Land of the Dead: or, why I liked English class

I have a horrible confession to make. I liked English class. I liked it so much I had to hide it. I never said anything, never contributed a single comment to any discussion, though my mind was teeming with ideas about everything we studied.

It was decades later, when I was an adult and went back to school, that I found the courage to say the things I felt and saw. By this time my perceptions had shifted, of course. Even the most familiar poem wasn't the same; someone had gone in there and changed it, in every textbook in all the world.

I guess Auden's As I Walked Out One Evening is my favorite poem because it makes me want to scream that I ever dared to write poetry and try to get it published. I DID get a dozen or so of my poems published in small literary mags, but maybe seven people bothered to read them, mostly the contributors. Sometimes I wondered if the editor had bothered to read them at all.

Example. I wrote a poem called Lightning - God must've been punishing me for writing a poem called Lightning, because in the final printed version it came out Lightening.

"Well, it's only one letter different," squawked the 19-year-old assistant editor who had neatly inserted an error where there was none before. She must have thought I had made a spelling mistake.

So now my poem, which HAD been about childhood sexual abuse and doing hard time in a mental institution, was suddenly about a much more powerful subject: Coffee Mate "lightener", guaranteed to replace cream with a metallic-tasting petroleum-based powder which would never go sour.

So much for MY adventures. In my last post I decided to illustrate that favorite poem from high school (written by that dry, craggy desert of a man, W. H. Auden), and in doing so, some of that English class stuff came back to me.

My teacher in high school, Mr. Griffin  (probably dead by now, I realize with a shock) read this one out loud one day, and I was riveted. Maybe it was the way he read it.
The class called this teacher Griffy Baby (though not to his face), and he was given to telling tales out of school, recommending we watch a literary-based movie called Carry On Up the Jungle. Sometimes when he was tired of teaching he told funny stories about his kids, one of whom resembled a baby Dylan Thomas. Then there was the day he showed us a home movie of a tawdry drama he had filmed with his drunken friends.

Griffy Baby was partial to giving me As, but was curious as to why I never said anything in class. My soul was so crushed with social isolation and constant, relentless bullying that I didn't dare open my mouth. But I was grateful for that magnificent poem, and I never forgot it.

So to make up for my silence in class, I want to do a blow-by-blow analysis here and now, which is maybe appropriate given Auden's legendary sexual orientation. (He also wrote an infamous poem called The Platonic Blow which I don't think I will post here, but I do encourage you, even urge you to look it up. It'll make your literary hair stand on end, or something else if you're gay. Short of out-and-out porn, it's the most sexually-explicit writing I have ever seen.)

As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.

When the poem opens, the scene is just so. . . normal. The poet is out for a nice little stroll. Just walking down the street. Then he sees crowds upon the pavement. . . not other people strolling along, but crowds. Assembled for what? And these crowds, which sound about as friendly as the spectators at a Roman coliseum, are fields of harvest wheat. I mean, they don't look like wheat or sound like wheat or smell like wheat or taste like wheat. This is no synonym, folks, it is that deadliest of things: a metaphor! And speaking of deadly, isn't it just a little obvious that these wheaten folk seem all ready for the scythe of the Grim Reaper? "Harvest" wheat, indeed.

And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
'Love has no ending.

Arch of the railway. This is why I included in my last post's illustrations quite a few images from a superb movie called Notes from a Scandal, with Cate Blanchett playing a 40-year-old teacher having an affair with a 15-year-old student. Having to meet in such a drippy place smells of the illicit, or at least of the damned uncomfortable. And that brimming river: hey, that's assonance, folks! He says it three times, too, which makes it magical. Brimming like tears, like a cup about to run over. But that nasty cup appears later on.

'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,

'I'll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.

Here he seems to be introducing silly mythical images which would be highly inappropriate if it weren't for the sing-songy, nursery-rhyme-esque form of the poem, with its strict rhyme and meter. Personally I wonder why he spends so much time on these innocent-sounding pronouncements, when I always thought the dank, furtive image of the arch of the railway implied meeting up with a prostitute, male or female.

