“Dennis Cooper, God help him, is a born writer,” William Burroughs wrote about the man who has, more than anybody else, come to inherit the subversive tradition most exemplified by the Great Outlaw of American letters. Burroughs gave his cautionary praise based on reading “Frisk,” Cooper’s most infamous and signature work; “God help him” was an eerily prescient choice of words. Burroughs may have been an outlaw, but in truth he may have had it easier than Cooper, who has not blinked through this most nauseating era of political correctness and radical gay self-righteousness. And Big Bad Bill never had a death threat made against him. Dennis Cooper has.
The death threat isn’t that surprising. Cooper is a dangerous writer, both for the pedestrian reader unable to get beyond surface, and for those who like their homosexual literary aesthetics cozily free of anything resembling depth or complexity. Cooper is anything but cozy. Prolific but terse, simultaneously poetic and laconic, he is a profoundly original American visionary, the most important transgressive literary artist since Burroughs. America being America, transgressive literary artists are not a highly appreciated commodity. Not surprisingly, particularly for a writer who has been influenced by European literary traditions, Cooper is more respected in Europe and even the Middle East; his books have been translated into 12 languages, including Hebrew. In England, his books are bestsellers.
All this is not to say that he isn’t appreciated here — in spite of what one might think reading the occasional Ameri-phobic European literary critic, who often feels the need to tell us what he thinks we don’t know about our own. The truth is that Dennis Cooper is an American master, and his great subject is American youth culture. George Bataille has certainly had his influence, and Cooper also summons to mind Genet, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, but he is, in the end, himself. He stands alone.
His vision is excoriating, hallucinatory, viciously funny. As with the work of the painter Francis Bacon, to really appreciate the effects Cooper creates, you have to be willing to look beyond the immediate “horror hospital” (to borrow a title from Cooper), to what Bacon once referred to as “sensation without the boredom of its conveyance.” There you will reach the pure, undistilled essence of Cooper’s achievement, which is rigorously literate, multilayered, brimming with intellect. He is a lover of language, and he uses it with the precision of a sculptor using a drill. Sentence for sentence, there are very few writers as perversely pitch-perfect.
The overriding obsession of anyone in a Dennis Cooper novel might best be summed up in his first, “Closer”: “He couldn’t decide if he wanted to draw David, fuck him, beat him up, or fall in love with him.” Add “or kill him,” and this would be a synthesis of everything Cooper has been working toward, unceasingly, since. Far from being a narrow vision, this accommodates everything there is: art, sex, the violence of life and the finality of death.
Probably the most subversive and delicious thing about Cooper is his genius at working humor into the most outlandish scenarios. Ziggy, the zoned-out teenage hero of “Try,” screams at his ass-hungry lech of a foster father, “If you loved me you wouldn’t rim me while I’m crying.” Watching a porn-movie sex scene between adolescent Chris and Don Haggarty, a resentful adult dwarf, the narrator of “Guide” has this observation: “The porn had this strange, silly, magical … I don’t know, charm. I guess it was mostly the fact that I was watching a dwarf, with all his fairy-tale baggage.” And what could be a more succinct description of oral sex than this? “The sensation’s indescribable, like however the opposite of being tortured to death might feel.”
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I had the opportunity to meet and talk with Cooper when he was recently in New York to attend a two-day symposium on his work at New York University. He is someone who seems to inspire devotion. “Beautiful: The Writing of Dennis Cooper,” an exhibit of his manuscripts, scrapbooks, first editions, photographs and letters in NYU’s Fales Library, features countless letters written to him, including those from writers such as Edmund White, Allen Ginsberg, Kathy Acker, all professing their awe. (There are a few naked Polaroids from gushing boy fans as well.)
In person he is tall, slim, still boyish and strikingly handsome, looking 10 years younger than his 47 years. While everyone seems to have a preconceived notion of what Cooper must be like based on his books, he is actually rather lovely — unassuming, polite, self-effacing and utterly candid.
