Depart from Me, Ye Cursed, into Everlasting Boredom

I picked up Backcast by Ann McMan (Bywater Books, 2015) at the public library because it had an enthusiastic blurb from Dorothy Allison.  It was worth my time, though I doubt I'll ever reread it.

The book is mainly set in Vermont around Lake Champlain.  A sculptor has won an NEA grant for a project in which thirten writers will contribute autobiographical essays and the sculptor will make metalwork art inspired by them.  She rounds up a bunch of writers she knows for two weeks at a lake resort; melodrama and comedy ensue.  The essays appear between the narrative chapters, unattributed, which makes it interesting to try to figure out which of the characters wrote each one.  (The answers can be found at the end of the book.)  It's all handled well enough, though a tad too familiar: the characters have predictable backgrounds and problems, and McMan has nothing new to say about them.  The one surprise is not enough to balance the banality.

What isn't surprising is the character who grew up in a viciously fundamentalist Christian family; even the terrible things that happen to her -- discovered in flagrante with her first love, turned over by her family to a rapist minister who promised to fix her -- are cliches by now, an easy way to win sympathy for a character without doing the hard work good fiction requires.  So I was particularly annoyed by this passage on page 242.

It isn't that I was opposed to traveling any road that led to a righteous life.  I simply didn't think I should be expected to deny who I was to do it.  That part didn't feel Christian to me.  All the stories I grew up hearing about Jesus talked about his love and forgiveness, not his judgment and wrath.  The way I saw it, God made me the way I was for a reason.  I never really chose to like other girls -- I just did.  And I especially liked Charlene.

It's also a cliche for people to say that they only remember stories about Jesus' love and forgiveness.  (What's to forgive, anyway?  Wouldn't forgiveness require that she give up the behavior she's being forgiven for?  And it should go without saying that there's no forgiveness in Backcast for the rapist minister; I'm not saying there must be, but then I'm not a Christian.)  I suppose it's plausible that even a Pentecostal Sunday school would stress kid-friendly stories of Jesus loving the little children of the world and play down the hellfire and damnation he preaches constantly in the gospels.  But the narrator here was in her mid to late teens when she met Charlene.  Did she never read the New Testament?  (She knows it well enough to quote the relatively obscure passage where Jesus promises that believers will be able to handle snakes without danger.)  Did she never hear a fire and brimstone sermon in regular worship services, or at the revivals her family attended?  I can't believe it; it seems to me that there's some bad faith going on here

I suspect that when people claim not to have heard that Jesus was a hellfire preacher, they're exhibiting a highly selective memory for what they don't want to remember.  Or maybe they just thought that Hell was for other people, bad people, not good people like them.  It's not for me to decide what is (or "feels") Christian; but I feel no obligation to respect the self-serving selective constructions of Jesus that Christians create to make themselves feel superior to others.

Franker and More Celebratory

In my earlier post on Kate O'Brien's 1958 novel As Music and Splendour, I noticed that Emma Donoghue wrote in 2010 that it had "a tactful and inexplicit quality" and doesn't put "a female couple center stage and neither is written from and for an emerging lesbian community the way Patience and Sarah so clearly was."  As I wrote in that post, when I read As Music and Splendour (thanks to Donoghue's reference to it) I found it surprisingly blunt and forthright, and its female couple shared center stage with the other main character's heterosexual relationships.

Then I stumbled on a reference to an earlier essay by Donoghue on O'Brien's work, which appeared in 1993 in Ordinary People Dancing: Essays on Kate O'Brien, edited by Eibhear Walshe and published by Cork University Press.  Donoghue's take on As Music and Splendour was quite different in that piece, much closer to mine.

What I find so satisfying about working on Kate O’Brien rather than on other lesbian novelists, quite apart from the quality of her writing, is her honesty.  She is explicit – not about sex (concerning which she has little to say) but about moral issues, decisions, hard words.  Reading the works of her contemporaries, even those as apparently “out” as Gertrude Stein, we have to struggle through euphemisms and code-words, layers of innuendo and ambiguity, all designed to protect the writers from embarrassing accusations.  Romantic friendships, especially in the girls’-school literary subgenre (a powerful example is Dorothy Strachey Bussy’s Olivia (1949), are often given a degree of intense eroticism that can only be called lesbian – yet nothing can be proved.  Whereas Kate O’Brien, on the two occasions when she writes about passion between adult women, calls it exactly that; no coyness veils her analysis of lesbian relationships.  She knows, and she makes her heroines acknowledge, that this is not romantic friendship but a quite different thing: something equivalent to marital love, though outside its social ‘order’; something punishable and costly, but often worth the price [48].

And:

As Music and Splendour (1958) is like Mary Lavelle in that the story unfolds far away from Ireland, but is much franker and more celebratory in its account of a relationship between two women.  Instead of playing a supporting role, the lesbian is one of the two heroines, whose stories are presented equally and in parallel.  Set at a safe distance in place (Paris and Rome) and time (the 1880s), As Music and Splendour nonetheless manages to create a modern Irish lesbian and give her a startling voice [50].

Much better.  I just realized that this essay was published in the same year as Donoghue's excellent historical study Passion Between Women.  Since then she has published a study of the poet(s) Michael Field, which I haven't yet read, and Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature, which I have.  I just looked again at Inseparable, which covers a lot of 20th century lesbian fiction as well as much older works, and I see that though Donoghue mentioned O'Brien and As Music and Splendour in it, she again got it wrong, lumping it in with The Well of Loneliness and The Friendly Young Ladies as a novel where the "generous" lesbian gives up her girlfriend to a man. Maybe it had been too long since she'd read either the novel or her earlier discussion of it.  With this 1993 essay, "'Out of Order': Kate O'Brien's Lesbian Fictions," to guide me, I'll be working through the rest of Kate O'Brien's novels.

