by Peter Wells
But there was another signpost pointing completely the other way. In March 1975 I had entered a short fiction competition held by the University of Warwick; it later became the prestigious Warwick Prize for Writing. It was, I told Russell, who was both confidant and sounding board, ‘a story I had based round the experiences at Brown’s Bay, which I had written in the midst of winter when all I could do was remember back to long sunny dusty days full of radios in cars, swinging coloured lightbulbs in Norfolks along the parade, and the wail of hymns inside suffocating tents … a mixture of pathos and grotesquery: and an odd wavering kind of beauty.’ To my delight, the short story won first prize.
Something was happening to me almost uncontrollably. Separated from New Zealand, I had begun to think about it obsessively, reconceptualising it. This is what happens to all expatriates — you suddenly come to comprehend the country that formed you. For me this took a primarily fictional form; or rather, I attempted to come to terms with my past through the writing of fiction — fiction, however, based very closely on my childhood experiences in New Zealand.4 (I was feeling my way towards being what would later be called ‘a gay writer’.) This flooding back of memories, after a period when the past seemed frozen behind a wall of ice, became unstoppable — it was a time of unthawing.
Perhaps not coincidentally, I had also fallen in love. At Warwick University I met a young man, a Londoner of emphatically working-class background. He had a shock of coal-black hair, very white skin, red lips made for kissing. He spoke with an exaggerated Cockney accent, was full of braggadocio and, for me more winningly, transparent insecurities. He was younger than me, intense and passionate, and he came — illegally — to live in my tiny room at International House. Like all first love affairs, it was rhapsodic, idealistic and overwhelming. He had only just come out. This highly sexual affair, with its hurricane-force intimacy, reoriented my life. If my memory was unthawing, the almost constant sex had a way of knitting my personality together so I became whole. So when I wrote to my parents about ‘things that are important to me — like finding someone I am happy living with’, I was introducing them to a man I thought of as my long-term partner. And even though it was the mid-1970s and pre-AIDS, when promiscuity was virtually prescriptive, I subscribed to monogamy without giving this too much close inspection.
My letter to my parents continued: ‘There’s an old cliché, you’re only alive or young once. Well it’s true. I feel I have to get my courage together sufficiently to make a great change in my life, and start doing something I want to do. This is something which I’ve wanted to do ever since I was a kid sitting in my bedroom scribbling away like a maniac into my diary. It has never really changed. I just lost sight of it in the immense period of upheaval when I first began to come to terms with the fact I was what other people call homosexual. Anyway, what I have always wanted to do, and am doing now, is write.’
I had made a decision that I would abandon my doctoral studies, which had begun to lose momentum anyway. Following the Boulton and Park paper, I had drifted along, uncertain of where I was going and what I was doing. I lacked the analytic tools.5
‘I have started writing in the past year. I very much wanted to get some stories published, win some prizes so I could assure you that my going into such a new field, inexperienced, would be worth it. Well I haven’t got much to show for a whole year’s concentration and effort — except perhaps my determination to keep writing, my joy in it, the pleasure it gives me …
‘I can imagine that this decision of mine, which is to finish at university without a doctorate, will come as a shock to you. Most of all to your expectations. I can imagine that you will immediately start worrying about me. But don’t. I’m not worried about myself, so why should you? I am aware of the great step I am taking, the great gamble, but I want to take it.’
I wanted Mum and Dad to know the most important thing that any parent can give a child:
‘I’ve found something which makes me happy. I think this is a great and beneficial gift — one of the greatest gifts anybody can give anyone. I am deeply grateful to you both having provided the circumstances which make it possible — and I want you to accept that what has happened is good.
‘This letter comes out all of a lump but it is something which has been constantly on my mind day and night for the last year. I have wanted to confide in you, share with you some of the enthusiasm I feel for what I’m doing. Above all I want to put you in the picture, so we don’t just grow apart. I do value you as parents, as friends, and I don’t want that to happen.’