Idealism, maybe? Or is this guy or girl, or guys or girls, just incredibly stupid, given to ludicrous hyperbole? In any case, all these blatherings seem sum-up-able in one word: "Forever." I will love you, dear, I'll love you. . . for all eternity.

'The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.'

The years run like rabbits, as if to say, my, how time flies when you're having fun! Or is it something else? They may be running away, but it has nothing to do with us chasing after them. Some day, such as NOW, we may fervently wish those rabbits would slow down.  Rabbits also imply a sort of dumb, embarrassing fertility, not to mention the rabbit being pulled out of a hat ("Nothing up my sleeve!") and Alice's white rabbit, who is somehow always running "late". (And note the double meaning of late!)

And just what does "rabbiting on" mean? That you talk too much?

And that "first love of the world" cannot be anyone but Eve, the first woman. Hmmm, I wonder what she charges?

But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
'O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.

I like this. I love this. I love the "device" of Time speaking to us, of all the clocks in the city starting to protest the bullshit of the lovers writhing under the arch. The audacity, too, of allowing Time to address us, as if God Himself decided to step up to the plate (which He does, all the time, in the Old Testament).

 

And already we have our warning: my teacher read this in a slightly smug tone. "You cannot conquer time."

'In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.

This is one of those ravishing verses of poetry that you don't want to touch because it's just so fucking magnificent. I wanted to write that on my term paper - "fucking magnificent" - but I didn't, and still got an A.

But he's doing the same thing here, capitolizing and I suppose personifying the Nightmare, Justice, etc. Justice being not blind, but naked. Pull down the blinds, please. And how about that little cough, ahem. Excuse me. Do you know who's in charge here?

'In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.

Nobody wants to read this because it makes them groan inwardly, especially those first two lines. It's so bloody true, even in the most goal-directed, achievement-stuffed life. And Time, that wonderful personified Wizard of eternity, will have his "fancy", much as a rich man might pick out a particularly tasty prostitute from the lineup. Fancy is a silly, ephemeral, frou-frou sort of thing, the opposite of plain: fancy this, fancy that. And it also means fantasy. The "tomorrow or today" is sort of like setting up a delivery time for a parcel: "oh, I'll be here tomorrow, I think, you can bring it round then. Or, wait a minute, I'll be home today."

'Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver's brilliant bow.

I had a little trouble with this until I stole an interpretation from someone else. Green valleys are very British, of course - how green is my valley, and all that -  but why is the snow (grey hair, old age) so "appalling"? It casts a pall over the valley, even obscures it completely so that the green life beneath it does not show. It might as well not be there at all. The next two lines are all shivery and liquidescent. I don't know what a threaded dance is, but I think the diver is Cupid. Once more, eroticism is shattered by that dirty old man, Mortality.

'O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you've missed.

This is among Auden's most famous lines, for some reason almost always misquoted (like Dylan Thomas' Do Not Go Gentle) as "stare, stare in the mirror". The mirror does come, but a few verses later, and in a much more disturbing manner. This one is effective, I think, because of understatement. Or: is the subject just washing his hands of the whole thing? (Didn't Pilate do the same thing? And Lady Macbeth? Oh, I'm going overboard here.)

'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.

Probably my favorite verse, because it makes me want to scream and never write again. Glacier, desert, crack in the tea-cup, land of the dead, where we all end up, unless you believe in Heaven, which Auden obviously does not. The safe comfort of the everyday and the brutal fact of mortality are so closely juxtaposed that we no longer take any notice. It's as close as the skin on your face.

'Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.

This is a weird one, and I suppose it echoes the nursery-rhyme quality of some of these verses. The Giant must be a reference to Jack and the Beanstalk, but what does it mean that he's "enchanting to"? I hope not what I think. Most Americans won't know this, but the Lily-white Boy (also a strange image) is a character in an English folk song called Green Grow the Rushes-o. Jill goes down on her back, well. . . innocence begins to prostitute itself. This is the Land of the Dead, which is beginning to resemble Hieronymus Bosch's vision of hell.

'O look, look in the mirror
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.

Yes. THIS is the verse with the mirror in it, and it has that "o look, look -", that sense of shock, almost of horror at the inevitable, strenuously-denied passage of time. I don't want to look, but I must look! And those ironic lines - life remains a blessing, but we're about to die so why is a blessing even relevant? And the stinging self-contempt of "YOU cannot bless", as if you have somehow, and mysteriously, lost all your power.

