gerhard's review against another edition
5.0
“Do books find you when you need them the most?” Sarah Schulman mulls. Donald Wiese reveals: “Since I didn’t know anyone who could show me a world of gay people I knew existed out there, I turned instead to literature for guidance. (Yes, I know, how very 20th century, but it was the 20th century.)
Rick Whitaker reminds us: “The fact that he is aging and will presumably not live forever is suggestive, for me, privately, of something sadly looming in my mind: the end of the age of gay sensibility.”
These three quotes were foremost in my mind when I finished Tom Cardamone’s wonderful love letter to a man described as “a ‘triathalete’ of prose letters: a master novelist, biographer, and memoirist.”
Alysia Abbott writes: “I’ve since learned he’s played mentor to many young writers, including Rakesh Satyal and Andrew Sean Greer. Not only is he a winner of numerous international literary awards but he’s one of our most important living LGBTQ pioneers. He took part in the 1969 Stonewall Riots, cofounded the Violet Quill and Gay Men’s Health Crisis. Through his autobiographical fiction and copious memoir writing Edmund White is the preeminent keeper of our collective memory.”
Of course, young, shy and not-yet-out me knew nothing about this when I first picked up A Boy’s Own Story many, many years ago (furtively, I might add, especially as the cover had a virginally beckoning youth adorning it.) I don’t think I understood it properly at the time, and a lot of it confused me. But the overwhelming feeling – and it is one I recall distinctly to this day – was one of relief. Here was someone, finally, who knew intuitively what I barely understood myself going through.)
As Kathe Koja quotes in her essay: “The most important things in our intimate lives can’t be discussed with strangers, except in books.” (Years later, I would read The Farewell Symphony after having lost several friends to AIDS, and going through the experience of having my long-term partner diagnosed with HIV six months into our relationship.)
A lot of the writers included here have similar feelings about the impact that A Boy’s Own Story had on their personal and professional lives. I wonder how different it is for young gay people today, especially given the ongoing difficulties faced, and the continuing struggles endured, by the LGBTQI community globally.
Therefore it is so vital that our history be preserved, celebrated, and cherished, so that the torch can be carried onto the next generation. Which makes Cardamone’s wonderful book such a treasure trove, and a beacon.
I first came across Cardamone when I read his seminal The Lost Library, which sought to bring back into the public consciousness many of the brightest stars of gay fiction that had since dimmed. (The fact that we lost so many greatly talented people to the devastation of the epidemic over such a brutally short period is something that quietly haunts both books.)
Ever since A Boy’s Own Story, White’s books have formed a backdrop to the seminal events of my own life, from coming out to the end of a 13-year relationship, and approaching middle age. He continues to surprise me, especially with incredibly astute novels such as Jack Holmes and His Fried and Our Young Man.
These struck me as being so mischievously non-PC in a gay age that, sadly, has seemed to have lost its sense of direction and cultural lodestones – mainly because we have ignored our past. And we do so at our peril, as Cardamone’s contributors all attest to so eloquently and emotionally here.
A ‘gay sensibility’ is not the same as ‘gay culture’, I don’t think. It implies an acculturation of influences and experiences, a slow building of something greater than the sum of its parts. White’s wonderfully extensive oeuvre – from The Joy of Gay Sex (of which I still own a PDF copy – any paper version would probably have turned to sludge from my sweaty-palmed thumbing through it over the years) to his non-fiction work – is ample testament to this.
I recently read The Unpunished Vice, his latest book (written in the aftermath of his heart attack and bypass surgery, which I knew nothing about), and I was especially privileged to read his thoughts about Japanese and German literature. Yes, even now White continues to surprise me with his vast knowledge.
I have not read Genet or Proust (with White himself called “the American Proust … he shares with Proust an understanding of the intricacies of the self, of social dynamics, and a descriptive virtuosity applied to the material world.”)
I must hasten to add: There is nothing condescending or preachy about White. He wears his erudition and wit lightly (and is still capable of writing the most boner-inducing sex scenes in gay fiction.) It is how he conveys his own enthusiasm and excitement with such joy and lightness.
“In my pursuit of lightness,” Ed writes, “I sometimes feel like a spider monkey swinging through the trees in a world that is more and more deforested. If I look hard I can still find moments of frivolity, of silvery silliness, of merry complicity, even of pure cross-eyed joy. Till now I usually can spot the next branch but sometimes it’s quite a stretch.”
