by Dwight Cathcart

by Dwight Cathcart

Sunday, August 21, 2011

But why should any of us read it?

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In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust, one of the first gay novels by a major writer, was published between 1913 and 1927, in Paris, in seven volumes and 4,300 pages (in the Modern Library translation into English). It is about a young boy growing up and coming to adulthood among the bourgeoisie and Parisian aristocracy during the period just before and just after the first world war. It moves so slowly that a person might think it had almost no story. In 2011, the gay man in the street might ask, What does this have to do with me? It is so long, it is so slow, it was written a hundred years ago, and I have pressing business.
And yet, in the hundred years that it has been out there, In Search of Lost Time has solidified a firm literary reputation. The novelist Graham Greene has called it “the greatest novel of the twentieth century.” Somerset Maugham called it “the greatest fiction to date.” The question here is why should gay people read it? Particularly in an age of DADT or DOMA or same-sex marriage?
For several reasons. These are good stories—the story of the narrator as he grows up and discovers the truth about his culture. The story of Robert de Saint-Loup, who dies on the Western Front, of the Baron de Charlus and his various seductions, of Swann and of Swann and Odette, of the rise of Mme Verdurin, among scores of others. But the greatest story is that of the narrator as he discovers the soft underbelly of Paris—hypocrisy, lying, pretense, values which will not be unfamiliar to readers in 2011.
Much of it is very very funny, one example of which is the scene at the beginning of the novel when Swann is arriving and Marcel and his mother and grandmother and grandfather are preparing to receive him, and Marcel’s great aunts are discussing how to thank Swann for the case of Asti he has sent them. There is this kind of comedy, and then there is the much deeper comedy reflected by the salon of the Verdurins and the reception of the Prince and Princesse de Guermantes when all of Parisian society seems to be exposed.
There is superb writing. Check out this:
As in that game enjoyed by the Japanese in which they fill a porcelain bowl with water and steep in it little pieces of paper until then undifferentiated which, the moment they are immersed, stretch and twist, assume colors and distinctive shapes, become flowers, houses, human figures firm and recognizable, so now all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water lilies of the Vivonne, and the good people of the village and their little dwellings and the church and all of Combray and its surroundings, all of this which is acquiring form and solidity, emerged, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea. Swann’s Way, p. 48
Here is a bit from the middle of the novel, from the seduction scene between Baron de Charlus and Jupien, the waistcoat-maker.
The latter [Baron de Charlus], resolved to precipitate matters, asked the waistcoat-maker for a light, but immediately remarked, “I’m asking you for a light, but I see I’ve forgotten my cigars.” The laws of hospitality prevailed over the rules of flirtation. “Come inside, you’ll be given everything you want,” said the waistcoat-maker on whose face disdain gave way to joy. Sodom and Gomorrah, p. 8.
If you care about our history—the history of gay people—this is the one of the first and the greatest contribution we’ve made to literature, and so it’s here for you to read. It’s ours. It’s us. It’s demanding. It will stretch your abilities. It will make you a better reader for everything else you read. And it will show you that most of the novels you read come from, by comparison, a narrow spectrum of literature and are small, indeed.
This giant novel by Marcel Proust is another reason to be proud to be gay.
Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. Lydia Davis. New York: Viking-Penguin, 2003
-----------------, Sodom and Gomorrah, trans. John Sturrock. New York: Viking-Penguin, 2003
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Sunday, August 14, 2011

Proust, publication, and the danger of leaving it to publishers

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Marcel Proust submitted a manuscript of his novel, À la recherche du temps perdu, to the Parisian publisher Eugène Fasquelle, in October 1912. This was the first time the book had been presented for publication. Fasquelle turned it down, saying he didn’t want to risk publishing something “so different from what the public is used to reading.” 
Two more publishers turned it down, and, on the fourth publisher, Proust offered to pay the costs of publication. This fourth publisher accepted the offer, and À la recherche du temps perdu was published in November 1913, in an edition of 1750. 
What is interesting here is the set of forces surrounding the publication of a book—the writer, the book, the publisher, the book-buying public. The publisher is sensitive to giving the public what it wants, which is a good thing, but if all publishers were equally sensitive to the habits of the public in this way, Proust’s book would never have been published. There is also the question of what does the public want? It is most convenient for the publisher if it can be said that “the public” wants “best sellers.”  
If publishers stick too rigidly to their idea of what the public wants, then different books will never get published. This is of particular danger for minorities, whose literature may be weakened. Or if “different” books do get published, readers may have forgetten how to read them. Lydia Davis, the translator of Swann’s Way (Penguin), addressing the difficulty of reading Proust, attributes this difficulty to several factors, “one [of which] is that the interest of this novel, unlike that of the more traditional novel, is not merely, or even most of all, in the story it tells.” (p. xvi) She goes on to say, “A reader may feel overwhelmed by the detail of this nuance and wish to get on with the story, and yet the only way to read Proust is to yield, with a patience equal to his, to his own unhurried manner of telling the story.” (p. xvi)
This is important, because I think we are in a similar situation, where American publishers hesitate to publish books that are different or challenging and Americans are consequently limited in what they can read. This is important also because this French writer, Marcel Proust, who had difficulty getting his book into print, wrote what many people say is the most profoundly important gay novel of the twentieth century.
Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. with an Intro. and Notes, by Lydia Davis. New York: Viking Penguin, p. xiii.
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Sunday, August 7, 2011

