CAN NOVELS BE GAY?
BOTTUM, J.
Books CAN NOVELS BE GAY? By J. Bottum If I were to say that the novel is an utterly heterosexual form of art—simultaneously an instrument and an expression of the relations between men and...
...The novel ends, after the long-expected death of his mother, with Lark— the windows tinted so no one can see in—sitting all day alone in his car, staring out at the men at the boat ramp...
...Lawrence convinced his generation with Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) that a serious book could present explicit sex...
...He makes use of the failure of his characters to live novelistic lives that develop toward a novelistic conclusion, and thus uses the intuition of heterosexuality to create the strange, sad cloud that broods above his stories of homosexuality...
...By J. Bottum If I were to say that the novel is an utterly heterosexual form of art—simultaneously an instrument and an expression of the relations between men and women—I would be entering realms so socially awkward and aesthetically complex that it hardly seems worth the effort...
...In a famous essay on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novels, Henry James set a catalogue of all the strong British class institutions America fails to provide for its novelists to praise or condemn...
...And there is a social problem, for American homosexuality lacks meaningful social structures— structures, for instance, that could help a novelist show how a muchpursued young homosexual ages into a much-pursuing old homosexual...
...They could frustrate homosexual desire by leaving it unacknowledged, as Thomas Mann did in Death in Venice (1911...
...His friends from his days in New York are all dead (AIDS taking most of them, and suicide the rest), the mother he returned to Florida to care for is dying in a nursing home, and the one handsome young man he’s managed to seduce recently won’t return his phone calls...
...Too honest to pretend that homosexuality is simply heterosexuality directed toward a different object, Andrew Holleran has made a fascinating move in The Beauty of Men—admitting the obstacles and allowing them to define the book...
...Lacking all the traditional assurances of a future life—deprived of children to carry on his name, shorn of friends to carry on his memory (as he has carried on theirs), and missing any sense of a God to carry on his being—Lark is haunted primarily by his mortality, and he yearns for an encounter with some transcendental grace...
...If pornography seeks its readers’ arousal, then Holleran is not pornographic...
...And yet Holleran’s technique is, I think, a dead end for the novel, an attempt that can be made successfully only once...
...But the rest of homosexual novelists are face to face with obstacles that will prove, finally, insuperable...
...or they could celebrate the desire and blame society for frustrating it, as E.M...
...The years have not brought Lark much wisdom, and how far Holleran intends the reader to trust the narrator is unclear...
...The novel contains very little story, as the author presents mostly an interior monologue of Lark’s memories and observations about the world he drives through— made, for the most part, to his dead friends...
...Edwardian novelists had several techniques for introducing homoerotic themes...
...Living without a job, without a lover, and without even a complete name, Lark is defined primarily by the absences in his life...
...But it is precisely Lark’s inability to live a novelistic life that gives Holleran his sad, elegiac tone and enables him to make his narrator an object of the reader’s sympathy and pity...
...We can see these problems at work in the novels of Andrew Holleran...
...Forster did in Maurice (finished around 1914, though not published until 1971...
...How did popular culture go from “Some Enchanted Evening” to “Me So Horny” in less than fifty years, he wonders, as he drives from his mother’s bedside to the local boat ramp where he and the handful of other survivors of his generation perform sex upon strangers, “kneeling on the dirty tiles” of the men’s room: the act that is his “main connection to the human race—the part currently living, that is...
...Novelists can write of homosexuality, of course, but the novel itself resists them in a way that other arts—modern dance, for instance, or lyric poetry—do not resist their makers...
...So I’m shallow,” he at last decides about himself—and so he is, and growing shallower as he detaches himself more and more from any contact with life...
...There is a narrative problem, for the natural rhythms of the novel—encounter, pursuit, conflict, resolution, and conclusion in promise for the future—are the patterns of idealized heterosexual intercourse, from which the serial patterns of homosexual sex manifestly differ...
...Nonetheless, I think the critical fact of it true...
...But though intelligible and visible social structures may be weak for all Americans, they are utterly absent from America’s gay subculture...
...But though he has near the end of the novel one cathartic sexual tryst with a stranger in a bathhouse, and though he invariably describes sex in religious terms (especially sex with Becker, the lost Florida lover whose memory obsesses him), he can find at last no salvation...
...Homosexuals “are their looks . . . are their bodies,” he declares about the pains of growing old...
...But these suggestive techniques gradually decayed, as explicit depictions of fictional sex made frustrated desire less and less plausible...
...The Beauty of Men follows Lark, a graying and lonely homosexual, as he drives back and forth across the deserts of suburban Florida...
...But the rest of us have no such luxury...
...Apart from any moral consideration, an author attempting a homosexual novel faces at least three obstacles...
...First in his 1978 picture of New York’s gay scene, Dancer From the Dance, and now in his latest work, The Beauty of Men (Morrow, 272 pages, $24), he has given strong and yet sympathetic accounts of his characters...
...Lark is properly ironical and fatalistically funny about the superficiality of his observations, but superficial they remain...
...The Beauty of Men remains, I think, a successful novel (although if his account of the sorrows of gay life is more than just a novelistic effect, Holleran has actually written a homosexual book that is a deep artistic indictment of homosexuality...
...There is an aesthetic problem, for any novel’s particular story gains some of its power from the way it ties into the general story of humankind— links that are forged ultimately by the promise, however tenuous, of the bearing of children...
...Holleran is probably America’s finest author of homosexual fiction, and he is a very good writer by any standard...
...The most interesting feature of Holleran’s fiction, however, may be the way in which he manifests what I believe is his knowledge of the essentially heterosexual quality of the novel...
...But his work is anatomically and psychologically precise about the cruising life many homosexuals live, and he manages to capture the deliberate camp and self-irony which make that life bearable—while he simultaneously casts over his books a pall of something deeply sorrowful, decadent, and autumnal, as though a Swinburne poem like “The Garden of Proserpine” had come to life in realistic fiction...
...or they could even mask the desire with a condemnation of homosexuality, as the interesting minor novelist E.F...
...Benson did in his British schoolboy tale, David Blaize (1916...
...America, too, seems empty and dying...
...An openly homosexual critic might be able to get away with the claim, much as an old-fashioned Marxist could brand novelwriting a middleclass enterprise without being thought to despise the working class...
...And that absence makes the task of the homosexual novelist extremely difficult...
...His narrating hero fails to fit the rhythms of his life with the expected rhythms of a novel, grows increasingly isolated from any part in the continuing human story, and (despite his superficial stabs at selfunderstanding) remains incapable of making intelligible the fact that he has grown old, ugly, and unwanted...
...THE ABSENCE OF SOCIAL STRUCTURES FROM AMERICA’S GAY SUBCULTURE MAKES THE TASK OF THE HOMOSEXUAL NOVELIST DIFFICULT...
...Since homosexuals obviously have written about their experience, any effort to locate the form’s origin in heterosexuality must only seem an effort to strip homosexuals of the power to write fiction...
...Gay fiction may have been easier to write early in the twentieth century, before D.H...
...In the United States . . . nobody seems happy anymore,” he explains about his country...
Vol. 1 • August 1996 • No. 48
