be laughed at’. The documentary’s narrative (written by the novelist Armistead Maupin) centres on examples around these three themes. Shots from Chaplin’s films like ‘The Soilers’ and ‘Wanderer of the West’, and an excerpt from a Laurel and Hardy film, emphasize how double entendre, cross-dressing, camp performance and close friendships between men could all signify to audiences ‘in the know’ that there might be seeing something more on the screen than just campy antics. Queer goings on in silent film morphed in the 1930s to the figure of the sissy. In films like The Gay Divorcee (1934), Myrt and Marge and Call Her Savage (1932), the sissy was present and ‘occupied the space between men and women’, and was often the butt of jokes. Harvey Fierstein confesses that he likes the sissy and would prefer ‘visibility at any cost’. One of the entertaining aspects of this documentary is the impressive array of commentators, including actors, scriptwriters, film-makers and film historians, who are all often witty. Significantly, Quentin Crisp is included, and as he says of the sissy: ‘there is no sin like being a woman’.

Or, in the case of Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo, like being a man. Carefully selected performances of these two sexually ambiguous actresses are included to point up the lesbian subtexts to both Morocco (1931) and Queen Christina (1934) through the vehicle of cross-dressing. Epstein and Friedman capture these ‘fleeting’ moments in the style of the documentary which alternates between fast-paced montage shots, and longer excerpts from key films discussed in the book. These snapshots are intercut with both informed historical context, along with personal reminiscences and thoughts on how many people looked for images of themselves on screen, with the figure of the closet dominanting both the production and reception of the films.

From the mid-1930s, with the advent of the Hays Production Code, it became increasingly more difficult for screenwriters and directors to represent any kind of sexuality on screen, let alone gay and lesbian sexualities. Novels were rewritten as screenplays and they were heavily edited, overseen by Hollywood’s censor, Joseph Breen. The lesbian became stereotyped as a monster, a predator on the young, innocent or virginal, as in Dracula’s Daughter (1936) and Rebecca (1940), while gay men were cast as sociopathic murderers, most notoriously in Hitchcock’s films, Rope (1948) and Psycho (1960) or as tragic alcoholics as in A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The ‘Legion of Decency’ enforced a series of rules and as Gore Vidal comments: ‘It was like working under the Kremlin. You just couldn’t use the word’.

Nevertheless, many writers and directors managed to bypass the dull-witted censors by writing between the lines or directing actor’s gestures and looks carefully, enabling the audiences to infer that that there was a hidden level of meaning, oblique, but always present. In the 1950s, described by Jan Oxenberg as ‘a decade of towering dullness and stupidity’, icons of (supposedly) straight masculinity like James Dean, Marlon Brando and Rock Hudson ruled the screen. Any whisper of effeminacy signalled that a man might be queer. Musical scores could also encode gay desires. Full renditions of ‘Secret Love’ by Doris Day, and ‘Ain’t There Anyone Here for Love’ by Jane Russell (Gentleman Prefer Blondes, 1953), are included, both of which can be read to represent how gay men felt, particularly as Russell camps her performance up in a gym full of indifferent buff male athletes!

Gore Vidal notes that writers became very adept at projecting subtexts into their screenplays, and directors into their actors’ performances. For Ben Hur (1959) Vidal proposed to the director, William Wyler, that the story of Ben Hur should be about the rekindling of a love relationship between Ben Hur (Charlton Heston), and Messala (Stephen Boyd) his Roman teenage friend. Wyler advised that Heston who should never know that the story was about homosexual love, or he would never agree to it, while Stephen Boyd, who played Messala, should be in the know. Our awareness of this anecdotal knowledge allows us to see how the performance of Boyd is supercharged with desire, and is a delicious irony. It is now impossible not to read the film as a story of love between two men, now we know both Vidal and Wyler’s intentions. As such, The Celluloid Closet draws our attention to where the traces of gay sexuality are in supposedly ‘heterosexual’ stories.

Epstein and Friedman signal the importance of Dirk Bogarde’s performance in the British film Victim (1961) as tacking homosexuality head on in contrast to Hollywood’s reticence. Hollywood literally made victims of gay men and women from the 1960s onwards, although the trend started earlier with Rebel Without a Cause (1955). We are shown a montage of characters’ deaths whose sexuality is suspicious. The sequence culminates in a climatic scene from Suddenly Last Summer (1959). The character of Catharine (played by Elizabeth Taylor) screams manically for help on a mountain top while her queer cousin Sebastien, the perfect homosexual, ‘one without a face or a voice’, is devoured by a group of young male cannibals on the remote island of Lope de Vega. Catherine’s call for help perhaps signifies that this was how audiences themselves were feeling when confronted by so many repeated tragic and negative images. Hollywood suggested that the natural trajectory for a gay man or woman was either suicide (The Children’s Hour, 1962) or violent murder (The Detective,1968) often at the hands of those who were repressing their sexuality. Armistead Maupin confesses that he was scared when he saw the film Advise and Consent (1962), one of the first to feature a gay bar: ‘I felt that the end of that road would be suicide’.

In the 1970s, two films seemed to offer promise that there could be more positive alternatives: The Boys in the Band (1970) and Cabaret (1972). Throughout the 1970s, despite increased visibility, stereotypes still abounded with the audience laughing at characters predominantly rather than with them, a phenomenon that continues to this day. We are reminded of how subtle, and not so subtle, homophobia in Hollywood could be with the use of the word ‘faggot’ in films from the 1980s, and from personal testimony. Ron Nyswaener, the screenwriter of Philadelphia (1993) relates his experience of going to see the controversial film Cruising (1980) where he and his boyfriend were chased out of the cinema by a group of homophobic thugs and they were gay-bashed. When Twentieth-Century Fox released Making Love (1982), the film was prefaced by titles warning that ‘it may be too strong’ for audiences. Hailed as the first sensitive depiction of love between two men, (a precursor to Brokeback Mountain almost) the studio head of Fox declared to the producer that it was ‘a god-damned faggot movie’ at the pre-screening and walked out. As did audiences.

Epstein and Friedman’s narrative is, inevitably, more circumscribed than Russo’s book which covers many more examples and many films from the late 1980s and early 1990s are included in a montage. Sadly, this re-release might have included an extra on what has happened to gay representation since the 1990s, although the extras do include deleted scenes and a fascinating interview with Vito Russo. The viewer is taken up to the time of Philadelphia (1993) and Thelma & Louise (1991) and there are some revealing anecdotes from Tom Hanks and Susan Sarandon on their views of these landmark points in their careers and gay film. Nevertheless, an impressive spectrum of films is covered. Informative, humorous, moving, and sometimes painful to watch, this is one of the most significant documentaries on gay film history in the last twenty years. Hopefully, it will educate a new generation of audiences on where current representations have come from, and how Hollywood ‘taught straight people what to think about gay people’. And as Maupin observes: ‘Hollywood still runs scared’.

Film Shorts Review: Here Come the Girls

2009-10-10T10:13:00.001Z

Multiple directors

Cast: Nathalie Toriel, Yolonda Ross, Lucy Liemann

Peccadillo Pictures DVD

Reviewed by Sophie Mayer

Film festival shorts programmes can be melancholy affairs: not because of the films per se, but the feeling that these slices-of-life or fragments of wild imaginations may be seen here and never again. More often than not, shorts don’t act as calling cards for the big-ticket feature, and the director of that film you loved is never heard from again. It’s like a brief pick-up, a smile and dance in a bar or a single fuck at the baths: you’re haunted by the question, could they have been the one?

All of shorts on Here Come the Girls have played their parts in film festival programmes, both queer and general, many of them winning awards as well as the prized Official Selection tag, so the DVD is like a festival of festivals curated across the last ten years of lesbian cinema – which is looking pretty healthy. There’s a diversity of content, narrative styles, performers and tones across the collection, from Suzanne Guacci’s sweet two-hander of domestic metaphors A Soft Place to Roberta Munroe’s Dani and Alice, a hard-hitting short about partner violence between two African-American lesbians that pays stylish tribute to 1980s issues-led TV movies while subverting their conventionally tragic endings (which contrasts again with Monroe’s very different, Whit Stillman-meets-The L Word/lesbian Woody Allen witty short Happy Birthday).
And there’s a diverse group of artists being recognised: several of the directors are either accomplished feature filmmakers – all hail Guin Turner! and friend-of-Chroma Inge ‘Campbell’ Blackman, recently feted at NY’s Queer Black Cinema festival – or went on to make features, like Laurie Colbert and Dominique Cardona (Finn’s Girl). Munroe made her films with the prestigious Fox Searchlight Directors Program (after several years as a Sundance programmer) and Cassandra Nicolaou, whose first feature Show Me starred Ginger Snaps cutie Katherine Isabelle, is a graduate of the Canadian Film Centre’s Resident Programme. While fellow Canadians Colbert and Cardona tell the tale of two school-age best friends experimenting with desire and identity (if you like boxing, you’ll love this short), Nicolaou tells a story of older lesbians, a lifelong couple facing up to dementia and terminal illness, in what could be called a lesbian Away from Her.

But it’s the emerging directors whose films charmed me the most, maybe because they came of age, as artists, in an era when they have models like Blackman, Munroe and Turner to look up to – and to challenge. Angela Cheng’s Wicked Desire is American indie at its best: the warmly quirky observation of Me, You and Everyone We Know, the blue-collar grittiness of Boys Don’t Cry and the almost poetic strangeness of Wild Tigers I Have Known. I hope Cheng gets funding for her feature soon, because Wicked Desire is bursting at the seams with great ideas, as it follows a young girl reading dimestore romance novels, flirting with the Thai boy next door, and discovering that her sister Jessica is enrolled as a boy at school.
Abbé Robinson’s Private Life also blurs the boundaries between lesbian, trans- and straight identities and desires, offering the challenge of ‘fluidity’ to lesbian cinema – all in 1952 Yorkshire. Drawing on the same historical taproots as Sarah Waters blockbusting novels, Robinson uncovers and tells a slender tale of female-female desire between the mill boss’s daughter and a young female mill hand who meet cute at a backstreet jazz bar in Leeds. Class, race, and gender really are meshed in this touching tale, which combines the sexy camp of La Cage aux Folles (as Ruth swaps her evening gown for pal Louis’ sharp suit so he can attend a boys’ night as Lauren Bacall) and the English romanticism of Brief Encounter: Never has Leeds railway station looked more dreamy.

So far, so narrative and character-driven. The two superstars, Turner and Blackman, offer more conceptual and experimental delights. Turner’s Late is a surprisingly complex and bittersweet film based on a simple conceit: the viewer listens to a series of answerphone messages left for Maggie as the camera pans around her apartment. It’s a neat solution to the thrills of the thriller and Maggie’s apartment is given incredible texture and vividness by the production designers. Texture, colour and style are entwined with the substance of Blackman’s Fem as well, a catalogue film unlike any I’ve seen before, a pin-up calendar of almost overwhelming femme variety. Beginning with Eve in the garden, the film reclaims lushness and excess, the camera lovingly recording every curve that each performer gladly exhibits. It’s a mutual seduction poetically voiced by Split Britches’ Peggy Shaw, and is definitely the short to show your next hot date. At one point Shaw praises the gorgeous femmes for “inventing new rules from old games.” Each filmmaker here takes up that challenge differently, but few are as successful as Blackman at inviting the viewer to play.

Sophie Mayer is a writer, editor and educator. Find out more at http://www.sophiemayer.net/

Review: Another Love by Erzsebet Galgoczi

2009-10-03T09:19:00.002Z

Another Love
By Erzsebet Galgoczi

Published by Cleis Press

Reviewed by Paul Kane

The most important character in this novel, Eva Szalanczky, is killed off in its very first pages, shot while attempting to cross the Hungarian border. Yet the crucial question of what motivated Eva’s act, whether it was a genuine effort to escape to the West or at root desperation, a reckless gesture that was tantamount to suicide, is what consumes the bulk of the book.