The facts of Cooper are these: He was born in Pasadena, Calif., in 1953, and grew up wealthy as the son of Clifford Cooper, who owned a company that built missiles for NASA. (One of Cooper’s memories of adolescence was his parents’ having their good friends Dick and Pat Nixon over to the house.) His family life was a deeply alienating experience. “I had severe problems with my parents. They divorced when I was quite young, and the divorce proceedings took forever, and my parents did not behave well during that period. The fact that parents barely exist in the books is probably because I escaped mine as completely as I could beginning in my teenaged years. I crashed at friends’ houses a lot, and tried to distance myself from the hell going on in my family home, and, ever since, I’ve had a very distanced relationship to my family.”
Considering that the 1960s were his formative years, I asked Cooper why his work reflects virtually no aspect of this time. “Hippiedom held little appeal for me, though the freedom it celebrated certainly appealed to me, and the fact that drugs were seen as tools of enlightenment certainly influenced me, and I took advantage of the plethora of drugs that were around. And rock culture was my culture, though I don’t know if that’s specific to the period — maybe psychedelic music influenced my thinking about form, since my writing has a kind of psychedelic feel, maybe.”
But it was punk that took hold of Cooper. “That was the most important, the first culture I felt aligned with without reservation. Disco, of course, I despised, and its grip on gay culture of the ’70s and onward undoubtedly helped create the deep alienation I feel and have always felt from gay-centric culture.”
He attended Pasadena City College and Pitzer College of Claremont Colleges, lived as an expatriate in London and followed a boyfriend to Amsterdam. Then he lived for a while in New York, before relocating permanently to Los Angeles. In the ’70s he founded the influential Little Caesar magazine, later to become Little Caesar Press, and published more than two dozen chapbooks of his poetry, as well as the work of, among others, Bob Flanagan, Tim Dlugos and David Trinidad.
His early short fiction has been collected in “Wrong,” but it is in “Closer,” his first novel, that Cooper began to explore in earnest the true nature of his obsessions, in the form of a walking enigma named George Miles. George Miles was his teenage infatuation — a kid three years younger, with extreme psychological problems, who became Cooper’s closest friend, and the inspiration for his five-novel cycle. Briefly, they were lovers. Even when Cooper lost touch with Miles, and Miles had disappeared, his emotional hold over Cooper was profound. In “Closer,” he is the victim of a violent mutilation, which he survives, only to vanish from the other books — until the last.
In “Period,” published this year and the last novel of the cycle, Miles’ memory lingers. “Period” is an elegy to the nature of obsessive love, the need to feel. It is also a memoriam: Before embarking on the writing of “Period,” Cooper discovered that the real George Miles had killed himself years before. In the history of great artistic inspiration there is another muse named George — George Dyer, the model-lover of Francis Bacon, whose genius, like Miles’, lay in being the object of passions both physical and aesthetic. It was George Dyer who haunted Bacon long after Dyer’s own suicide; likewise it is George Miles who is the locus of Cooper’s genius.
In “Period,” there is a character named Walker Crane, author of a book called “Period,” described by one of the characters as “a messed-up human being … not cool and evil like you’d think.” Later, he’s described as “an evil man. He made George get completely dependent on him, and then he dumped him, and exploited him for that novel, the fucking psychopath.” I asked Cooper about this. “I was poking fun at my reputation” — the idea that Cooper himself is not nearly as evil or cool as his image might suggest. (In fact, “Dennis” is described in “Guide” as being “sort of a wuss.”)
But perhaps, insofar as Miles is concerned, there is also an element of guilt involved: Cooper used Miles’ passivity and psychological traumas as stimulation. At the same time, he had taken care of Miles, before he disappeared for good, leaving Cooper with this need to reinvent Miles in fiction. “I couldn’t remember who the real George was. The real George got lost.”
Then came “Frisk.” It was the publication of this second novel in 1991 that led to the death threat. As death threats go, it was a fairly ludicrous one — more a piece of guerrilla theater from a half-baked queer splinter group. Cooper was due to give a reading from “Frisk” at San Francisco’s A Different Light Bookstore when he was handed a leaflet — a group calling itself the “Hookers Undivided Liberation Army” proclaimed that “Dennis Cooper Must Die! Must Die! Must Die!” (The flier is on view in the “Beautiful” exhibit at NYU.) His crime? Murdering young men, and glorifying his activities in a novel called “Frisk.”