Tactful and Inexplicit?

I hadn't heard of Kate O'Brien's As Music and Splendour until a couple of months ago, though it is a story of love between two women published in 1958.  I thought I knew most of the significant twentieth-century lesbian novels at least by reputation, so I was surprised when Emma Donoghue mentioned this one in her introduction to a 2005 reprint* of Isabel Miller's Patience and Sarah.

As Music and Splendour was originally published in the UK in 1958.  It's the story of two poor Irish teenagers who are sent to Paris, and from there to Rome, to study singing in the 1880s.  Having distinguished themselves by their talent in Eire, they are granted extended loans by an institution called The Committee, effectively mortgaging their futures for years.  Away from their hometowns for the first time, they turn to one another for company and become fast friends.  Both achieve success at high levels in the opera and are able to repay the patrons who paid for their training, though Rose becomes more of a star.  Clare, though more reserved, does quite well too, on her own terms.  The novel recounts their training in some detail.  The girls' teachers are depicted compassionately but without illusion; this is a very adult book in the best sense of the word.  I've never been an opera queen, so I have no idea how accurately O'Brien describes their milieu and its politics, but the details are interesting anyway.  Both draw numerous male admirers, but manage to avoid ruin, and not just because they're heavily chaperoned.  Rose eventually selects a young French tenor as her first lover, but Clare falls in love with the Spanish Luisa.  Yet As Music and Splendour isn't a romance, it's a Bildungsroman about two young women growing up to be artists.  Love is part of their lives, along with everything else that they encounter along the way, but music is the most important part.

Donoghue wrote that, in contrast to Patience and Sarah, such earlier historical novels like As Music and Splendour and Sylvia Townsend Warner's Summer Will Show "have a tactful and inexplicit quality; neither puts a female couple center stage and neither is written from and for an emerging lesbian community the way Patience and Sarah so clearly was" (page 16).  It's true that Patience and Sarah, one of my all-time favorite books, puts its female couple center stage.  As Music and Splendour doesn't, but as I recall, Summer Will Show does, though against the backdrop of mid-nineteenth century political revolution in Europe.  It's true that Summer Will Show is "inexplicit" about the nature of the relationship between the two women, but it was originally published in 1936, just a few years after the scandal and court battles surrounding Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness: it must have taken a fair amount of courage to publish even an inexplicit novel about lesbians that didn't demonize them.  (Indeed, O'Brien's 1941 novel The Land of Spices was banned in Ireland for a passing reference to homosexuality.) As Terry Castle wrote, if the relationship in Summer Will Show had been between a man and a woman, no one would have objected that you couldn't be sure it was an erotic one: heterosexuality is assumed, homosexuality must shout itself from the rooftops or it will be ignored -- and then heterosexuals will complain about the Love That Won't Shut Up.

As Music and Splendour, however, is explicit, depending on what is meant by "explicit."  There are no sex scenes, but O'Brien makes it clear that Clare and Luisa are not just good friends but lovers.  (I'm actually glad that Donoghue got that wrong, so I could be pleasantly surprised when I read the book.)  Most of a chapter of the novel is devoted to Clare's defense of her love for Luisa against the accusations of Thomas, a young Welsh singer, conductor, and composer who's in love with Clare.  It's a fascinating exchange, because Clare gets the best of the debate -- which is hardly a debate, since Thomas hardly bothers to make an argument, just indulges in name-calling.

‘I can’t understand that split in you.’

‘Split?  How do you mean, Thomas?’

‘I mean, pet – sit down, don’t look so furious – I mean, this unlucky schwärm you have for Luisa -- ’

‘Schwärm?’

‘Don’t get cross.  Wait.  Schwärm is a good German word – Schwärmerei – for the manias girls get for each other or for their teachers – in school age. Your development has been delayed, and you are having a schwärm now for Luisa -- ’

‘Oh Thomas, stop!  Please stop.  How dare you?  Because I told you truly that I love Luisa you must not bring your clever talk against something you know nothing about.’

‘No clever talk.  Sit down.’

‘Here I sit down.  What now?’

‘I know plenty about love, Clare.’

‘In some ways you may, Thomas.  And I have observed you, and I know your actions – but I appreciate your good manners.  Still – I think you are amoral.’

‘Amoral?  But you, Clare?  I take you to be serious and grown-up, in your own conception, when you say you are in love with Luisa?’

‘Yes – Thomas.’

‘Then – you are totally amoral.’

‘No.  I am, I suppose, a sinner – certainly I am a sinner in the eyes of my Church.  But so I would be if I were your lover.  So is Rose a sinner – and she knows it – in reference to our education and faith.  You, who come out of Baptist chapels, don’t know how clear our instruction is.  Rose and I know perfectly well what we’re doing.  We are so well instructed that we can decide for ourselves.  There’s no vagueness in Catholic instruction.’

‘But there’s lots of disturbance.’

‘That sounds witty.  What disturbance have you encountered?’

‘Well, love – the disturbance you create.’

Clare stood up.  Standing, she looked down on the weary, dusty young man whom she liked greatly, and to whose vivid intelligence and friendship she owed so much.

‘Thomas, I’ve learned fast – so has Rose – in two years of Italian life.  You can argue as you like against my loving Luisa.  But I can argue back all your unbridled sins.  We all know the Christian rule – and every indulgence of the flesh which does not conform to it is wrong.  All right.  We are all sinners.  You and I and Rose and Tonio and René and Mariana – and all our friends’ [207-8] 

Now, Clare is hardly taking a militant, pro-gay position here; she concedes that in the eyes of her Church (Roman Catholic, Irish division) her love for Luisa is a sin.  But not more sinful, she insists, than the heterosexual fornication that her friends and colleagues indulge in without a second thought.  And I ask the reader to remember again that the relationship between Clare and Luisa isn't depicted as an ambiguous romantic friendship which might or might not involve copulation.  Clare is explicit that she and Luisa are lovers in the same sense as Rose is with René, or Thomas with his numerous paramours.  Thomas, the all-too-typical male heterosexual supremacist, tries to dismiss her love for Luisa as a mere schoolgirl crush, but Clare rightly will have none of it.  She doesn't allow him to condescend to her, though that doesn't keep him from trying.  She demands that he give reasons, and he has to concede that he has none.