'O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.'

There was a crooked man, who walked a crooked mile. . . and the whole human condition is drawn in slanted lines.

It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.

And thus, the soft, gentle benediction, as we lie howling and writhing in the face of eternal Hell.

In the burrows of the Nightmare

As I Walked Out One Evening
by W. H. Auden
As I walked out one evening, Walking down Bristol Street, The crowds upon the pavement Were fields of harvest wheat. And down by the brimming river I heard a lover sing Under an arch of the railway: 'Love has no ending.' 'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you Till China and Africa meet, And the river jumps over the mountain And the salmon sing in the street, 'I'll love you till the ocean    Is folded and hung up to dry And the seven stars go squawking    Like geese about the sky. 'The years shall run like rabbits,    For in my arms I hold The Flower of the Ages,    And the first love of the world.' But all the clocks in the city    Began to whirr and chime: 'O let not Time deceive you,    You cannot conquer Time. 'In the burrows of the Nightmare    Where Justice naked is, Time watches from the shadow    And coughs when you would kiss. 'In headaches and in worry    Vaguely life leaks away, And Time will have his fancy    To-morrow or to-day. 'Into many a green valley    Drifts the appalling snow; Time breaks the threaded dances    And the diver's brilliant bow. 'O plunge your hands in water,    Plunge them in up to the wrist; Stare, stare in the basin    And wonder what you've missed. 'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,    The desert sighs in the bed, And the crack in the tea-cup opens    A lane to the land of the dead. 'Where the beggars raffle the banknotes    And the Giant is enchanting to Jack, And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,    And Jill goes down on her back. 'O look, look in the mirror,    O look in your distress: Life remains a blessing    Although you cannot bless. 'O stand, stand at the window    As the tears scald and start; You shall love your crooked neighbour    With your crooked heart.' It was late, late in the evening,    The lovers they were gone; The clocks had ceased their chiming,    And the deep river ran on.

coke and mentos bottle rocket hits cameraman

Cute 'n sexy gifs: it's Young Frankenstein!

One of a hundred or so fave moments from Young Frankenstein. I want one of those wigs, not for Halloween but just for everyday wear.

Gene Wilder, Gene Wilder. . . Gene Wilder (no I'm not gay, I take it back)

                                              Who's this? "Abbie Normal."

Even sexier in mascara.

Madeline Kahn, Madeline Kahn. . . I changed my mind, I guess I am gay.

(and, funniest movie line ever, even without seeing the movie)

"IT!. . . COULD! . . . WORK!!"

Stars and bars. . . forever

When I stumbled upon this video - well, actually, I didn't stumble because, triggered by my reflections on Vladimir Horowitz, I was deliberately trying to scare up some of his playing - I could not stop laughing, gasping, and just sitting in awe. This is one quirkily fabulous piece of music, a transformation of the ultimate American marching tune into an elegant Chopin-esque processional. I'm not sure when this was recorded, but it's certain Horowitz already had total command of it (he wrote the transcript himself, of course, and no one else dared tinker with it after that).

I thought of this one because of an interview I saw, so long ago that it appeared in my memory as grainy and bleached, like a dream or a bad colour TV. That's because, according to that resurrective/great gettin'-up mornin' of YouTube, it appeared on 60 Minutes in 1977. Mike Wallace, obviously fascinated with his subject matter, begs and pleads "Vlodya" to play his infamous version of the Sousa march, The Stars and Stripes Forever. At first he resists, insisting he has forgotten it (which he largely has), but finally he caves and goes over to the piano and just pounds the hell out of it, his foot jammed on the loud pedal, but somehow it still sounds elegant and impressive.

