Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise

by Paul Monette

  Around the next corner was Piaf’s plot. Fortunately we had a map to find it, because she is listed first on the grave as Edith Giovanna Gassion (dit Piaf), her sparrow nickname consigned to parentheses. In any case it’s a family plot, her own name no more prominent than the others. And we couldn’t get too close, because she had a guardian attendant that day, a little man with a henna-rinsed rug and Poirot mustache who seemed profoundly offended by our presence. He was cleaning up the place, bearing away the withered floral tributes and dumping them in a poubelle. October tenth had been the twenty-ninth anniversary of her death, and people remembered still. Was this peculiar man, pushing seventy now, some member of the Gassion family? Or more likely one of the forty thousand mourners who broke through police barricades at the funeral, just to be closer to her.

  The afternoon was sharp as an apple, clouds breaking up after days of rain, as we made our way around to the entrance again—one eye peeled for Proust and Isadora Duncan. We passed the line of memorials to those who’d died in the camps: Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald-Dora, Auschwitz, Ravensbruck, Mauthausen, each monument more horrorstruck than the last. Beseeching figures reachingjtheir bony limbs to the sky, that the agony might lift. At the Mauthausen memorial there are 186 steps carved in the stone, to represent the Sisyphean task of the inmates, carrying rocks from the quarry—186 steps to reach level ground, only to be sent back for more rocks.2

  We walked on somberly, mocked by the flashing sunlight through the chestnut trees, the necropolis having been washed clean by the rain. And then we entered a quarter that was overrun with graffiti, on every grave on every side. But not the urban graffiti we were used to, the hieratic mock-Cyrillic of the spray can. Here the notes and tributes were rather more formal: SEX DRUGS AND ROCK ‘N’ ROLL; WE LOVE YOU, JIM; THE MUSIC NEVER DIES. Intensifying in volume as we neared the grave itself, scarcely a bare spot left on the bourgeois marble—useless to sandblast such a torrent.

  At Morrison’s place was a curious assembly of punk Eurokids and retro American hippies, sitting about and smoking but altogether subdued and respectful. Hard to tell the difference, frankly, between this ragtag troupe and the fussy man with the henna job, as far as the fervor of memory went. There’s no one way to visit such places, no prescribed amount of tears. But always it seems we make the journey to enter a river of memory larger than our poor tributaries, the brooks of spring that have dried up by summer’s end.

  Inevitably, Pere-Lachaise is defined by its most distinguished residents, so many and so varied that one cannot help but move through its alleys like a tourist. As long as you’re there you might as well check out Proust. No disrespect in that, but hardly the level of pilgrimage that brings you to Ki-owa Ranch or the Protestant Cemetery.

  My own touchstone in Paris lies at the center of the city—the hub of France, in fact, from which all distances and road signs take their measure. If you are a hundred kilometers from Paris, it means you are just so far from the west portal of Notre Dame. At the stern tip of the He de la Cite, just behind the brawny cathedral, lies the monument to the French deported to the camps. It’s barely identified, easy to miss, a gated garden in front of what looks like a fortress wall. On either side a pair of steep stairways lead down to a walled courtyard at the level of the river.

  A concrete holding pen, it feels like, with a single opening onto the river, a barred gate like a portcullis. You are meant to feel that here is where they will board you under guard, onto prison ships that will carry you to your doom. If you turn away you’re confronted by the narrow entrance that pierces the fortress wall and beckons you into a kind of cave.

  The first thing you see, directly in front of you, is a dim-lit tunnel receding deep under the island. The tunnel is paved with tiny glass beads of light, one for each of the two hundred thousand deportees. On the end wall of the tunnel is a bright light, almost a searchlight, which I’ve been told is intended to represent hope. But it’s hard not to see it as the beam of a train, bearing down on all of us. At your feet there’s a sort of bronze sarcophagus, containing the remains of an inconnu, an unknown inmate.