Janos Maros is the army officer who identifies Eva’s body. An old childhood friend, he is driven to investigate her life – to traces its pattern, to somehow get inside her head. Maros is made aware of the overt political stance that she took as a journalist; this in 1959, some three years after the Soviet Union quashed the popular uprising (revolution, counter-revolution, call it what you will). He learns about Eva’s life as a lesbian and skirts around the periphery of a gay subculture of secrecy and clandestine liaisons, with a fair incidence of blackmail and the occasional murder. Inevitably, perhaps, Maros’ unofficial investigation encounters resistance from the state security service, as it spirals out to encompass the repressive political climate that was Hungary in the 1950s. Ultimately, Maros is forced to confront his own life and the choices and compromises – both personal and political - that he has made.

Erzsebet Galgoczi

Another Love has something of the flavour and atmosphere of Josef Skvorecky’s Lieutenant Boruvka novels, but with an excoriating political edge. Here, though, the mystery is not ‘Who done it?’, but ‘Why?’ What is it that impels Eva headlong toward what she believes is right, impervious to danger, armed with simply a wayward notion of truth?

The novel was filmed as Another Way in 1982, directed by Károly Makk, with the Polish actress Jadwiga Jankowska-Cieslak in the lead. By most accounts, the film too is worth seeking out.

Paul Kane lives and works in Manchester, England. Hewelcomes responses to his reviews and you can reach him at ludic@europe.com

Review: Leaving Tangier by Tahar Ben Jelloun

2009-09-26T00:02:00.002Z

Leaving Tangier
Tahar Ben Jelloun
Translated from the French by Linda Coverdale

Published by Arcadia Books Ltd

Reviewed by Max Fincher

Honest, informative and moving, Leaving Tangier by Tahar Ben Jelloun is a novel that explores the struggles facing young Moroccan people who want to leave their country in search of a better life. It is a novel that explores dreams, aspirations, isolation, and the need to find a better existence, but leaves us with an overwhelming sense that these dreams are eventually disappointed.

The central character, Azel, has studied law and lives with his mother, Lalla Zohra, and his sister, Kenza, in Tangier. Unemployed, he feels disaffected, and frustrated at not fulfilling his potential. His sister, Kenza, works as a nurse in a private clinic for a miserly surgeon. Azel spends his days in the local cafe where: ‘Long pipes of kif pass from table to table while glasses of mint tea grow cold, enticing bees that eventually tumble in, a matter of indifference to customers long since lost to the limbo of hashish and tinselled reverie’ (p.1). Jelloun evokes a sense of endemic apathy in Azel’s community, where everyone yearns for what they think is a better life across the 8-mile stretch of water to mainland Spain. Azel’s narrative voice is dream-like. He exhorts the young people of Tangier not to ‘give in to the siren call of sadness’ but to believe in the figure of Toutia, a mythical, redemptive woman who offers them hope to cross to Spain.

Al Afia, a local crook and pot dealer, also arranges for people to be smuggled across the water. He is hated by Azel, who holds him responsible for the tragic death of his cousin Noureddine in a boat crossing, along with several others who drowned. A brutal, hard man, Jelloun’s description of Al Afia’s regime of corruption is portrayed with unflinching honesty: ‘he buys everyone, of course, this country is one huge marketplace, wheeling and dealing day and night, everybody’s for sale, all you need is a little power, something to cash in on’ (p.6). ..we stink of corruption, it’s on our faces, in our heads buried in our hearts’ (p.6). Jelloun captures the sense of powerlessness that young men like Azel feel against the corruption of men like Al Afia, who can arrange freedom for a price who dominates their lives: ‘a man so feared, so loved, - or rather, protected – by those who lived off his generosity’ (p.9). Corruption extends everywhere. When Miguel is beaten up by the police who arrest him on a false drugs charge, the police use the opportunity to rape him in prison. Azel calls on Miguel, a wealthy Spanish art dealer who picked him up in the café, to come to his rescue. Employed as a waiter at one of Miguel’s parties, Miguel arranges for Azel to live with him in his villa in Barcelona. For Azel, Miguel epitomizes elegance and luxury, and as Azel hopes, his salvation to a better life abroad.

Miguel’s characterisation follows a long line of gay men, both literary and factual, who enjoy Moroccan men as exotic commodities, as sexually available for a price. We are told that Miguel ‘loved the ‘awkwardness’ of Moroccan men, by which he meant their sexual ambiguity’ (p.32). Azel is entranced and blinded by Miguel’s glamorous lifestyle in Tangier, only to be deeply disappointed when he arrives in Barcelona and is treated like a house boy. Azel encounters prejudice from Carmen, Miguel’s old housekeeper, who represents the conservative traditionalist fears about immigrants. Unhappy, he secretly seeks affection from a prostitute, Soumaya, also an emigrant from Tangier.

Azel and Miguel’s relationship gives us an insight into contemporary Moroccan attitudes to homosexuality that points up how difficult it is to grow up gay in Muslim culture. Azel repeatedly refers to himself as a ‘prostitute’ or a ‘whore’ to Miguel, while at the same time pursuing a relationship with Soumaya where he attempts to prove his masculinity to himself. Azel’s confesses that his relationships with girls were episodic but straightforward: sex was the object, nothing else’ (p.20). He admits to his girlfriend, Siham, that he doesn’t like anal sex: ‘When I was a kid, in my times, I did it a few times with boys, never with girls. I don’t like it much’ (p.25). What emerges in the novel is the overwhelming disdain that Moroccan men, even gay men Moroccan men, feel for the figure of ‘a zamel, a passive homosexual. The ultimate shame!’ Al Afia is a contradiction to Azel’s mind: ‘A man so powerful, so good, lying on his belly to be sodomized!’ That Siham confesses that she can take it both ways, and prefers anal sex because it preserves her virginity, may be one explanation for Azel’s disgust. When Abdeslam, Noureddine’s brother confesses to Azel that he likes having sex with men and to keep it a secret to himself, Azel is shocked: ‘You’re a homosexual’. Abdeslam denies the label, arguing that for him it’s a matter of what he prefers at any given time: ‘I switch back and forth’. What emerges is that Azel views his sexual relationship with Miguel purely as an economic transaction, as another part of his job. There is a culture of secrecy and repression in Moroccan society over men admitting that they desire each other, especially passively, which is associated with Western-European society: ‘In our country, the zamel is the other guy, the European tourist, never the Moroccan, and no-one ever talks about it but it’s not true, we’re like all the other countries, except we keep quiet about those things’ (p.107). Internalized homophobia and repression still operate powerfully in the minds of men like Azel, who admits to not loving Miguel and to their relationship being one based on selfish reasons on both sides.

Azel confesses to Siham, that he feels guilty about having sex with Miguel. He feels desperate that he will end up ‘doubting my own sexuality’. It is difficult to gauge how far Azel is bisexual, confused or suffering from denial and internalized homophobia (p.66). At one point in his diary he notes his complex feelings about being Miguel’s lover, and his fears over what he thinks his mother would think of him: ‘How can I tell her that her son is just an attaye, a faggot, a man who crawls on his belly, a cheap whore, a traitor to his identity, to his sex?...One can’t talk about such things’ (p.68). Later, Miguel reflects that ‘He was always watching himself, afraid of his impulses and couldn’t manage to be spontaneous when they made love’. However, the novel shows that Miguel’s treatment of Azel, treating him like a slave, commanding him to perform the role of a submissive servant and sex object hardly helps matters. We discover that Miguel has adopted two twins, and admits that the ‘gesture is both selfish and generous’, as he is afraid of dying old and alone. His need for Azel is just as selfish: to make him feel younger and desired. Nevertheless, Azel also uses Miguel: he asks him to marry his sister, Kenza, in order that she can secure a visa. As Miguel observes: ‘...there was something in Azel’s eyes that was difficult to put into words, a kind of pseudo-smile, an implicit way of revealing and inadmissible form of deception’ (p.92). By agreeing to marry Kenza though, Miguel hopes to ‘make Azel more manageable’. At no point does the reader feel that Miguel is a victim of a fortune hunter like Abbas, a man whom Azel become friendly with in the barrio of Barcelona, and who later confesses to cynically exploiting rich old gay men, one of whom turns out to be Miguel’s friend.

Jelloun is aware of how, historically, Morocco has lured Western gay writers, like Jean Genet, because Moroccan men have been seen as sexually available. Miguel self-consciously compares himself to Genet at one point in the novel, but one feels that this is a fantasy Miguel indulges in as a self-consciously civilized, middle-class aesthete: ‘Azel thinks I’m Jean Genet, you know – that French writer who used to come to Tangier, a rebel, a great poet, a homosexual who had served time prison for theft....It’s curious – even though I’m sure Azel hasn’t read Genet, he must think he’s pleasing me by acting like street trash. (p.132). Earlier, we are told that ‘Miguel had read the works of Jean Genet and wondered why he loved to say that Tangier was the city of perfidy’ (p.92). Perfidy, or deceit, is the essential theme to many of the lives and stories told here, most notably for how Jelloun feels that the socio-political conditions of Morocco has frustrated and disappointed their dreams and aspirations. Both Azel and Kenza practice deceit, and are in turn deceived by a dream of a paradisal European life that turns into nightmarish struggle to survive economically and socially.

Tahar Ben Jelloun

A multitude of stories are told in Leaving Tangier, of lives lived under the yoke of poverty, oppression and corruption. The stories of Azel’s family – his protective mother, Lalla Zohra who survives selling contraband luxury products, his sister Kenza, his wife, Siham and his friend Malika, educated but enslaved in the local shrimp factory – all give the reader an insight into how hard life can be. As we later learn, even Miguel’s story is similar to Azel’s own. Miguel’s friend Gabriel tells Azel that Miguel’s family were poor and that ‘like you, he had to follow a man, a rich and powerful English lord’. Each of the characters’ narratives in turn draws out unexpected congruences and parallels between each other, and each story fits into the web of shared experiences.

Leaving Tangier is also important for how it explores some of the potential causes and reasons for the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Morocco. We are shown how intelligent, talented young people can be twisted by desperate circumstances to believe in fundamentalist rhetoric that, while seeming to offer freedom and independence, is ultimately restrictive and oppressive. Unconvinced by the arguments of a man he meets in the café, who tries to recruit him to an Islamist cause, Azel is warned that he will miss Tangier once he leaves: ‘You’ll miss your culture, your religion, your country. We are against emigration, legal or clandestine, because our problems are things we have to solve here and now, without counting on others to fix them for us’. Mohammed Labri, Azel’s friend, joins a fundamentalist cause when he experiences life in Brussels, to disappear to Pakistan ‘never to be seen again’.

Importantly, the novel does not give us a one-dimensional perspective of how and where racism occurs. Azel is shocked and disgusted when he discovers that Kenza is having sex with Nazim, a Turkish man living in Spain whom she befriends. After abusing Nazim to Kenza, she asks him which other nationalities he hates and if this includes Arabs. His reaction shows that he is filled with self-loathing: ‘Arabs? I could never stand them. I’m an Arab who doesn’t like himself’ (p.144). Despite being treated badly by people like Carmen, and ultimately Miguel, Azel’s emotional immaturity and possessive attitude to his sister’s relationship prevent him from him seeing that his own view of Nazim is no different to the way that some Spaniards think of him. More broadly, the novel shows that crossing the water is two-way traffic; the Spanish or ‘Spanoolies’ as they termed who have emigrated to Morocco suffer from the same kind of attitudes that Moroccans encounter in Spain. Jelloun’s reminds us of how fragile a country’s social-political conditions can be and how these conditions can change with time. Not so long ago, it was Morocco that was perceived as a haven for the Spanish from the repressive tyranny of Franco’s regime in Spain. We see Miguel discovering a journal of his father that gives and account of the lives of political refugees in Morocco in the 1950s, and Miguel’s surprise at discovering that it was the Spanish who were the ‘illegal aliens’. When Kenza tried to commit suicide, Miguel finally understands the devastating psychological effects of unhappiness and broken dreams: ‘Miguel now realized that there was something terrifying about the loneliness of immigration, a kind of descent into a void, a tunnel of shadows of warped reality’ (p.199).

Fittingly, the novel finishes on the theme of return with a poetical, dream-like chapter that depicts a universal voyage back to Tangier under the guidance of Toutia, and which symbolizes an infinite number of journeys that have been both desired and undertaken for centuries. As in other of his novels, Jelloun employs the everyman figure of Moha, ‘a holy fool’, an itinerant storyteller who appears and who symbolizes Morocco’s hopes and dreams. As Don Quixote explains to the captain and those assembled: ‘He’s the immigrant without a name! This man is who I was, who your father was, who your son will be...we all hear the siren call of the open sea, the appeal of the deep, the voices from afar that live within us, and we all feel the need to leave our native land, because our country is not rich enough, or loving enough, or generous enough to keep us at home’ (p.219).