 

Horowitz went on and on until he fell over with age, and made lots of mistakes in concert, but couldn't seem to stop. I promise you, I won't get into his friend "xxxxx xxxxxx" and his own premature retirement from the stage. It interests me that Horowitz suffered so much from depression and substance abuse, and it saddens me too. This Wiki entry seems like a variation on the theme I dealt with a few posts ago about Who's Gay in Hollywood:

Personal life

In 1933, in a civil ceremony, Horowitz married Toscanini's daughter Wanda. Although Horowitz was Jewish and Wanda Catholic, this was not an issue, as neither was observant. As Wanda knew no Russian and Horowitz knew very little Italian, their primary language became French. They had one child, Sonia Toscanini Horowitz (1934–1975). It has never been determined whether her death, from a drug overdose, was accidental or a suicide.^[1]

Despite his marriage, there were persistent rumors of Horowitz's homosexuality.^[7] Arthur Rubinstein said of Horowitz that "Everyone knew and accepted him as a homosexual."^[21] David Dubal wrote that in his years with Horowitz, there was no evidence that the octogenarian was sexually active, but that "there was no doubt he was powerfully attracted to the male body and was most likely often sexually frustrated throughout his life."^[22] Dubal observed that Horowitz sublimated a strong instinctual sexuality into a powerful erotic undercurrent which was communicated in his piano playing.^[23] Horowitz, who denied being homosexual,^[24] once joked "There are three kinds of pianists: Jewish pianists, homosexual pianists, and bad pianists."^[25]

In the 1940s, Horowitz began seeing a psychiatrist. According to sources, this was an attempt to alter his sexual orientation.^[26][27] In the 1960s and again in the 1970s, the pianist underwent electroshock treatment for depression.^[28]

In 1982, Horowitz began using prescribed anti-depressant medications; there are reports that he was drinking alcohol as well.^[1] Consequently, his playing underwent a perceptible decline during this period.^[1] The pianist’s 1983 performances in the United States and Japan were marred by memory lapses and a loss of physical control. (At the latter, one Japanese critic likened Horowitz to a "precious antique vase that is cracked.") He stopped playing in public for the next two years.

 

Blogger's comments. Because Horowitz had more performing lives than a cat, he did emerge triumphant (again!) and play for a few more years to cataclysmic applause, mistakes and all. But isn't it sad that he felt so ashamed, or threatened by his homosexual side that he couldn't act on it, at least not without the terror of being discovered?

This goes on. We haven't solved it, friends. We think we have, which somehow makes it worse. Homophobia slithers around underground now, while on the surface of things we accept being gay as an inherent orientation (though some would say it's a "lifestyle choice"). 

But if you're any sort of religious fundamentalist, you probably believe it's a sin or an aberration. My feeling is that sexual orientation is hard-wired, and most of us are hard-wired to "tend" one way or another. This doesn't mean there is no heterosexual element in a homosexual orientation. Or the reverse. Maybe, like in Brokeback Mountain, same-sex attractions can spring up, seemingly out of nowhere. "I ain't queer," one of those adorable cowpokes (sorry) said in that movie. "Neither am I," Jake Gyllenhaal replied. I'd love to test out that "neither am I" theory with him, preferably in a sleeping bag out on the lone prai-riee (but then, there is the little matter of those Victorian women in corsets).

Can I confess something? Do you care? Since few people read this, I think I can safely say that for the most part I like and love men. Most of my close friends have been men (though admittedly, about 1/3 of them gay men). I like the way men smell and their low chesty voices and scratchy faces and the way they tower over me. I love their hands, especially their lack of tri-color nail polish with every other finger a different color.

Hard-wired, I think. Once in a while though, when I see, usually, a picture of a woman, or someone doing something adorable, or - what is it, anyway? Usually something very fleeting - I can't even think of an example now - and I think: my God, I can see how someone could fall in love with her. So does this make me queer-ish, or a part-time lesbian, or bisexual, or what?

As I get older I give less of a fuck because I am not, at this point, going to run off with a girl or a woman just because I wonder if I am queer-ish and want to test it out. I think women would be as hard to live with as men, but they wouldn't smell right to me. I don't want someone who looks too much like me, for one thing. I can go look in the mirror if I want to be appalled.

And going off with a woman - "going gay", a friend of mine calls it, with some annoyance - would be sexual infidelity just as surely as crawling into a sleeping bag with Jake Gyllenhaal on Brokeback Mountain.

And as far as I am concerned, neither possibility is about to happen any time soon.

Soupy Shuffle: GANGNAM STYLE!