  You are not permitted to enter the tunnel, only to wander around the vestibule. On the walls are carved quotations from the writers of the Resistance—Sartre, Camus, St. Exupery, Vercors. But the carver’s alphabet is jagged, as if every letter had been etched in the stone with a sharpened spoon handle. Defacement of a very high order, the graffiti of the damned. Curiously uplifting in its way, because there isn’t a false step anywhere, no Disney simplification, no tidying up. As you walk out into daylight again, incised above the doorway in the same prisoner’s alphabet is the final admonition: FORGIVE BUT DON’T FORGET.

  I wasn’t numb there at all. No tears exactly, but a sense in which I was centered by my grief. All my dead around me, bearing me up. We were in Paris seven days, staying in a small hotel on the He Saint Louis, barely a hundred yards from the monument. I paid a visit every day and usually had the place to myself. Like some version of the man with the henna wig, I grew quite proprietary, gladly offering simultaneous translations of the words in the stone to American tourists struggling with their high school French. One afternoon I was joined by an old man who told me he had survived two years at Bergen-Belsen. After a half-hour of showing me the monument, I wasn’t sure whether he’d be offended if I offered him a gratuity. When I did, he accepted it heartily and gave me a bear hug, then took off to have himself a glass.

  All of which somehow leads me back to 3275. I will probably die without forgiving anyone, certainly not the Kapos and the Commandants of Reagan/Bush and their genocidal politics of AIDS. It’s been engraved too long on my brain that my epitaph should proclaim—

  DIED OF HOMOPHOBIA

  MURDERED BY HIS GOVERNMENT

  Still room of course for a line or two of uplift, a scrap of Shakespeare, but I haven’t settled on that yet. My heart is too exhausted to sustain the bitterness anymore, not even against the calumnies of my enemies. The writer who trashed me twelve years ago in the Native has kept up his campaign. “It isn’t even English,” he remarked to an interviewer last summer, shuddering at my prose. He has a friend who calls him, he says, and reads whole paragraphs of me, reducing them both to whinnies of laughter.

  But his malice has lost its power to make me feel writ in water. AIDS has taught me precisely what I’m writ in, blood and bone and viral load. I can’t tell anymore whom I am addressing with my epitaph. The accidental tourist? Or my own grieving friends who can’t even parse their losses anymore, who don’t need bronze to recall me. And after all, I’ve been visiting my own grave for years now—pre-need, as they call it at Forest Lawn—and I don’t require any further vigil from anybody.

  Unless it is some kind of safety zone. And as long as there’s no piety in the gesture. I don’t like flowers, but the deer do. Keats and Lawrence and Stevenson all died of their lungs, robbed by a century whose major products were soot and sulfur. We queers on Revelation hill, tucking our skirts about us so as not to touch our Mormon neighbors, died of the greed of power, because we were expendable. If you mean to visit any of us, it had better be to make you strong to fight that power. Take your languor and easy tears somewhere else. Above all, don’t pretty us up. Tell yourself: None of this ever had to happen. And then go make it stop, with whatever breath you have left. Grief is a sword, or it is nothing.

  1. D. H. Lawrence and blew Mexico, Keith Sagar, ed. (Salt Lake City, 1982), page 96.

  2. For an aide-memoire to Pere-Lachaise, I am indebted to the superb guide to the cemeteries of Paris by Judi Culbertson and Tom Randall, Permanent Parisians (Chelsea, Vt.: Chelsea Green Publishing Co., 1986).

  THE POLITICS OF SILENCE

  THIS MORNING in The Washington Post there happened to be a pairing of my picture with Pat Buchanan’s picture. I’m sure I’m the only one who noticed that the pictures were printed askew, so that the bottom part of mine lapped over his—-almost as if I’m trying to butt in front of him. Which I am, as a
matter of fact. But think of the jowl-flapping and the wounded bluster at Pat’s house this morning, at such an egregious example of lèse-majesté. Not to worry, Pat. I’ll see to it that they don’t link us romantically, even in the tabloids. We’re both married men, after all, doing our leatherneck best to uphold family.

