U & I

 I wanted to know if this edition of Rabbit, Run had some front matter I had not read. Finally my resistance collapsed and I pulled the weighty collector’s volume off the shelf. The padded, bright red binding was somewhat more reminiscent of a comfortable corner booth at an all-night, all-vinyl coffee shop than one might have thought fitting for so aggressively “classic” an enterprise; but even so a bible-ready black fabric bookmark did curl with high seriousness out of the gilt-edged, acid-free solidity of the massed pages like a dried umbilicus: I said, “Wow!”—moved to mingled feelings of tenderness and stern disapproval by the prematurely ornate, bootstrappingly heirloomish, “undercooked” look it had, and I was unable to keep from opening it up. Within I saw a Reader’ Digestive illustration of boys playing basketball, and then...

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 I wondered whether the tone I took in places here might share its quality of unease with Beckett’s book—an unease that arose from intense, rivalrous, touchy admiration combined with an impatience with criticism as a literary form. Updike himself, I recalled, had in an essay neatly maneuvered past Beckett’s exegesis of Proust: “rather acerb,” he’d called it. (The same essay on Proust, by the way, contains one of my favorite things in all Updike, when he mentions that a page or two of his copy of Moncrieff’s translation is stained with drops of his now-alimonied wife’s suntan oil: suntan oil, the thicker exstillation of summer and leisure, crushed from the Palm at the End of the Mind—and I wonder, is this Stevensian sense of “palm” the explanation for why Updike mysteriously changed the title of one of his best early stories from “Walter Briggs” to the less good “Walter Palm” in an eighties trade paperback reissue?—has a Proustlan viscosity, I think; I envision the near transparency that the drops of lotion must have created in the paper as methylparaben portholes in Marcel’s prose through which we glimpse for a moment the knowable, verifiable life we have now, in America, with spouses and deck chairs and healing sunlight, as opposed to the unknowable life of a homosexual genius in France before the First World War.) 

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Most good novelists have been women or homosexuals. The novel is the triumphant evolved creation, one increasingly has to think, of these two groups, who have cooperated more closely in this domain perhaps than in any other. This important truth couldn’t hit us over the head until fairly recently: my own generation was the first to grow up with hard-core stars like Annette Haven a mere seventeen-year-old bike ride away, but more important, we were the first generation to grow up exposed to the range and subtlety and complexity of distinctively gay interests and ways of acting. These became common knowledge: they were no longer sexual semaphore among a gay elite, but were now a constant subject of discussion, delight, disgust, amusement, and enlightenment across an entire educated middle class. Our generation, I think it is fair to say, thinks it knows more about the moeurs of gaiety than any group so big and so mixed ever knew before, and armed with this marginally more sophisticated and less sniggering knowledge as we read past minorpieces and masterpieces, we gather hints and leap to conclusions with a confidence that would have horrified Edwardian bachelorettes. And slowly, with dawning amazement, as the results of our various informal surveys come in, we realize how staggeringly disproportionate our debt is to gaydom, in every possible area of literary deportment, but especially in the novel; and we mingle this knowledge with the long. recognized preeminence of women in the invention and perfection of the form, and we begin to get the uncomfortable sense, if we aren’t gay or female, that we may have chosen a field we can’t quite master. Heterosexual male nov. elists don’t for the most part really get it, instinctively: they agree with Jane Austen that the novel is a magnificent thing, toward whose comprehension all other forms of writing, and indeed of art, aspire, and this big-time grandeur attracts them, but they find, much to their perplexity, that they can’t internalize and refine upon its ways with quite the unstraining unconscious directness they displayed when thrashing happily through earlier intellectual challenges. At first they blame their false starts and archnesses on their own inexperience and continuing apprenticeship, and they redouble their efforts, but little by little they come to see, at first dispiritedly and then soon righteously, that they “stand outside the tradition”—that it is in a fundamental way alien to them. But they ave smart, and ambitious, and hardworking, some of them, and they find that they can bleed off and redirect some of their other proficiencies in order artificially to bulk up the central novelistic understanding they want s© badly and don’t innately possess. They stretch the stretchiest of all forms so that it embraces what they do well. And finally they produce things that are, though great, oddities: Ulysses, War and Peace, Pnin. In a field, then, in which heterosexuals end up so often on the periphery—as the legal counsel, drunken reviewers, imitative followers, codifiers, interpreters, academic apologists—for homosexual greatness, a person like Updike, who can be as tarabiscoté as George Saintsbury or Henry James, as foxily ironical as Lytton Strachey, as stylistically up to snuff as Pater, as metaphorically mother-witted as Proust, as zealously thematic as Melville, and who is thus in the same league at least with the bachelor-adepts of history, becomes supremely important to a writer like me, as a model of a man who has in his art successfully moved outside the limitations of his carnal circuitry. 

I offer this line of argument tentatively, with every expectation that I will be laughed at for believing in so primitive a form of sexual determinism; it seems, however, unusually convincing to me at present because many of the novels that I’ve liked lately (The Beautiful Room Is Empty, The Swimming-Pool Library, A Single Man) have been so directly premised on gaiety: you feel their creators’ exultation at having so much that wasn’t sayable finally available for analysis, and you feel that the sudden unrestrained scope given to the truth-telling urge in the Eastern homosphere has lent energy and accuracy to these artists’ nonsexual observations as well, as if they’re thinking to themselves, Well fuck it, while ’'m humming along at this level of candor, why should I propagate all the other received fastidious. nesses? Truths are jumping out at me from every direction! My overemphasis on sex is leading me back toward subtler revelations in the novel’s traditional arena of social behavior, by jingo! (Have people talked, incidentally, about the prompting influence that Angus Wilson’s Hemlock and After may have had on Lolita? Nabokov must have seen this gay book from 1952, in which the sole pure baddie is the heterosexual child molester, and thought that it was finally possible to amplify his reluctantly incinerated short story and show, now that gaiety was to an extent fictionally normalized, that even Humbert’s unthinkable perversion was more complicated and remorse-filled than Angus Wilson had made it out to be. Nabokov must have noticed how the undisguisedly gay angle of attack lit the old, overnovelized mores from new angles, and that a similarly reawakened sense of nanomanners might result from a fictional situation whose raking unthinkableness stirred his own endocrines more.) Of course, Edmund White’s apostrophe to the narrators boyfriend’s bottom (in a recent story in Granta) would not have been possible without Updike’s wide-screen description of a neighbor’s pussy; but nonetheless it is the homosexual novel right now, perhaps to an unusual degree, that seems to be driving us all toward advances and improvements.