Wednesday, July 11, 2007

What Happened

Originally published in GCN around 1980. Since then I've read a few more of Miller's novels, and though I still like What Happened (his last novel), I can't quite see how he got a reputation as a novelist. Miller had a very distinct writing voice, and once I saw how consistently he'd used that voice in his earlier work,What Happened seemed less fresh. On the other hand, his 1971 coming-out in the New York Times Magazine, reprinted as On Being Different, freed him from the closet strategies that beset so many writers. It also, I think, unleashed a lot of anger (as feminism did for many women), and Miller's anger animated What Happened in ways that his more contained earlier fiction would have benefited from. It's too bad he wrote no more fiction -- even his nonfiction was on, as he noted, "another subject" -- but I remember a scathing piece he wrote in the early 1980s for Rolling Stone, attacking American Christianity (including Catholicism) for its role as a vehicle for anti-gay bigotry. He died at 67, from complications of abdominal surgery, and I suspect he hadn't said all he had to say.

The Ugly Duckling; or, Memoirs of a Survivor

What Happened
Merle Miller
St. Martin’s Press, $10.95

Merle Miller’s novel What Happened was first published in 1972, a year after his public coming-out in the New York Times Magazine. Perhaps because it was not about prison, discos, or psychopathic killers, Harper & Row seem not to have pushed it, it was not widely reviewed, and it sank from sight (and print) like a stone. A year or so later, Plain Speaking, Miller’s startlingly reactionary puff job on Harry Truman, appeared. “Thank God you’re on another subject,” Miller’s mother told him, and no doubt the book industry, publishers, and writers of book-chat, agreed.

Now St. Martin’s Press has re-issued the novel with a more appealing dust jacket (the original edition had plain lettering on a black background) and a rambling foreword by Miller. Ignore the foreword, and be warned that the cute blond on the cover is not the main character, but read the book.

If it matters, What Happened is partly autobiographical. Like Miller, the narrator George Lionel grew up during the Depression in Iowa, a four-eyed, limp-wristed, squeaky-voiced sissy, and fled to the outside world in search of fame, fortune, and love. (If Miller’s earlier non-fiction writing can be trusted, George’s parents have the same first names – Monte and Dora – as his creator’s.) Like Miller, George married briefly and unsuccessfully, and during the McCarthy era was blacklisted for political aberrance. Both are middle-aged gay men whose lives and attitudes were shaped by a society which actively and mercilessly oppressed gay people. Both are survivors.

The parallels between author and character are worth pointing out because many people, even gays, may want when confronted with George Lionel’s life to pretend that he exaggerates, that things weren’t that bad. Partly because George Lionel is a sissy, not the manly, stereotype-shattering kind of faggot beloved of the present gay movement and straight liberals alike, and many of us seem to think that it’s still okay to pick on sissies, that it’s only okay to be gay as long as you don’t fit the stereotype.

George Lionel fits the stereotype in several ways. He is a concert pianist. He is effeminate. He is promiscuous. He drinks a lot. He is something of a misogynist. He is much given to self-pity. He has attempted suicide several times. Doesn’t someone like that justify all the things our enemies say about us?

Well, no, since you ask. Stereotypes need love, too. And George Lionel is more than a walking assortment of pre-Stonewall stereotypes. He also possesses a great capacity for love, a passionate concern for social justice, a first-rate creative talent, and the courage and stubbornness to keep fighting against a society which has tried, literally, to destroy him. (Miller’s reference to Anita Bryant in his foreword misses the point of his novel. George Lionel’s tormentors were neighbors, relatives, decent Middle Americans – you know, jerks.) George Lionel should remind us that stereotypical gays are people too, and that stereotypes exist mainly in the eye of the beholder.

For those of us who find it easy to turn up our noses at pre-Stonewall gay life, it is good to be confronted by someone like George Lionel. “I will not go to the ovens quietly,” he says, and he hasn’t. What Happened reminds me of two other books: like E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, it is a passionately caring book, unashamed to be thought silly for feeling deeply, willing to sacrifice formal brilliance for the message of human connection; like Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle, it is the story of a fighter since childhood (“the spunkiest little bastard on wheels,” another character calls George), and if George Lionel is less self-assured than Molly Bolt, he’s been beaten up more often. It doesn’t stop hm from fighting, though, and to me his ambivalence makes him more lifelike. What Happened is also as funny and quotable as Rubyfruit Jungle:

In school when they did A Christmas Carol … I was always Tiny Tim, that little faggot, that screaming, sanctimonious little faggot. I know where he ended up, hustling in Piccadilly Underground, undercutting the other boys. “I’ll show you a good time for tuppence, sir. God bless us every one.”

What Happened is the story of the lives of many of us. Don’t be put off by its occasional mawkishness, its roller-coaste swings of mood, its sometimes cartoonish characters. There is enough truth in this book that if you care about gay fiction – if you care about fiction – you can’t afford to miss it.