Herman’s funeral was among the many my father was never paid for, which changed him, in Mom’s mind, from a dear and amusing friend to one of the “characters” who, she claimed, were always latching on to my father, to live off him, to drain him of money and affection, and finally to die on him.
Today I like shad roe a lot. And somehow, by the time I was nineteen and married, I had decided—from Herman and several other gay black men I’d seen or met—that some blacks were more open about their homosexuality than many whites. My own explanation was, I suppose, that because we had less to begin with, in the end we had less to lose. Still, the openness Herman showed, as did a number of other gay men, black and white, never seemed an option for me. But I always treasured the image of Herman’s outrageous and defiant freedom to say absolutely anything. …
Anything except, of course, I am queer, and I like men sexually better than women.
43.11. A black man …?
43.2. When I was eight, my grandmother and grandfather took me (as did the parents of so many Harlem children) to meet Mr. Matthew Henson. A small, frail, brown old man, much like my mother’s gentle father (with whom he was good friends), Mr. Henson had been part of Admiral Robert E. Peary’s expedition to discover the North Pole. Scouting for the exploration party, a day before the rest, Mr. Henson—alone—had been the first man to reach the pole. He was a great explorer, the likes of Livingstone or Stanley. He was mentioned in the heavy volumes of the Encylopaedia Britannica, whose black-and-gilt spines repeated themselves for twenty-four volumes down the length of our lowest living room bookshelf. Volumes had been written about both Henson and Peary—and, despite a falling-out, the admiral had never stinted in giving Henson credit for the discovery; though Henson, an innately modest man, would always say, whenever it came up, “It was Peary’s expedition. I got there first because he was ill and ordered me to go on ahead. But I never felt the discovery was mine.” He and his aging wife lived with their daughter in the Dunbar Houses, farther up Seventh Avenue. And my parents wanted me to know that this humble man, this great man, this valiant man who’d first set foot on the North Pole was black, was real, and lived in Harlem like I did … and they hoped, as did a lot of other black parents, that I just might make the mental leap: therefore, I too could do something memorable in the world.
Standing before his armchair, with my hands folded in front of me and Grandpa behind me, while the sunlight from the Venetian blinds made bars over the taupe wall, I asked, very tentatively, what the North Pole had been like.
Mr. Henson looked up, smiled at me over his pipe, and said, “Well, it was very cold.”
It was a dignified, an ironic, and, doubtless, a true answer.
But, as with all things, my memory of Mr. Henson, too, has its excess. Once, Grandpa, after spending the day with him, as he did from time to time, came home to sit in the living room and explain, pensively: “He said the hardest part of the expedition was not sucking Peary’s toes—to keep them from getting gangrene, when they got frozen. What was hardest, he said, was when they had to eat the dogs …” And old Mrs. Henson (twenty years later I learned that Peary, Henson, and several others on the expedition had left illegitimate children among the Eskimos with whom they’d stayed) would walk down Seventh Avenue each morning to stop into my father’s funeral parlor and say good day; and if a funeral was in progress, no matter whose, she’d slip quietly into the chapel, sit, and attend the service.
43.3. “That first year when we were at Science,” Chuck told me years on, “when you all still lived over the funeral parlor? I stayed over at your house a couple of days during winter vacation. You’d gotten a guitar for Christmas that year. A nice one, too. Your parents hadn’t given you a case—I figured that was their way of making sure you didn’t take it anywhere; but I didn’t say anything about that. It was a Sunday evening; you and I were sitting around, and you were playing, when your father called us into the living room to see something on television. It was Miriam Makeba, her first time singing on the Ed Sullivan Show. I don’t know why—maybe because later Stokely married her—but I’ve always remembered that: watching Makeba sing on TV. With you and your family.”
And later, that summer, Chuck and I would go down to the midnight showing, organized by Jean Shepherd, of Sydney Poitier and John Cassavetes in The Edge of the City: the young black boy and the young white boy, sitting in the crowded theater, watching the shades of gray purveying such awesome distortions of themselves on the screen.