Max Fincher wrote his PhD at King’s College London, a queer reading of late eighteenth-century Gothic fiction that was published as Queering Gothic Writing in the Romantic Age by Palgrave Macmillan (2007). He has taught part-time on eighteenth-century fiction and women’s writing, at both King’s College London and Royal Holloway, and is an occasional book reviewer for the TLS. He is currently writing his first novel, tentatively titled The Pretty Gentleman, a queer historical thriller set in the Regency art world.

Review: NAKED LUNCH @ 50 Anniversary Essays

2009-09-19T05:41:00.003Z

NAKED LUNCH @ 50
edited by Oliver Harris & Ian MacFadyen

Published by Southern Illinois University Press

Reviewed by Richard Livermore

Ever since Rimbaud, poetry and letters in general has been split in two - the bourgeois and the anti-bourgeois, by which I do not mean the anti-capitalist, but rather the militantly ‘perverse’ and ‘disreputable’ - or, if you like, the transgressive. The bourgeois sensibility, which promotes the ethical at the expense of freedom, turning an essentially transrational phenomenon into a category of the rational, includes the politically-correct. Edmund White’s recent biography of Rimbaud, for example, in which, on behalf of politically-correct values, he questions Enid Starkie’s Freudian assertion that Rimbaud might have enjoyed being raped by some soldiers he encountered during one of his teenage sojourns falls, I believe, into the category of the politically-correct. The politically-correct is an attempt to hold the line, to stop discourse spilling over into the anarchic and finding in freedom values to live by. What Rimbaud sought in poetry and life was a complete disordering of the senses, an opening up of himself to all the possibilities and permutations within himself. Why should that not include enjoying being raped?! Whether or not he did enjoy it is another question entirely, of course. What we are talking about here are possibilities not actualities, which anyway cannot be known. The point is that the transgressive transgresses the politically-correct, no less than it did bourgeois morality in Rimbaud’s time. I once wrote an essay called “Rimbaud, Our Contemporary”, in which I tried to show Rimbaud’s relevance to our own times and if there is a post-Second World War writer who embodies the kind of values which Rimbaud the poet would have believed in, it is, I believe, William Burroughs. No writer seems to have gone further than Burroughs in the Rimbaudian quest to disorder the senses and this is what makes The Naked Lunch such a seminal work and one worthy of a book of the nature of Naked Lunch @ 50.

What is it that is so good about this book? Well to begin with, except here and there, it completely eschews an academic approach to its subject. What we have instead are personal documents registering the impact Naked Lunch has had on its contributors - many of whom are creative figures in their own right. And there is such a wide variety of these that it in fact becomes a pleasure to turn the pages of this book and go from one writer to the next, knowing that what you’ll get is something different from what you’ve just had. What I would expect from a book of this nature is that it tells me things about its subject that I did not know before and therefore illuminates the complex, fragmentary text which is The Naked Lunch - not to mention the enigma of William Burroughs himself - and this expectation Naked Lunch @ 50 fulfils in abundance. Nearly all the contributions are memorable encounters of some kind or other, whether they are discussing aspects of the novel’s background - for example the racist South of the USA in which the lynching of ‘niggas’ was treated as an enjoyable family occasion, or Tangiers during a time of upheaval against French domination - or the impact the book has had on various cultural milieux from Germany to (gay) Apartheid South Africa, or simply the impact it had on individuals poets, writers and musicians, such as Barry Miles Jü rgen Ploog and R.B. Morris, it is a fascinating compendium. There is no attempt to whitewash its subject or gloss over some of Burroughs more ‘dubious’ political positions, especially in connection with the pre-occupations of certain post-Colonial critics, but you are very much left to come to your own conclusions. After all, no-one can have the last word in such matters. Works of literature ( & I do not use the upper-case L here), have a life of their own which invariably escapes any attempt to consign them to political boxes.

Those sections of the book which deal with Burroughs’s heroin addiction, his impact on other creative figures, on certain cultural milieux of the early 60s, his implicit anarchist critique of contemporary society and its methods of bureaucratic and technological control, his relationship with the Beats and Brion Gyson, his position vis a vis “Queer Culture”, the anti-colonial struggle, the racist South, or the War on Drugs, even the difference between the novel and the Cronenburg’s heterosexualised (Why, oh why?) film based on it, make for fascinating reading. As do Ian MacFadyen’s connecting “dossiers” which explain some of the more obscure references in the essays and place them in their wider contexts. Then, of course, there is Jeremy Reed’s vivid poem at the very end of the book, Avedon’s Burroughs Portrait, which adds a nice finishing touch to the book as a whole.

William S. Burroughs

Less satisfying - for me anyway - are the essays which attempt to place Burroughs in the critical context of the academic ghetto, arguing over whether Burroughs is a modernist or a post-modernist or even an amodernist, using jargon-terms such as paratext and intertextuality in attempts to define his precise literary or canonical status. Frankly, I couldn’t care a less about such discussions; they mean nothing to me and the only purpose they serve is to reinforce my belief that academics need to get a life or go out rather more than they do. Such discussions have very little ‘street-cred’ in my opinion, and they are certainly not going to inspire anyone to erect barricades or mount any ramparts. Auden said that poetry makes nothing happen. That wasn’t Burroughs’s philosophy. He obviously wanted to make things happen by drawing our attention to the kind of world and society we live in. He was nothing less than an anarchist who believed: “Democracy is cancerous, and bureaus are its cancer. A bureau takes root in the state, turns malignant like the Narcotics Bureau, and grows and grows, always reproducing more of its own kind, until it chokes the host, if not controlled or excised. Bureaus cannot live without a host, being true parasitic organisms. (A cooperative on the other hand can live without the state. That is the road to follow. The building up of independent units who participate in the functioning of the unit. A bureau operates on opposite principle of inventing needs to justify its existence.)” His radical stance is very well stated by Theophile Aries in his own contribution: “His many arrests, searches at airports, the many routines enacted by cops, the many bureaucratic procedures he had to undergo— all these experiences he went through were intelligently used in Naked Lunch but applied to everyone, not only addicts. He extended police encroachments to all citizens, foreseeing that some day everyone might be considered a criminal under obscure, ever-changing laws.” In 2009, we can see how prescient Burroughs was. Given all this, how anyone can make such a writer conform to their specialist concerns is beyond me. The Naked Lunch is not, and was never intended to be, a football to be kicked around from one academic to another. Burroughs was offering a radical critique of society as he saw it evolving in front of his eyes.

Another issue about Burroughs which is raised primarily by academics and touched upon here is the extent to which his ‘resistance’ has been co-opted and even to what extent he might have collaborated in this by setting up his own corporation to market his books. Well, to answer the second question first, all I can say is that writers have to operate within the limitations of the society that they are thrown into. This is very distinct from their written work which expresses a certain imaginative vision that transcends these limitations. As I have said, a writer’s work has a life of its own. Such criticisms of Burroughs remind me of those critics of Chomsky who call Chomsky a hypocrite because he owns shares in companies while calling himself an anarchist and writing against Corporate America and its wars. We all need to get by in this world. Engels, after all, was a businessman who supported Marx and, as Marx himself said, we make history, but not in circumstances of our choosing. This issue regarding the moral consistency between a writer’s life and his or her work is a real red herring in literary biography. Writers write in part to transcend the limitations of their day to day lives, and their work should not be held to account because of the way those limitations impinge on the way they live. As for the criticism that his work has been co-opted by corporate capitalism, well, that point is arguable. Has the spirit of his work been so co-opted? I very much doubt it. But post-modernist academics seem to want to convince us of the idea that we cannot transcend this society we live in, that the imagination has no function but to reinforce the social, cultural and spiritual norms generated by this society. Well, that is a point of view which is far from being settled at the time I am writing.

As I have said, only a very small minority of contributors approach Burroughs from an academic perspective and the book takes them in its stride very well. They do not intrude or alter the general tone of the book, which is very definitely a non-academic one. It is on the whole a true celebration of Burroughs’s book that really does live up to Michael Hrebeniak’s ‘blurb’ on the back cover, which talks of “a dynamic assembly of writing forms.” and describes it “as a whole new critical form.” It is one of those rare occasions when I agree with the blurb, and the editors, Oliver Harris and Ian MacFadyen, are to be congratulated for having the vision to produce such a book.

Richard Livermore was born in 1944. 6 weeks later, his father was killed in a bombing-raid over London and, not long after that, his mother was sectioned. He grew up in homes and boarding-schools, which he left at 15 to join the army. 6 months later, he was discharged and over the next few years went from job to job or was unemployed until in 1974 he went to Newbattle Abbey College and from there to Edinburgh University to study English Literature and Philosophy. On leaving university, he was largely unemployed until in 1985 he went to teach English in Spain. He returned in 1990 and did various cleaning jobs until his recent retirement.

He has had many poems published in magazines - both on-line and off - and numerous collections in book-form by various publishers (Lothlorien, Diehard, Chanticleer). His most recent collection is his "Selected Poems" published by Chanticleer.

At the moment Richard Livermore is a gentleman of leisure at the expense of the state and Her Majesty’s Government.

Event: Poetic Licence

2009-09-17T10:36:00.006Z

Gay Icons
National Portrait Gallery
2 July – 18 October 2009

Reviewed by Eric Karl Anderson

At the National Portrait Gallery in London, there is currently an exhibit on called Gay Icons which seeks to “explore gay social and cultural history.” The “gay icons” were chosen by a range of influential figures such as Jackie Kay, Ian McKellen, Chris Smith, Sarah Waters and Elton John and present a fascinating range of individuals from those from the centre of gay cultural life to the outermost and nearly-forgotten fringes. Jonathan Keane has organized a dynamic series of events to accompany this exhibit. On this evening, writers/performers Alan Hollinghurst, Paul Burston, Jay Bernard, Bette Bourne, Dean Atta and Neil Bartlett gathered for the event ‘Poetic Licence’ to read from their work, present a selection of their influences and question the degree to which words/literature can be iconic.

Alan Hollinghurst spoke about how the novelist Ronald Firbank was virtually unknown in his lifetime and how his slender highly-stylized novels were critically misunderstood, but how Firbank was a strong influence on writers like Evelyn Waugh. He read a passage from Ronald Firbank’s majestic The Flower Beneath the Foot.

Paul Burston began by presented a scene from A Streetcar Named Desire and spoke meaningfully about how when he studied the play everything but Tennessee William’s sexuality was considered in his seminar. Yet, it seemed to him impossible to discuss the seminal tragic figure of Blanche DuBois without acknowledging that she came out of the imagination of a gay sensibility. Burston read a passage from his novel The Gay Divorcee where he brought to life his own feisty female.

Paul Burston and Tennessee Williams

Jay Bernard presented a series of autobiographical illustrations and spoke powerfully about how influence doesn’t necessarily come from expected sources. She discussed how William Golding’s orphaned island boys left an indelible mark upon her and how she could feel more authentically herself posing as a white boy on an internet chat forum flirting with a teenage Texan girl rather than presenting herself as who she really was - an adolescent black girl questioning her sexuality in Croyden.

Bette Bourne gave a mesmerizing talk/performance about portrayals of identity and how the most flamboyant artifices can be the most sincere expressions of who we are inside. From September 21st – 27th he’ll be showcasing a no-doubt essential new performance at the Soho Theatre.

Bette Bourne

Dean Atta presented a series of powerful performance pieces about coming to terms with his estranged father and an individual’s responsibility to the community. He discussed a range of influences ranging from Martin Luther King Jr. to Maya Angelo to Bob Marley and how the beliefs and messages of these prominent figures have in some cases been obscured.

Neil Bartlett cited his most important gay icons including the masterful Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo and ended reading a passage from Oscar Wilde’s little known story “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime” (printed in Ganymede issue #4). In reading passages from this story and his own novel Skin Lane, he spoke about the power of the character who walks through the night experiencing the inverse of societal norms as a way of getting to the essential core of his identity.