I'm not the first one to point out that legendary entertainer Soupy Sales originated the Gangnam Style of dance. He left out the horse-riding arm movements for the most part, but the legs are the same. Like Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves, he rode freehand, which is much more dangerous and daring. 

There was something likeable about Soupy. I remember having lunch in the den and Soupy admonishing me to eat the crusts on my sandwiches "because they're just as good as the rest of the bread". He was in Detroit at the time, so I must've been about five. Soupy was also infamous for asking kids to mail "all those little pieces of paper" from their parents' wallets to his address. He netted tens of thousands before being reprimanded with a suppressed chuckle. (Let's not get into the naked girl who appeared at the door during a sketch on live TV.)

So why would I even want to look back on my for-the-most-part-wretched-and -miserable childhood? There were a few bright moments, but the one person I really loved and related to went crazy and died.  I don't relive my childhood now: I reboot it through the sunny freedom of frolicking with my grandkids. I don' t know what might have happened to me without them, but I suspect I would not have made it through 2005.

Levant and his "honeysuckle"

This is a bad version of a good clip. The clip I used to have (of the same song) mysteriously shrank, filling about 1/4 of the screen, which is too bad because THIS one leaves out a few seconds before and after the song which are completely charming. But this is a good example of Oscar's strange seductiveness, which does seem to apply to men as well as women. I mean. . . calling a man "Honeysuckle" is just a little too much, isn't it? Any nickname that has "suck" in it is suspicious to me.

Who's Gay in Hollywood: and why do we care?

  

“WHO’S GAY IN HOLLYWOOD” the rag/mag said.  Not a question, but a statement. I saw it as I was waiting to buy carrots or something in the checkout line. I didn’t have time to look the article up, but I assumed Tom Cruise figured large.

Katie Holmes had him over a barrel, I think, with nude bathhouse scenes or something like that, and had her dainty little twitterfinger poised on "post". This is why he put up no fuss, though he claims to have been “blindsided”.

Men still have beards, apparently, and not the nice scratchy ones I like to nuzzle up to, with the merest hint of aftershave masking the natural scent of their. . . oops, there I go again. I guess I’m not gay after all.

Not even after all that corset stuff.

I mean beards, as in women who carefully protect their male partner’s gay identity. But I don’t know whether it’s as simple as all that.

Some men (Anthony Perkins comes to mind) have tried desperately to “straighten” themselves, often with the help of so-called therapists in the business of normalizing people and forcing them into boxes of conventionality. Some of them are successful in meeting and marrying and, I assume, feeling a degree of sexual attraction to their female partners.

But it seems that something always “happens”. Sooner or later, there is a rebellion, a sort of bursting out. Look at those bloody televangelists, like the one, what’s his name anyway, the one with the rectangular smile who was caught suck - : oh sorry. I’m sorry, but I can’t avoid using technical language for the sake of precision. They break out. Their wives stand beside them in their pastel polyester dresses, smiling tightly during the press conference and explaining why they’re going to “stand by their man”, who isn’t gay anyway but merely misunderstood (or maybe bipolar, a very popular current explanation for questionable behaviour).

This “who’s gay in Hollywood” mentality flies in the face of that classic Seinfeld line, “not that there’s anything wrong with that” (which of course means the exact opposite). It’s like revealing who’s an axe murderer or an identity thief or one of those people who steals the money for the Remembrance Day poppies. I mean, I will admit I hungered and thirsted to open that National Midnight Star or whatever it was, but I didn't, because every time I do, I always run out of time to find the article because the cover story is WAY inside somewhere without an index, like, after Rosie O’Donnell’s heart attack or something. So I never get to read the story or look at the pictures (and the text is never more than 50 words or so).

If this lip-smacking over who's gay and who isn't is so prevalent, just how far have we come in accepting sexual differences? Why is it that the chief insult I hear among young people today is, "Ohhh, that's so GAY"? When used this way, can it mean anything good?

OK. Dissonances relate, so I’m going to relate a few. I am working my way through one of the most harrowing biographies I’ve ever read. It’s called A Talent for Genius by Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger, and it’s about Oscar Levant, a celebrity that could only have flourished in the era around World War II. This book recounts, blow by awful blow, Levant’s slow descent into disabling mental illness and a Howard Hughes level of reclusiveness which caused him to spend the last five years of his life in his pajamas, seldom venturing out of his bedroom. If anyone came to see him, he’d stand at the top of the stairs and bellow, “State your business!”

