Seuls les enfants savent lire (Only Children Know How to Read) is a very personal memoir on the books he read when he was a child by Michel Zinc, the French scholar, chair of 'Littératures de la France médièvale' at the prestigious Collège de France. It was published in 2009. I was recently tidying up my bedroom in Paris when I found the book, unread, at the bottom of the pile by my bed. Before storing it in the library, I flipped through its pages and stumbled on this passage, dedicated to Un bon petit diable by the comtesse de Ségur, a book I was not insensitive to, when I was myself a child...
'Quand à Charles, "bon petit diable" qui ne mérite pas le fouet, il échappe, on le sait, à celui de Mme Mac'Miche grâce à l'ingéniosité de la bonne Betsy, qui rembourre son fond de culotte avec les visières du défunt cousin Mac'Miche, puis, le stratagème découvert et la culotte baisée (sic), colle sur son postérieur des images de diables qui effraient sa superstitieuse tortionnaire.' (p74)
Michel Zink, Seuls les enfants savent lire, Tallandier, 2009, 126p.
Adam Mars-Jones was recently awarded the very British Hatchet Job of the Year for his 'severely' negative review of By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham published last year in The Observer.
This quote...
By Nightfall tells a story of midlife crisis averted, when Peter is sexually tempted by his brother-in-law (young and messed up, with a certain amount of bisexual history). Cunningham is a gay writer who wants, as so many of us do, to achieve a mainstream readership – he succeeded with The Hours – but here he stacks the odds against himself. Gay male readers tend to feel that their lives haven't been squeezed dry by novelists, not just yet, and may resist even a convincing portrait of a heterosexual man. Others may feel cheated when Peter finds he's not quite as straight as he thought.
... could very well apply to Edmund White's recent novel Jack Holmes and his Friends (Bloomsbury, 2012, 200p) which follows the lives of two men, Jack and Will, from their early twenties to their mid thirties in New York City. One is homosexual, the other heterosexual, lying at the opposite ends of Kinsey Scale...
Jack had never been in love with anyone except Will. He felt embarrassed by his passion for Will and winced when he remembered it. It seemed so self-hating and childish. Although Jack had no interest in gay liberation, which struck him as raucous and led by shaggy-haired leftists with smelly feet, nevertheless the movement had made him see how "unliberated" he'd been to fall for a straight man.
I have just finished the book and was disappointed, not just because I did not find Jack's attraction to Will convincing: le coeur a ses raisons...
In the first part, set in New York City in the early sixties, young Jack Holmes falls in love with Will, an heterosexual coworker his age, while discovering, and experimenting with, his own sexuality. The third-person narration is clearly presented from Jack's perspective. I was surprised by the repetitive use of the term gay, as well as by the term 'husband' to qualify a few same-sex partners, which sounds anachronistic...
Part II is a first-person account by Will. Nine years have 'gone by.' We are now in the second half of the seventies. Will is now married to Alexandra and they have two children. The story is centered on Will's affair with a young Italian-American, Pia. Part III is the continuation of the story, back to the third-person narrative. The end of the novel is brought forward by another anachronism, that I will not reveal. A huge one for that matter, unless I did not rightly get the chronology in the novel. I leave it to your judgement. Remember that we are at the end of the seventies...
City Boy, White's memoir of his life in New York during the period covered in the novel, was much better.
Antoine Deléry's biography of Peyrefitte (Roger Peyrefitte - Le sulfureux, H&O Éditions, 2011, 336p, in French) is not the most exciting book around. At least it's a quick read. One of its interests lies in the extensive quotations of Peyrefitte's public letter to François Mauriac after the famous columnist wrote a harsh paper on him after watching a documentary on the movie adaptation of Les amitiés particulières.
The Lettre ouverte à M. François Mauriac, prix Nobel, membre de l'Académie française, published by Arts on May 6th 1964, is nothing other than a public outing of Mauriac (as we would say today), supported by quite graphic allusions, like the mention of some love letters to Cocteau...
Qui êtes-vous mon cher maître? Un écrivain que nous admirons, mais un homme que nous ne pouvons plus supporter. Vous vous êtes impatronisé du rôle officiel de moralisateur, beaucoup moins pour défendre la morale que pour vous punir, aux dépends d’autrui, de votre pendant irresistible à l’immoralité. (Who are you my dear Master? A writer we admire, but a man that we can no longer stand. You have endorsed yourself with the official role of moralizing, much less to defend morality than to punish you, at the expense of others, for your irresistible inclination to immorality.)