And again, a few pages later:

‘What is love, then?  Two silly girls kissing each other?  Is that love?’

‘Maybe.  I find it to be love.’

‘Oh Clare – how all this torture heaps up love!  What are we to do?  Where am I to bury you, you unnatural, appalling one?’

‘You can’t bury me until I’m dead.  But why am I unnatural or appalling?  Consider your own career.’

‘Darling, I’m a man.’

‘I didn’t think you’d be so stupid as to say that.’

‘Nor did I.  See how you degrade me!  Stop striding!’

Clare leant against the window.

‘Easily I might have loved you,’ she said.  ‘But – she caught my heart before I knew what was happening, Thomas.  And I think she’s lovely, and I love her.  I can’t help it.  It’s true.’

‘She isn’t even faithful to you.’

‘I know.’

‘If you were a man you couldn’t endure that.’

‘No.  Men, as you call them, don’t seem to be able to endure things.  I don’t know what sex you suppose me to belong to, but I can endure Luisa’s life.  I love her,  you see.’

‘She’s promiscuous.  She’s a whore.’

‘Maybe.  It may be for that alarming honesty that I love her.’

‘Then you know more than I do about love.’

‘You’ve never been in love, Thomas -- ’

‘I’m in love with you -- ’

‘Only since you discovered you can’t get me -- ’ [212]

Amusingly, Thomas at one point invokes love's "texts – Plato, Ovid, Stendhal" as authorities for Clare, which he retracts right away as "no good" (209), though not, as far as I can tell, because he remembers that in Plato's philosophy "love" meant primarily erotic (if sublimated) love between males.

I've had some exchanges like this with heterosexuals who objected to the supposed immorality of erotic love between people of the same sex, while ignoring or brushing aside their own heterosexual immorality, which was often extensive.  Thomas, of course, is mainly miffed because Clare won't let him have sex with her.  But I've also met homosexuals who accepted that view.

It's also a common move to dismiss homosexuality as adolescent dabbling, as though heterosexual adolescents didn't dabble with one another too.  When I remember that As Music and Splendor was published in 1958, I'm impressed by the position O'Brien let Clare take.  Reading it also took me back to the mindset that was common among queers as well as among straights before and often after Stonewall, in which same-sex love was not to be taken seriously, just a kind of dirty play.  For all that, there were plenty of committed, long-term same-sex relationships between males or between females, but I've met many gay men and lesbians of my parents' generation who, though they were in such relationships themselves, saw them as a kind of second-best making-do.

I had a curious conversation in the mid-1970s with one such man, who was indignant when a drunken wife at a faculty party said that it was no secret that he and his partner were a couple.  Everyone at the party was shocked too, because while it was no secret, you weren't supposed to talk about it.  My friend asked rhetorically if they'd talk about each other's adulteries (which they probably would).  I asked, very seriously, if he considered his fifteen-year relationship with his partner to be morally equivalent to adultery.  He thought a moment, then allowed that he didn't.  But I think that on some level he did.

Kate O'Brien, who was old enough to be that man's mother, managed not to bring his attitude to As Music and Splendour.  Given the informal censorship of the 1950s, which required apologetic shame for homosexual characters if not a violent death at story's end, it's a remarkable novel, and I hope to find time to read it again someday.  And though I disagree with her account of it, I thank Emma Donoghue for bringing it to my attention.

*By Little Sister's Classics, published by Arsenal Pulp Press, Vancouver, British Columbia.

Too Gay, Not Gay Enough, and Just Right

I'm probably guilty of this myself, but it still bothers me when other people do it. (I like to think that if I caught myself doing it, I'd correct it. But I'd probably argue about it instead.)

Band of Thebes linked to an online conversation between Carol Anshaw and Stephen McCauley, nearly all of whose novels I've read. That's easy to do, since neither of them publishes much: Anshaw's fourth novel in about twenty years, Carry the One, will be published in March; McCauley has published six in about the same period, and his first, The Object of My Affection, is still my favorite. I like them both, but they say some things that throw me a bit. For example:

Steve: ... It's always jarring (and boring, no?) to have gay characters presented as the perfect neighbor and friend whose main function is to fix someone's hair or make a fabulous outfit for them. It seems to me that really expresses a great deal of discomfort around the subject. You have to justify their presence in a work of fiction by having them be supernatural in their goodness. You still see that in the way African-American characters are presented as the all-good supporting cast who help the white folks get in touch with their feelings and solve racism.

Carol: I think of those as "gay" characters. They give absolutely no manifestation of sexuality; they are composed only of their affect. Gayer than springtime hairdressers. Women with tool belts [although, to be honest, I kind of don't mind those]. Probably African-Americans feel the same way about "black" characters.

I think if you're going to attempt to write narratives with gay characters, you have to let go of worrying about homophobic responses. Queer is the place you start from, not a condition you are going to argue on behalf of.

I don't want to harp too much on terminology, but I think what bothers me here is not the "gay" vs. "queer" distinction (empty though it is), but that McCauley and Anshaw are talking about two different kinds of work, not two kinds of characters. The gay characters who "give absolutely no manifestation of sexuality" turn up in work by and, more importantly, for heterosexuals. (Just as the "magic Negro" characters appear in works by and for whites.) As McCauley put it, they're the "supporting cast."

