The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered (21 page)

In October 1984 I followed Peyrefitte’s narrative down to Sicily. Fersen and Nino go there to visit the Greek sites at Agrigento and Syracuse — where they also pay their respects at the grave of the boy-loving poet August von Platen (1796-1835) — and they tarry long enough in Taormina for Fersen to write a short novel, Une Jeunesse, about a French painter who falls in love with a younger man — in Taormina. Like all other affluent tourists of their day, they visit the studio of the photographer Wilhelm von Gloeden (1856-1931), famed for his evocative images of Taorminan boys, generally naked, in classical locations and pseudo-classical poses. I had been to Sicily several times, but never to Taormina, which had a reputation for touristic chic that I was not interested in investigating. I found the town full of coupled German clones, with tailored jeans and primly trimmed moustaches. Although they gave the Corso a pleasantly gay atmosphere in the evenings, this was not the kind of gayness one would travel so far south to find.

Among the postcards of Taormina’s famous views — over the straits to Calabria, across the proscenium of the Greco-Roman theatre to Mount Etna — some shops still sell monochrome postcards of von Gloeden’s photographs of local boys. When I spent a long time in one such shop, making my selection, the proprietor, an old woman perhaps in her 80s, came out from behind her counter and led me by the hand down the street to the building that had been the photographer’s studio. It was with real warmth and pride that she said of him, ‘He was the first tourist. We owe everything to him.’ I still use one of those postcards as my bookmark in the Peyrefitte novel. Fersen himself may have chatted with these very boys, while they waited to be stripped and posed.

I no longer have my French edition of
L’exilé de Capri
. I suppose I lost it on one of my moves between Vietri and Nottingham, where I now live and work; but I prefer to think that someone stole it — or felt compelled to borrow it without asking me, too embarrassed to acknowledge a depth of interest. Perhaps it was one of my students, seeking an extra-curricular supplement to what I had already taught him; sentimentally, I hope so. Re-reading the novel now, in English, in England, I feel far removed from its center of gravity, distant in both space and time, but still close in sensibility (to use an unfashionable term).

When he settles on Capri, Fersen buys the promontory beneath the Villa Jovis and builds himself a beautiful home, the Villa Lysis. (Lysis is the boy in Plato with whom Socrates discusses the nature of friendship.) Here he brings Nino Cesarini, a 15-year-old laborer he has picked up in Rome. He has Nino educated and sculpted — nude, of course. And so begins a life-long idyll of sacred estheticism and profane love. Although Fersen makes several long trips abroad — to north Africa, for instance, and to Ceylon — all he has to do is stay put on Capri and, eventually, the whole of the queer world will turn up on his doorstep.

This is, therefore, a book full of queer cultural celebrities, some of them greatly admired by Peyrefitte, but some just shown making fools of themselves. With Fersen we encounter writers, artists, musicians — Jean Cocteau, Camille Saint-Saëns, Norman Douglas, Renée Vivien, Nathalie Barney, Jean Lorrain, André Gide, the scions of the Ballets Russes — along with an assortment of aristocrats and riff-raff from all over Europe. Some of them are hiding from scandals at home; others generate fresh scandals that will follow them back.

Peyrefitte offers us a version of early 20
^th
century history in which all of the world seems queer. It is a vision of sybaritic privilege, doubtless distasteful to many, in which indulgence in the arts looks oddly like an eighth deadly sin. To be sure, reading
The Exile of Capri
is like the most reviled yet most mundane of the solitary vices, offering the temporary pleasure of a dream, without any real or lasting personal connection. A disappointing pleasure, perhaps, but worth indulging in, all the same.

Celestial Arts, 1988

Bill Brent

Paul Reed published three novels over a span of 16 years. While he completed and published work in other genres for multiple publishers in the 12-year hiatus between his second and third novels – journals, short fiction, nonfiction; even a whimsical meditation on the respective virtues of cats versus dogs – I glean that the work he considered most important was his book-length fiction. As with so many veterans of the epidemic, Paul's creative work was impeded by the exigencies of the AIDS crisis, including his own health issues. That he was able to turn this adversity to his advantage, and maintain his prolific and varied output, is testament to his ingenuity and perseverance.

Paul rose to prominence as the first wave of AIDS was claiming the lives and community of many gay Americans. Thus, the reporters and reviewers who brought Paul's work to the public's attention – mostly gay – would have had a strong emotional investment in promoting such work. In that era, promoting the gay movement in general was conducive to job security and the formation of a gay identity. Therefore, it is hard to claim that, with this “gay agenda” (the true agenda of any persecuted group is not predation, but survival), and lacking an historical perspective, any reviews or reports were entirely unbiased. Paul was in the right place at the right time.