Among the abundant book production of Peyrefitte chronicled in the biography, L'exilé de Capri, his fictionalized biography of Jacques d'Adelsward-Fersen, the founder of Akademos, the first homosexual journal in France, stands out. After a scandal involving boys in 1903 Fersen has to flee Paris for Capri where he lived until his death in 1923. A sad life. Apparently Peyrefitte's book includes an interesting painting of homosexual Paris in the early 20th century. Deléry claims that after L'exilé Peyrefitte's style will never again display the 'joyous irony and the cheerfulness' that characterized his earlier production.
The last part of the biography is dominated by what Deléry describes as the great love of Peyrefitte's life: Alain-Philippe, a young actor, had a minor role in the movie Les amitiés particulières. They met during a visit of the author to the shooting location. Alain-Philippe was 12 years old. Peyrefitte 57. Irronically, when Alain-Philippe grew up, after causing the financial ruin of Peyrefitte through dubious investments in the show business, he will marry Amanda Lear... Another sad story.
Philippe Jullian's biography of Oscar Wilde, first published in 1961 and recently reissued (Éditions Bartillat, 2011, 430p, in French), is another story. It is not as definitive as Richard Ellman's Oscar Wilde, nor as crisp as Neil McKenna's The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde. A very pleasant read, though, with a lively and mastered style. It made me want to read again The Portrait of Dorian Gray, especially in the scholarly edition recently provided by Nicholas Frankel (Harvard University Press, 2011, 296p), which features for the first time Wilde's original text, more explicit on the gay context than the previously known editions... According to Jullian,
Dorian Gray est, en somme, le premier roman pédérastique écrit depuis le Satiricon (...). Il faudra attendre vingts ans, avec la Mort à Venise, de Thomas Mann, pour trouver un beau livre aussi complètement homosexuel. (Dorian Gray is, in short, the first gay novel written since the Satyricon (...). It will take twenty years, with Death in Venise by Thomas Mann, to get a beautiful book, so thoroughly homosexual.)
A Box of Darkness - The Story of a Marriage by Sally Ryder Brady (St. Martin's Press, 2011, 240p) is a strange, fascinating, book. And sad.
Sally and Upton have been married for 46 years when Upton suddenly dies. In the aftermath of his death Sally finds gay porn magazines and videos in his belongings... She is transported many years back, when, after 8 years of marriage and four children, one morning, after a night of heavy drinking and spending the night at a friend's place, Upton confessed that he had had sex with his friend, Edward.
After a lot of self-questioning and doubts, Sally ends up putting the incident on account of 'Edward drunken seduction,' and after Upton proclaiming: 'I give you my promise, it will never happen again. Never. I give you my word,' she seems to have forgotten it. Not to say that the marriage went uneventful. Upton, although charming and brilliant, was subject to temper tantrums and was an alcoholic, absorbed in his work, leaving Sally very much in charge of the family.
When she discovers the gay porn material, she writes,
I surrender to a flow of sorrows - first the self-pitying sorrow of a spurned lover; then the sorrow for the sex we'd only rarely shared the last fifteen years; and finally sorrow for Upton and the great burden of his secret. How could I have not known he was gay? Or did I know? What did I know? What did I know that I didn't know I knew until this minute?
But it is not simple. In writing her memoir Sally Ryder Brady tries to understand what her marriage meant. In the end, a futile exercise:
I could spend the rest of my life trying to understand Upton. But who among us can truly know what is in another's heart?
Sad finding, but so true... She nevertheless adds:
What I know is that Upton chose me and that he loved me. I think that is enough.
Isn't that a wise conclusion, after all?
The best at The Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, is the museum building itself. Well, maybe I am slightly exaggerating, but still... The new building, housing the world's most comprehensive collection by the late Spanish surrealist, according to the Michelin Green Guide, opened earlier this year. It overlooks Tampa Bay and is a clean, modern, construction. The first floor houses a small restaurant serving Spanish specialties, including a nice gazpacho that you can gulp down with a glass of cava....
What is disappointing in Dali's works is the lack of sensuality in his representation of bodies. Even his copper engravings for an illustrated edition of the Maldoror Songs fail to elicit any sensual emotion...
But suddenly two canvasses detach themselves from the rest, with their clear homoerotic images... The small Dos Adolecentes and the monumental Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus.
Well, I am back in South Florida. I have brought with me the whole series of the Donald Strachey mysteries that I intent to read in the order in which they were published. They have aged pretty well. In the Author's Note to Death Trick, the first title in the series that has recently been reissued by MLR Press, Richard Stevenson makes a direct reference to 'Joseph Hansen's pioneering Dave Brandstetter series.'
Death Trick, is set in ancient times - preAIDS - and was published in 1981.