You can call the characters whatever you want -- when I was young, we might have distinguished the two classes as "homosexual" and "gay", with the gay ones being central -- but what counts is their place in the narrative. (Band of Thebes sniped the other day at Mike Mills's film Beginners because the main character's gay father comes out [at 75!], and dies a few years later, the only "two gay storylines" allowed by "mainstream entertainment gatekeepers"; while that's true, strictly speaking, the film 1] was not mainstream 2] and was an autobiographical work by and from the viewpoint of the straight son. Despite this, he gave his father a richer, more honorable treatment than we usually get from heterosexual artists, and much better than the mainstream.) And I can think of a number of novels written by heterosexual or unspecified authors that dealt with the love and sex lives of their gay characters. As long as there are novels and films in which "Queer is the place you start from, not a condition you are going to argue on behalf of", I don't object to those in which we're supporting characters -- though I won't give them many points for inclusiveness either.

McCauley, I think, is too optimistic when he says,

I'm sure you had the experience, as I did, of being in a movie theater and hearing an entire audience freak out when two men kissed on screen or even touched each other in an intimate way. As a young person, it was a pretty jarring, upsetting experience. It made me feel I was in hostile territory. It's hard to imagine that happening now, probably because people have become so desensitized from watching totally mainstream entertainment like "Glee," "Will and Grace," and "Modern Family."

I've had that feeling of being in hostile territory, and I agree that progress has been made, but "desensitized"? Let's see: "Glee" didn't get any male-to-male kissing until the second season, and "Will and Grace" took longer than that. And there was still hostility. For that matter, straight boys are freaking out over frontal male nudity in movies, without any homoerotic stuff on the screen. McCauley himself notes recalls "one reader comment about Alternatives to Sex in which a reader complained that there wasn't enough warning on the cover that it was about a gay man. Like maybe one of those warnings labels on a cigarette pack?" No, we still have a long way to go, and maybe we'll never get there.

Even odder to me is when McCauley says,

As much as I love Paul Rudnick's hilarious pieces in the New Yorker, they sometimes seem to come from a collective "gay attitude" rather than an individual point of view. Although come to think of it, I suppose he's toying with that notion. Some of the humor comes from the way he winks at that. "We know we all think this way, right?"

All I've read of Rudnick's essays are the ones in I Shudder, and Other Reactions to Life, Death, and New Jersey (HarperCollins, 2009), and I don't see a "collective 'gay attitude' in them. For example, from page 239, speaking of the 1993 March on Washington:

There was true, infinite gay diversity, which meant that there were many people to admire, a more select group to ogle, and a copious supply of marchers dressed or undressed in ways that would embarrass the conservative gay politicos who yearned for timid respectability.

I'd bet that what McCauley says about Rudnick is what Rudnick would say about other gay writers.

Both Anshaw and McCauley talk about the mixture of sexual orientations in their characters -- all of them aren't gay, that is. I'm all in favor of that, though I'm also quite comfortable with fiction that keeps straight characters on the periphery, just because I don't think you can claim that gay people and relationships are fully equal if you need to throw in some straight ones for balance or (gag me) universality. McCauley (hm, he does seem to be the main problem here, doesn't he?) also says,

It's interesting that just as openly gay actors are more accepted playing straight roles, openly gay writers such as Emma Donahue and Colm Toibin are accepted writing books like "Room" and "Brooklyn," neither of which has any gay content. The books are taken on their own merits, even after they've written gay novels. It points toward writers getting less stuck in a particular mold or being limited by a label.

I'm all in favor of writers not being limited, but what McCauley is talking about here is nothing all that new. (Of course it's true that the category of "openly gay writer" is a relatively new one.) Women writers have written about male characters, and there used to be (maybe still) almost a subgenre where a Jewish writer wrote a novel only about gentiles. Black writers, too: Chester Himes's prison novel Yesterday Will Make You Cry, whose protagonist and most other characters are white, or James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room. But think too of Armistead Maupin, whose novels have always had a mix of gay and straight characters, or the protean Gore Vidal. But it cuts both ways: for writers like Alma Routsong (better known as Isabel Miller, the author of the lesbian classic Patience and Sarah) it was liberating to be freed from the necessity of writing about heterosexual characters. As Carol Anshaw says,

Like, I know there are gay people for whom being queer is still troublesome, or for whom being out feels exposed. I'm way on the other side of the spectrum. I feel so lucky to be queer. When I was straight, I hated the strictures of marriage, of polite society in general. I hated plugging into the program (which was much more of a program back then, credit in your husband's name, taking his name as yours, etc.). Everything got better when I came out. I'm a natural renegade, and so jumping the fence landed me in an unequivocally better place.

Amen to that. One of the reasons I'm annoyed by the "I was born this way, I can't help myself!" line is that coming out landed me in an unequivocally better place. Coming out freed me to be the person I wanted to be, and while many born-gay people would say the same thing, it's hard to believe them when they talk about their lives as something they would never have chosen if their genes hadn't made them do it. But then, I'm a natural renegade too.

And oops! Anshaw referred to herself as having been straight, in the past tense. I've been meaning to write about the fuss that started when Cynthia Nixon said the same thing -- not only GLBTQ people but "supportive" straights were all over her case. More to come on that.

Bird-Eyes

Another book review for Gay Community News, published sometime in 1988. Bird-eyes won a Lambda Literary Award for Best Novel. Madelyn went on to publish a fine collection of stories, On Ships At Sea (St. Martin's Press, 1992) and another novel, A Year of Full Moons (St. Martin's Press, 2000). Another novel is reportedly in progress; I hope her health allows her to finish it. Meanwhile, here she honors the memory of our mutual friend, Steven Cuniberti.

