Rowland moved into his own far smaller, one-bedroom place in the West Village. There he met other, younger, more easygoing, marijuana-smoking, sexually available young men. He himself ‘came out of the closet’. An act he made much of but which his former roommates looked surprised at, the stockbroker commenting, ‘I thought you were queer the day I met you. In fact all of us have been waiting for you to realize it yourself.’
The Love Tribe was bought not by Knopf or Viking or Farrar, Straus, the houses his agent first sent the manuscript to; not by Simon and Schuster, New Directions, Morrow or Grove Press, the second batch to see it (considered hipper, more open to new authors); not even by smaller presses in all of whose offices the manuscript had languished for so very many months. Instead Rowland Etheridge’s first novel appeared as a ‘Dell Paperback Original’. With the expected tawdry cover art, graced as it was by an illustration of hippie headbands and love beads, grass pipes and tambourines. Other books have, of course, survived worse beginnings, and Rowland remained hopeful that if it didn’t have, in his own words, ‘class’, at least it would have ‘exposure’.
Unfortunately for Rowland, someone in the marketing division read his manuscript after it had been purchased. The backcover copy read, promisingly, ‘An in-depth look into today’s wildest, most beautiful, and boldest young people. Over-privileged and over-pampered, they indulge themselves and each other in every excess, every depravity, every possible combination of dope-smoking, alcohol-drinking and sexual experimentation!’ Despite this, someone had come to the realization that this book was too good, too honest, to appeal to the crowd who preferred the moralizing trash of Jacqueline Susann and Rona Jaffee. As a result, The Love Tribe was released in a first printing of only 20,000 copies. Not nothing, true, but not nearly enough to require those all-important cardboard box ‘dumps’ to be set up with nothing but his novel in them in the front of book racks in the explosively expanding book-chain shops. Indeed the printing wasn’t even enough to require more than one ‘pocket’ of airport and newspaper-stand racks. Rowland’s novel was seen around a few months, and when it didn’t require instant reprintings, vanished from sight.
I’d come across a copy of The Love Tribe with its dated cover art a few years back at a yard sale in Cambridge, Mass. ‘Arcane, huh?’ the girl selling it had said. ‘My mother’s book! Very “with it” in its time!’ she added. I’d paid a dollar for a book that had listed when new for $1.95 and I enjoyed reading it more than I would have thought. The story of four young Ivy League college graduates who moved to New York, the book was as autobiographical as anything the other Purples had written. According to St George, it was ‘sincere in its depiction of young men trying to “find themselves” at the same time they are simultaneously hiding and revealing themselves to each other’. Given the year of publication and what else was being written at the time (only Rechy’s City of Night!), it was astonishingly open in its manner of dealing with ‘sexual experimentation’. Cummings pointed out, ‘The narrator’s one gay experience is charmingly funny in its depiction if ultimately irrelevant to both character and book. While another character, the extremely handsome actor Jed Thomas [obviously based on the adored roommate], ends up a closet homosexual, marrying for his career then hustling skid-row bums for sex in his Lincoln Continental’. Fleming, who knew better than I ever would, wrote, ‘The scenes allegedly set in the East Village seem based more on what Etheridge had read in the East Village Other than what he’d experienced, sort of a Cook’s tour of the hippie scene. But the ambience of young people in a big city feels unforced, and the easy, disorganized way the young characters have among themselves seems accurate. It’s probably as incisive a glimpse into those lives as anything written at the time or since.’ Reuben Weatherbury summed up in the intro to his second Reader, ‘All in all, as a debut, while breaking no formal or stylistic ground, The Love Tribe was fresh, and entertaining.’