The easiest way to get into the future

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Life is tough, but it is tougher if you don’t tell the truth about it. The hardest part of growing up gay in the years after World War II was not knowing what the truth was. People lied to us and about us—people and institutions and organizations, governments and religions—and it was difficult to know the truth. Then it got to be hard to determine where those lies came from.
I was ten years old, and I didn’t know how to fight against all of them—the president, the newspaper, preachers, the governor, my teachers, my scout leader, my grandparents, aunts and uncles, my parents—who laid down what I was supposed to believe about myself. I was really unsure whether or not I was supposed to fight against any of them. I was an adolescent, and I was surrounded by all these hard things people were saying, and I didn’t have any idea what to do, because I wasn’t sure that they weren’t right.
At first, I thought, my goal was to find a way to make the pain stop. The other was just too big a job. I ran away when I was eighteen, and when I was twenty, and twenty-three. I tried to find a way of living that didn’t hurt so much, and then, later, I tried, piece by piece, to find what was causing it. This little bit comes from these people. That little bit comes from those folks. But if you can’t get away and you can’t make it stop, then you start thinking, I must deserve this. For decades it has been easy for gay people to think we were somehow guilty. 
So it’s necessary that we search out the truth and then tell it, every little bit of it and never forget it. This is the world we live in. It’s the only way to move into the future. We have to determine and then remember what happened. For example, we can’t forget that federal public health officials under Reagan said they had “plenty” of money to fight AIDS. And when we have determined who said what and who did what, we can’t forget what we know, that these people—among them the public health people under Reagan, the Republicans who provided the votes to pass DOMA and DADT, and all the sorry lot of them under Bush II—committed great crimes, and they were never charged. We must never forget who the criminals are. If we forget that, we’ll have forgotten our history.

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Sunday, July 31, 2011

That which does not kill us, makes us stronger.

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For the last few weeks, I have been corresponding with a man I knew briefly at a school in the South in 1957 and 1959, and, as may be usual in such exchanges, we attempt to find out how we remember it in 1957 and—very gingerly—to find out how we are today. It is a delicate maneuver. I think he liked the school then, and I didn’t. 
The school was a conservative stronghold in the South and not a good place to be if you were a gay kid. I knew I was gay, and I needed to figure out what to do about it. I was naive and didn’t know this school would not be able to give me what I needed. In 1957, in the South, there were just damned few gay men out there on whom I could pattern my life or that I could learn from. In that, this school failed me. 
I left this school after two years. Afterward, I did the wrong things—I went into the Army, and instead of starting to write as I wanted, I went to graduate school. I planned to become an academic. I got married. Looking back on it, it seems like everything I did was a deflection from what I really wanted to do. It wasn’t until I was middle-aged that I began to live as I had always meant to live. Since then, I have lived without any reference to that school in the South. I live in a gay community among gay or gay-friendly folks, and I write my gay novels. 
But occasionally I am invited to exchange letters with other men who experienced that school in the South. In these exchanges, what I look for is that the other man sees how brutal those years were, and how dangerous for gay kids. And now, today, what I look for is acknowledgment that the people I am dealing with have learned what was wrong about the culture in 1957 and have changed as I have.
In the years since that school in the South, I got a doctorate and learned about literature. I taught college for eighteen years—Shakespeare every term—and later, when it came time to write my gay novels, I found I was hugely affected by my experience in the classroom. And I had my children, who are with me still, and whose children are with me still, and who enrich me and my partner still. 
Life is interesting that way. If I had been given a chance to think about it, I would have said, “I never meant to get married,” but I did get married, and now that I am doing what I always meant to do with my life, I find that I do it better, deeper, with more conviction, because first I did those things I didn’t ever mean to do. In that way, the homophobia at that school in the South—because I had to learn what it was and to fight against it—has been a gift that keeps on giving. 

For a full, fictional treatment of this kind of life, see Race Point Light.
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Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Bear Week in Provincetown

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I think the whole idea behind Bear Week is that the community is exploring images of maleness. In the past, maleness has had something to do with images of male beauty—think of anything by Michelangelo or Perseus with the Head of Medusa by Cellini—and bears have altered that to something rougher, something less refined, something more mature, bald rather than shaved. Bears and their cubs. It is an interesting, and a sexy, idea. 
During Bear Week in Provincetown, bears come from all over the United States, Europe, and Australia and New Zealand to celebrate the look and style. By all accounts, the restaurant staffs find the bears great visitors in Provincetown, friendly, open, easy to wait on, sexy, thoughtful, and generous. 
While many of the men present themselves in an exaggerated image of maleness, as hairy bears, there were many other things going on in Provincetown during Bear Week. On Monday night, they hold a contest for the audience’s approval for the best drag act, and all three of the judges were in drag, although not all the contestants. On Tuesday night the show was Peter Pansy, with a guy playing Peter. Every night on Commercial Street, barkers were in such costume that a passerby couldn’t tell what gender they were—what they had started out and what they aimed for now. Courtney and I stayed in a new house in the West End, and we found that men staying in nearby houses called to us when we hung on the railing of our deck. A warm friendly open community.  
Walking into the West End on Commercial Street, late one afternoon this week, Courtney and I passed two men with small children. It was such an ordinary sight that it was not until we had gone another hundred yards that I focussed on the fact that the two men were together and the children were theirs. Provincetown spends time and energy exploring questions of gender, and when a person is there, he’s passing among a whole variety of genders without quite realizing it. This is not so much experimenting with gender issues. I think the experimenting is long over in Provincetown. What’s happening is those of us at the end of Cape Cod are employing all the varieties of gender we’ve discovered and are showing them off to each other. 
Another important thing happened this week. A panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has lifted the stay of Judge Phillips’ decision declaring DADT unconstitutional and then has apparently stayed the implementation of its own stay. It’s dizzying, I know. A very good commentator on these matters is Ari Ezra Waldman, in Towleroad. 
At this moment, the Congress, the Executive Branch, and the Courts are all twisted up over gay matters. They are making fools of themselves. Provincetown led the way years ago and continues to lead the way into the future. 
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Designed by Edward Wharton.