We were both overawed, and rode back home on the subway speaking softly, all but silent, appreciative.
The few times I’ve seen it since, I’ve often wondered why.
Looking over my life, even there in the hospital, it seemed to me there was a very comparatively easy story to tell. It would encompass stepping down onto the dusty red bricks of the Brick Floor Book Store, just up Amsterdam Avenue from our new home in Morningside Gardens, where, from the upper shelf near the door, I would pull down, then purchase, the new Grove Press trade paperback of Radiguet’s Count d’Orgel. Or how, on its first site at the corner of MacDougal and Eighth Streets, I’d turn in to the Eighth Street Book Shop and from the shelves downstairs in the lower level buy the small black-and-white pamphlet, Howl and Other Poems or the little white folded-over volume by Diane DiPrima, This Kind of Bird Flies Backwards, or how, coming into the tiny ground floor space, I’d make my way up the shoulder-wide stairs to the more spacious upper room of the New Yorker Book Shop, where I’d finally find the Signet paperback of Devil in the Flesh.
That easy story would tell how (when I was seventeen), as she neared the end of medical school, Barbara got a new boyfriend—Fradley. Fradley was redhaired, white, and pretty easygoing. There was much talk in my family of the money in his. He supported a modest apartment in Greenwich Village looking down on Minetta Lane. Now he would turn up with Barbara at Thanksgiving dinner at my Aunt’s home in New Jersey. Now, if for some reason I was out with Barbara, we’d stop off on a chill evening at Fradley’s in the Village. Once, in his apartment I noticed a large book in a white cover lying on a small table against one wall. Fradley saw me looking at it and said:
“Oh, that’s by a friend of mine. He gave me a copy. I tried to read it, but I really couldn’t quite understand it myself. You might be interested in it, though.” On the back was a quote from Robert Graves, comparing the novel favorably to the “Mr. Eliot’s The Waste Land” and another bit of praise from Stuart Gilbert, whose study of Ulysses I had just been reading a few weeks before. “Somewhere near the beginning of the story,” Fradley went on, frowning, “someone tears up a letter and the pieces fly away like seagulls. Then, later on, around the middle, someone is on a boat, watching a bunch of seagulls, that fly away like pieces of a torn letter …?” He looked at me with a questioning expression.
And my own thoughts went to some essay on Moby-Dick I’d recently read that had discussed form in the novel. But it didn’t seem to be the time to say anything.
“Now that’s fascinating!” Barbara said. (She thought much that Fradley said at the time was fascinating.) Stepping up beside me, she opened the cover. “He signed it to you, too. ‘From Bill,’” she read out.
“I didn’t really read it myself.” Fradley reiterated, to my continued observation. “He told me about it. I tried to read it, but it’s kind of rough going.”
Once again I looked down at the title, and decided this book was something I eventually must master. Barbara stepped away and I started paging through it. “It is long,” I said, turning to the last page. Nine hundred fifty-six pages. (Five years later when Voyage, Orestes! finished at one thousand fifty-six manuscript pages, how my extra hundred, as I riffled through them the night I completed it, made me smile!) And later the tale would tell how, in my third-floor bedroom, I stretched out on my belly, to read Gertrude Stein’s advice to the nineteen-year-old composer, Paul Bowles, in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas: “If you don’t work hard when you’re twenty, Paul
, no one will love you when you’re thirty.” For a moment, among those volcanic revelations telling thousands of young people in every nook of the United States that the art world was not a series of isolated geniuses at work in their solitary towers, but rather a socially, if not a seamlessly, accessible reality, I felt Stein’s wise and incisive voice had singled me out personally.
I would work.
I’d work until my eyes and my fingers and my mind were numb with working. I put my face down on the pillow beside the book and drew a readying breath.