  The reporter in the Post also notes that this could be one of my last public appearances, which is a pretty cheap way to fill a house. Have no fear. I do not expect to keel over in the next forty-five minutes. But I am reminded of a story.

  My friend Bruce Vilanch is the primo comic writer in Los Angeles, the master of the one-liner, who’s written material for some of the funniest people in the world. Not long ago he wrote a Vegas show for Jim Bailey, the incomparable female illusionist. Bruce flew up to Vegas for opening night, and they’d saved him a nice ringside table. This was one of those evenings where Jim wasn’t going to impersonate several ladies, but just Judy Garland.

  The orchestra struck up a fanfare, and Jim came strutting out dressed as Judy, belting “Swanee.” Bruce is sitting next to a couple from the Midwest, so encased in polyester they were fireproof. And the man turns to his wife and says, in some bewilderment, “I thought she was dead.”

  And his wife kind of pats his knee and replies with a knowing smile: “It’s the daughter.”

  That’s what I think of when people write to my publisher asking, “Is Paul Monette still alive?” No, but the daughter is.

  I have titled these remarks “The Politics of Silence.” A friend of mine suggested to me last week that Becoming a Man would have been a better book without the diatribe of the first five pages. A more seasoned writer, he seemed to imply, would have tossed those pages out before submitting the book for publication. We talked at some length about whether art should be political or not. His own sister is a novelist, a very fine one, and it was she who’d heaved my book across the room after feeling assaulted by those five pages.

  I said to my friend: “Is your sister political?”

  And he replied: “No, she’s an artist.”

  This is not something I can agree to anymore. It is simply not enough to be an artist, unengaged. If you live in political times, if the lightning rod of history quivers with fire on your roof, then all art is political. And all art that is not consciously so partakes of the messiness of politics, if only to flee it. People still went to the opera in Nazi Germany. People still read books that were pleasant and diverting.

  Robin Lane Fox, a massively learned historian of religion, says most people believe that the Christian world was a fait accompli, a historical inevitability. But in point of fact, until Constantine converted to Christianity in 313, the western world was a battleground between pagans and Christians. The pagans were an urban, sophisticated class^not unlike us. They had their mysteries, and of course they had their gods, very human gods. So one of the first things the early popes did was systematically destroy the pagan texts, or lock them up in monasteries. Professor Fox was only able to reconstruct a semblance of the pagan world by going through ancient cemeteries reading the gravestones.

  If you destroy the record, you destroy the truth.

  I’ve learned in my adult life that the will to silence the truth is always and everywhere as strong as the truth itself.- So it is a necessary fight we will always be in: those of us who struggle to understand our common truths, and those who try to erase them. The first Nazi book burning, I would have you remember, was of a gay and lesbian archive.

  In that light, I think there could not be a more appropriate place to talk about censorship than the Library of Congress. Censorship is such a subtle thing. Most of it we don’t even hear about, because it’s done in the dark by dirty and ashamed people, by self-appointed judges who are convinced they know what’s best for all of us. These are the people who always keep a match ready to start a conflagration.

  We must not be lulled into a false sense of security by our First Amendment freedoms, freedoms which have never in the history of this nation been under so much attack. It is a wholly specious argument to say we are engaged in a fight between literary standards and moral standards. These matters are very specific and very concrete—the withholding of a particular book from the library shelf, the capitulation to pressure that would bar from the hungering reader books as diverse as The Wizard of Oz, Huckleberry Finn, and The Catcher in the Rye. Not to mention The Origin of Species.

  Just this week we’ve been struggling with the very nub of this issue. My colleague Dorothy Allison, who was nominated for a National Book Award in fiction for an exquisite and remarkable novel called Bastard out of Carolina, was abruptly canceled from giving a National Book Week speech in Oklahoma. And the most tragic thing about it is that they made their decision to censor without ever having seen the book, let alone read it. They just heard through their own grapevine that Dorothy is a lesbian poet, and suddenly it was deemed inappropriate that she address an audience that might include children.

