Ode On a Grecian Urning

Published in GCN in July 1980 (I remember working on it in their office while visiting Boston that summer). So far I haven't read any more of Patrick White's books, not even the memoir in which he wrote about his homosexuality.

The Twyborn Affair
by Patrick White
Viking Press, 1980
$14.95

One reason writers must write to satisfy themselves is that they can't be sure of satisfying anyone else. This is nowhere more true than in fiction about gay men. Writers can expect attack from those like me who evaluate art according to the tenets of radical gay politics, and from those who are looking for a nice, respectable book (no fats, fems, or freaks) they can introduce without embarrassment to Mother. Both factions tend to worry how straights will react, though by now we ought to know that our enemies will accept unhappy endings (and middles and beginnings) as The Grim Truth About Gay Life and dismiss happy endings as biased fantasies, while our friends will ask us what we think about it.

A lot of us are looking for a book about Everygay, even though no one knows what the typical gay man is like. Generally, of course, what is wanted is everyone's idealized image of himself or his imagined Mr. Right. There is nothing wrong with this, but we had better realize that no one can write a book that everyone can identify with. Me, I love good sloppy Grade B romances (I've read The Front Runner eight or nine times), but I'd appreciate some well-written fiction about unlaundered but three-dimensional gay men, complete with feet of clay. They don't have to be all things to all men, and the endings don't always have to be happy, as long as some of them are.

That being said, let me advise you right now that Eddie Twyborn, the protagonist in Patrick White's The Twyborn Affair, is not Everygay, unless Everygay is the Australian-born former mistress of an elderly Greek who imagines himself an heir to the Byzantine throne; a decorated war hero; and the madam of a London brothel with an upperclass clientele. Can't identify, huh? Don't worry about it. Not many people are a young prince who discovers that the middle-aged Theban queen he married is really his mother, but that doesn't mean Oedipus Rex is irrelevant to the rest of us. What counts is whether the author can use an exotic character to say things about the general human condition, and whether the reader is honest and empathic enough to look for him- or herself in what seems at first glance to be a weirdo. (I remember a group of middle-class professional gay men discussing Dancer from the Dance who first complained that the book had nothing to do with their lives, and then said that they knew its descriptions of Fire Island, The Everard Baths, etc., were accurate because they'd been there. Repeatedly. Such hypocrisy abounds as well among gay male fiction's political critics, who may have radical rationales for being baths regulars but can't abide characters in fiction who are.)

When I first heard about The Twyborn Affair I was dubious. That the main character is a man who spends most of his life impersonating a woman (while relating sexually at various times to members of both sexes) was not encouraging. Gays as hermaphroditic figures are an old and tired symbolic device which fascinates those who can't conceptualize sexuality apart from a butch/femme, Jack-and-plug polarity, but which has little to do with the reality of gay life; it isn't even a useful model for understanding drag queens. From my perspective The Twyborn Affair sounded like, not a gay novel, but a straight novel which used a straight fantasy of homosexuality to affirm masculine/feminine polarity as the basis of sexual life.

However, the novel is set during a period beginning just before the First World War and ending just before the Second. Anyone who has read Jonathan Katz's Gay American History will recognize that a non-polar concept of homosexuality is a relatively recent development even among gays, and people like Eddie Twyborn who passed successfully as members of the other sex were probably more common than anyone, gay or straight, has thought. Most obviously, cross-dressing was a disguise for aliens in a hostile environment. But it was also one way of conceptualizing and identifying one's self in a society whose prevailing ideology of sex did not provide for one's existence. In those days, as now, the available sexual categories ("sodomite," "bugger," "invert," "urning," and so forth) were inadequate, and gays had hardly begun to work out an identity free from heterosexual influence. I think Eddie Twyborn should be comprehensible to anyone of any gender or orientation who has failed to fit perfectly into the Procrustean bed of masculine/feminine roles on which we are expected to lie - and surely that means virtually everyone.