It was about the time of the book’s publication that Etheridge met both Dominic De Petrie and the young man who was to become his first lover. De Petrie was a neighbor on far west Charles Street in Greenwich Village, at that time a low-rent neighborhood. He and Rowland had met once before. Now they began socializing. Older, more accomplished and more settled, Etheridge must have seemed a model for the six years younger De Petrie. And indeed, a few years later, De Petrie gave a copy of the manuscript of his first novel to the elder to read, and it was Etheridge’s strong positive reinforcement which encouraged De Petrie to continue as a writer despite little immediate success anywhere else. Damon Von Slyke also enters the picture at this time. He’d already had a play produced in the Village several years previously, and we may assume Von Slyke and Etheridge knew of each other by name and reputation. In his journals, De Petrie mentions both present at a holiday party. His description of their meeting was: ‘Although I felt sure they’d be friends since they share so much in common in terms of background and attitude, Dame and Rowland were very cool to each other. The time I dragged them into discussion they went at each other like cats: swift, vicious, indifferent to the destruction they caused.’
But De Petrie’s instinct was right. In later years, the two became closer, if never intimate. It was De Petrie who later complained of the two of them at one particular Purple Circle reading session, ‘They’re like two old Southern biddies in not sufficiently silent conspiracy: they constantly take the High Road in any argument, declaring we’d better get out of the gutter, if we mean to be anyone in the future. As though only they know the correct path for us all. This only irritates me, but Jeff Weber was deeply incensed by it, and swore a deep and lasting oath against especially poor Rowland. Nor was Frankie McKewen amused when the two of them chose the occasion of his reading from Whitman’s Sons to make disparaging comments about “some people’s unconscious constant misuse of certain grammatical tropes”.’
If getting Etheridge’s first novel published was difficult, getting the second out proved far more difficult. More than seven years would pass, before Etheridge’s agent was able to place a manuscript. The Timrod collection lists a dozen MSS from this era by title and form and number of pages, but gives no clue otherwise as to what they are. Thaddeus Fleming read, or at least scanned, most of them and reached this conclusion: ‘Not quite literature, not quite genre. One might charitably call them “experiments”.’ Irian St George had been less charitable in his study of De Petrie and his colleagues. He’d pointed out how Etheridge’s fellow Purple Circle members had taken current genres and had ‘not only fulfilled their readers’ expectations as well as any contemporary on the best-seller list, but had deepened them with instinctively serious use of character and choice of “fable”, then lifted them to a far higher realm altogether’. Of the unpublished Etheridge MSS, St George wrote, ‘They reek of cleverness, they fairly drip with the author’s patronizing toward a genre he could not possibly succeed in. He’d have done better to leave off these attempts altogether.’
This is not absolutely fair, however, as it leaves out of the picture what authors actually have to go through not only to have writing careers but also to eat and pay rent and live. But then most critics would say that’s none of their concern. By the time Rowland Etheridge’s second novel, The Eleventh Commandment, was published, another paperback original, from Avon Books, not only had he been out of college fifteen years, not only had he gotten virtually nowhere with his playwriting and not far with his fiction writing career, but also – tellingly – others had succeeded. Damon Von Slyke’s Systems for Approaching Emmeline, for example, had been published by the most prestigious publisher of the day and garnered marvelous reviews and not bad sales. Mark Dodge’s first novel, Buffalo Nickel and Dominic De Petrie’s first, Who is Christopher Darling, were both published the same year, and nominated for that year’s Hemingway Award as best first novel. Worse, each followed those books with better sellers, De Petrie’s Singles and Dodge’s Keep Frozen. No surprise, then, that Rowland was feeling pinched, in need of succes
s, no matter how literary or commercial it might prove to be.
The Eleventh Commandment would provide little. Set in the revived New York art scene in the new and chic downtown area of SoHo, the book was a mystery novel. With one novelty: the detective was a middle-aged woman, a socialite, who gets drawn into murder and mayhem via her patronage of the arts and her willingness to serve on various committees given to artistic causes. A post-Stonewall-era book, Etheridge’s new novel had one openly gay and one lesbian character. Even more ‘current’, its villain turned out to be a hell and brimstone televangelist minister.
About the novel, Purple Circle critics are almost taciturn: ‘Pleasant, well wrought, with an unusual and artfully drawn sleuth,’ commented St George. The others agreed, Fleming adding, ‘This light entertainment had but one longer-lasting value, an unfortunate one for the author: while not terrifically successful, it was successful enough that the editor requested a sequel.’