Bird-eyes
by Madelyn Arnold
Seattle: The Seal Press, 1988
201 pp.
$8.95 paperback

It's scary enough just reading, let alone reviewing, the work of someone you know, especially if diplomacy is not one of your strong points. So when Madelyn Arnold asked me to review her first novel, Bird-eyes, I was eager to see it but nervous. I've known Madelyn for seventeen years but I'd never read any of her work before. It didn't help that the deal with Houghton Mifflin she'd once mentioned had evidently fallen through and a small press had published the book instead. Maybe it's just my bad experiences as a reviewer, but it seems to me that small gay and lesbian presses aren't what they once were. I've read too many books the last year or so that mainstream houses probably rejected not for gay content but for amateurish writing. Oh well, I thought, as I unwrapped the package from Seal Press, if I don't like it I can always ask Stephanie to give it to someone else.

I needn't have worried. Bird-eyes is good; rough, painful, but good. It's the story of Latisha Prentiss, who in 1964 at the age of sixteen is committed by her family to a state-run mental hospital for being a lesbian, a runaway, a prostitute (how else could a 16-year-old runaway in 1964 support herself?), and a junkie (“If you can't relax when you hustle, sex will hurt you--which is where jazz comes in” [116]). In 1964 in Middle America these things spelled C-R-A-Z-Y, and things haven't changed that much since then, including the power of parents to sweep their deviant children into institutions. With the help of a gay male patient named Bryan, Latisha is planning her escape from East Central, to return to her lover Tina, the woman who introduced her to prostitution and smack.

As the novel opens, a new patient arrives: Anna Robeson, a farm woman of forty who became depressed after her husband died and was pressured by her children into committing herself as suicidal. Anna is deaf, but she is forbidden by the hospital staff to use sign language (it's “animal-like: something out of caveman-throwback stories”; again, if you recall last March's student revolt at Gallaudet College for the deaf, whose administration was hostile to Sign, things haven't changed all that much since 1964). Latisha, wounded by the sight of Anna's naive directness, tries to teach her how to get along in East Central, and the two become friends. Despite the prohibition, Anna teaches Latisha some Sign, naming her Bird-eyes. Eventually their subversive disobedience is discovered by the staff, complicating Latisha's plans for escape.

But this is only one thread, though an important one, in a novel in which a lot is always going on. A mental hospital is a handy symbolic microcosm of society for novelists, and it encourages the creation of a Dickensian gallery of grotesque characters, among both the patients and the staff. So we have (among others) Vivian-who-never-talks, Weird Diane with her outbursts of almost random violence, Doctor Kim, “a Korean Mormon whose English was the kind you hear in kamikaze movies”, and Nurse Wykowski with her incestuous motherliness. They are the conventions of the fiction of madness, and they lend a paradoxical predictability to Bird-eyes. Arnold does this just to let you know that she knows what she's doing, however; it's as if she were saying, OK, here's the usual stuff—but now it's going to get weird.

East Central is no shelter from a violent world. Bird-eyes reminds you of the psychiatric fads of the Fifties and Sixties -- aversion therapy, Electro-Convulsive Therapy, lobotomies – asking bitterly, “Treatments come and treatments go; where do you bury the survivors?” (148). Latisha is taken out of the hospital, drugged, straitjacketed, to be “interviewed,” i.e. put on display at a downtown medical center seminar. But there's more. Bryan pimps Latisha to the male staff, she pimps herself to Wykowski. She is attacked by a male patient:

And there's more laughter but now his attendants are yelling at him easy Danny, easy -- now don't hurt that girl and we're all tangled up, he hardly can move and so he shoves; . . . My lip is bleeding: I shove as hard as I can and then it's his fist, my teeth explode and my head snaps back, cracking hard against the seat: instant nausea, I can hardly think; and suddenly they've got him up under the arms and they're standing on the seats on either side of us, twisting his arm -- there they are, much too late as usual, his attendants [100].

Compared to which the streets don't look so bad:

We were just on the street and hungry, by ourselves, without a pimp (and you need a pimp, a man to crush other men, but he'll make you want to kill him). And what proves I'm no good is that sometimes I was happy on the street. Bad things happen, but none of it is personal. There's an uncertain feeling that's sometimes very nice. . . Sometimes things would get better as the day wore on; that never happened at home. Sometimes we'd have money -- drive-in movies -- southern-fried chicken and jazz, and Southern Comfort. Not too bad. I mean, there's still the fact that you had to hunt up the next trick when the money ran low, but what's perfect [116].

But what really lifts Bird-eyes safely out of the routine and puts it on a level with such books as Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time or Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar is Latisha's unforgettable voice. Tough, ironic, streetwise, walking a tightwire above an inferno of violence and the fear of madness, Latisha's baby-butch bravado never quite drowns out the loneliness and terror that keen insistently beneath. It is Madelyn Arnold's achievement to have put that voice onto paper in such a way that that you always hear its full complexity. There is some resemblance to the style of Joanna Russ, who also excels at the meticulous delineation of horribly raveled inner states, but Madelyn's style, while no less cerebral, is more concrete somehow. When Latisha stands in the shower -- her only refuge at East Central -- you feel the water drumming on her skin; when she talks of her fear of going crazy, she draws you in so that you feel it too.

You can get so everything's exactly equal: people and walls and Vivian and Diane: the TV and the cement blocks and the way they fold the milk containers, and when everything is equal, what are you? That's when you sit and stare. You have to fight that actively, all that staring: and when you find yourself doing that you have to get up and move. You simply move. Just walk someplace and look back where you were -- not far away – and remind yourself that you aren't there anywhere. So you are not equal to the way you were: that place is not yourself, and you're still free [36].