I understand from people who have read Patrick White's other books that he treats Eddie Twyborn with more sympathy than he usually accords his protagonists. For the most part Eddie is treated kindly, and White does not seem to depend on straight folklore or reductive psychiatric theories in his exposition of his character. Indeed he doesn't seem concerned to explain Eddie Twyborn but simply to explore him. Eddie is a mystery to himself, but rather than seek his solution in himself, he seeks it in other people. Admittedly the self is bottomless, and I don't think Eddie is either unrealistic as a character or unique as a person because he uses other people as mirrors to find out who he is. He becomes a marionette, and what is nightmarish about the second part of the book, where he looks for simplicity on a ranch in Bogong in the Australian outback, is the way Eddie is jerked this way and that by his perceptions of the expectations, desires, and fantasies of the people around him. He feels that he knows who he is only in bed with someone else, but the identity he finds there varies with his partner. As in Pier Paolo Pasolini's film Teorema the young visitor arouses sexual confusion on his arrival, but instead of sexually dominating his environment Eddie is overwhelmed by it.

I've read that White writes out of his convicion of human isolation and aloneness, but The Twyborn Affair seems, on the contrary, to postulate a spiderweblike net of human interaction where the characters thrash around, tangled in their interconnectedness and interdependence. To an extent it's true that we humans are lonely, isolated, fearful creatures - babies really, squalling for our mothers to come change us, feed us, cuddle us. Most of us are like this some of the time, some of us are like this most of the time, but it would be a mistake to call such a vision either the whole truth of the human condition or wholly false. The feeling of connection, of relation, may be illusory, a delusion of those who cannot face solitude and death, but I doubt it is so simple. To dwell solely on human isolation strikes me as equally romantic and adolescent, a sour-grapes flight from the difficulty of drawing sustenance from relationships. I think it's to White's credit that he is not so simple. Whatever theories he draws on don't get in the way of his art. The Twyborn Affair felt real to me in its depiction of Eddie's (admittedly extreme) rootlessness and his quest for identity. His methods are not my methods, but his are, I suspect, somewhat more typical. A non-polar idea of sexuality is by no means universal even among gays, even in our supposedly more enlightened times.

I kept trying as I read the book to figure Eddie Twyborn out, in my terms. Is he supposed to be gay? Bisexual? Transsexual? Multiple personalities? On one hand I was asking what White thought he was doing as he wrote the book and created the character, but on the other I was trying to fit Eddie into a box, to find him an identity. It is also to White's credit that Eddie is not easily categorized, either by himself or by the reader.

Perhaps that is the point of what at first seemed to me the book's gratuitous ending: Eddie (as Eadith Trist, the London madam) encounters his mother in London and demands to be accepted by her, not as her son but as her daughter. Mrs. Twyborn accedes: "I've always wanted a daughter." Eddie/Eadith seems finally to have arrived at an identity, and almost immediately afterwards is killed in the German bombing of London, torn literally limb from limb. Is this meant to suggest that to define oneself is a kind of death? If so, I think it's an easy way out. Like many books, The Twyborn Affair deserves to be evaluated apart from its ending.

Apart from its ending, it is a fairly good book, though I wouldn't call it a great one. It isn't the kind of book I'm likely to return to repeatedly for news from inside, like Small Changes by Marge Piercy or The Cook and the Carpenter by June Arnold or A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood. But if Patrick White isn't gay - his sexual orientation is unknown to me - he has done a good job of projecting himself into a gay character and describing what it feels like from inside: his portrait of Eddie Twyborn is complex and vivid and - yes - sympathetic. His prose is often labored but there are some wonderful flashes of imagery, such as one man's "red nipples as unblinking as foxes' eyes in the surrounding fuzz of orange fur." And anyone who describes love as "that great ambivalence" can play on my team any time.

A note of consumer interest: Viking is charging $14.95 for the hardcover edition of this book. The binding is flimsy - my review copy began to split apart as I reached the end of the book, and I am a gentle handler of books - the type is squintingly small, and the paper seems a grade above newsprint. I know production costs are soaring, but I feel sure a better job could have been done at this price, especially with a Nobel laureate's book. If you're not sure you want to read it - and I believe it should be read - I'd recommend you wait for the paperback, which is likely to be overpriced too but will probably be as well-made.