The Thirteenth Trump is Death came out two years later, an Avon paperback. This time the setting was the hip art scene even further downtown, in Tribeca and the ghettos of the South Bronx. The scene was again the art world, but also the world of the professional occult, from new-age astrologers to Spanish-speaking sorcerers operating out of street-corner bodegas. Another mystery, it was again light and entertaining, but this time the middle-aged sleuth was accompanied by her newly divorced daughter, making it more ‘feminist’. About this book, the critics have even less to say. Only Cummings remarks: ‘Etheridge’s decline into commerciality reaches its nadir. Unluckily for the author, but luckily for posterity, the book didn’t sell as well as its predecessor and instead of a contract for a new mystery, Etheridge received a royalty statement showing a large unearned advance.’
To say this caused a crisis is an understatement. Because by now not only Von Slyke but other of Etheridge’s juniors were obviously way past merely nipping at his heels, they were surpassing him. Both Mark Dodge and De Petrie had successfully launched careers. Then Aaron Axenfeld burst onto the scene with Second Star from the Right, both openly gay and a commercial success. Mitch Leo had already released The Younger as sections from his autobiographical gay novel came out in Christopher Street. This was more successful in praise and sales than Rowland’s book, and also in effect. He could only wonder at the injustice of it all.
The result of this crisis turned out to be one of the most rapidly written of all of this usually very slow writer’s works, and possibly the one for which he will be known in the future. Desperately, Yours was intended to be a send-up of the kind of gay novel Etheridge’s pals had written. His intention was to make fun of them. Instead, it ended up being his most sincere work, not only because of the (unintentional?) openness of its narrator, but because of the revelations accorded by the use of this specific authorial voice. De Petrie writes in his journals of the surprise with which all the other members of the Purple Circle greeted Etheridge’s reading of the first chapter of the novel at their meeting in the Leo-McKewens’ living room. And despite what Von Slyke had told me of De Petrie’s put-down of the novel’s opening line, his journal entry is filled with respect, even a little awe at what his old friend had produced. ‘We’ve all been so careful so far not to “overburden” each other at these readings,’ De Petrie wrote, ‘and so we’ve generally held back our important stuff and only read each other short stories or works we’re not sure are yet in progress. Thus it was a great shock to have old Rowland come up to bat last night and knock our socks off with his new novel. He doesn’t have a title for it yet, but it’s his first openly gay work, contains his own extremely Etheridgean voice, with all of its peculiar inflections and affectations intact, and we sat open-mouthed, gape-mouthed, stunned, as he read us the madcap opening scene. Afterwards,’ De Petrie concluded, ‘we were a lot quieter than we usually are at the finales of these get-togethers. Damon, never one to mince words, said to Rowland, “Roll, you finish the book as well as you’ve begun it and we’ll be forced to take turns knifing you in the Senate antechamber.” Roland couldn’t have been more pleased.’
He did go on to finish the book, if not quite as well as he’d opened it, then not too far off the mark he’d set. De Petrie and Von Slyke went out of their way to get the editor of a good hardcover publisher they knew to take it. Desperately, Yours was published in 1981, and it is clear from the author’s letters, as well as from McKewen’s and De Petrie’s journal entries of the time, that Rowland was not only pleased with the book and felt equal to the rest of the other Purples for the first time in years, but that he expected it to make his name once and for all.