These words had been typed out on my portable Remington, on the thin folio paper that I used to write stories. Then I handwrote in pencil:
‘In all fondness and deep love,
Pete’
TWO DAYS LATER I SENT a letter to Russell. ‘My dear Russell’. By now we were writing to each other reasonably regularly, though by no means with the metronomic monotony that dictated my letters to our parents. (The coming out letter above ended, somewhat anticlimactically, ‘PS Received yours this morning. Many many thanks.’) In the abstract space that is distance, Russell and I had achieved the seemingly impossible: we had removed the sibling rivalry that had been so destructive when we were younger. Instead we treated each other with relative courtesy and interest, and the powerful bond we shared had room to flourish.
‘After a great deal of indecision and loss of nerve,’ I wrote to Russell, ‘I wrote to Mum and Dad last week, saying I thought it was time they acknowledged the fact I was gay … I’m not sure if this is incredibly fool-hardy, even cruel … I am worried that they will both punish each other, apportioning blame out, breastbeating in the silence etc. Both of them have a really strong line in emotional terror … I only hope not. I tried to make the letter as good and kind and hopeful as ever, pointing out I am not sad or anything, that it is just a part of my life, like a limb on which I walk … I don’t know what sort of Christmas you will have in Auckland. I can imagine my letter will cause a major adjustment in the lives of us all — perhaps … I’ve told them these facts in my life, not from a wish to be brutal or anything, but just so that … we don’t grow totally apart. Surely a family should be based on understanding each other rather than just pure familial links.’
Russell kept every one of the letters I sent him while overseas, right from my first letter sent from Hong Kong. I didn’t keep a single letter from him. This is a neat encapsulation of the terms of our relationship. I was the spoilt younger brother. (I was also moving around a great deal, the usual reason for jettisoning ‘excess baggage’.) In many ways he was an ideal older brother. There was nothing he would not do to help me, and I relied on his constant faith in me without ever quite acknowledging it. That he loved me obsessively was something I could overlook when we were twelve thousand miles apart. And the fact that he kept my letters (which came back into my possession after his death) meant, when it was time to reconstruct this part of my life, I had a contextual bed of fact to check against the inexactitude of my own recollection.
Hindsight is an erratic, even duplicitous gaze. What makes us uncomfortable we remove from the gaze of others and then slowly from ourselves. We end up preferring the narcissism of an unreal image behind which we hide our insecurities, secret unhappiness and doubts about whether we have done the right things in life. I was — am — no different. And when, forty years later, I re-read the letters I’d sent my brother, I cringed at my apparent self-confidence, my self-assurance in believing my opinions were interesting.
There is also the syntactical awkwardness of the coming out letter itself. I have no memory now of how many copies I wrote before ending up with the one relatively clean version I sent my parents. But the first two sentences are an obstacle course in awkward locution. At the same time I have to acknowledge something that remains with me only vestigially now: a young person’s grace — or naivety — that the world can be improved, and that as humans we will evolve into a better space. What strikes
me now with this letter is my affection for my parents. I was trying to make things easier for them, so our relationship could keep growing. I was very naive.
THERE IS IN FACT ANOTHER backstory behind this relatively simple, even earnest coming out letter, one that this letter effectively screens from the reader.
When I murmured the word ‘perhaps’ in relation to the thought that my letter would dramatically alter the relationships within the family, I was acknowledging a sense of reality about how our family worked. If my parents’ marriage was built on a secret, they had unknowingly created a house of secrets within which we had all accustomed ourselves to feel at home. Speaking out in this context was treasonous. So when I murmured ‘perhaps’, what I was really saying was I doubted anything would change.
Twenty-three days later, the other side of Christmas, I wrote to Russell again. He had rung me — which gives some sense of the crisis: ‘I was so pleased to hear your voice … You seemed so distant and I had trouble hearing … I wonder how your Christmas went at home.’
