Archives for 2008

Ed: Edmund White

This big fat book is not for wee Gay people but is a collection of not-very short stories. The editor, Edmund White’s own writing style is ornate, and most of the stories, from America anyway, are over-written. White does not realise that “fine writing” gets in the way of narrative.
In his ‘Introduction’ he mentions the fact that an informal group of Gay (he uses the word to mean simply homosexual males) writers met in New York in th early 1980s. By 1990 most of them were dead or dying, these were men in their twentieSeand thirties in 1980.
Surely this should come across with the force of an explosion? Here, it all passes the reader by: style is everything.
The ornate language of most of the stories from America, not to mention the fact that all of the characters appear to live on air, saps one’s interest. Most of them aren’t especially interesting as stories.
Gore Vidal iSean exception to this, and William Burrough’s The Wild Boys carries the reader along, even though it is nonsense. The wonderfully name Armistead Maupin (who has written Tales of the City, a series of comic novels about San Francisco – yes, AIDSeand all) turns in a good lively story, as is to be expected.
This side of the Atlantic is different, structure is all: E M Forsters Dr Woolacott is beautifully thought-out, and well-written. It is also dead as mutton. The best piece in the book – and by far the shortest! – is Tom Wakefield’s likable slice of life Darts.
This is something of a literary person’s stroke-book and for it’s price you can get three or four honest stroke-books. It’s a book to be requested for the public library shelves, as different individuals will like and respond to different stories. But nobody could possibly like or respond to them all.

Auth: ‘Pickles’

Pub: Penguin
This book consists of 274 pages of text, some with relatively few words. There are fifteen pages of drawings ironically called ‘Plates’, (in the manner of a text-book) presumably also the work of ‘Pickles’.
I read this book in two sittings (and would probably have read it in one if I hadn’t been interrupted), ‘Pickles’ can certainly carry the reader along. I had assumed that it was going to be something good natured like Kate Charlesworth’s Exotic Species or the locally-produced Superdyke. Good-natured Queens is not.
In a Preface to the 1986 edition (it was first published in 1984) ‘Pickles’ writes “… gladness [is not] compulsory …”. Fair enough; but what is to be made of the following (P. 98): “An incestuous relationship with Uncle Brian probably made them what they are, along with a little love from mummy, and too much time spent playing with their sisters’ toySeand friends”? It could be ironic. But irony is something! to be used sparingly, like vinegar. Like vinegar, it should stimulate the taste and appetite – not kill both stone dead.
gain, on page 110, “It is reasonable enough to expect a masculine figure to behave like a man – but watch it walk”. That “it” is alienating: ‘Pickles’ is saying that he is not one of these people. This quotation and the one above comes from a description of Heaven (the London disco). This is where his gallery of queens ends up, after he has paraded them. They are all true-to-life, but ‘Pickles’, who in his 1984 Preface praises the “great queens” “colourful and sensational” challenge to drabness, clearly loaths his characters.
A reviewer, quoted on the back of the book uses the word “dis- relish”, but there is more to it than that. Genuine [self-]hatred is in there too, and so is sentimentalism. “Ben’s diary”, a thread through the whole book, ends in something like fulfillment for young Ben. Two elderly queens in the last few pages regret the past and criticise the present, in particular “rubbing people’s noses in it”. (Queers not being themselves “people”).
This book reads as if it had been written by Quentin Crisp’s reactionary alter-ego run riot. ‘Pickles’ (the vinegary pseudonym is well-chosen) can write brilliantly, but the repeated one-note jars, and is counter-productive. There’s plenty wrong with the commercial gay scene and Gay life in general, but this scab-tearing is futile. There is no sense of people being trapped on the treadmill of commerce, or even just human solidarity: these people are on the same level as the creatures which scuttle about when a stone is turned over.
The cover has a detail from St Mark on the Throne with Saints, …by Titian, or more likely, one of his apprentices. The detail is a picture of St Sebastian. The arrow is clearly sticking out of a rib, the Ilegs are a job-lot, which do not connect with the trunk. The exquisitely handsome face is the image of a semi-hippy boy I used to drool over in the early seventies … but I digress. This book is vile.
[Richard Lyttle]