I said I thought the death threat was more a stunt for attention — a mock fatwa — than a real threat, and Cooper concurred. “Of course it was. I realized it once I spoke to the guy responsible. When ‘Frisk’ came out, it was the heat of the moment — ACT UP had kind of become Queer Nation, Jeffrey Dahmer had just gotten arrested, ‘American Psycho’ had just come out. There was a lot of hatred directed at me.”
No doubt, it is his use of real names — specifically his own in “Frisk,” as a character who commits savage murders in his head — that has allowed those prone to outrage to indict him for crimes he never committed, beyond the crime of creative license. Did he mean it as a deliberate provocation, a kind of self-indictment?
“Using mine was both a provocation and a self-indictment. It was also a way to introduce the idea that authorship is an issue in the work, suggesting parallels between myself and the fictional Dennis, and emphasizing and blurring the distinction between fiction and the truth, fantasy and reality in ‘Frisk’ and ‘Guide,’ both of which play with the idea of what is ‘true’ and ‘confessional’ and what is ‘made up’ and ‘manipulative.’ As for using the other real names, it depends on the situation. Sometimes I used real names for the above reason, and sometimes I used them to ground the work in the real world of the readers in order to give it a sanity, and sometimes I used the names as an homage to the real people I referenced, and sometimes they were all of these things at once.”
A film of “Frisk,” released in 1995, only added to the misunderstanding. By the end of the book, it is clear that the grotesque, cartoonlike butchery is a fiction. In the movie, this element was deliberately blurred. When the film was shown for the first time in San Francisco, a furor erupted — people yelled at the screen, there were walkouts and indignant press write-ups, with accusations such as “virulently anti-gay” and “internalized homophobia” being leveled. What might have made the difference — at least to Cooper — was a statement he prepared to demonstrate his displeasure at the director’s decision to depart from Cooper’s original intentions.
“The novel is about the difference between what is possible in one’s fantasy life, and what is possible in one’s real life,” Cooper wrote. “It tries, in various ways, to seduce the readers into believing a series of murders are real, then announces itself as a fiction, hopefully leaving readers responsible for whatever pleasure they took in believing the murders were real … I question very strongly the decision in the film to leave the question of whether the murders were real or not up in the air. Murder is only erotic in the imagination, if at all. … By choosing to represent only the surface of my novel, by using my novel to eroticize sadistic sexual acts against innocent people in an uncomplex way, the film perpetuates a common, simplistic reading of my work, and this concerns me.” Though the filmmakers promised to read Cooper’s statement after the film’s screening in San Francisco, they reneged; he has since disavowed it.
Other offers have come Cooper’s way to turn his books into movies, but he has resisted them, partly because he likes the fact that books are books, with an integrity of their own. The art of fiction is one that Cooper believes in, and one that he fearlessly pursues, sticking to the same subject matter and themes that have made his reputation. Now, with “Period,” the George Miles cycle — five short, dense novels — is complete, and taken as one long book, it is as significant a contribution to American literature as “Naked Lunch.” As such, the publication of the last book in this cycle is a watershed moment. But Cooper himself is ready to move on, planning a book based on Kip Kinkel, the 15-year-old Oregon teenager who opened fire at high school after shooting his parents to death in their home. The book represents a departure for him. “I’m not going to access my psychosis. There will be no sexuality at all, no abuse beyond what every teenager goes through.”
Provocation in one form or another defines Cooper’s work, but it does not necessarily define him. He has a “ton of straight friends,” including teenagers who find him through his books — “then their parents find my books, and all hell breaks loose.” He has friends over for a weekly “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” viewing. And then there’s his 9-year-old nephew Cody, with whom he shares a mutual admiration society. “He’s extremely attached to me because I play Nintendo with him all the time. I really love him.”
It was my therapist who suggested, after bearing witness to my despair about the end of my 12-year relationship, that I attend a Co-Dependents Anonymous meeting, a 12-step group geared toward those who “enable” addictive behavior in others. Because CODA is not about some specific behavior or substance abuse, it also serves as a catch-all for those who have become excessively dependent on something more amorphous than heroine or gambling. I’ve never taken a 12-step approach to my own life (I’ve never been an alcohol or drug abuser), but I did become dependent in love. I guess a 12-year relationship will do that to a person.