Cardamone’s book has made me realise that I do need to read Proust one day, if only to show my solidarity with keeping alive the notion of a ‘gay sensibility’. And I don’t have to fear feeling stupid if I don’t understand it: There is joy, and lightness, in the act of discovery itself.
Donald Weise offers a beautiful, generous portrait of White that sums up the man and his work, and how inextricable the two are:
Happily for me, my feelings about Ed and his writing ‘matured’ as I got older. [I think this is true of any long-time reader of White.] Partly because I liked his other fiction but also because I’d read and admired essays he’d written for the New York Times Book Review, Vanity Fair, and the New York Review of Books among a handful of other publications. These were insightful and gossipy pieces on artists as varied as Jasper Johns, Robert Mapplethorpe, Jean Genet, and Ned Rorem. Ed, I discovered, is a cultural critic who can go deep with the best of them, yet at the same time be playful, racy, and drop the perfect nugget of gossip (more often than not sexual) into a serious discussion of French literature or modern photography.
Much like the essays of Vidal, but without Vidal’s self-conscious wit, condescension, and derision, Ed can take almost any topic, however grand, and discuss it as if it were no more complicated to navigate than the TV Guide crossword puzzle. In the hands of most writers, critical examinations of such heady authors as Foucault, Proust, or Nabokov turn into a literary death-march through the past. Not in Ed’s case. Put another way, the size of a novelist’s dick might be discussed prominently before a single work by the author is ever mentioned. To say this is my kind of writer is an understatement of the first order.
Cardamone himself is part of a ‘new’ generation of gay writers. His Green Thumb and The Lurid Sea are two of the most exhilirating gay-themed novels I have ever read. But I think he is fully aware that he is part of a chain of light in a long path of darkness, passing the torch along from one generation of readers and writers to the next.
The fact that Cardamone revels in experimental fiction that pushes the envelope of what we define as ‘gay fiction’, and yet at the same time pays such eloquent homage to, and is grounded in, our literary canon and its history, is something that White himself must surely approve of.
The final word has to go to Edmund White himself, of course, who comments: “[I’m] alive in order to—well, to teach, to trick, to write, to memorialize, to be a faithful scribe, to record the loss of my dead.”
Rick Whitaker reminds us: “The fact that he is aging and will presumably not live forever is suggestive, for me, privately, of something sadly looming in my mind: the end of the age of gay sensibility.”
These three quotes were foremost in my mind when I finished Tom Cardamone’s wonderful love letter to a man described as “a ‘triathalete’ of prose letters: a master novelist, biographer, and memoirist.”
Alysia Abbott writes: “I’ve since learned he’s played mentor to many young writers, including Rakesh Satyal and Andrew Sean Greer. Not only is he a winner of numerous international literary awards but he’s one of our most important living LGBTQ pioneers. He took part in the 1969 Stonewall Riots, cofounded the Violet Quill and Gay Men’s Health Crisis. Through his autobiographical fiction and copious memoir writing Edmund White is the preeminent keeper of our collective memory.”
Of course, young, shy and not-yet-out me knew nothing about this when I first picked up A Boy’s Own Story many, many years ago (furtively, I might add, especially as the cover had a virginally beckoning youth adorning it.) I don’t think I understood it properly at the time, and a lot of it confused me. But the overwhelming feeling – and it is one I recall distinctly to this day – was one of relief. Here was someone, finally, who knew intuitively what I barely understood myself going through.)
As Kathe Koja quotes in her essay: “The most important things in our intimate lives can’t be discussed with strangers, except in books.” (Years later, I would read The Farewell Symphony after having lost several friends to AIDS, and going through the experience of having my long-term partner diagnosed with HIV six months into our relationship.)
A lot of the writers included here have similar feelings about the impact that A Boy’s Own Story had on their personal and professional lives. I wonder how different it is for young gay people today, especially given the ongoing difficulties faced, and the continuing struggles endured, by the LGBTQI community globally.
Therefore it is so vital that our history be preserved, celebrated, and cherished, so that the torch can be carried onto the next generation. Which makes Cardamone’s wonderful book such a treasure trove, and a beacon.