Neil Bartlett

The event was an inspiring evening which successfully honored the icons which inspire us, brought to light some queer figures whose influence has been nearly forgotten and showcased an impressive range of talent that will no doubt inspire many future generations.

Eric Karl Anderson is author of the novel Enough and has published work in various publications such as The Ontario Review and the anthologies From Boys to Men and Between Men 2.

Review: Bigger Than Life: The History of Gay Porn Cinema from Beefcake to Hardcore

2009-09-12T01:58:00.001Z

Bigger Than Life
By Jeffrey Escoffier

Published by Running Press

Reviewed by Kevin Killian

Jeff Escoffier writes with ease and efficiency on a subject upon which hardly anybody has a handle: gay porn and the films that emerged from photographic studio practice in the 1960s. As history, Bigger than Life is as sprawling as its subject, for commercial porn as we know it today comes from multiple sources and practically defines the Marxist concept of uneven development.

Escoffier’s earlier chapters are perhaps his liveliest. We learn that some of the physique photographers had made private sex films for private clients, with perhaps only a single copy run off, but it wasn’t until the late 1960s that anyone thought of going public with this material. The moving image captures an urgency and a phenomenonolgy that quickly made the still photo seem antique (thus, many old school lensmen bitterly protested the new medium). Sex seems more “real” on film, and as if to prove that it was really happening, subsequent generations of porn fetishized the come-shot to the point where it now provides most of the narrative interest of whatever actual feature it appears in. But this was not always the case. Sometimes—often—the early hardcore gay cinema did without the laundry list of kissing-oral-anal and did whatever the storyline dictated. In other ways the directors of the day shared the improvisatory, often goofy strategies of the New American Cinema, a sort of experimental frame of mind based on Emersonian pragmatism that might yield a shockingly “artistic” result, as well as being hot.

Thus the Joe Gages, the Cadinots, the Toby Rosses and the Wakefield Pooles. The supersaturated Technicolor washes of James Bidgood’s Pink Narcissus—like Vincente Minnelli on Ecstasy—will never be repeated today. —Well, maybe someone like Todd Haynes might do it in pastiche, but the industry itself has moved on. Escoffier excels when analyzing the plots of early hardcore films, (e.g. Desires of the Devil, 1971), to show how a director’s cinema quickly became a performer’s medium or at best, a collaborative performance between actor and cameraman.

Escoffier’s critical skill never falters but as his narrative goes on, we see with a sinking feeling that practically no two careers in porn can be distinguished, and any individual career is so brief that it’s over before it has begun, like butterflies in reverse. Bigger than Life is filled with hundreds of names—most of them dopey and pseudonymic—and only a handful of good stories hide in the haystack of bodily perfection. It’s a cinema of “stars” who, like the starlets of the classical Hollywood cinema, make a film every month, then after two years they’re invited to jump off the giant Pornotopia sign—because they’re history. Do porn aficionados develop lifelong attachments to the stars they once jerked off to? Probably not, because otherwise wouldn’t the stars have longer careers? Seems like their audiences tire of them quickly, or else the peak of physical perfection is brief as that of a banana or apple. Escoffier is quiet on this subject; the affectional and the obsessive are outside his purlieu.
Three cataclysmic disasters overtook porn, one after the other. Video supplanted film at a certain point, leading to an increased democratization of body and fetish types on the one hand, but to a slapdash and muddy visual look on the other. (This was the argument animating Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1997 film Boogie Nights.) The genre reacted by exploding, so it was only a disaster to the dandy. In the second disaster, well, it is useless to complain of AIDS in this context, that it ruined porn, but it decimated the ranks of its actors and its effects continue to manifest themselves today. The rise of barebacking video shows that the market still wants to see that dick slide up that ass, naked and unwrapped. Finally, the internet happened so there is no longer a “gay porn film industry” today, not when you and I could start our own channel, aim the webcam at our own crotches, and take the money of a paying public. Well, I wouldn’t make much money but I’ve seen guys uglier and older than I going at it and often. Indeed, commercial studios are now resorting to faked “amateur,” “candid” footage to please the tastes of a public interested only in the “real.” Again, everyone’s a “porn star” now - I was just reading a statistic that said that everyone - everyone of you reading this review - has photographed his own genitals in arousal. In a world of infinite images, whither arousal?

In a way, as Escoffier indicates, what has happened to porn parallels what happened to the larger gay movement during the same period. Jostled back and forth between radical and conservative factions, both porn and the political arena in which it was crucibled have tended to follow the formulas of neoliberal globalism - a complete lack of care, a totalizing system dedicated solely to the market. This book tells you how we got there.

Kevin Killian is a San Francisco writer His books include Bedrooms Have Windows, Shy, Little Men, Arctic Summer, Argento Series, I Cry Like a Baby, and Action Kylie. His new book of stories is called Impossible Princess (from City Lights Books).

Review: Collected Poems and The Unfinished Poems of C.P. Cavafy

2009-09-05T15:59:00.011Z

Collected Poems
The Unfinished Poems
C. P. Cavafy
translated with an introduction and commentary by Daniel Mendelsohn

Published by Alfred A. Knopf

Reviewed by Richard Canning

A new English edition of the poetry of Constantine Cavafy might ordinarily not constitute news. In the past half century, plenty have come our way: six full or complete new translated collections in the last decade alone: Mavrogordato (1951), Dalven (1961), Stangos and Spender (1967), Friar (1973), Keeley and Sherrard (1975), Khairallah (1979), Kolaitis (1988), Theoharis (2001), Sachperoglou (2007), Barnstone (2007), Haviaris (2007), Sharon (2008) and Boegeheld (2009). He is, then, not only ‘the foremost homosexual poet in modern European literature’ (Christopher Robinson) but among the most translated of all twentieth-century poets – a rather startling achievement for someone of whom E.M. Forster (an early advocate) could write in 1951: ‘To be understood in Alexandria and tolerated in Athens was the extent of his ambition.’

These two volumes from Knopf, though, arrive with fanfare and a deal of advance praise (Richard Howard; Mark Doty, whose collection My Alexandria nods to his Greek forebear; Edward Hirsch), and with good reason. In Daniel Mendelsohn (The Elusive Embrace, The Lost: a Search for Six of Six Million), they have a translator of rare pedigree. He makes his way through the Ithacas and Spartas of the known Cavafy canon – comprising over 250 works, long classified as the ‘Published’, ‘Repudiated’ and ‘Unpublished’ poems - with great dexterity and a formal awareness that distinguishes the poems, as I shall show. But ardent Cavafy fans will head directly to the second book. For Mendelsohn is the first English translator to tackle the thirty incomplete poems Cavafy left when he died in 1933, which were first collected in a Greek scholarly edition, Ateli, in 1994. Though they take up only 33 pages of The Unfinished Poems (the rest is substantial textual apparatus), they illuminate the last fifteen years of Cavafy’s career in startling and diverse ways, returning to themes common in the verse we had, but also pointing to emerging preoccupations previously unsighted. This becomes even more important, given that – by general consent – Cavafy is considered a late developer; the great poems came to him in mid-life. His earlier writings were considered - even by himself during his ‘Philosophical Scrutiny’ of them at the age of forty - to have constituted a twenty-year accumulation of juvenilia.

Cavafy’s obsessive scrutiny of his own oeuvre, and the dismissal, suppression or concealment of material he did not (yet) rate (so) highly, might make Mendelsohn’s embrace of the late poems appear speculative. (Cavafy was orderly in everything. He even died on the day of his seventieth birthday.) Will these new poems bear any comparison to the known output? The answer in most cases is a definite yes. Moreover, Mendelsohn persuasively argues that Cavafy meant for all the pieces present here to be seen and recognized in due course - as with his many ‘Unpublished Poems’, to which Cavafy typically appended a note: ‘need not be published. But it may continue remaining here. It does not deserve to be suppressed.’ To him, verses were like seedlings, to be slowly nourished and encouraged until they had recognizably come to flower. (One bears in mind helpfully here Yeats’s belief that a poem is never finished, only abandoned).

C.P. Cavafy

The recent past has seen a tendency to distinguish between Cavafy’s ‘historical’ verse and the ‘erotic’ material, which is then invariably accorded lesser status. Mendelsohn challenges this, arguing that Cavafy ‘did not have two subjects – present desire and the ancient past – but looked at the decline of civilizations dead for a thousand years and the end of love affairs that sputtered only months ago with the same eye… In both cases, it is the contemplation that redeems that object from oblivion.’ I agree. To understand Cavafy’s historical aesthetic, we need to perceive the world as he did: by way of Alexandria, his home city: an ancient one, but, more importantly, a living palimpsest: a place where the past hadn’t gone anywhere. It is not merely that there are ghosts among Cavafy’s Alexandrian peers: it is that ghosts and flesh-and-blood men and women co-exist and prove – to the poet – indistinguishable. Even at their most consistently ‘historical’, then, Cavafy’s poems – like Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues, many set in the Italian Renaissance – resonate with the urgency of contemporary concerns. Forster noted that there was ‘nothing patronizing in his attitude to the past’, but the truth is even stronger than this: Cavafy chose to judge, and thought it fit to judge, historical figures according to values which were not just contemporary, but perennial.

The late poems are reflective, quite frequently nostalgic, with some of the wistfulness of late Auden whenever they tackle desire. One, at least, might have been written yesterday: ‘The Item in the Paper’, where a young man reads of the murder of a boy he enjoyed a sexual tryst with: ‘The newspaper/ expressed its pity, but, as usual,/ it displayed its complete contempt/ for the depraved way of life of the victim.’ The word ‘contempt’ – its true subject – echoes through this poem, a caustic threnody to prejudice. Another poem, ‘On the Jetty’ - about an evening of illicit lovemaking – isn’t designed as a companion piece, but might well have been: ‘Night of our encounter/ on the jetty; at a great/ distance from the cafes and the bars.’ ‘The Photograph’ has the poet gazing at the ‘beautiful youthful face’ of a former lover, now dead, but adds in consolation: ‘they didn’t let any foolish shame/ get in the way of their love, or make it ugly.’ (On the subject of shame, a friend recorded how, each and every time Cavafy consorted with a male prostitute, he would return home and write the words: ‘I swear I won’t do it again.’)

‘The Bishop Pegasius’, meanwhile, illustrates Cavafy’s chronological sleight of hand. Nominally, it describes an encounter between two men of the early Christian period – the bishop and young emperor-to-be, Julian - who professed to be believers, but were secretly pagan sympathizers. Yet it resonates with a different, yet entirely comparable, erotic significance to the attuned reader:

They entered the exquisite temple of Athena
…They looked with longing and affection at the statues –
still, they spoke to one another haltingly,
with innuendos, with double-meaning words,
with phrases full of cautiousness,
since neither could be certain of the other
and they were constantly afraid they’d be exposed…

Indeed, furtiveness, suspicion, discretion and secrecy are hallmarks of the corpus of Cavafy’s poetry, including those on historical themes; these preoccupations, it seems clear, arose readily from the poet’s temperamental concerns about his sexual identity and consequent social predicament: ‘An obstacle was there and it stopped me/ on many occasions when I was going to speak.’ (‘Hidden’, an ‘Unpublished Poem’ from the Collected Poems).

Thus a poem about Justinian, the despotic Byzantine ruler savaged in his adviser Procopius’s Secret History reads:

Frequently Justinian’s gaze
caused terror and revulsion among his servants.
They suspected something that they dared not say…

Another Unfinished Poem trumpeted by Mendelsohn is ‘After the Swim’, which literally wrong-foots the reader, seeming to be set in one moment in the contemporary world, in the next, at the tail end of Byzantium: ‘They were slow getting dressed, they were sorry to cover/ the beauty of their supple nudity/ which harmonized so well with the comeliness of their faces.’ ‘Crime’ is spoken by one of a set of young thieves, who describes his partner in the crime, Stavros, unaffectedly as: ‘The best lad in our group,/ clever, strong, and beautiful beyond imagining.’ Cavafy’s attraction to the physicality of poor, working-class youths is obvious – but his rationale for imitating their direct and straightforward mode of expression relates not to his erotics, but to the obsession with secrecy and hypocrisy that Cavafy felt was part of bourgeois, hypocritical social mores (hence Forster’s reference to his ‘amoral mind’).