The fact was that every Christmas we spent together as a family was tense. There was always a sense of dwelling in a minefield, that at any moment a tripwire would accidentally set off an explosion. (Christmas still makes me apprehensive; it carries a sense of impending misery from which I have to actively shake myself awake.)
‘I hope Mum was not too upset … She wrote to me three letters day after day, after she received my letter. Each one progressively more mellow, in a way. More supplicating. I hope she realizes that her non-recognition of my gayness — in effect — for barring Dad from any knowledge is this — is her own choice, and she does it from her own sense of weakness — the flaws in her own relationship with Dad. It’s a horrible irony that these have to re-occur so late on. I hated the thought of causing her any pain; in some ways she has so few defences; she is pure Tennessee Williams; but some amount of truth is necessary to my own life.’
My memory of Bess’s response is visceral. She sent me a letter saying she ‘thanked God’ she had got to the letterbox before Dad and she had read the letter first. She implored me never to raise the issue again. Dad above all must not be told. This to me was a shocking, a dismal, response. In my mind’s eye, I saw her ripping the letter up into a thousand small pieces and flushing them down the toilet. I have no memory at all of the three letters she sent day after day as she thought the situation through. This in itself is an interesting statement on the unreliability of memory. Or was it that the first outright rejection blocked any memory of further communication? I have no memory, either, of her letters becoming more mellow, ending up as ‘supplications’. (Or were the supplications Please do not speak to your father?)
Bess was then aged sixty-one, and suffered from a duodenal ulcer — all that keeping silent, all that stress. Gordon was a prematurely aged sixty-nine-year-old ex-serviceman, self-medicating with alcohol and the heavy tranquillisers (Valium, Mogodon, Seconal, Tuinal) that were part and parcel of the period. Yet in an unexpected and long-term way, the letter was a success. Such was Bess’s unconditional love, she supported my decision to embark on the risky business of becoming a writer. She had no interest in the arts and knew that being a writer was practically a form of financial suicide. But she had experienced Dad’s frustration at spending his life doing a job he did not like: they had never branched out, as she suggested they might in that long-ago wartime letter, written at a crossroads of their lives. Dad had spent his life in drudgery at a bank. She was determined that I should be supported doing something that I was passionate about. That she could not accept my sexuality related to her understanding of morality — or, as I would see it, her misunderstanding of morality.
Or was it a case that she could support me in one area of my life as a way of saying she could not support me in the other? Whatever, supporting me in my choice to become a writer was one way I felt the depth of her love.
Bess and Gordon were older than many post-war parents, although I had no sense of that growing up. In their style and values they remained emphatically pre-war — on the surface, a sporty, fun-loving couple from the 1930s and ’40s who enjoyed a party, a swim, a good drink. It may have been that the ambiguities buried so deeply in their marriage made them delay having children. Bess’s version was that Dad never wanted children anyway. According to Bess, the classic unreliable witness, Dad’s first response to her saying she was pregnant with Russell was a very basic one: Get rid of it.
I am not sure about this. Dad was a kind man and it sounds like a rash statement in the middle of an argument. Or was a child the bandage that Bess produced, unasked, to hold their shaky marriage together? It is a classic ploy. When I wrote to Russell, ‘I am worried that they will both punish each other, apportioning blame out, breastbeating in the silence etc. Both of them have a really strong line in emotional terror’, I was not exaggerating. My parents went on terrorising one another for the rest of their marriage. In this sense, the coming out letter was a failure.
IT WAS A GREAT COMFORT to me that I could be candid with Russell in a way I could never be with my parents. He in his turn talked to me about the anxieties in his own life. We are talking the 1970s here, when homosexual relations were still illegal. He was a solicitor and lived a double life, as we all did, with the consequent strains and tensions. A promising Labour politician had had his career ruined by National’s Robert Muldoon on the basis of gay innuendo, introduced inside the safe-house of Parliament. The sense of surveillance in Muldoon’s New Zealand was never far away after the so-called Moyle Affair.