I was a little leery about subjecting myself to the 12-step way. I see many gay men — having suffered the fallout of obsessive-compulsive behavior and various addictions — who have turned to 12-step groups like a new drug, and sometimes the effects are as numbing as any pill they could pop in at any club. In an attempt to remove pain completely from their lives, they walk around like Stepford wives with pecs. They don’t drink, smoke or do drugs. They smile a lot, and hug one another, like the Teletubbies. They are the new gay fascists — skeptical of irony, downright hostile to whatever constituted a “bad attitude,” yet still looking for the supreme male specimen. (That never changes.) Luckily they’re in the minority of gay men.
But the bottom line was that I was suffering. I needed — and was willing — to experience the shock of recognition, so I went. For the record, this meeting wasn’t full of gay Stepfords; these were men who were feeling all kinds of things, including an inordinate degree of negativity and isolation, and by the end I felt lightheaded from a mixture of empathy and despondency. But there was a moment of levity: During the meeting one of the participants wryly mentioned a new book of self-help he’d bought, called “Finding The Boyfriend Within,” and even in a roomful of co-dependent gay men in pain, this was greeted with a hearty, knowing laugh. Apparently, more than a few had been down this path before.
Gay men in particular seem to be ideal customers for the self-improvement trade, whether they’re self-anesthetizing types or smart people simply struggling with the external pressures of homophobia as well as the internal pressures of maintaining body and soul in an extremely unforgiving queer world. Books like “The Principles: The Gay Man’s Guide to Getting (And Keeping) Mr. Right” and “How to Survive Your Own Gay Life” reflect this. “Finding the Boyfriend Within,” the newest addition to the canon, was written by Brad Gooch, former model. For those familiar with Gooch’s work, you could see this coming from the Fire Island Ferry, and revel in the delirious preciousness of it all. The author of one respectable book (“City Poet,” a biography of Frank O’Hara), this is also the same man who only a few years ago wrote a novel called “The Golden Age of Promiscuity,” with its cover art a glory hole. Not one to lag behind the times, Gooch has now embraced the healing power of aloneness. (That for many gay men there is a direct corollary between promiscuity and being alone is one of the many ironies Gooch glosses over.) Whatever you want to say about the age of promiscuity, it wasn’t golden, and neither is celibacy, but unfortunately those are too often the only choices gay men give themselves.
That Brad Gooch would finally write a book that is a paean to self-love is too perfect. As one of the customer reviews at Amazon.com commented, “I always knew Gooch had this book in him … that’s why I’ve always hated him.” The book’s first 33 words tell you all you need to know about the lucky man: “Here’s the situation: I’m in my mid-40s. Everyone says I look 10 years younger, more or less. I’m gay, but extremely flexible and historically not too worried, ashamed, or complicated about my predilections.” What a man! Not only does the world acknowledge his eternal youth, he’s “extremely flexible” to boot. (What, exactly, does being “extremely flexible” mean, you might wonder? It usually means that you’ve slept with a woman once in college, accidentally, when drunk.)
But the hilarity doesn’t end there. By Page 16, Gooch is being pummeled with praise at a party. He meets another guest who tells him how great looking he is, what a good writer, such a nice guy, how he sees his picture in gossip columns. Gooch relates this to us so that we know the wide-reaching effects of his charm, talent and fame, but he does it in such a way that it’s meant to look anecdotal. Next he’s told snidely by his admirer that without a boyfriend, “it’s all worth nothing.” This little passage, like the opening gem, is a cagey bit of narcissism masquerading as reportage. We’re supposed to take this as a lesson that even Gooch with all his good fortune can suffer the insensitivities of a world that devalues singledom.
By the time you get to Page 19, Gooch has repaired to his fabulous SoHo apartment (later we’re told just how wonderful it is). He looks at the general mess of dirty laundry and scattered newspapers, and wonders: What would he do if he were expecting a romantic evening with someone?
“So I decided to experiment. I … made the bed. Lit my yellow Museum of Modern Art vase-sized candle. Turned the light down to an amber glow. Prepared a cup of warm milk sprinkled with nutmeg and cinnamon. Put on a CD of Franz Liszt’s late piano pieces. Eventually I drifted off into a cloud of sleep …” At this point, you could stop reading; a happy ending has been found, with Gooch lying in his own buff arms, as it was always meant to be. But no; what then follows is a series of “awareness exercises” designed for the average gay man to get in touch with the beautiful, intelligent, sensual stud within — just as Gooch has. These exercises include listing the pluses and minuses of having a boyfriend, listing the qualities of your outer “package” as well as your inner qualities (Gooch decides his outer package includes his package, his SoHo apartment and his fabulous writing career), and taking yourself out on a date. The book concludes with a quote from the 13th century Persian poet Rumi: “Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere/They’re in each other all along.”