Daniel Mendelsohn

In one note of 1906, for example, Cavafy rewarded his simple ‘folk’ with a ‘beauty’ which, he argues, is singularly absent in ‘affluent youth who are either sickly and physiologically dirty, or filled with fat and stains from too much food and drink… you think that in their bloated or dimpled faces you can discern the ugliness of the theft and robbery of their inheritance and its interest.’ Joe Orton and Morrissey might concur. Another new late poem, ‘Company of four’, similarly observes a gang of ruffians, if from the outside: ‘The money that they make certainly isn’t honest./ But they’re clever lads, these four, and they have found/ a way to make it work and stay clear of the police.’

As well as the thirty new complete-if-unfinished poems, there are four less prepared drafts, one of which is memorable. ‘My Soul Was On My Lips’( a reference to Plato’s Symposium) is spoken by a boy of twenty-five, on realizing that his younger lover’s comment that he might soon die was no idle fantasy. He returns, seizes the boy and kisses him all over. The poem ends, however, with this proleptic denouement:

I didn’t go to the funeral. I was sick.
All alone his mother mourned for him,
over the white coffin, pure of heart.

Of the Collected Poems, it is probable that Mendelsohn will receive both praise and some censure. No translation to date has satisfied everybody. Yet it seems to me that at his best, Mendelsohn’s liberties - in at times adopting a different poetical schema for the lines; at others, in freely embracing all manner of English idiolects and coinages – renews the verse admirably without misrepresenting it. He manages, I’d hazard (though I’m not a native speaker), a version of Cavafy’s peculiar, sometimes unstable shackling together of demotic Greek and elevated idiom. Keeley and Sherrard’s versions, perhaps the best known in English, come to feel somewhat prosaic by contrast, even while they may be more literally correct. Compare ‘Walls’:

With no consideration, no pity, no shame,
they have built walls around me, thick and high.
And now I sit here feeling hopeless.
I can’t think of anything else: this fate gnaws my mind –
because I had so much to do outside.
When they were building the walls, how could I not have noticed!
But I never heard the builders, not a sound.
Imperceptibly they have closed me off from the outside world.
(Keeley/Sherrard)

Without pity, without shame, without consideration
they’ve built around me enormous, towering walls.

And I sit here now in growing desperation.
This fate consumes my mind, I think of nothing else:

because I had so many things to do out there.
O while they built the walls, why did I not look out?

But no noise, no sound from the builders did I hear.
Imperceptibly they shut me off from the world without.
(Mendelsohn)

It is neither apt nor fair to compare these poems in terms of accuracy (Cavafy, incidentally, being fluent in English, read over and commented on the very first translations, and, early on, even wrote three poems in English. But he was never as keen to see the approved translations published in Britain and the States as Forster expected or wanted). Vassilis Lambropoulos – in an essay in an American exhibition calalogue,‘What these Ithakas mean’ (2002), argued that Cavafy’s own use of the Greek language was ‘not diachronic but precise, or, to use his word, upright.’ Paradoxically, on the one hand then, to Lambropoulos, it ‘needs no translation: its exact vocabulary operates on a shared level of abstraction.’

Yet that’s only putting half of the case. It is also true that Cavafy sought to bring to some accommodation the span between the tradition of elevated (written) Greek literature and the contrasting example of demotic (spoken) language. The result the poet himself described as a ‘blend’. As Mendelsohn points out, it is consequently a mistake to overemphasize the supposed ‘laconic plainness’ of the verse, which is just one aspect of its texture in the original.

Consequently, while it is true that Cavafy’s language, as Lambropolous allows, ‘can sustain almost any translation: its exacting vocabulary in the end makes each new rendition its own,’ I’m persuaded that Mendelsohn’s version of ‘Walls’ is starkly the more poetic. It is more memorable, resonant, but also more spacious. Its somewhat imagistic phrasing “stutters” the reader into the predicament of the speaking poet. The poem feels more porous, itself an intrinsic Cavafyan quality. (Mendelsohn’s ‘Introduction’ to the Collected Poems makes a similar claim: that he sought to offer us ‘a Cavafy who looks, feels, and sounds in English they way he looks, feels, and sounds in Greek’). What it also manages to reflect is the fact that Cavafy had chosen a clear, if loose ‘a-b-a-b-c-d-c-d’ rhyme scheme in the original (even Forster did not realize that any of Cavafy’s verse rhymed). Mendelsohn alludes to it, and opts to echo it, without being enslaved by any demand for a purely imitative English rhyme scheme. (In his ‘Introduction’, Mendelsohn makes an equally intelligent case for aiming broadly to imitate Cavafy’s distinctive enjambment.)

It can be somewhat difficult to find particular poems that have been retitled in Mendelsohn’s version - perhaps my sole quibble. An appendix might have listed the original Greek titles, as well as those found in Keeley/Sherrard. Still, when I did get to ‘The Year 31 B.C. in Alexandria’ (a poem better known as ‘In Alexandria, 31 B.C.’), it was a revelation. Few translators have attempted to match Cavafy’s use of rhyme in this poem. Those that have done so have, arguably, done the poem a greater disservice by making it sound like ‘doggerel’, as Peter Bien characterised Mavrogordato’s rhymed version. Walter Arndt similarly came unstuck. His rhymed version nevertheless “cheats”, since Cavafy’s poem is rendered in rhyming couplets, yet Arndt opens with:

From his suburban village come,
Still dusty from the way he’d fared,
The pedlar arrived. And: “incense!” “gum!”
“The finest oil!” and “scent for the hair!”

Arendt also uses a French word, ‘canard’, to effect a rhyme in this poem’s closing lines: ‘He is tossed the prodigious Palace canard:/ Antonius in Greece is winning the war.’ As Bien has noted (again, in ‘What these Ithakas mean’), though the vowels are spelt the same, there really is no way of securing a rhyme between ‘canard’ and ‘war.’

Bien himself offers a version of this poem which closes with:

he too is tossed the gigantic palace yarn
that Antony, in Greece, has won.

He concedes, however, that ‘yarn’ is something of a stretch here. Cavafy’s Greek word would most directly become ‘lie’ in English, the word Mendelsohn prefers:

someone tosses him the palace’s gargantuan lie:
that victory in Greece belongs to Antony.

I find this the best by far of the many versions we now have. Mavrogordato’s couplet is simply ungainly:

And someone tosses him too the gigantic piece
Of palace fiction – Antony’s victory in Greece.

Keeley and Sherrard get the award for literalness, opting for ‘lie’ and also preserving the present continuous sense of Cavafy’s original (‘is winning’, rather than Bien’s ‘has won’, which is too dogmatic):

someone tosses him too the huge palace lie:
that Antony is winning in Greece.

(This is certainly superior to Dalven’s account, which manages couplets but no rhyme, and is resolutely unpoetic:

One of them hurls at him also the gigantic lie
of the palace – that in Greece Anthony is victorious.)

Yet the effect in Keeley/Sherrard is simply lacking in force, as a result of the abandonment of the original’s rhyming couplets. No translation can capture all, but I liked Mendelsohn’s resort in English to ‘victory in Greece belongs to Antony’, too, which aptly suggests imminence, rather than achievement: the victory is rumoured, not secured. Overall, Mendelsohn’s ‘The Year 31 B.C. in Alexandria’ – by responding in a relaxed way to Cavafy’s metre, but stringently to his poetics - proves succinct, memorable, dexterous, lapidary: again, Cavafy-like, in sum:

From his little village near the city’s outskirts,
still dusted with his journey’s dirt,

the peddler arrives. He hawks his wares –
“Incense!” “Gum!” “The finest oil!” “Scent for your hair-”

through the streets. But the tremendous stir,
and the music, and parades, won’t let him be heard.

The mob shoves him, drags him, knocks him down.
And at the height of his confusion, when he asks “What on earth is going on?”

someone tosses him the palace’s gargantuan lie:
that victory in Greece belongs to Antony.

Now, to complement Mendelsohn’s two volumes - perhaps to be collected into a single, indispensable paperback edition? - we might hope for a successor to Robert Liddell’s 1974 life of the poet. Still the only one available in English, while full of diverting and helpful incidents, it is marred by a somewhat meandering and incomplete narrative structure, and shows its age too in its implied approach towards Cavafy’s erotic nature.

Richard Canning’s forthcoming edited volume, 50 Gay and Lesbian Books Everybody Must Read (Alyson, 2009) will include an essay on Cavafy’s poetry by the American novelist David Plante. He can be contacted at r.canning@shef.ac.uk

Review: Hotel de Dream by Edmund White

2009-09-02T17:29:00.001Z

Hotel de Dream
Edmund White

Published by Bloomsbury

Reviewed by Gregory Woods

Poor Henry James! What did he ever do to deserve his exhumation and re-animation by early twenty-first century novelists? His fastidious particularity about human relationships seems to have become regarded as if it were a distant and exotic cultural practice, like foot-binding or cannibalism, vaguely picturesque but ultimately demanding to be stamped out. Is loquacious celibacy such a terrible crime? It is as if we can no longer imagine a thoughtful, inactive man without speculating on what it is he is concealing about his person. Now, in a novel about the American Naturalist novelist Stephen Crane (1871-1900), Edmund White has introduced James as a more or less malevolent presence, working against the interests not only of the uninhibited life, but even of literature itself.

Some of this may have been my fault. In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle (June 19, 2004), Colm Tóibín said it was a reading of my History of Gay Literature (Yale University Press, 1998)—which he had been asked to review in the London Review of Books—that led him back to Henry James: ‘James loomed quite large in that book, and I had to go back and look up things about his sexuality and how it was both concealed and disclosed in his novels’. The eventual consequence, for which I cannot sensibly claim any credit, was Tóibín’s wonderful novel The Master (2004).

When I first heard of White’s new novel I egotistically wondered whether something similar had happened with White and Stephen Crane, a friend of James’s. After all, I had ended one of the chapters of my History by conjuring up a book combining the virtues of his prostitution novel Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) and his Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage (1895) to express how much had been lost when Crane abandoned his ‘gay’ novel. The story is told that he did write forty or so pages of such a narrative, but then destroyed it on the advice of Hamlin Garland and other friends. I am not seriously suggesting that my book, which he has probably not read, gave White the idea for his; but he is answering questions many of us have independently asked on hearing of the phantom Crane book. Like the rest of us, White has asked himself what such a book would have been like, and why its author would have embarked on it in the first place. In his ‘Postface’ to Hotel de Dream he asks, ‘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 an era when homosexuals themselves were groping for explanations of their proclivities?’ (pp.225-226).

White imagines Crane deciding to reassemble the story Garland persuaded him to destroy. Hotel de Dream is delivered in three parallel narratives: that of Crane himself, close to tubercular death, being tenderly conducted across Europe to a sanatorium in the Black Forest by his beloved not-wife Cora, retired whore and brothel madam; that of a boy Crane once encountered in the streets of Manhattan, who wore make-up, sold himself to older men, and inspired Crane to attempt to tell the story of a relationship between such a boy and such a man; and the third, Crane’s novel itself, entitled The Painted Boy. In this, Theodore, a respectable, married banker with no form in such matters, is so taken with a boy he meets in the street that he sets him up in a rented room, has a nude figure of him sculpted, and, ultimately, sacrifices job and family to his evanescent charms.

The main bulk of White’s book alternates Crane’s journey towards his own demise with Theodore’s pathetic decline into social non-existence. By comparison with Theodore’s loss of his lover, job and family, Crane’s loss of life is a relative cheerful affair. White has diligently researched what Crane would have had to research, and provides us with atmospheric and persuasive glimpses of late nineteenth-century gay Manhattan. That Crane knows he is in his final illness, and that he is dictating this novel to a woman who used to be a brothel-keeper, allows White to make The Painted Boy explicit to an extent that would otherwise have been implausible. Crane has nothing left to lose, so not only can he compose what he refers to as his ‘boy-whore book’ (p.9), but he can include thoughtful details on penis size and other matters that look somewhat more Whiteish than Craneish.

Henry James and Stephen Crane

One of White’s early books, co-authored with Charles Silverstein, was The Joy of Gay Sex (1977), in its day a daring and ground-breaking work of celebration, its title recalling not only its heterosexual counterpart by Alex Comfort (1972) but also the 1957 obscenity trial of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, the most shocking line of which was taken to be ‘who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy’–its most shocking word being not ‘fucked’ but ‘joy’. While never pretending that sex is untroubled, White has always argued, even when the odds seemed against it, that it could be both copiously entertaining and the source of deep personal fulfilment.