I don't want to dwell on the autobiographical element in Bird-eyes, but it's there, so it should be mentioned. Madelyn Arnold (which, incidentally, is a pseudonym) was herself committed by her parents to a state mental hospital as a teenager for being a lesbian. There are other parallels between Latisha and Arnold, but there are also differences -- Madelyn always told me, for instance, that she convinced the not-too-sophisticated staff that she was heterosexual by necking in public with a young man who had also been committed for being gay. Eventually they released her. Latisha, on the other hand, escapes. For me this indicates Madelyn's understanding that it's not enough, in writing a novel, just to elaborate on what happened to you or to someone else. The true ending would probably have tipped the story into black comedy; the ending of Bird-eyes shows Latisha taking her freedom, rather than its being given to her, yet leaves her a fugitive forever.

Most of the small-press gay fiction I've had to read the past year or so I will never read again. But Bird-eyes haunts me, and when I'm feeling strong enough, I'll go back to it. Yes, it says, life is hell. But if you let yourself go numb, you've lost. It will take all the courage you've got and then some, but as long as you can feel pain, you are resisting, and as long as you resist, you're still free, however uncertainly. Bird-eyes is terrifying because it dares to face the hell of memory. And I find that I want to boast: a friend of mine, someone I know, wrote it.

The Maybe Islands

The Stone Gods
by Jeanette Winterson
London: Hamish Hamilton, 2007
(to be published in the US by Houghton on April Fools Day 2008)

I first encountered Jeanette Winterson through her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, a fairly naturalistic account of growing up lesbian in a working-class Pentecostal family in northern England. After that I read her novels more or less as they appeared in the US. (So far I haven’t gotten to Boating For Beginners, her retelling of the story of Noah’s ark, which Winterson dismisses as a potboiler, and one or two others.) After Written on the Body, which dazzled me, I began to notice what seemed to me a loss of energy in her writing. This was confirmed for me by her collection of stories, The World and Other Places. The stories were arranged in order of writing, and the earlier ones gave me as much pleasure as I’d remembered her earlier fiction doing; like her later novels, the later stories became more distanced and abstracted. Her writing was as skillful as ever, but something was missing.

Then a comment on Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For blog linked to Ursula K. LeGuin’s review of Winterson’s new novel, The Stone Gods. As the commenter said, LeGuin was “critically enthusiastic” about the novel, though I can’t recall the novel’s “characters … repeatedly announcing that they hate science fiction.” (Looking over the text, I found one such announcement, but I’m not sure it should be taken literally. If you read the book, you’ll see why.) LeGuin also complained that “to me, both the love stories in the book are distressingly sentimental”, though she conceded that sentimentality “is very much a matter of the reader's sensibility.” I disagree about the love stories in The Stone Gods, which I enjoyed, especially since similar criticisms could be (and have been) raised about the love stories in LeGuin’s fiction, as in science fiction generally. Ditto for the novel’s didacticism; SF has always had a didactic streak, as LeGuin knows, but I never found Winterson’s commentary intrusive. She’s sharp and witty, and her ideas are interesting. One word that never occurs in LeGuin’s review is satire, and like so much SF The Stone Gods is satire, the love child of Stranger in a Strange Land and The Female Man. The question about satire is not whether it’s subtle, or whether it’s didactic, or even whether it’s sentimental, but whether it hits its mark.

The Stone Gods begins with the announcement of the discovery of Planet Blue, which except for a few dinosaurs is pristine and hospitable to human life. Since it is universally agreed that human beings have ruined the planet we have, Planet Blue looks like a great place to start over, learning from our mistakes and doing it right this time. (Are you done laughing? One reason I love Winterson is her disdain for this evergreen daydream.) Billie Crusoe, the narrator, works for Enhancement Services of the Central Power, one of three major power blocs on her planet of Orbus. "Enhancement" refers to the appearance modification that is practiced universally in the Central Power:

All men are hung like whales. All women are tight as clams below and inflated like lifebuoys above. Jaws are square, skin is tanned, muscles are toned, and no one gets turned on. It’s a global crisis. At least, it’s a crisis among the cities of the Central Power. The Eastern Caliphate has banned Genetic Fixing, and the SinoMosco pact does not make it available to all its citizens, only to members of the ruling party and their favourites. That way the leaders look like star-gods and the rest look like shit-shovellers. They never claimed to be a democracy.

The Central Power is a democracy. We look alike, except for rich people and celebrities, who look better. That’s what you’d expect in a democracy [19].

Somehow Billie is assigned to interview a Robo sapiens named Spike, a cosmetically female robot that has just returned from a survey mission to Planet Blue, and then is forced onto a spaceship taking the first human colonists to the new world.

Of course, Spike and Billie fall in love, and things go drastically wrong. There’s a brief interlude about Billy, a young English sailor left behind on Easter Island by Captain Cook’s expedition in 1774. He falls in love with Spikkers, a half-Dutch, half-Islander, “a man of forty years, yet wonderfully preserved, lean and strong, and with a cheerful, inquisitive face that reminded me of a good dog that never had a bad master” (105). Then we’re back with Billie, only on Earth this time, in a near-future Tech City after World War III. Spike is here too, “the world’s first Robo sapiens. She looks amazing – clear skin, green eyes, dark hair. She has no body because she won’t need one. She is a perfect head on a titanium plate” (132). Billie is her tutor, assigned to “teach a robot what it means to be human” (135); she smuggles Spike to Wreck City, the “No Zone” beyond the end of the tramlines, basically like the slums that circle today’s great cities except with residual radiation from the nuclear weapons that flattened the West in the war. In Wreck City they encounter a man Friday and a motley batch of post-punk dykes, mutants, and subversives, and things again get strange.