That Gooch is both handsome and shameless doesn’t make him a liar. There are just enough homey truths in his book to comfort any number of world-weary individuals looking to be told that the secret of happiness is in embracing yourself. You’re OK, really — it’s just that you’re underappreciated, mostly by yourself, and that once you learn to love yourself, the right guy will come along to love you, too.
Maybe.
Gooch is smart to qualify his “findings” with this one word, and this is, of course, the caveat. The sad truth is that no matter how many goddamn cups of warm milk you might pour yourself, or no matter how many times you listen to the Brandenburg concertos before drifting off to sleep, there are no guarantees that true love and an end to loneliness will follow. Behind his sensual face and his chicken-soup-for-the-soul approach, Gooch ends up coming off as a cold-hearted cynic.
He exploits the emotional dissatisfactions of other gay men, the vast majority of whom don’t enjoy the privileges of being an ex-model or a glamorous writer. What could be easier, and more condescending, than telling people that if you’re just good to yourself, then good things will follow? That’s his message, in 171 sugar-coated pages: The only person you have in the end is yourself. Twenty-one dollars, please.
No doubt the book is being sold with Gooch’s chiseled mug on the cover to lure unsuspecting souls into purchasing it, and apparently this works: At Amazon.com, some of the readers’ observations on the book were based on its cover alone. “Brad Gooch is cute … an attractive spokesperson for the gay community and that is important.” And from someone calling himself loveholy: “A great read!!!! And if I dare to say this … this guy is Gorgeous!! He exudes such spirituality and those warm eyes …” Just imagine the sales if he had posed nude for the cover.
After reading Gooch’s guide to self-love, I realize I’m a lousy boyfriend within — all I want to do is have sex with myself, roll over and sleep, and the worst part is: I don’t mind. I guess I’m just treating myself like the cheap date I know I am.
I‘d always pondered, from the safe haven of a partnership of several years, just what possessed certain gay men to behave as they did. Why the flitting from one failed relationship to another, why the obsession with bodies, why the constant pursuit of sex and the feverish calculation of smoldering stares from strangers on the street? Why was nothing enough? There seemed never enough sex to be had, nor a sufficient number of weights to be lifted, never enough admiration to be received. At the same time, none of it ever really mattered. No one seemed any happier, any less depressed or dissatisfied, for all the scores scored and pounds lost. How fast can you run on a treadmill going nowhere? I smugly asked.
And then, my relationship of a dozen years was suddenly over, 12
years apparently being a benchmark figure, the double digits either amazing
or appalling my friends. Those who wanted to be in a relationship were stunned that any two men could be together so long. Those who professed they had no use for long-term commitment waxed condescending about how two men could be together so long. Which is why, when I was finally, irrevocably single, I felt like an unmitigated failure: Why couldn’t I make this work? What would people say — especially my family, whom I had finally convinced that our relationship was as valid as the marriages of all the fucking nieces, nephews and cousins all around us?
In the end, there was nothing I could do; there I was, a single man again. So much of the validation I received from being part of a couple was now gone that I felt like demoted royalty, stripped of the “highness” title. It wasn’t just a question of status, however — it was also comfort. So much of my life had been lived in cave-like zones of connubial bliss that I never wanted to question what wasn’t working. I was stoned on domestic partnership.
“Get over it, Nancy,” was basically what my well-meaning friend Tom told me on my birthday a year ago, when denial was still very much part of my day-to-day existence. Wounded, I still had the wherewithal to respond to my friend, famous for cashing in his chips when the game got
dicey, that he — who’d never been in a relationship longer than two years — had no right to question my mourning.
“Six years,” said Marlane, my friend who had been through a painful divorce. “It takes six years to get over a 12-year marriage.” To her, it was not simply a mathematical equation — divide the number of years in half and that’s your grief time — but a question of the feelings involved. But for many of my gay male friends, such feelings did not enter into the equation. The fact that it took a heterosexual woman to validate my grief was not lost on me.