In States of Desire (1980), his remarkable travelogue through gay liberationist and anti-gay America just before the outbreak of AIDS, he wrote: ‘My ideal reader, at least when I write fiction, is a cultivated heterosexual woman in her sixties who knows English perfectly but is not an American’. It was for her sake—or rather, for the sake of his own grip on her attention—that he hoped his books would not be consigned to the gay sections of book shops. She accounted for certain over-refined aspects of his first couple of novels, not least their aesthetic preciousness. Only by turning his attention to another type of reader would he be able to achieve his most striking effects.

The critical commonplace of those days—still not entirely discredited today—was that the liberation of homosexuality was destroying the literature of homosexuality, because what had once been so satisfyingly hidden away in discreet metaphor and expedient obliqueness was now becoming brazen and unapologetic. Where once there had been Proust, there were now writers like Genet and Burroughs. It is an odd rule if you apply it to anything else (American literature would be so much better if it never mentioned America…) and its proponents tended to rely on forgetting that Proust had actually treated the topic in a straightforwardly explicit manner. In a 1980 essay, ‘The Political Vocabulary of Homosexuality’, White argued that, on the contrary, ‘liberation should free gays from tediously repetitious works that end in madness or suicide, that dwell on the “etiology” of the characters’ homosexuality (shadowy Dad, suffocating Mum, beloved, doomed, effeminate Cousin Bill) and that feature long, static scenes in which Roger gently weeps over Hank’s mislaid hiking boot’. Far from hobbling gay writers, the release from (self-) censorship would allow them the freedom to stretch the boundaries of their work. The implicit aim was a point at which it would seem no more limiting to call someone a ‘gay writer’ than to call him an ‘American writer’.

White saw that he belonged to a generation of gay writers who, because they could be open about their sexuality, might actually address gay readers in their own language, using the conventions and assumptions of their own subcultures. They would write about gay life without explaining it to a judgemental, non-gay audience; and they would avoid the language of statute books and medical directories. Where possible, they would be positive about homosexuality, but they would not dogmatically cover up the negatives. If they wrote well, it might even be possible to overcome the indifference or overt hostility of the non-gay reader, yet to do so without apology and without compromising on gay subject-matter. (No more swapping of the genders of pronouns, for instance, and no more speaking of mere friendship when love or physical desire were meant.) As White put it in a 1993 speech, ‘I decided to work on the principle behind the New Yorker that pretends all readers are Manhattanites, a policy that flatters even Iowans’.

That has been White’s great achievement. No writer of his generation has done more to shape a viable future for the gay novel beyond pornography, yet he has done so without airbrushing out sexual detail, whether pretty or ugly. His reputation rests on the trilogy of autobiographical ‘gay novels’, A Boy’s Own Story (1982), The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988) and The Farewell Symphony (1997), plus the later continuation of his own life story, A Married Man. All the rest of his books are offshoots and byways, albeit impressive ones. For many years he has been the most interesting, adventurous and ambitious of the American gay novelists. Not for him the aimless dispensing of camp froth that has waylaid so many gay writers; nor for him endless variations on the teenage coming-out story. He has far more to say about humanity’s queernesses than most of his colleagues herded together. Like Proust and Isherwood before him he has made fiction and even myth out of the quotidian materials of his own life; like Genet, of whom he has written the authoritative biography, he has transmuted his deepest degradations into a life-affirming poetry. Although he works in a discernibly gay tradition, his preoccupations with love and loss cannot rationally be regarded as any less ‘universal’ than the rampant heterosexualism of an Updike or a Roth.

In The Farewell Symphony, White examines the first years of gay liberation in New York City, and their legendary sexual excesses, with both enthusiasm and scepticism. Since the book is the third of a trilogy, he is able to look back on his (narrator’s) life and evaluate his changing impressions as representative of major social changes for American gay men in general. Whereas in the 1950s he had thought he was the only one, by the 1960s he had come to believe that everyone was one. In the previous decade, people had laughed at the idea of homosexual rights as if at that of safe-crackers’ rights; now they were part of a coherent political platform. And yet, he claims, the only rights gay men really wanted to protect were sexual—above all, quantitative. (‘Even “love” was a suspect word, smelling of the bidet’—by which I think he means women.) In those days before gay marriage and partnership rights, he says, gay men had sex first and then, over conversation, decided whether they could become friends. He and others of his generation imagined that the couple could be replaced by a more general festival of Whitmanly adhesiveness. Yet he keeps insisting, reasonably, that anonymity does not preclude intimacy; indeed, he avers that the most romantic experience he ever had was with a stranger.

Then, of course, everything changed. The last chapter of The Farewell Symphony begins with the sentence ‘Somebody at my gym became ill’. The catastrophe of AIDS begins and the players start to leave the stage. As if summarising the changing moods of the trilogy as a whole, the narrator speaks of gay men as having been ‘oppressed in the fifties, freed in the sixties, exalted in the seventies and wiped out in the eighties’.

It is to White’s great credit that, notwithstanding his productive vanity—always readily acknowledged by him with wry irony—he exposes his own faults with exhibitionistic flair, anal warts and all. The narrator of his trilogy is no sexless observer, as Proust’s Marcel and Isherwood’s Christopher so often seem to be. On the contrary, he commits some terrible sins (if I can borrow a concept from an alien cosmology). Of these, perhaps the worst is when the HIV-positive narrator of The Farewell Symphony rapes a young rent boy without using a condom.

Reviewing A Boy’s Own Story in the TLS (19 August 1983), Alan Hollinghurst ridiculed White’s more extravagant metaphors, associating them with ‘the forced and yet strangely complacent diction of queens’. Such expressions as ‘the terrible, decaying Camembert of my heart’ reduced him to fits of hilarity. Such eccentricities of expression have proliferated over the years, but now, in order to sound a bit like Stephen Crane—who was a precursor to Hemingway, writing in visual images and respecting masculine inarticulacy—White has reined in his wilder excesses. Even so, there are moments when the language of the book falters. Crane would not have used the word ‘sex’ to mean sexual activity (p.8), and it is extremely unlikely that he would have spoken of sharing accommodation ‘with five other male friends’ (p.28)’, rather than just with five friends, their maleness being taken for granted. Although White takes care to point out that some of Cora’s diction is learnt from her lover (‘philtrum’, for instance), there are times when she waxes unconvincingly literate, as when she is thinking of Henry James: ‘all he did was write and contemplate life as obscured by the prismatic interference of the mirrors in her mind’ (p.41). Theodore sometimes seems to know too much about his era in Manhattan. This is a side-effect of White’s trying to keep his readers abreast of late nineteenth-century detail, rather than of any such need on Crane’s part. Although White is aware that this might be a problem—at one point another character has to intervene in Theodore’s information-giving, saying ‘Yes, I know … I, too, read the papers’ (p.181)—he apparently has not felt the need to solve it. At other times, for similar reasons, White includes for our sake a detail that would, for Crane’s readers, have been a statement of the obvious, as when Theodore speaks of ‘The United States, all forty-four of them’ (p.171).

White is rather more sentimentally sympathetic to the foolish Theodore than one would have expected of Crane. In the end, though, his portrayal of Crane is scrupulously respectful, and his attempt to construe Crane’s writing, in terms of both his general style and the specific substance of The Painted Boy, is an impressive tribute. One cannot say the same about his portrayal of Henry James. When Crane dies, his boy-whore book unfinished, Cora sends the only manuscript to James, hoping that he will sympathetically fill in its gaps and try to get it published. But it shocks him and he destroys it. Thus, Hotel de Dream begins and ends with the two burnings of The Painted Boy, Garland’s and James’s. There have been other, minor holocausts in between: thinking it a veiled attack on herself, Cora burns a published short story that Henry James has dedicated to Crane; Theodore destroys the report that a detective compiles for him when he jealously has Elliott followed. Then, when he is stolen from Theodore by a pretty stereotypical Mafioso, Elliott gets a lot more than his fingers burnt. It is as if White is both celebrating and deploring a period when the written word was revered to the extent of being routinely erased for its tendency to scandalise. None of his own career could have happened in Henry James’s lifetime—unless he had adopted Jamesian strategies of indirection and obfuscation. Yet he seems to be blaming James for having submitted to and colluded in such anti-literary social pressures.

Although without the preaching, there is something implicitly preachy about this ending. It conveys a (what?) post-Freudian? post-Kinsey? post-Stonewall? dogmatic attitude to telling the truth about sex—and telling it straight, not slant. We see James almost entirely from Cora’s point of view, and she does not like him. Not only does she think him as ‘queer as a football bat’ (p.38) but she believes he can approximate Crane’s ‘throbbing’ masculinity ‘only through a eunuch’s sly attitudinizing’ (pp.42-43). He emerges as a flaccid monster of inhibition. What is lacking is much sense of why he does what he does—other than because he was a closeted celibate who should have known better. Aimed at the master of the nuance by a writer who is himself mighty respectful of nuance, this makes little sense. White has James acting on a decisive opinion not so much about literature as about propriety. If this leaves James looking mean-spirited, it has a similar effect on White himself. There is something dispiriting about this attack—from such a great distance—on the author of The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl. It is not much fairer than manuscript-burning itself.

Review: The Pure Lover

2009-08-29T02:28:00.008Z

The Pure Lover
David Plante

Published by Beacon Press

Reviewed by Eric Karl Anderson

In addition to many novels, David Plante has written compelling memoirs about his upbringing, development as a writer and his relationships with female friends. The Pure Lover is a very different kind of autobiographical piece which traces his longstanding relationship with the poet Nikos Stangos who died in 2004. He speaks directly to his lost lover addressing him as “you” throughout the book while recalling details of Stangos’ life to formulate an unsentimental portrait of the man he lost. Rather than presenting a straightforward narrative, details are presented in flashes with powerful short sections which simulate memories rushing forward. Something about this effect is so captivating and moving that I was enraptured from the beginning to the end of this short stunning book.

Plante’s moving tribute stands as a counterpoint to Andrew Holleran’s elegiac novel Grief which mourns for a generation of gay men, some of whom found their physical passion stymied by a fear of AIDS resulting in prolonged melancholy loneliness. The Pure Lover records a deep forty something year companionship between two men which weathered jealousy, depression, periods of separation through work and illness. The love, deep pleasure and joy in each other which Stangos and Plante shared withstood these trials just as any long term relationship, heterosexual or homosexual, must if it is to continue. However, we have precious few written tributes to lifelong homosexual relationships that were lived openly. This alone makes The Pure Lover a unique testament, but this deeply tender book also evokes feelings which are universal. Plante ponders the inevitable tragic consequence of two people who are so deeply romantically entwined – that ultimately they must be separated by death. And, though Stangos’ mental and physical deterioration put a considerable strain on both of them, the love they shared didn’t diminish. However, Plante stoically observes, “My love for you was not enough – you died.”

Plante exhumes memories of his lost lover by listing the details of his life in poignant lines and meditating on Stangos’ many accomplishments, particularly the striking and philosophically-engaged poetry he produced. (I previously reviewed Stangos’ posthumously published Pure Reason here) Details of Stangos childhood growing up in civil war-torn Greece are recalled chronologically leading up to their meeting. These succinct recollections painted with evocative details such as the family’s passionate communist maid and a visit to a brothel while Stangos was an adolescent expand voluminously to recreate a vanished era with magnificent force. Plante and Stangos’ relationship formed from a chance meeting and, like many encounters, could have easily never have happened. The details Plante divulges about their intimacy build to create a fully formed picture of a passionate, hard-won relationship. Through the supremely pared down style the author uses these specific details are elevated into something grander and more meaningful.

David Plante & Nikos Stangos

Alongside the personal reflections about his lover’s life and their relationship, Plante also speaks universally about what it’s like to lose a loved one. Each section is headed by short statements about the condition of grief and its effects. These are profound statements which are as striking as solemnly performed piano notes, much different from the prolonged deep inquiry into the numerous mechanisms of grief as presented by Joan Didion in her monumental book The Year of Magical Thinking. In Plante’s numerous observations about the condition of grief he states, “Grief demands a grand, timeless expression, and the bereaved tries, tries for that expression, and wonders if the expression is false.” As a testament to love, this book is finer than any other I can recall. The Pure Lover manages to achieve something which every writer strives so fervently to obtain in their prose; it struck me profoundly because it is so true.