Actually, I like that, and there’s a lot about Levant that I find charming and fascinating and even awesome. I mean awesome in the true sense, awe-inspiring. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anyone play the piano like that. In his movies, in which he’s often better than the predictable material, he rips open the triteness and boredom of the dialogue by blazing his way through Gershwin or Tchaikovsky or even Khatchaturian’s Sabre Dance. His musicianship was total, and his oddball role as an “Oscar Levant type” has never been equalled. (He even wrote all his own dialogue, which is still unheard-of.) The authors of the book describe this as his “disgruntled wiseacre persona”.

But something happened to Levant along the way. He was seduced by celebrity, first appearing as a devastating “wit” on radio, then later (much degenerated) on TV panel shows, the kind featuring Kitty Carlisle, Betsy Palmer and Bennett Cerf.

So why am I even mentioning this? I’m struggling with the bio, but I haven’t even been able to crack his autobiography, Memoirs of an Amnesiac, because they were written when his mind was half-disintegrated from the drugs his “doctor” was shooting into his veins at midnight, in a car parked down the block from his house. I am mentioning this because his memoirs are constantly mentioning and referring to “homosexuals”. Over, and over, and over again. It’s a sort of sad, veiled “I’m not gay, I’m not gay” that I might not have noticed before I got so deeply into this harrowing subject.

Hell, I don’t know if he was gay or not, and maybe he mentioned the h-word all those times because he was provocative, a social rebel, and sometimes downright obnoxious, a narcissist who would do absolutely anything to draw public attention to himself. He dealt in shock, and this was a shock word then, for sure. Homosexuality was a mental illness, something to be “treated” and, ideally, conquered so the guy could fucking-well get married and stop suck – sorry.

I’ve seen a few Amazon.com reviews of this book, and some are quite indignant because ONE paragraph mentioned his idolatrous relationship with the legendary George Gershwin, a man who would barely give him the time of day. (But he did give him a watch. Speaking of time. And let's not get into the little sketch he drew of Oscar, above, in which he seems to be wearing very heavy eye shadow.)

It goes like this:

“Levant, who once referred to ballet as ‘the fairies’ baseball’, was an unenlightened creature of his time when it came to the subject of homosexuality. His unthinking homophobia may have been a defense against his own powerful attraction to Gershwin, whose looks and style he admired as much as he admired George’s music.” Oh, and. . . there’s this: “Though he would have enduring friendships with gay men such as Virgil Thomson and David Diamond, he was not above making wisecracks.” (Blogger’s note: let’s not leave out his associations with those indisputably gay men of music, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein and Vladimir Horowitz, known in the Moscow Conservatory as "Vlodya the Boy Toy". And then there was Gore Vidal - founder of the Sassoon line of hair salons - and Christopher Isherwood, author of "Boys I Have Known: from Boston to Berlin").

I just detect a murmur below the surface here. A murmur of longing and ambivalence, a profound discomfort with his own feelings.  He loved to spend time, a lot of time, with men who were known to be gay, fairly “out” for their era. Horowitz, well. . . who wouldn’t want him? I’d jump him any day, fairy or not. How’s this for a buried reference to sexual attraction:

“While both men loathed the routine drudgery of the road, both felt that there was a sensual, almost sexual thrill to the physical contact with the keyboard.”

And here's another, a beauty:

"Horowitz once took Levant aside and showed him a number of photographs of himself as a youth, looking like Franz Liszt with long brown hair. In one of them, Horowitz was clearly wearing lipstick. Horowitz looked at the photograph with Oscar and said with a sly smile, 'Decadent.'"

Whoa.

But readers of the book don’t like this sort of thing, this implication. Even the suggestion that Levant had a gay side, that he had a jones for George and was horny for Horowitz, provokes a kind of fury: how dare you even IMPLY that my hero could have been gay? It’s slander, I tell you! And this from people who would be indignant if you accused them of homophobia.

But does it really matter who he rolled around with, so long as he was deeply unhappy?