More than a quarter century after Paul's first novel was published, enough time has passed to permit a more objective review of his work. I can hardly claim complete objectivity, as I had a personal and professional relationship with the author that spanned nearly a decade. I own a signed collection of his complete works, which he bestowed upon me over the years much as a parent might pass down a collection of family memorabilia to a child. It was a shrewd strategy on Paul's part, who, having witnessed at close range my penchant for subcultural documentation, must have realized the wisdom of gifting me with his 14 volumes. His three journals
(The Q Journal, The Savage Garden,
and
The Redwood Diary)
now strike me as precursors to the well-rendered blog, in their detailing of the day-to-day shifts in consciousness of someone dealing with a life-threatening illness (and, as in
The Q Journal,
a highly unorthodox treatment regimen).

In reviewing these books, and
Longing
in particular, I felt as though I were getting to know for the first time about a part of Paul's life that I had intuited while he was alive, yet which remained largely unknown to me then. While couched in the conventions of fiction, Paul took his settings and plotlines primarily from direct experience. Of his three novels, only
Facing It
relies on research to a significant degree. Paul was an intensely private individual, yet through his works, he reveals his vulnerability and his idealism with remarkable candor.

Above all, Paul was a deeply humanistic author. He expressed his humanism with subtlety and sensitivity to “the spirit of the times,” as Dr. Kiljoy remarks in
Vertical Intercourse,
and that is a remarkable gift indeed.

When we wish to examine the transcendent forces operating beneath the surface of everyday life, it serves us to scrutinize our existence at its most severe and least prosaic level – in a word, survival. This is where Paul's work pays dividends to the astute reader. Let us examine how Paul's choices of character, setting, and conflict point to his underlying intensity and grit, in light of what I consider to be his literature's primary theme: psychic survival in harsh times.

In his novels, Paul describes or alludes to the state of longing to the point of pervasiveness. He even uses
Longing
as the title of his second novel. Longing denotes an absence, a desire for an unattained Other. There may still be hope for attainment, though often there is not. But longing is more painful to bear than hope, which often wears an optimistic, happy face. Likewise, dismissal implies a more final judgment than pessimism, one that often eradicates the object or banishes the concept entirely from consideration. In other words, both positions on the axis are more absolute and penetrating than their more everyday counterparts.

Thus longing is Paul's most haunting idea, one which spans his entire novelistic career. There are glimmers of it even in his debut,
Facing It,
whose very title implies a longing for life before the deadly epidemic. The argument scenes between the parents of Andy, the dying protagonist, demonstrate this battle between longing and dismissal. Edna wants to visit her gay son before he dies, while her husband Chuck, who has long disowned Andy, forbids it:

Even at the time Paul died, he had a new novel-in-progress set in Maui, “longingly” titled
Another Island:

Dismissal manifests variously in Paul's novels, but primarily as refusal to accept people in their totality (e.g., homophobia); and refusal to take others seriously (often by teasing, scolding, or belittling them).

Paul juxtaposes the visciousness of
Longing's
gym queens in chapter five, against the underlying condescension of the straights toward gays in chapter six, for what they judge to be an inferior way of life. Thus he shows the reader how the gym queens got so viscious – because their enclave is the only sure defense against a dismissive if not downright hostile straight world, which offers them little but the anguish of longing:

Of course, the gay ghetto is quite capable of replacing one superficial world with another, as the protagonist realizes soon enough:

Yet the solution to the
Puer Aeternis
dilemma is not simply to snap one's fingers and get over it. The Castro and similar neighborhoods in other large American cities became a gay ghetto not to ensnare those rich enough to afford them, but initially to protect them from an even greater hostility without. However, a constant defense gains no ground. In the end, the inhabitants often turned that hostility inward, via the twin battlements of bitterness and ennui, in their flight from it. Dismissal is nothing if not a desire to travel more lightly.

One can certainly understand this desire to feel less burdened, even at the cost of psychic self-neglect, or the risk of seeming callous in the eyes of others. One side effect of the AIDS epidemic is something that Paul refers to twice in
Vertical Intercourse
as “compassion fatigue.” As the protagonist observes, “It seems that all things, all this, the epidemic, the dying, the renewal, the hope – they are all experienced in some mode of delayed response. They do catch up, but sometimes it takes weeks, or months, or years.”