Auth:David Sweetman
Pub: Harvest Books
The blurb on the [paper]back of this book claims it is "well-written . In the sense that all the facts are in their proper order and it isn’t actually ill-written, this is accurate. But it’s quite pedestrian, especially compared with RenauIt’s own writing, which Sweetman analyses in terms of “deviant sexuality”. .
Despite the fact that he uses words like “gay” (even though on one of its first appearances it is in inverted commas); this being an incident during Mary’s second visit to Greece, in 1962, when, wearying of a search for the distinguished musician Mikis Theodorakis, she insisted on going to a club her (male, straight) hosts considered …notoriouSeand hardly the place for a woman. It was a gay club. It is typical of Sweetman’s approach, on this as on other occasions in his biography he mentions the incident in passing. He is not interested in how, or why a woman in her late fifties, who lived at the other end of a different continent, acquired the knowledge of such an establishment.
This would be quite acceptable if he had not offered the reader interminable information about Mary’s shabby-genteel upbringing. Her mother, Clementine Challans (the name is Huguenot in origin) comes in for a great deal of criticism, but the poor woman only had normal, ordinary, human, faults. A snob, having married a doctor, she had the odd experience of sliding down the social scale. Her husband was not wealthy and could not buy a ‘smart’ practice so they spent most of their married life on the border of London’s East End.
Mrs Challans found the tom-boyish Mary hard to control, and turned to her other child, the more amenable Joyce. The Challans’s refused to divorce, though they argued incessantly. Sweetman places, the responsibility for this at the wife’s door, but Dr Challans’ aloofness (it seems to me) would have vexed Job. Clementine lived to a great age and Joyce nursed her in her last illness.
Mary Renault (she pronouned it Ren-olt: it was taken from a character in a Jacobean play), loved the theatre, but was spectacularly bad at acting, after a number of false starts, simply walked off the street in Oxford, and into the Radcliffe infirmary, saying she wanted to be a nurse. She was 28. She met her lover Julie Mullard, in her first place of work, and remained a professional nurse until taking up residence in South Africa in 1948.
Renault’s literary life is divided by the latter event, she wrote five books before and during the war. Her first was well-received but war-weariness soured the response to the later ones. She dealt with lesbianism in some of them, which, along with the (male) homosexuality dealt with in The Charioteer of 1953 almost put paid to her chances of publication in America.
Her New York publisher, Morrow, were scared by the anti-Gay hysteria raised by Senator Joe McCarthy, and his help-meet, the odious faggot Roy Cohn. Her first "Greek" novel The Last of the Wine was published in 1956 by Parthenon, a smaller imprint than she imagined (she remained over here, with Longmans, until she found she’d been sold to Allan Lane [Penguin] with the rest of their chattels in 1972. She then moved to John Murray). Sweetman implies that it was Parthenon’s marketing that made the Americans take Renault Sun more seriously than the British. The idea that the Yanks might be more perceptive than the Brits doesn’t seem to have crossed his mind.
But it is clear that they were more perceptive and welcoming of a major talent – so was America’s Gay scene, which was purchasing (in great numbers) Mary’s books on the most exulted form of male homosexual love well before Gay Liberation came along.
Sweetman does not ask why a lesbian, brought up in a repressed age (she was nine when the Great War broke out in 1914) should have exaulted (and she did!) in male beauty. There are, from her private letters, lyrical descriptions: of a Xhosa youth, of surfers on the beach near her Cape Province home, and of rioting (!) Zulus. It was the men who attracted her to ballet. There are interesting, but not strong, women in her "hospital novels, but only one genuine central character is female: Eurydike, Alexander the Great’s sister in law, in Funeral Games, her last novel. She is a destructive Kali-like figure.
This is a straightforward chronicle of Renault’s life, her battles, victories … and defeats. He is good on the war-weariness afflicting Europe, during and immediately after, WWII. It and an award of a large amount of money from MGM – drove Mary and Julie Mullard to South Africa. Mary became involved in the anti-Apartheid “Black Sash” movement in the ’50s/’60s, but was accused of being a reactionary in the 70s/80s. This was due to her insistence on the PEN (the international association of writers) Centres in Cape Town – of which she was Honorary President – and Johannesburg not lowering their entrance requirements.
Renault’s imagination dwelt in ancient Hellas (many scholars deemed her the greatest of their company), her dealings with contemporary politics are of little real consequence. Peter Elstob, sent to the RSA by PEN’s International Centre, in London, had been shocked by Renault’s attitude when he met her at the very start of his tour. He wasn’t so sure that he had all the answers by the end of it. The Xhosa and Zulu loathed each other, Black and Cape Coloured had problems relating, the two White tribes were at odds. Renault realised, after a while, that many Anglos in “Black Sash” were motivated by distaste (or worse) for the Boers, rather than a commitment to liberal values. She was quite right in refusing to patronise Black and Coloured writers by allowing PEN to lower its’ standards in South Africa.
[Sean McGouran]

