Recalling the Cory Book Service

Richard Schaefers was kind enough to draw my attention to a fascinating Oct. 5 "American Chronicles" piece on The New Yorker's homepage: "The Book Club That Helped Spark the Gay-Rights Movement." (Not sure whether it will run in the print edition.) In it, Michael Waters recounts how "Donald Webster Cory" (real name: Edward Sagarin) came to establish the Cory Book Service, which distributed various gay and lesbian books to subscribers. He ran it from 1952 to 1954, before selling his mailing list and all but disavowing the project after coming under the influence of a disapproving therapist. It would re-emerge in 1957 as the Winston Book Service (run by a straight woman!) and operate for a decade before finally disbanding, under yet another owner, in 1969.

Frank O'Hara speaks!

Last night, a dozen of us gathered for a lively discussion of Brad Gooch's City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara that conincluded readings of three O'Hara poems. If you'd like to hear the poet himself read some of his works, here's a YouTube link courtesy of Bernard Welt.

In addition, Ernie Raskauskas was kind enough to share this delightful 2019 reminiscence of Joe LeSueur, O'Hara's longtime (and long-suffering) roommate and occasional lover, by his nephew, Jason S. Farr, who is also gay.

Jasper Johns, Footman

Although the renowned artist Jasper Johns does not figure prominently in our current selection, City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara, which we'll discuss this coming Wednesday, he does rate a few mentions in the index (pp. 315, 322-323 and 395). The last of those is the most significant:

"Jasper Johns made a sculpture of wood, lead, metal, brass and sand in 1961 titled Memory Piece (Frank O'Hara), in which a rubber cast of a foot in the sand was taken from a plaster foot of O'Hara's foot. 'I remember casting his foot on Front Street in my studio,' says Johns. 'I cast his foot and did a drawing for the piece, which included a cabinet with the drawers full of sand. At that time I had a house in South Carolina. I needed a carpenter but could never find anyone to do it. I think it was done after his death. But I gave Frank the drawing for it.' This was the piece referred to in O'Hara's letter-poem to Johns, written in 1963: 'Dear Jap, when I think of you in South Carolina I think of my foot in the sand.'"

Johns, of course, is much in the news currently for the huge retrospective of his works ("Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror") that just opened at the Whitney Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Here are reviews/commentaries from the Washington Post's Philip Kennicott and Sebastian Smee (the former concentrates on Johns' homosexuality, the latter more on his aesthetic) and the New York Times' Deborah Solomon and Holland Cotter. I'm planning to see the Whitney show later this month; not sure yet about going to Philly.

Alec (& Maurice & Clive)

Last month I posted a review here of William di Canzio's Alec, which enough of you have already proposed for our next reading list that it's a very safe bet we'll be reading it early next year. In the meantime, Octavio Roca was kind enough to share this New Republic review of the novel by Alexander Chee (whose Edinburgh we discussed in 2005). Unaccountably, the Post still has not reviewed Alec (!), but here again is the New York Times review.

Roberto Calasso on Greek love

For various reasons, I suspect that most of my fellow BookMen don't plan to read the book we'll be discussing tomorrow night, Roberto Calasso's The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. So I'm going to take the liberty of quoting one of the most interesting passages (Chapter III, pp. 70-71) from that work:

"With the heroes, man takes his first step beyond the necessary: into the realm of risk, defiance, shrewdness, deceit, art. And with the heroes a new love is disclosed. The woman helps the hero to slay monsters and capture talismans. A shining initiator into religious mystagogue, she has a splendor that ranges from the glimmering radiance of Ariadne to the dazzle of Medea. But the heroes also ushered in a new kind of love: that between man and man. (My emphasis.) Heracles and Iolaus, Theseus and Peirithous, Achilles and Patroclus, Orestes and Pylades--all enjoyed what Aeschylus calls 'the sacred communion of thighs', a communion Achilles chided Patroclus for having forgotten merely because he was dead.

"The love of one man for another appears with the heroes and immediately reaches its perfect expression. Only the heroes--and precisely because they were heroes--could have overcome what for the Greeks had been an insurmountable obstacle to such a love: the rigid distinction between separate roles, the obstinate asymmetry between erastes and eromenos, lover and beloved, which had condemned love relationships to being painfully short and stifled by the strictest rules. The cruelest of these rules was that, while the lover was granted his swift and predatory pleasure, the beloved was not to enjoy any sexual pleasure at all but was to submit himself to the other only reluctantly, in something the way nineteenth-century wives were encouraged to submit to their husbands. And the lover could not look into the eyes of his beloved as he ravished him, so as to avoid embarrassment.

"The heroes swept all these rules away. Their relationships were long-lasting--only death could end them--and their love didn't fade away merely because the beloved grew hairs on his legs or because his skin, hardened by a life of adventure, lost its youthful smoothness. Thus the heroes achieved the most yearned-for of states, in which the distinction between lover and beloved begins to blur. Between Orestes and Pylades, 'it would have been difficult to say which of the two was the lover, since the lover's tenderness found its reflection in the other's face as in a mirror.' In the same way, these words from the Pseudo-Lucian hold up a late mirror to what was the most constant erotic wish of Greek men, and the most vain."

A Mann Reconsidered

Way back in 2005, our group discussed Colm Toibin's The Master, which dramatized the life of Henry James at the turn of the 20th century. (I found it extraordinary, but my admittedly vague recollection is that not everyone at the discussion was bowled over by it.) Toibin is back now with another novel exploring the inner life of a sexually conflicted literary giant: Thomas Mann, whose Death in Venice we discussed in 2008. In The Magician, Toibin takes as his starting point Mann's (not so) secret diaries, which were published decades after the novelist's death, but covers his entire life--not just a slice of it. Here is the New York Times review.

Meet Tomasz Jedrowski

The 15 (!) of us who attended last week's discussion of Tomasz Jedrowski's first novel, Swimming in the Dark, concurred, with rare unanimity, that it is an impressive debut--particularly for someone who is not a native English-speaker. Mike Mazza was kind enough to share a link to this NPR interview with the author for those, like me, who are eager to hear more about (and from) him.