I first came across Cardamone when I read his seminal The Lost Library, which sought to bring back into the public consciousness many of the brightest stars of gay fiction that had since dimmed. (The fact that we lost so many greatly talented people to the devastation of the epidemic over such a brutally short period is something that quietly haunts both books.)
Ever since A Boy’s Own Story, White’s books have formed a backdrop to the seminal events of my own life, from coming out to the end of a 13-year relationship, and approaching middle age. He continues to surprise me, especially with incredibly astute novels such as Jack Holmes and His Fried and Our Young Man.
These struck me as being so mischievously non-PC in a gay age that, sadly, has seemed to have lost its sense of direction and cultural lodestones – mainly because we have ignored our past. And we do so at our peril, as Cardamone’s contributors all attest to so eloquently and emotionally here.
A ‘gay sensibility’ is not the same as ‘gay culture’, I don’t think. It implies an acculturation of influences and experiences, a slow building of something greater than the sum of its parts. White’s wonderfully extensive oeuvre – from The Joy of Gay Sex (of which I still own a PDF copy – any paper version would probably have turned to sludge from my sweaty-palmed thumbing through it over the years) to his non-fiction work – is ample testament to this.
I recently read The Unpunished Vice, his latest book (written in the aftermath of his heart attack and bypass surgery, which I knew nothing about), and I was especially privileged to read his thoughts about Japanese and German literature. Yes, even now White continues to surprise me with his vast knowledge.
I have not read Genet or Proust (with White himself called “the American Proust … he shares with Proust an understanding of the intricacies of the self, of social dynamics, and a descriptive virtuosity applied to the material world.”)
I must hasten to add: There is nothing condescending or preachy about White. He wears his erudition and wit lightly (and is still capable of writing the most boner-inducing sex scenes in gay fiction.) It is how he conveys his own enthusiasm and excitement with such joy and lightness.
“In my pursuit of lightness,” Ed writes, “I sometimes feel like a spider monkey swinging through the trees in a world that is more and more deforested. If I look hard I can still find moments of frivolity, of silvery silliness, of merry complicity, even of pure cross-eyed joy. Till now I usually can spot the next branch but sometimes it’s quite a stretch.”
Cardamone’s book has made me realise that I do need to read Proust one day, if only to show my solidarity with keeping alive the notion of a ‘gay sensibility’. And I don’t have to fear feeling stupid if I don’t understand it: There is joy, and lightness, in the act of discovery itself.
Donald Weise offers a beautiful, generous portrait of White that sums up the man and his work, and how inextricable the two are:
Happily for me, my feelings about Ed and his writing ‘matured’ as I got older. [I think this is true of any long-time reader of White.] Partly because I liked his other fiction but also because I’d read and admired essays he’d written for the New York Times Book Review, Vanity Fair, and the New York Review of Books among a handful of other publications. These were insightful and gossipy pieces on artists as varied as Jasper Johns, Robert Mapplethorpe, Jean Genet, and Ned Rorem. Ed, I discovered, is a cultural critic who can go deep with the best of them, yet at the same time be playful, racy, and drop the perfect nugget of gossip (more often than not sexual) into a serious discussion of French literature or modern photography.
Much like the essays of Vidal, but without Vidal’s self-conscious wit, condescension, and derision, Ed can take almost any topic, however grand, and discuss it as if it were no more complicated to navigate than the TV Guide crossword puzzle. In the hands of most writers, critical examinations of such heady authors as Foucault, Proust, or Nabokov turn into a literary death-march through the past. Not in Ed’s case. Put another way, the size of a novelist’s dick might be discussed prominently before a single work by the author is ever mentioned. To say this is my kind of writer is an understatement of the first order.
Cardamone himself is part of a ‘new’ generation of gay writers. His Green Thumb and The Lurid Sea are two of the most exhilirating gay-themed novels I have ever read. But I think he is fully aware that he is part of a chain of light in a long path of darkness, passing the torch along from one generation of readers and writers to the next.
The fact that Cardamone revels in experimental fiction that pushes the envelope of what we define as ‘gay fiction’, and yet at the same time pays such eloquent homage to, and is grounded in, our literary canon and its history, is something that White himself must surely approve of.
The final word has to go to Edmund White himself, of course, who comments: “[I’m] alive in order to—well, to teach, to trick, to write, to memorialize, to be a faithful scribe, to record the loss of my dead.”
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