In an undated letter to Russell concerning the arrest of his current lover, we talked about the realities of the situation. The reason for the arrest was not made clear, but my supposition is that ‘John’ was caught ‘cottaging’ by a policeman — a common tactic in the repression of homosexuality at this time. Attractive, well-hung policemen would often be chosen as bait to lure men who had few opportunities for meeting other men for sex into public toilets: the result — arrest and publication of details of full name, job and address — was deliberately destructive.
‘I can never quite work out with Mum and Dad whether our relationship to them, vis a vis, our homosexuality, is based on the thin veil of illusion that our sexual bias does not exist. Is invisible to them. Of course an occasion like this speaks it loud and clear, and to a very wide, interested, beery-breathed, sharp eyed, scissor tongued, and notch-in-the-belt public. I imagine people where you work must have put one and one together and worked out a gossipy sum totally one thousand and one days of Sodom. These are all public-personal issues of course, and I have no doubt your personal credibility, and the esteem in which many people personally hold you, will carry you over, so long as you yourself hold tight.
‘I can’t see you, or how you are, so I am talking in the dark. How are you surviving in it? … You are in a very vulnerable position. You are a public servant, and reasonably prominent, hence, exposed. Please write and tell me what is happening with the case; also what your approach will be to Mum and Dad, if any … As far as I know, they know nothing. They’ve made no allusion to being worried or anything in their letters; in Dad’s last one, sent on 30 January, he just said you were very busy, they didn’t see much of you. We are really in the position of parents with children, seeking to protect them. One has to be careful of putting too much strain on Mum above all, she is a real whirlpool of worry. Also she values the mirage of social life so much that she would never question, in her rational self, its laws … the whole thing brings it home to me the minute pressures of NZ life.
‘Well, I must be off,’ I added at the end of the letter, ‘I envy you swimming, and don’t get caught in any rips.’
I FEEL MANY THINGS WHEN I now look at my 1977 coming out letter. It seems to encapsulate a past self that I look back to almost with longing. What do I mean by this? At twenty-seven you think you know the world. At that time I thought you came out and that was it. Today I see life is a constant state of beco
ming, of essentially coming to terms with unexpected changes that go on throughout life. Ageing itself is an intense philosophical process as much as a bodily experience.
But I also feel a deep and residual sadness reading this letter, as I know how it was received. Bess was terrified of what Dad would say. Herein lies, at the very least, a deep ambiguity. I was being asked to return to silence to protect her relationship, itself ambiguous at best, with her husband, my father. Why was she so frightened of him? It’s hard not to think that the secrets of her wartime life made her extremely vulnerable to a kind of emotional blackmail. She was always, so to speak, on the back foot. Contemporary popular psychology did not help. Its ‘explanation for the origins of homosexuality’ was singularly punishing for the mother of a homosexual son. The son was classically meant to be feminised or castrated by an overpowerful, anxious mother. In other words, she was to blame.
Imagine then, if you had by some freak of nature mothered two homosexual sons — and these were your only children? And you yourself had issues to do with guilt and secrecy? She wished to keep my homosexuality secret, or at least unnamed, so that she did not have to face further obloquy from her husband who had every right, according to contemporary theory, to blame her for ‘turning’ me and my brother into homosexuals.
But I have another theory, and one my mother did not know about. (And surely in a house of secrets, there are always further locked and barred rooms, rooms without exits, rooms sealed up, rooms that only the imprisoned individual knows and feels at home within.) Long after Dad died, I asked to see his war records.6 I wanted to try to understand more about this man who was always deeply mysterious to me, a man who I could claim never to have really known, not intimately, not closely. What I did know about him was that his war experience was central to his identity, to his core of masculinity. It was who he was. But when I finally got his medical records, I came to a different understanding of him.