More than that I won’t say, because you should read it for yourself. The Stone Gods is more fun than any book of Winterson’s I can remember. Admittedly she’s not for all tastes – at her wildest she’s a bit dry – but she seems to have let loose here. If she hasn’t quite regained the energy of her earlier work, she’s acquired a new verve that is very encouraging to see. The satire is sharp and, I think, hits the mark. And oddly, The Stone Gods was published at about the same time as Terry Pratchett’s latest Discworld book, Making Money, which is also satirical and also features a female (though heterosexual) love interest named Spike.

Tolliver Always

2007 has been a pretty good year for gay fiction, with a number of important (to me, anyway) writers putting out new work: Neil Bartlett’s Skin Lane, Emma Donoghue’s Landing, Samuel Delany’s Dark Reflections, Sarah Schulman’s The Child (which I haven’t seen yet). In the past week I’ve read two new novels that update established characters, long-awaited by their fans (including me).

According to several reports I’ve seen, Armistead Maupin denies that Michael Tolliver Lives is a new installment of his Tales of the City series, but I haven’t seen his rationale. It would almost have to be hairsplitting, maybe based on the switch from third to first-person narration that has characterized his books since Maybe the Moon. So, as the title suggests, Michael “Mouse” Tolliver is the viewpoint character, but we learn what’s up with everyone else, though not everyone makes an appearance. Of all the characters Michael has most in common with his creator – Southern boy relocated to San Francisco, has a new younger husband – so at times I wondered whether the voice was that of Mouse or Armistead. But don’t forget the differences: Michael’s a PWA and Armistead is not, Michael is fifty-six (my age) and Armistead is half a decade older, Armistead is an internationally known writer and Michael’s a nurseryman and gardener.

The book is sexier than its predecessors, though Maupin’s been moving in that direction all along. Remember that the series began to appear in the 1970s, and it was bold enough back then to have unapologetically, openly gay characters in fiction from mainstream publishers like Harper, let alone the San Francisco Chronicle, where Tales first appeared as a serial. Maupin is still tamer in that respect than many gay male writers; he’s simply matter-of-fact about sex, as he is about everything else, which I appreciate. I noticed from some of the customer reviews on Amazon.com, though, that not everyone does.

If you’re familiar with the series, you’ll want to read Michael Tolliver Lives, so if you haven’t read it yet I won’t summarize it. Suffice it to say that for me, anyway, Maupin did an excellent job of returning to characters he hadn’t written about since Sure of You appeared in 1989. Michael really feels like an acquaintance I’d lost touch with for a couple of decades – he’s changed with age but he’s recognizably the same person. Those of us who followed the series in its heyday came to feel about each book as the latest batch of news from beloved friends. (Alison Bechdel’s Dykes To Watch Out For comic strip, which has been running since the early 1980s, has the same effect on people.) I’ve never been sure whether Maupin counted as a “great” writer, whatever that means, though both Christopher Isherwood and Edmund White have compared him to Dickens. He makes it look so easy, doing what he does, that it’s easy not to take him seriously enough. (Just how much of a writer he is, is shown by his film projects. I finally saw The Night Listener last week, which he co-wrote and co-produced, and it was a turkey, far inferior to the book.) Maupin has created a world that a great many people want to visit, and if you haven’t done so yet, you should.

Then there’s Nicola Griffith’s Always, her third novel about Aud Torvingen, five years after its predecessor Stay. Griffith’s two science fiction novels, Ammonite and Slow River didn’t impress me (though lately I’m tempted to reread them and see how they look to me now), but The Blue Place, which introduced Torvingen, blew me away. For a while I reread it at least every year. It’s a strange, dark, very violent book, and Torvingen – a six foot tall Norwegian lesbian ex-cop resident in Atlanta – is a remarkable creation.

What I found most compelling about The Blue Place was the sensuousness of its writing. Aud (who, like Michael Tolliver, narrates) attends to everything she does – playing pool, having sex, working wood, killing a man with a flashlight, flying over the North Atlantic – with total concentration, and tells us about it with You Are There vividness.

I had been working for the last two weeks on a chair of English pine. My hand slid down the wood, zzst zzst, and buttery shavings curled to the floor. Zzst zzst. English pine is darker than its acid-yellow American cousin, so rich it makes you want to reach out and put it in your mouth. The grain is finer, denser, a little less spongy, such a joy to plane that when I first started working it I often took off more than I needed for the sheer pleasure of watching the blade slide through it. Zzst zzst. The shavings piled up. Sunlight, shivered and greened by the foliage outside the window, warmed the heaps, filling the room with the simple, uncomplicated scent of fresh-cut pie. Zzst zzst. I could feel my face relaxing, the muscles around my ribs letting go.

Always interlaces two stories in alternating chapters. In one, Aud goes to Seattle with her coffee-vending friend Dornan, to meet her diplomat mother and her mother’s new husband, and to tend to properties there that were left her by her late father. Though it’s supposed to be a short visit, she immediately begins digging into the city, looking for buried bodies – no particular reason, it’s just Aud’s way. In no time at all Aud finds that there’s hanky panky around a warehouse she owns, being used by a film company to shoot a TV pilot. Working at the shoot is Victoria “Kick” Kuiper, former stuntwoman and caterer extraordinaire, with a muscular body to die for.

The other story begins the previous year in Atlanta. Aud had decided to teach a class in self defense for women, in the basement of a New Age bookstore. She drew a varied crew of students, and struggled to get them to break through their Southern feminine conditioning and learn to get angry, to hit back. Much of this thread consists of lectures by Aud, Socratic dialogues with her students. We learn quickly in the Seattle thread that something had gone seriously wrong with this group, but just what is withheld until the end of the book. (It’s not much of a surprise.) Aud feels that she’s failed, a factor in her running away to Seattle.

