Nights with "Andrew" Holleran

During a recent vacation in Truro, I happened to pick up the copy of Nights in Aruba that I had read when it first came out in paperback twenty-six years ago. Anything after Dancer from the Dance, the great American gay novel, would have been somewhat disappointing. Aruba was more so. But as I began re-reading it, I was reminded what a very good writer Holleran is and was caught up in his Proustian reminiscence. Maybe some intolerance, some moralizing, some political correctness had—as it has—prevented me from doing this novel justice. After a few chapters, however, when "Andrew" (as we might say "Marcel") has arrived in Manhattan and begun the infamous Holleran mope, the remembrance of books read, like a tisane-sopped madeleine, became overpowering. You want to shake him and scream GET A LIFE! Neither "Andrew" nor Holleran is unperceptive of his condition. That oddly makes it worse. There's no distancing the character from the author, nor the author from the person. And we know now, which we blessedly didn't twenty-six years ago, that this saga will continue, through the interminable Beauty of Men to the gratefully brief Grief.

"Andrew" it turns out isn't the narrator's name. We learn very late in the book that it is "Paul." There's a host of characters whose names we learn only very late in the book. Poor editing and multiple revisions? Or is this adult baptism (a thing Lady Bracknell called "grotesque and irreligious") a deeper symptom of Paul's inability to come out to his hyperduliated mother.

More pertinently peculiar is that despite Paul's devotion to the beauty of men—that's what his life in Manhattan, indeed on Earth, has been all about—we get no descriptions of beauty in men, or beautiful men, or beautiful parts of men, or parts of beautiful men. Not that Holleran isn't long on descriptions: numerous sunsets and church services are endlessly described. Similarly (?), in spite of all the sex Paul has, no sex act nor aspect of any sex act is described. To speak it is to confess it? That's what Paul's life seems to say. So long as his homosexuality remains unspoken, he need never worry about his mother hearing of it.

I'm looking forward to my next re-reading of Dancer from the Dance because it's not obvious to me where "Andrew" (to use a generic for all the narrators in the last three autobiographical novels) comes from. Though there are first-person pentimenti in Dancer, they seem as puzzling and inconsequential as those in Madame Bovary. I wonder what happened to Holleran that he gave up the discipline (?) of the third-person to wallow as he has since in the mope of the first.

Eye candy/food for thought...

A tip of the hat to Eric for sharing word of the site Hot Guys Reading Books.

Enjoy! Cheers, Steve

Tim Dean

I just found that Tim Dean, the author of our present selection "Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking," when at Johns Hopkins University wrote his doctoral dissertation on Hart Crane. If I had know this I would have tried to read it before our last meeting.

Dear All,

In relation to what we were saying about the psychological connection in Virginia Woolf's Oralando, someone had mentioned a connection with Lydden Starchey. Lydden Starchey was one of the founding members of the Bloomsbury group and, therefore, friends with Virginia as well as a lover of John Maynard Keynes (the economist and also Bloomsberry, as they called themselves).

Starchey was a biographer who won fame and fortune for his biography of Queen Victoria published, I believe, in the early 1920s. What was important--and it became an issue when Virginia Woolf published Orlando, calling it a "biography."--was that Starchey was then on the forefront of creating a new concept of writing biography, incorporating psychoanalytic concepts into the portrait that the biographer was trying to paint.

This was a direct result of work done by Sigmund Freud who, with his publication in 1910 of a paper called, "Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood," then wrote a letter to Carl Jung saying, "The domain of biography must, too, become ours,..." Freud continued working on this kind of psychoanalytic-biography/case history on both historical and living subjects (analysand) The implication, of course, was that henceforth biography would examine the psychological elements in the development of a personality--something that Starchey was doing and that Virginia would incorporate into the writing of Orlando. It should also be said, as was noted in our discussion, that the bisexual nature of the human being was considered--in the psychoanalytic circles in both Vienna and Zurich--to be normal.

Not only were these new ideas coming to the fore in the biographies of Lydden Starchey and, therefore, most certainly discussed among the Bloomsberries, Lydden's younger brother James--who was also a Bloomsberry. He moved to Vienna in 1920 to undergo analysis by Dr. Freud. James lived until 1967 and he was--invited by Freud, himself--to become the translator into English of the standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud.

Robert Mitchell

The Way of All Flesh

I met Edmund White in New York a few years back and we keep in contact often. He's been a generous guide to my own personal reading. I told him a little about our group and that we were reading "The Way of All Flesh." He was impressed w/ our group and the books we pick (I think his exact words were, "Your group is so serious."). He asked me if we've ever read "The Leopard" and then suggested I read this blurb he wrote.

Polari

—something completely new to me, and so I needn't be the last, herewith this post. All the way at the end, past the glossary, is this wee bit

As feely ommes...we would zhoosh our riah, powder our eeks, climb into our bona new drag, don our batts and troll off to some bona bijou bar. In the bar we would stand around with our sisters, vada the bona cartes on the butch omme ajax who, if we fluttered our ogle riahs at him sweetly, might just troll over to offer a light for the unlit vogue clenched between our teeth.

from our Casualty anthologist Peter Burton. Makes me wonder what I may have missed in Hollinghurst!

The Unbareable Lightness of Stripping

Greetings, Colleagues--

Though we were a small (dare I say intimate :-) group this past Wednesday evening, we had an enjoyable discussion of Craig Seymour's memoir, All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Washington, D.C.. Tim wasn't able to join us, alas, but we concurred with his e-mailed comment: "Enjoyed the book, mostly ... or rather up to the last 60 pages, which seemed much less interesting to me and unneeded. Anyone interested in pop culture would have liked it better, I suppose, but might still have found it unnecessary (an epilogue could have covered the great demise of D.C. strip clubs). All that notwithstanding, I learned something about the "industry" and about the mind-set of someone who might wander/end up in it. Entertainingly written. Good book to start off the summer."

Hope that encourages those of you who have not yet read the book to do so. If not, perhaps the following sample will do the trick (so to speak...):

"You know what I've always wanted to know? When you're out there and the customers are jerking you off, how do you keep from cumming?"

"Usually," he deadpanned, "you just look at one of them." (p. 29)

Cheers, Steve