Of course, I have gay male friends who are capable of offering the same kind of comfort. But I’ve noticed that often gay men are the least equipped to empathize. Trained to not care, we place ourselves in a rigid existence of emotional self-denial. Outwardly, we might seem like the most extravagant of hedonists, denying ourselves nothing, neither drugs nor booze nor steroids nor sex. Inwardly, however, we lead lives of self-denial with a monastic stoicism.
“Saw you in J’s. You and I stared at each other for a half hour, then I left. Wished I’d asked for your name.” So reads an ad in the personals of one of the free gay weeklies. It speaks volumes about emotional self-deprivation: Give attitude first, pine later, in true Barbara Stanwyck style. It’s safer to pay for the placement of an ad and print your yearnings than to deal with those feelings in real time. In the same way, when the guy flippantly referring to “my future ex-boyfriend” with a Holly Golightly shrug is not 20 or 25 — the right age for this kind of brazen attitude — but 35 or 40, I cringe at his self-delusion. You really have to wonder what’s wrong with a guy who talks of disposing of lovers like used condoms — or why a gay man would consider this kind of behavior toward another gay man acceptable.
The bad behavior of most gay men toward each other results from a primal form of self-loathing. But it’s difficult to recognize. It can be shrouded in the guise of high standards, the great search for the unattainable. “I deserve the best and I won’t settle for anything else.” Many gay men attempt to make themselves unattainable through the body beautiful. They become more body-conscious than 11-year-old bulimic girls. Instead of bingeing and purging, they deny themselves by pumping up to the size of a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day float, rejecting any and all lesser physical specimens, forgetting that youth is not forever, that bodies betray us and that nothing evens the score like age.
Such a banal embrace of delusion finds its apogee in butch culture, which excludes everyone who’s not hairy and/or hyper-masculine and embraces a punishing Über-male image that caricatures manhood, usually with a large dose of S/M thrown in. And who’s the punishing top? “Daddy,” the hairiest one, the one most eager to administer the belt or the dildo or the fist. To these top and bottom queers, the only way of being a man is to play at pain, over and over. To themselves and each other, they’ll never be anything more than faggots, so they keep on playing the game.
Ironically, gay men pursue sex with a constancy and fervor unrivaled by any other humans because they want to be rejected: They need the daily fix of humiliation that so often stems from seeking out intimate contact. It’s not the casual sex or the seedy environment that creates the debasement. My friend Bill, for example, has cheerfully been down in the “skank” (as he calls it, appropriately) of basement booths in porn bookstores. “Every once in a while you’re separated from the universe by a plywood door, and it’s heaven on earth,” Bill said. “But most of the time we go to these places because we feel bad.”
This is the daily interactive trafficking in self-loathing, and gay men have turned it inside out, creating an exquisite origami of disgust. I know
someone who takes numbers from admiring men on the street precisely because he doesn’t believe he’s worth the time of day. He needs the flattery and fawning, but because he assumes such strangers are fools for finding him attractive, he takes their numbers with no intention of calling.
Having been married, I’m cautious about going through it again, not only because it was so painful but because it was so worth it. The idea of being alone suddenly seems less solitary than I’d imagined. I’m certain it’s less
lonely than scouring jerk-off joints and bars looking for a
nameless fuck every night. An occasional fuck, or the more than occasional one, in a skanky room among men you don’t want to spend your life with, is an experience I wouldn’t deny myself if I wanted it, and I have wanted it. And when you really want it, it is, as my friend Bill says, “heaven on earth.” It’s when you don’t and you’re in that skanky room that you’re in trouble.
I’d rather be alone for life than play the gay games of ritual debasement and self-loathing. The single most difficult thing to accept is that after all gay men have been through together, we’re still often our own worst enemies.
“When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood. People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless, loquacious father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and all the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years.” Thus wrote Frank McCourt in his bestselling memoir “Angela’s Ashes.” Well before that book went on to sell millions of copies and win the Pulitzer Prize, it was a foregone conclusion that, as McCourt asserted, “nothing can compare,” either qualitatively or quantitatively, to the unique brand of woe known as Irish suffering. It has long been accepted that the Irish have cornered the market on misery.