It would be an interesting footnote to discover that he swung both ways, or tried not to, or was really horrified about the whole thing, or else just didn’t care. It might be true, and it might also be that none of this is true and he was as straight as the straightjacket he routinely wore when committed to the psychiatric ward.

Sexual orientation, now there’s a tricky one, a marshy, even murky topic. I once had a doctor tell me, “OK” (drawing a little diagram with “Gay” on one side and “Straight” on the other). “Here’s the most butch guy you ever saw, driving a ten-ton truck and tattooed all over his body.” (Drawing a little x on the far “straight” side.) “Here’s the gayest man in the world, you know, one of those interior decorator types you see skipping around" (similarly, the x on the “gay” side.) “But most of us are. . . "

The doctor (probably gay) then drew a whole series of pictures of flowers and rainbows and little frisking puppies who didn’t CARE what their sexual orientation was! Wheeeee, it’s spring and I’m in love!

Moreover, I had a psychologist (not that I’ve ever been to one) tell me that if society were different, which it isn’t, we would see a lot more fluidity in sexual orientation and less emphasis on “gay”/“straight” categories, with people moving back and forth along that continuum throughout their lives.  “I’m attracted to the person,” as the saying goes, not putting so much emphasis on whether their genitals go “in” or “out”.

(Addendum. Men are just women turned inside-out. The cock is the vagina. The balls are the ovaries. I don’t know what happened to the uterus: the prostate, maybe?)

But this fluidity, this flexibility between the poles of gay and straight would play hell with marriage and having babies and a lot of other things. It would create great confusion. And I am sure people are doing it, even as we speak, because things like sexuality are powerful and don’t want to be governed, and somehow have to be governed, or so we tell ourselves.

When someone has an “affair”, it means breaking out in some way, bursting the bonds of commitment and doing something illicit, exciting, and inherently shameful. I guess if a straight man/woman suddenly burst out and had a gay “affair”, the ante would be upped and the whole thing would be even more shameful, not to mention exciting.

Those supermarket social values! They do hang on. So maybe Oscar didn’t get to sleep with George (who strikes me as cool, ascetic and probably asexual, secretly believing no one was good enough to sleep with him anyway). Maybe he didn’t even want to. But I pick up this subtext, this murmur of longing, and it’s tragic. Did this have anything to do with his mental deterioration in his later years, his natural charm calcifying so that in his later TV appearances his face resembled “a Kibuki mask of pain”?

Clifton Fadiman, Oscar's close friend, was assigned to review his first book (A Smattering of Ignorance) for the New Yorker right about the time the Declaration of Independence was signed. No nepotism there, obviously. But he had something interesting to say about his pal's internal conflict:

"He has been immensely talented and could be again if the locked horns of the elks fighting inside his head could only be separated. He has suffered and still suffers far beyond what is proper to the human condition."

Two elks. Two rutting beasts, both male, in a battle to the death in order to reproduce. Interesting image.

Oh, he may have been gay, or fluid, or rigid, or this or that. We don’t know, and will never know. Or maybe he was just a tear in the stifling fabric of convention, frightening people into laughter by flipping politeness upside-down. He was celestial energy blazing through the concert hall or the living room, leaving behind him a sparkling mass of awe and confusion. For that I must thank him: and for never resolving his sexual identity problems.

CODA: a short one cuz I have to be somewhere. I have noticed lately that the term "bisexual" is fading. You're either committed to the gay cause, or you're not. If you also dip your wand in female waters, it's somehow suspect. You have to get on-board or be seen as disloyal somehow. I also notice that if male celebrities do "come out", they piggyback (sorry) or do the stepping-stone bit, first saying they are bisexual before turning into Elton John and adopting a bunch of kids, the latest fashion accesory. (Too bad they don't fit into a purse like Britney's chihuahua, later abandoned for having needs and being no fun any more.)  Why must society polarize? It's yet another way of putting human sexuality into a restrictive box.

So there.

Coda to the Coda: and saaaaaay, what's the deal with "gay woman" and "lesbian"? Why all the confusion? It's as if "gay woman" is just a subsidiary of "gay man", who is just "gay" and that's it. Sorry, have to go.

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

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