The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered (11 page)

That house helped make
The Blue Star
possible, in a big way. He often went there to work, and completed large portions of all his later novels there. Moreover, Robert had a talent for living well, which deeply informed the voluptuous living in his novels — the kind of good living that is sacramental, not consumerist. Robert and Michael traveled with their own bed sheets, for instance, just in case, because
one has certain standards
. Lots of people have written about the legendary tea salons the boys hosted at their West 95
^th
Street apartment — again, another story, except to mention that the teas seem, in retrospect, to have taken place in a kind of temple: the long living room of the boys’ graciously-proportioned, pre-War apartment, made even more palatial by a pair of towering
faux marbre
columns that Robert had installed at great expense.

Those salons were always packed with cultural luminaries, gay and otherwise, and it was at one of them that Robert first told me of the new book he was writing.

“It’s going to be beautiful, Muzzy, if I can just pull it off,” he said in a whisper. “But let’s not speak of it here, among
these
people.”

He might have been fetching a plate of crab puffs from the kitchen at that moment, and might well have been confiding the same thing to everyone else, but Robert did take care to make me feel special. He called me Muzzy, after the Carol Channing character in
Thoroughly Modern Milly
, a nickname I felt was an immense honor. Then he accorded me a more important honor, early one morning, down at the shore. I came downstairs and found Robert outside, on the terrace, with the manuscript of a story I’d given him. He had read the thing that morning, instead of working on
The Blue Star
. It was the first real fiction I’d ever written, a story entitled “Good With Words,” and I was delighted that he’d agreed to look it over, even if apprehensive.

“
You
,” he said, pointing his finger decisively, when he spotted me at the bottom of the stairs. Everyone else in the house was still asleep. “Come over here.” I was too terrified to pass through the kitchen and pour myself a cup of coffee, from the steaming batch Robert had already prepared for his guests.

For an hour we sat on the terrace and talked of writing, as the waves crashed away beyond the thicket of rugosa and a scrawny strip of beach. Writing was sacred, Robert reminded me. Writers were priests, and a calling was not to be ignored. He explained that he’d found my story good, and that this meant I should stop monkeying around in magazines — I was senior editor of
Interview
at the time — and start taking myself more seriously as a writer.

My little story was printed in
Advocate Men
and eventually made its way into
The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories
. And I wrote other stories. But it would be years before I completed my first novel,
Dreadnought
, and even then it was Robert’s spirit that helped me get through the ordeal of writing it — much as Chase in
The Blue Star
takes his time becoming the vessel he was meant to be, and does so after a tap on the shoulder by fate, in the form of Niccolo, whose chief talent is taking one’s self seriously.

Yet not too seriously.
The Blue Star
also expresses what might be called a respect for fun as a supernal quality — fun when it’s combined with pleasure and joy instead of substituting for them, as often happens in American life. This side of Robert was often on display during weekends at the beach house, when gossip had to be shared and games played. It was customary, for example, for Robert and Michael to welcome me and my boyfriend, Barry, for a weekend with a little note they’d secreted away beforehand in a certain rabbit-shaped box in the room of the house that I preferred, the Suite Orientale, so-called because it boasted a pair of extravagantly exotic, red-black-and-gold lamps in the form of Chinese courtiers. Upon departing at the end of a weekend, Barry and I would leave a note for our hosts. One weekend, I had planned ahead. The note we left was the first clue in an elaborate treasure hunt that led to further clues — ten of them, I think, in the form of parts of a map, which I had hidden throughout the house all weekend, right under Robert’s nose. The last of the parts led directly to the treasure: a miniature casket brimming with fake gemstones I had collected from shops in New York’s button-and-bauble district, off Seventh Avenue. I had placed the casket in the powder room — the one with the Blue Star murals.

The reason I speak so much of the beach house is that both it and Robert’s writing reflect a deeper quality that was essential to him as a man and an artist. Robert always said that the key to life was rearranging the furniture. Consider that statement’s practically Victorian resonance — imperial in its ambition to remake Nature in accordance with our needs, our beliefs, even our esthetics. Indeed, in his personal life Robert did as much decorating, landscaping, and commissioning of suits as his characters do, and this all reflects an urgent faith Robert had in an individual’s pure agency.

In the years since Robert’s death, I’ve re-read his novels frequently, just to stay in tune with his wavelength. I also direct the annual literary prize that bears his and Michael’s name, the Ferro-Grumley, which I co-founded a year after they died. I guess you could say that the prize itself is a kind of conspiracy, devised in Robert’s name to draw attention to the kinds of truthful, luminous writing he aimed for in his books and sought in those of others, books that continue to sit upon our shelves, as seductively incandescent as a blue star.

Amethyst Press, 1989

Wayne Courtois

Thirteen Short Essays

1. What I Meant to Do, I Think

I meant to write a conventional critical essay on John Gilgun’s novel Music I Never Dreamed Of. But who was I kidding? I’m not a literary critic. Perhaps instead I can write a series of impressionistic pieces that will magically coalesce in the mind of the reader into some of kind of magnificent whole . . .