Aud is often accused, even by her creator, of being cut off, detached, isolated. I’ve never been able to see this. A friend once told me that she’d been critical of my own defenses, until she realized how vulnerable I am. Of course. Aud’s vulnerability is deeply buried under her own formidable defenses, but Griffith gives us glimpses. I have the impression that some people think one should simply go out and (figuratively) lie in traffic, because being run over – or running over other people - builds character. Ever since I figured it out, I knew that I had better things to do with my life than get hurt simply for the sake of proving my vulnerability. I never take dares. Aud seems to me very connected to other people, and she takes those connections seriously.

Her most strained relationship is with her mother, whom we’ve met only over the phone in the previous books. (Aud hasn’t seen her in person either for many years.) I don’t believe that Aud sees how much she is like her own idea of her mother: formidable, coldly rational, emotionally controlled. So it’s a bit of a surprise, to Aud and to the reader, when we meet Else Torvingen in person, that she turns out to be a good deal warmer and more likable than Aud’s portrait of her. (She’s also a fan of Hothead Paisan.) It may be that her relationship with her new husband has changed her, but I suspect that years and distance have built up a caricature in Aud’s mind. The images, the stereotypes we construct of people, have as much to do with our own wishful thinking—what we want them to be—as with the people themselves. (In my own mind, for example, my 4’11” mother is still twelve feet tall, as she seemed when I was a child.)

Always is a vast book, almost 500 pages of small type, yet it moves along briskly. It’s packed with lore about martial arts (Griffith is a martial artist herself, who taught women’s self-defense classes in England before she moved to the US), cooking, the politics of real estate development, art, woodworking, cooking for people on chemotherapy, multiple sclerosis (Griffith was diagnosed in 1993), and more. It pulled me along as if Aud herself had a grip on my wrist and were making me keep up with her long-legged stride. Fortunately I could close the book when I just couldn’t keep up anymore, but I always returned for more as soon as I could. Griffith says there will be more about Aud; as with Michael Tolliver, I’m looking forward to it.

Takeoff and Touchdown

Lesbian writers have had a lot of influence on me, ever since Jill Johnston's 1971 "Lois Lane Is a Lesbian" essays in the Village Voice prompted me to come out. Since then, lesbian writers have written many of my favorite books, whether about gay men (The Front Runner, Memoirs of Hadrian, The Persian Boy) or about, well, lesbians. From Kate Millett and Isabel Miller to Sarah Waters and Alison Bechdel, they've been among my role models as writers.

Emma Donoghue is another. I first read Passion Between Women, her historical study, and from there moved to her first two novels, Stir-fry and Hood. I liked the idea of Kissing the Witch, her retelling of fairy tales from a lesbian sensibility, but the result didn't do much for me, though the book seems to be one of her more popular. Slammerkin, a largely heterosexual historical novel, also enlarged her audience, though it wouldn't have won me over if it had been the first thing I'd read by her. After a collection of stories based on historical anomalies, The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits (which I almost wrote as Brith to Rabbis), and another historical novel, Life Mask, it's not surprising that many of her readers think of Donoghue primarily as a historical novelist, and were surprised by her move to the present in the stories of Touchy Subjects and her new novel, Landing.

To me that return was a relief. I feel sure that writing about historical subjects is important to Donoghue, but I also feel sure that her heart goes into her novels about contemporary, preferably Irish, lesbians. (I don't think this is because I can't connect to historical fiction; I really love Sarah Waters's books, for instance.) Hood swept me off my feet: it follows Pen O'Reilly, a young woman whose lover since high school has died in an auto accident, through her first week of shock, grief, and adjustment. It's exquisitely written, and her account of Pen's tangled feelings moved me deeply.

So I was eager to read Landing, and it didn't disappoint. Landing is about the coming together of Jude Turner, a small-town Canadian dyke of 25, who runs the historical museum in a hamlet called Ireland, Ontario. (Inspired by but not modeled on Dublin, Ontario.) Jude is stubbornly resistant to modernity: she has no cell phone, no e-mail (except for museum business), and has never flown. When her mother becomes ill during a visit to England, however, Jude bites the bullet and boards a plane. Along the trip she strikes up an acquaintance with a flight attendant, Síle (pronounced Sheila) O'Shaughnessy, a very cosmopolitan 39-year-old Indo-Irishwoman with a female partner of five years. It's just one of those random bumpings-together that happen during travel -- they don't even know at first that they're both gay -- but they find reasons to get in touch. They begin to correspond (Jude overcomes her aversion to e-mail), to bond, and next thing you know they're crossing the pond for holiday visits. Síle's relationship ends, messily, and Jude has loose ends of her own to tie up.

Donoghue does her usual wonderful job of recounting the progress of their growing connection. But the real barrier is their respective rootedness, or in Síle's case, her determined lack thereof. Who's going to risk giving up the life she's used to? Will Síle move to Canada, or Jude to Ireland? I suppose I'm especially ready to respond to a story like this, because I so often wonder about trying to start a life with someone new in middle age -- not a likely prospect right now, but it comforts me in my confirmed bachelorhood -- and fantasize about moving out of state, or (better) out of the country when I retire, but what will I do with all my books? One reason to read a novel like Landing is to experience vicariously how such scenarios might play out. It helps that Landing is told from the viewpoints of both protagonists alternatively, since I identified with both in different ways.

I see from customer reviews on Amazon that some people find the story insufficiently action-packed, which I suppose is true. In some ways Landing is a very old-fashioned novel, and Donoghue an old-fashioned novelist -- witness her fondness for the 18th century. (You want action, try something like Nicola Griffith's The Blue Place, another favorite of mine.) But one of the things a novel can do is to take things slowly, to take its time developing characters, to depict relationships in all their complexity. Donoghue does that very well, and I'm glad to have her back in the 21st century.