  There has been endless backing and filling and covering of tracks over this incident, with every Oklahoma library official bending backward to assure us it was all just an innocent glitch of scheduling. The schedule, you see, had been set in stone months before, and there simply wasn’t room for any more authors. Really? One wonders if they would have found room for Toni Morrison or John Updike.1

  For forty-five years, since the end of the war, there has been a campaign to tell people that Anne Frank never existed, that her Diary was a pernicious fiction, foisted on the public by the Jewish conspiracy. They haven’t won yet, the rewriters of history. Anne Frank’s book is still there, in every library. Teenagers still get to read it. But a lot of fundamentalists don’t want it in schools, because it’s “obscene.” And while they’re at it, they don’t want the Holocaust taught either, because it never happened.

  Now their tactic is to check out offending books from the library and throw them away. Such has been the fate of Heather Has Two Mommies and Daddy’s Roommate, both published by Alyson Press in Boston. Sasha Alyson has publicly declared that he will send these books out free to any library that wants them, but within a week they’ve usually vanished.

  I want to say that it’s difficult to speak of my fellow citizens as my enemies. I never expected to grow up with enemies. But then, I never expected to get this far as a man, or to become so involved in the politics of my time. It’s clear now that the fundamentalists’ agenda of lies and hate grows daily, and it’s Protestant and it’s Catholic and it’s Muslim and it’s Jewish. It starts as a kind of lunatic fringe in each religion, till the fringe consumes the center.

  It’s no secret that I’m very hard on the Pope, a figure of consummate evil and irresponsibility. A lot of people take umbrage at those remarks, saying, “You really shouldn’t be criticizing other people’s faith—we still have freedom of religion in this country.” Unfortunately, I think what’s happened to our freedom of religion is that we’re free to be nutcake fundamentalist Christians and hate everybody else. Meanwhile, no one seems capable of drawing the line between freedom of religion and the naked politics of hate.

  I have great respect for anyone’s relationship to his or her God, just as I have enormous esteem for priests and sisters I know who constitute a kind of resistance movement in the Church. These are the ones who believe in Liberation Theology. These are the nuns who have come out pro-choice, unleashing a witch hunt against them by the Vatican. They deserve our support and gratitude.

  And as for their leaders and commandants, I’ve always been suspicious of their obsessive interest in other people’s sex lives. People who spend all their time combatting the sexuality of others suffer from a kind of sexual-compulsive personality disorder. And it’s they who give tacit approval for the violence against us, whether it’s a bunch of drunken louts who attack us in the streets with baseball bats, or the systematic wrecking of gay kids’ lives by fundamentalist parents. Many of these so-called leaders, of course, are homosexuals who can’t come t
o terms with themselves, and they displace their own guilt and discomfort on us.

  One of the most chilling things I had to write in my autobiography was that I told homophobic jokes when I was in the closet, anything to cover my own tracks. It’s hard to find a corrective role model, because there really isn’t a gay or lesbian spokesperson in Punditland. So many of these strutting opinion-makers—like Buchanan and Will, James Kilpatrick and William F. Buckley—have been good little Catholic boys all their lives. They were taught their intolerance in the Church of the forties and fifties, and apparently they have rigorously avoided contact with us sodomites and heathens ever since, so as not to contaminate their self-righteousness. Their fathers and their priests also believed that the Jews murdered Their Lord, but that one’s been relegated to a back burner, too controversial after the Holocaust.

  I would like to draw a distinction, though, between homophobia and homo-ignorance. There’s much more homo-ignorance than homophobia, I think. And though it’s difficult for us as a people, as a tribe, to hear the hate spewed at us, we know it’s better for that hatred to be public than for it to be secret. When I speak of the politics of silence, I don’t just speak of the silence of gay and lesbian people for fifteen hundred years—those rare exceptions like Whitman or Michelangelo notwithstanding. I want you to understand that that silence is as much self-imposed as imposed by our enemies. We learn the message of their hatred all too well, and we choose the closet, hoping to protect ourselves. And that very invisibility is just what our enemies want, the silence that stunts our self-esteem.