Having read McCourt’s book and steeped myself in the rich tradition of 20th century Irish literature from John Millington Synge to James Joyce to Edna O’Brien and beyond, I was taken aback by the high life I saw in Dublin when I visited there last winter. The city seemed so sharply opposed to its representation in literature, even to the way it’s portrayed in much of recent Irish fiction. The joint was positively jumping — you could almost mistake it for certain sections of New York or London. (To me, nothing signifies yuppiedom more than fussy cappuccino bars, and I was surprised at how many of those I saw.) What I witnessed is the Ireland of today: confident, with a flush economy and newfound wealth. The Young Turks cruising the Temple Bar district on their cell phones, driving Jags and pumping the city’s co-op markets into the stratosphere are light-years away from the traditional image of Irish men and women as the downtrodden victims of British imperialism. Granted, this was Dublin, not Limerick. But the same held true for the less “sophisticated” cities I visited, like Cork and Galway. Modernity had come home to roost all over Ireland, bringing a new can-do image to brush up against the old, put-upon one. Ireland is now a land of players.
Nevertheless, the classic image of Irish suffering persists, supported by a solid basis in history. The Irish have suffered, as few other peoples have, from famine, civil war and occupation. You could even say that pain is the Irish way of life. They don’t really need a reason to suffer, but they do have an explanation for why so many of them endure it: God. For Irish Catholics — the fold that brought forth James Joyce, Edna O’Brien and Frank McCourt — suffering has always been presented as something offered up to God, a sort of insurance policy to increase your likelihood of getting into heaven. Naturally, Irish Catholic writers, no matter how lapsed, have worked this notion into their art, and for good reason: It’s great material, even when an artist chooses to reject it. Joyce bridled at the way his countrymen made a religious fetish out of pain; for him, the ultimate act of betrayal and self-preservation, both artistic and psychological, was to leave.
Add being female to the mix, and you have Edna O’Brien. As McCourt wrote, traditionally the Irish woman has been seen as both pious and defeated; very little challenged that image until O’Brien began (scandalously) producing her novels in the early 1960s. The women in her “The Country Girls Trilogy” heard the siren call of the city, shook off the fetters of their Catholic girlhoods and went wandering. O’Brien saw her first nine works banned in her homeland — the price she, as the dominant Irish female novelist of her time, paid for bucking accepted notions of Irish womanhood. No longer was the typical Irish literary heroine a woman like Pegeen, keening over the loss of her Playboy of the Western World by “pulling her shawl over her head and breaking out into wild lamentations,” as Synge described her. But the lives of O’Brien’s women characters were filled with a new kind of suffering, the loneliness and isolation that came with defying their Catholic roots. Kate and Baba, the central figures in O’Brien’s trilogy, were creatures with an overtly sexual makeup, prepping for the pains of freedom.
The Kates and Babas in O’Brien’s fiction have given birth to the likes of Nuala O’Faolain, author of the 1998 memoir “Are You Somebody: An Accidental Memoir of A Dublin Woman” and representative of the new Ireland — a high-profile, well-educated, widely-traveled career women with assorted lovers, no children and a life in the city (usually London, certainly nothing less than Dublin). A journalist and TV producer, O’Faolain frames her book as the portrait of a young feminist, and she give us a sign of what the literature of a sleek, successful Ireland might be like. The vision is strangely dispiriting.
O’Faolain’s story carries the reader through the last three decades of painful growth, from her early traumas trying to avoid pregnancy and getting sidetracked by a series of emotionally (and sometimes physically) violent affairs with men (with time out for a lesbian interlude)until the ’90s, when O’Faolain discovers the joy and freedom of living alone, in her own house of splendid isolation (to borrow from a title of one of O’Brien’s works). Yet after O’Brien’s naked, wounded explorations of the female psyche, O’Faolain’s personal story of New Age transcendence, while perhaps just the thing for today’s Oprah Book Club audience, seems flat. Perhaps self-empowerment just doesn’t have the resonance of artfully drawn pain.