Or something like that.

2. Days of Our Inner Lives

In the title essay of her collection The Din in the Head, Cynthia Ozick — who really is a literary critic, as well as a fiction writer — refers to the novel, a perennially dying art form, as “the last trustworthy vessel of the inner life.” As I mulled over this apt description it occurred to me that the conflicted protagonist of a gay novel may have more than one inner life. There’s the one that we all recognize, the inner life that runs on autopilot, dictating the character’s thoughts, observations, and emotions throughout the day; then there’s the inner inner life, which is telling him that he is living a lie — that the world is upside down and will stay that way till he corrects it. The author of a coming-of-age gay novel faces the difficult task of giving two inner lives their due, as they battle it out with each other.

3. Homo = Werewolf

If you are Stevie Riley, then it’s like it is 1954, you live in South Boston, you’re nineteen years old, and you know you’re homosexual. But there are no homosexuals. They don’t exist, except in dirty jokes. The word homosexual is never heard on TV, or used in newspapers or magazines except in the most furtive, negative contexts. The few films and relatively few books that have dealt honestly with the subject are so out of reach that they may as well be on Mars. Here is the only kind of information that Stevie Riley can get his hands on, as he explains to a female friend:

Stevie has just returned home to live with his family, after spending a year and a half in seminary like a good Irish Catholic boy. He was dismissed from there for not having a vocation — a verdict he agrees with, though there’s more to it than that. Stevie is a product of his place and time: he knows he’s queer but he can’t accept it. Who can blame him? Maybe, if he manages to get laid with a woman, the queerness will go away. That seems to be the conventional wisdom, and he has no friend or mentor who can tell him otherwise.

4.
Next He’ll Be Pissing in the Holy Water

Recently I saw an old Brazilian horror flick called
At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul.
The monster / protagonist is a snarky mortician who has qualities of both a vampire and a ghoul. His first horrific act in the film is to eat meat on Good Friday. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, there he is, gnawing on a leg of lamb in his window while a holy procession passes on the street below. I was reminded that Brazil is the largest Catholic country in the world; no doubt many viewers of this film were sincerely horrified by the maniac’s sacrilegious act.

I was reminded, too, of Stevie’s mom — how she verbally abuses and slaps her sons around at the merest hint that they might be committing sacrilege. She says that Stevie’s older brother Brian is endangering his “immortal soul” by reading
Studs Lonigan
, for Christ’s sake. And while she doesn’t seem to be disappointed that Stevie left the seminary, she seems haunted by the question of
why
he had to leave. In one terrifying scene she explodes at him, calling him an “introvert.” It’s probably the worst word she knows, and its echo of
pervert
isn’t lost on Stevie, who’s cut to the quick. He actually sinks to his knees, right there in the living room, breaking a religious statue in the process. More yelling. The neighbors are pounding on the walls.

It’s a typical night in the Riley household. Even the neighbors pounding on the walls are doing so “out of habit.” They know it won’t do any good.

5.
At Least He’s Not Reading 120 Days of Sodom

Like his older brother, Stevie also reads
Studs Lonigan.
When he mentions it during confession, the priest tells him to stop reading. Stevie asks why, and the priest explodes:

When Stevie says it’s not enough, he gets kicked out of the confessional — a painful yet necessary step in his liberation.

Note the punctuation of the priest’s dialogue. “Did you ask why!” is not a question. Neither is “Did I hear you ask why!” For the priest — the ultimate authority figure in this hell on earth — exclamation points are as good as question marks, because he already knows all the answers.

That you can endanger your immortal soul by reading a book is still a widely held notion in the world. It makes me glad I’m a non-believer, considering some of the books I’ve read, not to mention the things I’ve written. Oh, my soul would be toast on Judgment Day — and not cinnamon toast, either.

6.
The Urban Death Machine and Joie de Vivre

I laughed with delight at Stevie’s first mention of
Studs Lonigan,
because that was precisely the novel I was thinking of while reading
Music.
“It’s about us,” is Stevie’s assessment of James T. Farrell’s work; and he’s not wrong. By writing
Music I Never Dreamed Of,
John Gilgun placed himself squarely in the tradition of Farrell, Nelson Algren, Henry Roth, and other great chroniclers of the urban death machine. And nobody does it better. Consider this description of Stevie and his friend Luanne entering the subway:

7.
Meanwhile, Many Years from Now . . .

Gilgun gives us two tantalizing glimpses of Stevie in the future. Near the beginning of Chapter 6 he makes the startling assertion that it’s May 9, 1989, and he’s re-reading the novel
1984
, another book that he had read during his fateful 19
^th
year. And later, at the beginning of Chapter 8, he makes the startling statement that “I’m sitting here at my Apple computer, an instrument I could not have dreamed of in 1954, writing my book. It is 5:10 a.m., May 12, 1989.”