Eric Karl Anderson is author of the novel Enough and has published work in various publications such as The Ontario Review and the anthologies From Boys to Men and Between Men 2.

Review: I'll be Back Before You Know it

2009-08-22T10:34:00.000Z

I'll be Back Before You Know it
by Maria Jastrzebska

Published by Pighog Press

Reviewed by Radcliff Gregory

In a market awash with books from sub-standard prose writers masquerading as poets, Maria Jastrzebska’s stunning anthology shines out like the Star of Africa. Here is a rare collection not suffocated by propaganda, self-indulgence or plain bad writing – I’ll be Back Before you Know it doesn’t just make the grade, it holds up a challenge to other modern poets.

Before I began reading the book, I admit to dreading the complement described as ‘prose poems’, which, along with ‘experimental poem’, is usually a warning light that a literary abomination is thundering relentlessly in the direction of an unsuspecting reading. Instead, here we find mind-altering gems such as the truly innovative ‘Stripes and Polka Dots’ that will forever change the way you look at these enduring staples of design. This piece, with its anarchic anti-punctuation spacing and slithering rhythms, dances before your eyes and plunges into crevices of the imagination other poets have long since forgotten to explore. The lines of this poem are rather like the eponymous polka dots that “are/ self-contained yet vulnerable scattering what poise they have/ like teeth breaking out onto velvet shiny as sequins tiny/ as seeds drops in snow spotting blood they always bounce”.

I’ll be Back Before you Know it is full of surprises, each snapshot of life perfectly poised, lingering over the scene like a lover. The reader is taken on a journey exploring and celebrating who and what already is, and is about to be, lost, the intended and unexpected absences that kaleidoscope our lives. Memory is the dynamic force that unites and divides. For the narrator of “1”, it is the tape recording of an androgynous voice that carries the vocal ghost of “My mother… rough like the smoke in your throat, a caress of light from a long dead star.” This prose poem’s sequel recounts the “First Anniverary Of My Mother’s death,” the protracted and gory removal of a tooth presenting the dentist as a symbolic midwife to spiritual reincarnation.

Jastrzebska delights in dragging out the full beauty of language, kidnapping words from disparate cultures only to liberate them in a linguistic joie de vivre absent from much modern poetry. ‘Night Afore Monster Ceilidh’ paints a vivid picture of Scotland in vibrant carnivalesque mode, revelling in native dialect to force the poem into the reader’s own throat so we can taste it for ourselves. The “…enormous/ metallic birds and stooped/ in ragged cloaks – poking long/ noses in our armpits till we can’t help/ but laugh” beautifully encapsulates the ‘time warp from reality’ concept of the genre.

Maria Jastrzebska

The echoes of early spirituality in modern organised religion introduce and close the ‘Syngoga Wysoka’ “Two griffins/ in a bare wall/ remain/ after the clutter of churches,” and the sunlight still “falls across a fragment/ of faded Hebrew.” The poem draws heavily on the imagery of art to show how much of what has been perceived to be knowledge of biblical times and theology has historically been extrapolated from later fictitious depictions rather than unadulterated contemporary documents and representations.

‘My Beloved’s Shoes’ is a fascinating dissection of how a shoe collection can not only reveal a great deal about someone’s taste, but also how the assorted manifestations of footwear can become an interactive extension of the owner’s psyche, always awake and ready to liberate their wearer, submissive enough to be neatly contained, and yet disconcertingly active, as “Rows of them, her own small army, its generals at the top” are “Neatly stowed in Perspex boxes.” Yet the “red Choos, green sparkling Ginas, nude manolos for smooching [and] pleated silk Louboutins” have a secret double life: “when night falls they pirouette above us, glisse here, echappe there.”

As Jastrzebska’s collection is about human transience, the later poems inevitably turn to the consideration of the ultimate departure from life. ‘The Holidaying Dead’ is a curious narrative, pointing out that “Eternity needs to be filled.” The poem alternates between the poignant mischief of ghosts who “with a flick of their fingers[,] sprinkle water on the heads of their loved ones and leave”; they also “swap lovers, switch genders, falling helplessly in love.” But “they have, after all, their own journeys to make. To go where they can pick blue plumbago flowers under a waning moon, learn to skim empty ravines like shadows in undulating flight.”

It is easy to see why the Warsaw-born author has been translated into languages that intersect many apparently disparate cultures. Jastrzebska transcends time and space, ethnicity and the politicised religion to speak to our inherent spirituality, the poetry of shared and individual soul that converges in the collective ancestry from which we are all forged.

Radcliff Gregory is the author of Everywhere, Except…, and the sold-out Fragile Art, and Figaro’s Cabin (under a pseudondym), and also anthologised in Chroma, Poemata, Coffee House and Poets International literary publications, and a dozen books by publishers including Crystal Clear, Forward Press and Poetry Now. Outright winner of six UK poetry competitions. Also writes non-fiction articles and essays on literary criticism, literature, disability and gender issues. Currently organising Polyverse Poetry Festival, which he founded. He also tries to find time to complete his first full-length prose work.

Review: The Work of Jack Spicer

2009-08-15T17:58:00.000Z

Jack Spicer, my vocabulary did this to me: the Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer
edited by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian
Wesleyan University Press

Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance
Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian
Wesleyan University Press

Reviewed by Richard Canning

Some people are said to create their own good luck. Certainly fifties poet Jack Spicer (1925-65) created his own bad luck; so comprehensively that it is little surprise that his verse should scarcely be known today at all. It was confined even in his lifetime to small-scale publications, themselves limited by the author to distribution in the San Francisco Bay Area alone - excluding, naturally, any bookstores Spicer had taken against. This included the trailblazing hub, Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights: ‘Ferlinghetti is a nonsense syllable invented by The Poet’, Spicer deadpanned in the ‘Explanatory Notes’ to a poem by that name.

In their first-rate group biography Poet, Be Like God, Ellingham - who becomes a key player in the ‘San Francisco [formerly Berkeley] Renaissance’ circle about halfway through - and Killian persuasively argue that Spicer’s pre-eminence in poetic performance, creativity and critical judgment in his day, not only marked him as a vital catalyst for others’ work – among them, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Marianne Moore, Allen Ginsberg and Thom Gunn, but above all his peer and gay poetic fellow traveler Robert Duncan, whom Spicer came to describe as a commercial ‘whore’ for seeking to be anthologized. It also stemmed from an especially unclassifiable poetic talent, which simply fell out of currency because it could not be fitted into the dominant collectives or fashions (neither the New York School of Frank O’Hara and followers, nor, for sure, the Beats).

Ginsberg, though almost entirely absent from the San Francisco scene, proved pivotal to the eclipsing of Spicer. His briefish residency in the city in the mid-1950s saw him both pen Howl and, notoriously, give it its first, immediately scandalous and sensational public reading. Spicer, meanwhile, illustrated his knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, by being on an unhappy one-year secondment to the East Coast. (He argued that New York was a ‘primitive’ place with ‘no feeling for nonsense’: ‘Wit is as far as they can go… no one screams in the elevator.’)
Still, they were scarcely fellow travelers anyway. Spicer thought his poems were dictated to him, more or less, by Martian forces, or the guile of the poetical dead. Despite the poems’ intimacy and personal honesty, it reassured him, doubtless, to think of their stemming from beyond himself. He excoriated in verse ‘the big lie of the personal.’ Ginsberg’s embrace of prophetic bombast in particular struck Spicer as unbecoming. Yet, as Ellingham and Killian argue, Howl in a stroke both summarized the San Francisco Renaissance’s countercultural or non-materialist tendencies, and betrayed them. For one thing, Spicer’s fundamentally rational temperament could accept neither the chop-logic of the Beats’ Whitman-inspired all-inclusiveness, nor their celebration of drug use, free love and altered states. Spicer’s ‘Some Notes on Whitman for Allen Joyce’ (1955) is effectively a series of reproaches to the deceased poet for all he lacked or missed: ‘Forgive me Walt Whitman, you whose fine mouth has sucked the cock of the heart of the country for fifty years. You did not ever understand cruelty.’ Himself progressively dependent on brandy to ward off depression, Spicer experienced the loss of one friend and lover after the other to drugs, which he saw as the antithesis of poetry. Howl, meanwhile, he dismissed as ‘crap.’

Ellingham and Killian tease out the ingenuity and originality of Spicer’s verse, as well as the complex nature of his circle’s group dynamics and his – for want of a better term – political manoeuvres (there was rarely anything very ‘politically’ expedient about them). Poet, Be Like God is far from hagiographical. Spicer was capable of terrible anti-Semitism for instance. When reproached for casual remarks of this kind in public, he retorted: ‘Don’t feel bad – this isn’t Auschwitz, you know.’ His bile was at least broadly distributed. To Bob Kaufman, Spicer argued: ‘I’ve heard of professional niggers - but you’re the first amateur.’ Against such moments stand acts of conspicuous principle. Unlike many peers, Spicer refused to sign an oath of loyalty to the American constitution at Berkeley (which included personal renunciations of Communism, amongst other things), effectively exiling himself for a while to the University of Minnesota. Both he and Duncan were brave too in the open, non-idealized expression of gay sexual feeling in their poems (‘Homosexuality is essentially being alone.’ [‘Three Marxist Essays’, 1962])

What of the work? my vocabulary did this to me, impeccably presented and furnished with notes detailing textual variants and original sources, collects all volumes published by Spicer in his lifetime plus a good number of early, freestanding poems. These Spicer would disown as ‘one night stands’; he stressed the need for verse collections to speak within and among themselves: ‘Poems should echo and re-echo against each other. They should create resonances. They cannot live alone any more than we can.’ (A telling comment, this, given his frequent solitude.) It isn’t complete; Gizzi and Killian plan a further, uncollected volume, taking in the remaining, early poetry and some play-scripts.

But as well as the verse, it includes Spicer’s workshop questionnaire for a poetry course he taught at San Francisco State College, ‘Poetry as Magic’, which hints at the revolutionary teacher he was acclaimed to be by many devotees (though Spicer professed to distrust academic teaching entirely, and claimed not to enjoy participating in it): ‘Write a paragraph about how the fall of Rome affected modern poetry… Invent a dream in which you appear as a poet.’

my vocabulary did this to me – the title may or may not constitute Spicer’s ultimate or penultimate words, as he acknowledged the fact that he was dying in hospital - contains plenty to persuade us of Spicer’s significance. Arthur Rimbaud, Jean Cocteau and Hart Crane are early lodestars, though the example of W. H. Auden perhaps looms largest, in some cadences (‘Poetry, almost blind like a camera/ Is alive in sight only for a second’ [‘Imaginary Elegies I’]), themes (‘Psychoanalysis: an Elegy’) and conceits (‘But when he turned to face me with a kiss/I closed my lying heart against his lips’ [‘Orpheus in Athens’]).

The work not renounced by Spicer opens with After Lorca (1957) - a collection of translations, part-translations and pseudo-translations (in fact, original poems by Spicer) of the Granadan author’s writings, then much less familiar to English readers than now. Federico Garcia Lorca himself finds himself surprised to be introducing Spicer from beyond the grave. ‘The dead are notoriously hard to satisfy,’ “Lorca” writes. In a sense, though, Spicer considered all poetry to constitute, in its deployment of language and thus inevitable compromise with literary and lexical traditions and forerunners, ‘an argument between the dead and the living,’ as he would later term it.

Admonitions (1957) features a set of poems dedicated to acquaintances. The intensity and frustration of one blighted love affair – with aspiring painter Russell FitzGerald – is beautifully transposed into a brief, enigmatic lyric:

For Russ

Christ,
You’d think it would all be
Pretty simple
This tree will never grow. This bush
Has no branches. No
I love you. Yet.
I wonder how our mouths will look in twenty five years
When we saw yet.

Others can feel almost retributive. One, to an ex- who spurned Spicer, ‘For Mac’, begins: ‘A dead starfish on a beach/ He has five branches/ Representing the five senses/ Representing the jokes we did not tell each other…’ and closes: ‘And love/ Is like nothing I can imagine.’