Not that the new Irish writing is entirely free from pain. Now, however it’s a thoroughly modern form of suffering — the kind of contemporary distress that can afflict anyone, anywhere. Flip through some recent Irish novels and you’ll find the trials that afflict all humanity: domestic violence (“The Woman Who Walked Into Doors” by Roddy Doyle); fraternal loss (“Waiting for the Healer” by Eamonn Sweeney); sexual trauma (“Breakfast on Pluto” by Patrick McCabe); existential angst (“Crowe’s Requiem” by Mike McCormack). These books present wrenching dilemmas but not ones that are particularly Irish. You’re much more likely to read about chemical depression and alcoholism than abortion or living through a civil war. This isn’t to say that these writers have neglected the tensions that arise when the new pushes up against the old. In “The Dead School,” a recent novel by McCabe, a teacher who once considered joining the priesthood is riled by the new attitudes overtaking the forbidding provincial Catholic culture he has always cherished and considered the bedrock of his life. He sees himself, and the old Ireland that was his solace, being dragged into a future he’s terrified by — the future that I saw for myself when I was in Ireland.
The well-dressed Dublin yuppies hanging out at the trendy film centers and restaurants make it clear that they have no time for the old troubles. The Catholic church, the British occupation, the IRA, poverty — all the old sources of suffering have begun to fade, and national misery is becoming increasingly outmoded. The next generation of Irish writers will have to turn their attention to the problems that arise from inside the minds and hearts of a people who are now among the winners on this planet. Connoisseurs of the old style of misery must turn to the Albanians or the Serbs, depending on the events of any recent week. There seems to be no more Ireland for the Irish to escape from.
Part memoir, part biography, part gay literary criticism, part journalism, “Eminent Maricones” is Jaime Manrique’s celebration of himself and his place in the pantheon of homosexual Hispanic letters. For the author to include his own experiences alongside those of two celebrated Latin American writers (Manuel Puig and Reinaldo Arenas) and one Spanish icon (Federico Garcma Lorca) may sound like hubris, but it makes perfect sense within the structure of this slim but significant volume.
The book is a deft combination of six essays written independently of one another and published over the course of eight years in periodicals ranging from Christopher Street to the Washington Post Book World. Manrique knew Puig and Arenas personally, and he weaves his relationships with them in with the fabric of his own life. The book begins with a jaunty chapter of childhood reminiscence in which the author describes the complexities, both erotic and social, of his origins: He was the illegitimate child of a Colombian aristocrat, who already had a family, and a peasant woman who, after her rich lover deserted her, relied on such varied jobs as running a boardinghouse and turning tricks.
Manrique tells his story with a tanginess befitting the exotic locales of his adolescence: a banana plantation his father gave his mother in order to provide her with a steady income; the Colombian capital, Bogota and, later, Tampa, where he discovered the delirious allure of literature. He filters nothing out of his forthright narrative — neither watching from a corner of the bedroom, aroused, as his mother made love to one of her various men, nor the pain of a testicular infection he got from fucking donkeys with his uncle.
As an aimless high-school senior in a musty Tampa public library, Manrique happened on Manuel Puig’s novel “Betrayed by Rita Hayworth.” In New York City a decade or so later, he found himself in a fiction workshop at Columbia University taught by the Argentine expatriate. Manrique was as taken with Puig’s fragile-diva persona as he had been by the writer’s unique and important novels, “with their mixture of movie lore, tangos and boleros, radical politics, Freudianism, and camp.” He’s at his most eloquent describing the influence of this seminal writer on his own work and on his life.
He’s also superb when he’s championing Reinaldo Arenas. The Cuban novelist chronicled the horrors of the Castro Revolution before he finally escaped to New York City, where Manrique came to know him; he died early of AIDS. Though Arenas isn’t as well-known in this country as Puig is, he’s an equally significant member of the Latin American pantheon.
The author’s examination of Lorca, on the other hand, is a bit rhetoric-bound and obvious in its deconstruction of the great Spanish poet and playwright’s “internalized homophobia.” Certainly Manrique has a point, and he supports his claims well, but not much of his analysis is news. Nor is what it exposes unique to what he calls “Spanish society.”
But the bigger picture is here, and Manrique’s overall point is well taken. “Maricon” — Spanish for “faggot” — is a word that, Manrique writes, denotes “a person not to be taken seriously, an object of derision,” adding, “The three writers who take up most of this book were maricones — homosexual men whose destiny was their sexual orientation.” He celebrates the “courageous audacity” of these writers, “who defy the definition of what a maricon is supposed to be,” and at the same time he sings himself. And does an honorable job of it.