As easily, that tale might tell about going downtown with an older friend, Lloyd, to the Five Spot (then on the corner of St. Marks Place and Third Avenue) to sit late in the blue lights, hands around my single drink for the evening and listening to Thelonious Monk; or of going down to the Cedar Street Tavern, with another older friend, Stewy, looking for Samuel Beckett—because Stewy, not knowing who he was, had started a conversation with him the night before, and bringing the tale of the odd Irish writer he’d been conversing with the previous evening back to Lloyd and Marilyn and me and Gale and the rest of us, we’d exploded with enthusiasm; and I’d made Stewy take me there the next night.
Only Beckett didn’t turn up that evening.
It would be almost as easy to talk about Pierre—the first openly gay young man I ever knew. Again, somewhat older than I, he was a Frenchman studying at NYU. Once, when several of us were walking in Central Park together, he turned to Marilyn and me, who were holding hands, and commented: “You look so cute together, I could have you both at once.” Pierre said he was going to write a novel about his year in America.
But people often said they were to write novels.
A couple of years later, back in France, however, he did. It was called Manhattan Blues. Gale had provided a character for it; but I don’t think either Marilyn or I showed up.
The story would so easily go on to recount how I went to a party with Marilyn and stout, brilliant Victor, and Pierre, and Lloyd, and Jose (pronounced Zhosé: Marilyn’s mentor at the time) and his wife Heidi, and a black poet who wrote in French named Leon, and Marie (whose book of poems had come out just after Ginsberg’s in the Pocket Poets Series, and who spoke fluent French, and whom I pumped for half an hour about Aimé Césaire). It was held for the literary journal, Botteghe Oscura; near, yes, the punchbowl, I struck up a conversation with an orange-haired writer in a sports jacket, with the odd first name of Cleveland, who’d published there. I asked him to tell me something about the journal, and jocularly he explained that, well, in the last issue they’d printed a translation of a truly magical story by a great, but not well-known, German writer, about a woman who had an affair with a dog.
The next day I purchased a copy of the thick issue in five languages and spent a bemused evening in my room on my bed, among its dark caves, reading Robert Musil’s dense, sea-haunted, and almost opaque “Temptation of Quiet Veronica.”
An easy tale …?
But there is always a story, harder to tell (looking for a place in another column), about how, when I was sixteen, my father stood under the street lamp on Amsterdam Avenue at one in the morning, his coat blowing wide, shouting at me: “No, I will not go up and meet her! I will not! A white woman, old enough to be your mother? And now you tell me that she’s drunk? Don’t you understand, you are a little black boy!” Now he practically hissed, in that epoch when to call someone “black” was precisely as insulting as calling them a nigger. “Suppose she took it into her head to say you did something? Just suppose? You could be hauled into a court for rape! You could be killed—” and, while his anger mounted to where he could no longer speak and his face only quiver, suddenly he took his fist and—not hard, but shockingly (as shocking as his suggestion: because at once it floodlit the chasm separating the worlds we lived in)—hit me in the shoulder, to turn me on the empty sidewalk and start me for home.
Equally hard would be to tell how (at seventeen) I crouched in the closet, among shoes and dust with the corner of a cardboard carton cutting into my back, while I listened to my father (angry) and my uncle (placating), outside in the living room, who’d come down looking for me, talking to Lloyd and Steve and Stewy (I tried to picture the graduate student we all called Granny quietly going on with his studying at the side table), patiently lying on my behalf, saying, no, they hadn’t seen me that day, but if I stopped by, yes, certainly they’d tell me that Dad and Uncle Hubert were looking for me, were anxious to see me. And a few minutes later, Lloyd opened the closet door and looked down. “Okay. Come on out.” As I stood up, he said: “You, young man, had better get in contact with your father.” Or to tell how, ten hours later, when the apartment was empty, I sat on the couch, numbly, as close to suicide as I’ve ever come, listening again and again to the Brandenburg Concerti on Lloyd’s hi-fi. When this one is over, I’ll get up and do it. No, when this one is finished—but another one’s started already. Maybe one more. And now one more? All right, I’ll listen to one more. …
What’s hard to tell is how (when I was eighteen), when Chuck came up to spend some weeks with his mother in New York, one afternoon when we were just sitting around in his room not doing anything, I looked over to see he had fallen asleep on his bed. A few minutes later, I lay down on the rumpled bed beside him, thinking I might nap too, but close enough to feel his arm against my flank, and his breath against the back of my biceps and lay there for an hour wondering if I might turn and touch him.