Edited by David MARCUS

Pub: Martello Press
This collection of stories, edited by a man who surely haSean encyclopaedic knowledge of the modem Irish short story, proves rather conclusively (I fear) that alternative sexualities were not a major concern of Iish authors.
I found the first item, Sean O Faolain’s How to Write a Short Story rather unpleasant, indeed anti-Gay, and rather awkwardly written. William Trevor’s Torridge iSean oddity in this setting. All of the characters are of the English public-school type. The story is well constructed, but hardly life-enhancing. (I realise that this collection is not liberationist agitation, but surely the fact that most
of the stories are down-beat is relevant to a review of the first such collection?) .
I will deal with the “well-made” traditional stories fIrst. They are all well written. Ita Daly’s Such Good Friends, Ray Lynott’s: April, Val Mulkrn’s Memory and Desire, and John Jordan’s He Lay: Down on Me, all end in rejection or despair, or both. Ray Lynott’s’ story being the best-written and most subtle, Jordan’s being quite crude and unpleasant.
Of the others, Edna O’Brien’s The Mouth of the Cave barely exists, while Padraig Rooney’s Tabernacles is too ornate for its own good. Colum McCann’s Breakfast for Enrique is a trifle dour, but: well-written and heartening. It reads like the precis of a novel, rather than a ‘real’ short story. It deals with full-blown AIDS. Terry Prone also deals with HIV/AIDS, in a tremendously spirited and invigorat ing way, in Blood Brothers, Soul Sisters.
Three of the stories are meant to be funny, or at least amusing. Julia O Faolain’s The Widow’s Boy – a well-trodden path, but very well done. Frank Rowan’s Ringsend is a very funny yarn about a prissy Dublin queen who faces the ultimate horror… no, My Lips Are Sealed – read it yourself.
I enjoyed Patrick Boyle’s Shaybo, even though it is positively raucous. He is the only person from The (Wee Black) North represented in this collection.
I also found Emma Donoghue’s story Going Back very enjoyable and, thankfully, upbeat. But while it involved two Gay-identified young Irish people (of different sexes, having what reads remarkably.like a sexual relationship), they are in London.
Irish writers seem to fmd alternative loves rather exotic, as witnessed by the settings – France, San Francisco, London (it’s exotic if you’re queer in Kiltimagh). We also have the Stage, the Gaeltacht (in Ray Lynott’s April the unrequited love of a young priest for a beautiful brown-skinned ferryman) and in Desmond Hogan’s A Poet, and an Englishman the English poet is discovered by his complaisant wife in the arms of a teenage Traveller. You don’t get much more exotic than that.
Like all anthologies, this is uneven, but one hopes that the next such effort is full of the likes of Emma Donoghue and Colum McCann, and isn’t padded out with stuff from old hands like William Trevor, whose story here is from a British and specifically English tradition. It is not really about love: it is about wild justice.
Brian Finnegan’s cover is a bit odd (it shows two fully-dressed’ men being intimate), given that the book is sub-titled Irish Gay and: Lesbian Stories, and that half the contributors are women.
[S. McGouran]