As we now know, it didn’t. It’s difficult to say why. True, it was published at the same time as some of the other Purple Circle members’ best-known novels. Yet the simultaneous publication didn’t seem to get in each other’s way. Damon Von Slyke’s Instigations sold almost as many copies as Mitch Leo’s Refitting Tom Devere and De Petrie’s romantic idyll A Summer’s Lease. And all three were well reviewed in the nascent gay press and even in the mainstream press. So what happened to Etheridge’s chef d’ouevre? Why did it sink from sight so quickly, while the other titles went on to multiple reprintings, paperbacks and long shelf lives? Certainly all three of his fellow Purple Circlers promoted the book and Rowland in the many interviews they did. They made certain it was placed next to their titles on bookshelves and in bookstore windows. One has to assume that people read it and that a few even liked it. Yet there is barely a stir of wind compared to the hurricanes of hosannas that accompanied the other three titles’ publication. Desperately, Yours arrived and left bookstores with the most minor of flurries. Not even enough copies were printed for it to have an afterlife as a remainder. De Petrie fulminated about this in his letters to the others. Closer to the author than the others, he was able to see its effects on Etheridge. ‘Brave, and silent and absolutely steadfast, yet looking as though someone had from out of nowhere punched him very hard in the solar plexus,’ is how De Petrie described Rowland in a letter to Aaron Axenfeld, who was in Sanibel Island at the time. ‘Whenever I see him, I want to scream, “Be angry! Please! You have every right!”’ For his part, Axenfeld wrote to Etheridge, detailing his own manifold joys in his friend’s novel, predicting, ‘This is your best work. Don’t be too discouraged by the reaction of the gay hoi polloi.’
Unfortunately, the gay hoi polloi was exactly the group that Etheridge had hoped to attract with the book. His long-term ‘steadfastness’ now began to dissolve. Without telling either his agent or the other Purples, he gave up fiction writing and returned to his first love, the theater. The next decade would be given over to plays, with some minor successes, especially once he’d left Manhattan and established himself as a playwright-in-residence at several New England universities.
Fleming sees Desperately, Yours as ‘something of an aberration in Etheridge’s oeuvre’. He goes on to claim that it was only his friendship with the others, possibly his proximity to De Petrie, that’s responsible for Rowland’s connection to the other Purples. Cummings is more generous: ‘We wonder today what it is about Rowland Etheridge’s two gay-themed novels that so escaped his contemporaries. They seem so much a part of the gestalt of the time, so in tune, at one, with the works of, say, Axenfeld and Weber, as to be inseparable. But apparently in that era itself, they stood apart just enough to become pariahs.’
The critics agree that Desperately, Yours is Etheridge’s best gay-themed work. Cummings likes the two plays Etheridge managed to get written and produced over the following decade. But both Fleming and Weatherbury see in Mustang Sally and Beauregard in Brooklyn Heights a return to the old try-anything-if-it-works Etheridge credo of literary art: the first play, ‘a very slight effort, an obvious rip-off of Sam Shepard and Lanford Wilson’; the second a ‘bisexual boulevard comedy with Neil Simon ambitions’. Still, the plays were produced at college drama departments and Beauregard even had a brief run at an Off-Broadway theater, while Sally was optioned for film. And t
he two plays kept Etheridge working, busy, among young people, providing local fame and folding money. They also had the considerable side benefit of introducing him to his second, longest-lasting romantic partner. At the time Etheridge was cutting a somewhat glamorous figure on campus, Christian Tobermann, twenty-five years his junior, was a PhD candidate in the School of Physical Sciences at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, completing his thesis on ‘Insular BioDiversity in New World Reforestation Projects’. They met at a party after the UMASS premiere of Beauregard and returned to Etheridge’s off-campus apartment. Tobermann moved in the following week.
And while their relationship held fast, nothing else seemed to in Etheridge’s life. The college connections ended, as they had to, and Rowland returned to Manhattan, to the thankless chore of once more trying to get productions of his plays put on, to write screenplays for producers without sense or cash, to lose one agent, gain another, to try his hand at fiction writing again. All of this activity accompanied by far tighter finances, as his trust fund no longer matched inflation and his royalties slowly petered out. All of it accompanied by less socializing, greater dependence on alcohol and more time spent alone or with only very old friends – including the college roommates, married men (including the avowed homosexual) with families and successful careers. Only one bright spot stands out in this period: a commission for a new novel arranged by De Petrie, who by that time, i.e. the early 1990s, had successfully launched his small press, Casement Books (named after Roger Casement), and done so well with the first twenty titles published that he was looking for new work.
The Book of Lies Page 29