As Poet, Be Like God argues, 1960’s The Heads of the Two Up to the Aether is Spicer’s most substantial volume, though for some the startling contemporary rewrites of the Gawain myth and others in The Holy Grail (1962) may most deserve study: ‘Lancelot fucked Gwenivere only four times. /He fucked Elaine twenty times/ At least. She had a child and died from it.’ (‘The Book of Lancelot’)

The Heads… was inspired by an aspiring poet, James Alexander, who pitched himself to his senior as a Rimbaud to Spicer’s Verlaine. This collection innovates by splitting Spicer’s poetical ‘I’ from himself as author, editor or literary “self”. At the outset, the latter announces, as part of an ongoing set of ‘Explanatory Notes’ to the poems: ‘To begin with, I could have slept with all of the people in the poems. It is not as difficult as the poet makes it.’ Spicer could be very funny. Inspiration for this bifurcation may have come from Rimbaud’s infamous line ‘Je est un autre’ (‘I is another’). The effect is tantalizingly self-dramatizing and self-aware. One fine poem, ‘Several Years’ Love’, invokes both Shakespeare’s Sonnet 144 (‘Two loves I have of comfort and despair’) and – surely? - Alfred Douglas’s queer apologia ‘Two Loves’ (1892), with its famous summative quotation: ‘I am the love that dares not speak its name’:

Two loves I had. One rang a bell
Connected on both sides with hell

The other’d written me a letter
In which he said I’d written better

They pushed their cocks in many places
And I’m not certain of their faces
Or which I kissed or which I didn’t
Or which of both of them I hadn’t.

Spicer’s notes to this poem mischievously read:

‘The two loves are the pain The Poet had. I do not think a doorbell could be extended from one of them to the other. The letter, naturally (as will become more apparent in the conquest of Algeria or outer space) was written to somebody else.

The cocks want to be sure of themselves.’

The figure of Orpheus, poetic prototype, parades through all Spicer’s work. He is displaced, however, in the second section of The Heads of the Two Up to the Aether – entitled ‘A Fake Novel about the Life of Arthur Rimbaud’ – by the teenage French prodigy himself, as caught, perhaps, in that famously haughty photograph:

They said he was nineteen; he had been kissed
So many times his face was frozen closed.
His eyes would watch the lovers walking past
His lips would sing and nothing else would move.

(‘Chapter IV: Rimbaud’)

‘Love’, found in 1962’s A Red Wheelbarrow, once again circumnavigates this essential theme, but from Spicer’s own perspective. Just as he could complain of being ‘trapped inside my own vocabulary’, he here figures love, apparently well-meaning, descending to the helpless and vulnerable, and inflicting further helplessness and vulnerability: as in the myth of Prometheus, whose liver was eaten out nightly by Zeus, in the form of an eagle:

Tender as an eagle it swoops down
Washing all our faces with its rough tongue.
Chained to a rock and in that rock, naked,
All of the faces.

A poem in Golem (1962) concerning the death of an unnamed poet, foreshadowed not only Spicer’s own demise three years on, but, bathetically, the sense of diminishing returns surrounding his poetic oeuvre, its influence, circulation and recognition:

He died from killing himself.
His public mask was broken
Because
He no longer had a public mask.
People retrieved his poems
from wastebaskets. They had
Long hearts.
Oh, what a pain and shame was
his passing.
People returned to their
Business somewhat saddened.

Gizzi, Killian and the tiny Wesleyan University Press are to be thanked for the substantial and vital act of retrieval evidenced in my vocabulary did this to me, a book which could, and should, reshape everyone’s conception of the pinnacles of post-war American poetry for good.

Richard Canning teaches at Sheffield University, where he can be contacted. He most recently edited Between Men 2: Original Fiction by Today’s Best Gay Writers (New York: Alyson, 2009). Canning’s brief life of E.M. Forster (London: Hesperus Press) and edited collection 50 Gay and Lesbian Books Everybody Must Read (New York: Alyson) are forthcoming later this year. A brief life of Walt Whitman (London: Hesperus Press) follows in 2010.

Review: Blue Sky Adam

2009-08-08T09:20:00.000Z

Blue Sky Adam
By Anthony McDonald

Published by BIGfib

Reviewed by Liam Tullberg

Blue Sky Adam is Anthony McDonald’s long-awaited follow up to 2004’s poignant coming of age tale, Adam, the story of the sixteen year-old title character.

Set six years later, the opening chapters of Blue Sky Adam see the now 22 year-old protagonist named in the will of Georges Pincemin, an elderly gentleman with whom Adam formed a brief and seemingly inconsequential friendship. Understandably, it’s with surprise that Adam discovers he’s been bequeathed Le Grand Moulin de Pressac and Château L’Orangerie vineyard in Gironde, southern France. The news comes at a pivotal point in Adam’s life having recently completed his studies at the Royal Academy of Music and beginning to question the longevity of the sexual relationships he has with friends, Michael and Sean.

It’s in France that Adam’s journey truly begin as it is here that he met his first and only true love, Sylvain Maury, when he was considerably younger. Given Sylvain’s personal demons, the relationship had been tempestuous at best and impossible at worst, ending with a court order for the two never to be in touch again. When Adam’s last letter to Sylvain went unanswered, he reluctantly gave up the hope that he would ever again meet his lover. Until now.

And perhaps things would run smoothly were it not for the appearance of Stéphane, Adam’s handsome neighbour. Stéphane is welcomingly adept in wine production and his gentle nature and kindness prove irresistible to Adam. In contrast to the troubled Sylvain, Stéphane is portrayed almost as a breath of fresh air. That’s not to say he’s without his own complexities, of course, which make his relationship with Adam all the more engaging.

Each of the central characters in Blue Sky Adam is intricate and plausible. The males are clearly the dominant force – though Stéphane’s sister Françoise is well-drawn and given an intriguing edge – and each faces personal conflicts that echo those of Adam’s: who, and what, does he truly want? Though secondary characters, Michael and Sean each develop substantially throughout the narrative with their tentative experiences in relationships highlighting one of the novel’s themes: that sexuality isn’t as black or white as it is often perceived to be, and that this in itself need not be an issue.

Adam is an empathetic central character with the universal need to love and be loved. What’s interesting about a character his age is his maturity and determination to succeed in a field in which he’s little experience. Taking on the daunting task of wine production, he’s reluctant to let any obstacle he faces thwart his achievements and the same can be said for his want of Sylvain.
Another theme that McDonald investigates is the duality of love and lust. Unlike the many narratives in which X loves Y, X loses Y and X eventually gets Y back, Blue Sky Adam explores the concept of being attracted to and loving more than one person –even more than one gender –but the matter is never sensationalised. There are some particularly touching scenes in which Adam, Sylvain and Stéphane attempt to exist together as one, but ultimately Adam must choose between the two. Though it’s interesting to note that this choice is one he feels he has to make, rather than one which he chooses.

The prose in Blue Sky Adam is apposite and evocative and McDonald creates a world in Adam and his friends truly exist. The southern France he creates is beautiful, not least his descriptions of La Grand Moulin, Chateau L’Orangerie and the rural France in which they stand.
Blue Sky Adam is gay fiction at its best and explores contemporary sexuality through characters who live on after the last page is turned.

Liam Tullberg is a Bristol-based author currently working on his novel, From the Darkness, and can be contacted through www.liamtullberg.com

Film Review: Lost and Delirious

2009-07-29T07:49:00.004Z

Directed by Léa Poole

Cast: Mischa Barton, Jackie Burroughs, Jessica Paré, Piper Perabo

Peccadillo Pictures DVD

Reviewed by Sophie Mayer

When I first saw Lost and Delirious in 2001, I thought it was the most perfect lesbian film ever made. It outstripped my personal best of Salmonberries (what can I say, I like the girls of the frozen North?) because its hearts-on-sleeves tale of adolescent love seemed more universal, and its embrace of emotional honesty more ambitious. I loved its defiant heat, its refusal to go quiet.

I still feel that those qualities define the film: it has neither the icy disaffection of arthouse cinema, nor the hysterical sentimentality of Hollywood. Léa Poole draws spectacular performances from her young cast (OC fans should check out Mischa Barton when she still had flesh), whose quivering pouts convey the depths of passion and grief rather than a tantrum about the new iPhone. It was an unfashionable tone in the summer when Ghost World ruled, and it’s even more unfashionable in the Skins era. Mary B., Paulie and Tori may be sarcastic, flippant and rude, but they’re never apathetic. They care – mainly about each other, somewhat about Shakespeare, and a little bit about birds and trees.

It’s the “about each other” bit that makes this a Peccadillo release, of course. Mary (Mischa Barton), known as Mouse, arrives at boarding school after the death of her mother and finds herself rooming with Pauline (Piper Perabo), known as Paulie, and Victoria (Jessica Paré), known as Tori. Drawing the shy new girl into their friendship, Paulie and Tori re-christen Mouse “Mary B. for Brave” when she shares her grief with them in a round of confessions about the girls’ relationships with their mothers. Mary’s bravery lies in her ability to survive the confusing new world of the school, including rooming with two charismatic girls who are both crazy, and crazy in love. Cue hot love scenes with added cute, straight voyeure.

But the film is not (just) boarding-school porn: it’s adapted from Susan Swan’s The Wives of Bath, known as “Canada’s Lady Chatterley” because of the censorship it faced, not only for its depiction of lesbian sex in a school, but also its utterly shocking ending, in which Paulie castrates a male character and uses his penis (and some Superglue) to transition in order to “become” male and win back Tori’s love. Not so popular with the male broadsheet critics. The book’s stunning critique of sex, gender and class is tempered, rather than tamed, for the film, as Poole makes a number of interesting decisions: she updates the story from the 1950s to the twenty-first century; she dropped the plot concerning a merger with the nearby boys’ school (which was given ample, if uncredited, treatment in the Kirsten Dunst vehicle Strike!); and she changed the balance of the novel by giving the viewer some insight into Tori’s cruel behaviour towards Paulie.

What seems like a love story is in fact only the springboard for a thorough-going exploration of these young women’s relationships not with each other, but with their mothers. Mary, grieving for her loss, feels dead from the waist down and seems barely able to connect with either Paulie or Tori, who hates her mother but says she is “addicted to her, like chocolate.” It’s this addiction – which is both romantic/incestuous and about her family’s comfortable, bourgeois lifestyle – that causes her to pull away from Paulie. Deprived of Tori’s love, Paulie feels again the bereavement of being taken from her mother by Children’s Aid: she even tells Mary that Tori has the same fake brightness in her eyes as her adoptive mother.

Entwining the mother/daughter and lover relationship is as risky as anything in the book, and I think that’s what gives the film its depth and purchase beyond the obvious attractions of beautiful young women kissing passionately to the strains of Me’shell and, in my favourite scene, weeping to Ani Difranco’s “You Had Time” (which Poole and her composer discovered via Perabo, who had it on her Walkman). The intensity and ferocity of mother-abandonment underlying these demanding, world-blotting-out relationships between the girls raises these moments above cliché.

But it also introduces a worrying politics that I totally missed on my first viewing. 2001 was a more innocent time, both globally and for me politically. After six years in Canada, I was more aware of what it meant for Paulie to imagine her mother working the streets at Gerrard and Parliament, and why certain characters in Canadian art are paralleled with wild (and endangered) nature. Both suggest that she has First Nations heritage (Poole invents a First Nations character, a school gardener played by the wonderful Graham Greene, to – surprise – dispense wisdom to Mary and be identified with the natural world). Paralleling Paulie with Cleopatra (the dark Other) underlines the implication. Paulie’s crazy courage, her desperation to be loved, and her final act of merging with the wild world/dying are all tropes of the Noble Savage, the romantic Indian with no place in the contemporary world. So how are we to take her exhortation to “rage more”?

In its politics and emotions, Lost and Delirious feels like a film from another time, when bisexuality was the new black, riot grrrl had morphed into girl power, and a daughter’s grief didn’t have to stand parallel for larger national ones. In telling its story of innocence and experience, the film takes a bold stand on the side of adolescent passion in all its colours – and the transfer preserves the hallucinatory colours of the Ontario landscape – but its final cut is crueller even than that imagined in the novel.

Sophie Mayer is a writer, editor and educator. Find out more at http://www.sophiemayer.net/