What’s so much easier is to tell how, back at my house at Morningside, I sat up on the piano in my room that had been ceded me by my Aunt Virginia, my feet on the bench, while Chuck, cross-legged on my bed, leaned back against the wall, and I read out loud to him Rechy’s story, “The Wedding of Miss Destiny,” published in the Evergreen Review, and sections from the newly published novel by Alexander Trocchi, Cain’s Book, with overwhelming adolescent enthusiasm.
On the wall, just above Chuck’s head and to his left was the cover I had cut off of a literary magazine, Trembling Lamb, I’d bought at the Eighth Street Bookstore in the Village. It showed a close-up of Jean Harlow’s yearning profile. To the bottom left of the picture was an un-attributed quote:
“I have three years left to worship youth, Rimbaud, Jean Harlow, Billy the Kid …”
What’s much harder to tell of, however, is the rest of Trembling Lamb, lying in the back of my own closet—coverless—on top of the orange crate in which were packed my old journal notebooks, juvenile short stories, and adolescent novels. In it I’d read (to myself) the opening sections of LeRoi Jones’s novel, The System of Dante’s Hell, with its portrait, lyric and intense as Jacobs Room or Nightwood, of black life in Newark and I’d wondered, troubled, as now and again I had for so many years, if there was something wrong with me that so many of my friends were white, that so few were black.
(Easy: discovering “simony” in our Encyclopaedia Britannica and writing in my journal, “To sell the soul is simony,” sure, as I wrote it, that a proper soul did not exist.)
In the hospital, I wondered: Is it the easy stories that make us who we are? Is it what, when we can finally tell them, the hard stories reveal of us? Or is it simply the gap, the tension, the places where the two are always threatening to tear entirely apart, that finally mold us, at any moment, to a given response, active or internal, that make others—or even ourselves—recognize us as persons?
43.4. My fourth science fiction novel, City of a Thousand Suns, was officially published on January 1, 1965. But the first copies were available as much as six weeks before, in November (and certainly by the early part of December of ’64), when I was still in the hospital. I brought it in to show Dr. G. The three books of the trilogy, all out now, were the emblems, the public markers, the traces by which some allegorical chronicle of the two years from my twentieth to my twenty-second birthday might be read. (Voyage, Orestes! was the private dossier running from eighteen to twenty-one, still hoping for publication.) The split between the world of desire
and the world of material was something I could by now explain to myself in many ways.
In terms of history? One of the last books I read before entering the hospital was Morris Bishop’s biographical study of Beatrice Cenci, whose father had been accused and convicted of sodomy: he had been imprisoned, in the words of the judge, “for practicing with grown men [i.e., his stable grooms] what it is only acceptable to do with boys.”
In terms of my own family? I remembered very well my father’s explosions of rage when he suspected, when I was nine or ten, some of my early heterosexual experimenting. Yet when I would go off with some male friend for a frantic session of mutual masturbation and make-out and his suspicions seemed similarly aroused, he would all but ignore it—especially if I lied to his questioning and said we’d been looking at pictures of women.
Yet there was an entire counterhistory to my eighteenth and nineteenth years that, as long as I could not tell it to myself, could not bring it within the play of discourse, was, in its unsettling effects, threatening to bring the world of objects, actions, engines, windows, doors, and subway trains down around my head, and send me plummeting in an endless fall among them.