Waiting for the Barbarians

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  The problem, to my mind, is that whereas the Franzen’s considerable artistry as a shaper of fictions makes Alfred a memorable character whom you enjoy encountering on the page, his shortcomings as a memoirist—the failure of feeling for others, the narrowness of vision, the solipsism—render his real-life father a personage you don’t want to spend a lot of time with. This, in the end, goes for Franzen himself. The present day is, we know, mad for memoir, but memoir is a genre that has its own requirements, structures, and standards, and they are not the same as the ones imposed by fiction. Some novelists, even very good ones, should avoid it.

  The strange conflict and contradictions of personality that have marked Franzen’s life and vein his work, the competition between nerds and bullies, the differences (and similarities) between an artist’s life and the art he makes, are themes that occur most memorably, in the new collection, in an essay devoted to the comic strip Peanuts—a classic of American culture that, revealingly, Franzen seriously misreads.

  The second chapter of The Discomfort Zone is ostensibly a paean to the creator of a comic strip that, more than anything else in American popular culture for many decades, celebrated the comic side of discomfort—the sheer, poignant, foolish awkwardness that comes with being human. Unsurprisingly, Franzen clearly relishes the deeply flawed personality of the man who created this beloved cultural icon: Charles Schulz, for all his huge success, was, as Franzen expertly suggests in his essay, a difficult, embittered, resentful man, still seething over perceived insults four decades later. Even more suggestive than the portrait itself is the fact that Franzen so fervently defends this not very nice man—the midwestern offspring of Scandinavian parents, it’s worth mentioning—whom he describes, not without disapproval, as “childlike … in the absoluteness of his scruples and inhibitions.” To Franzen, the aloof, rigid Schulz is an artistic hero: “To keep choosing art over the comforts of normal life,” he writes in a passage reminiscent of the Harper’s essay, “is the opposite of damaged.” Reading this, you can’t help wondering who it is he’s really defending.

  Franzen’s insistence on seeing this off-putting personality as a model is, no doubt, what leads him to his startlingly wrongheaded interpretation of the comic strip that is so important to him—a misreading that, because it’s about the tensions between awkwardness and grandiosity, human failing and inhuman arrogance, says a great deal about the man and the writer both. “Almost every young person experiences sorrows,” he rightly points out at the beginning of his exegesis of the Peanuts series. The sentence gives you hope that the geeky child still hiding inside the adult Franzen is going to admit that, like everyone else, he loved Peanuts because he, too, identified with the perpetually awkward, perpetually failed, and yet just as perpetually optimistic Charlie Brown. But no: for Franzen—who tells us that, as a child, he “personally enjoyed winning and couldn’t see why so much fuss was made about the losers”—the real hero of Peanuts is not the “depressive and failure-ridden” Brown but the grandiose beagle, Snoopy. Franzen asserts that “clearly Snoopy” was Schulz’s “true alter ego,”

  the protean trickster whose freedom is founded on his confidence that he’s lovable at heart, the quick-change artist who, for the sheer joy of it, can become a helicopter or a hockey player or Head Beagle and then again, in a flash, before his virtuosity has a chance to alienate you or diminish you, be the eager little dog who just wants dinner.

  The problem here is that Snoopy’s self-proclaimed virtuosity does, to no little extent, alienate and diminish: if he’s amusing, with his grandiose grudge against the Red Baron (and, as I so vividly recall, the Van Gogh and the spiral staircase he lost when his doghouse burned down), it’s precisely because he represents the part of ourselves, the smugness, the avidity, the pomposity, the rank egotism that most of us wouldn’t dream of strutting the way that Snoopy does. (He’s funny precisely because he does the things you’d never dream of doing.) Franzen, like most of us, is an awkward combination of Charlie and Snoopy; the difference being, or so it seems on reading this new book, that whereas most of us think of ourselves as Charlie with a bit of Snoopy, Franzen—still stuck in the compensatory defenses he perfected as the unhappy child he so vividly sketches here—is, and wants everyone to know that he is, a lot of Snoopy with just a bit of Charlie. For my part, I’ll stick with Charlie. Who, after all, would want to spend that much time with a character who’s so self-involved that he doesn’t realize which species he belongs to?

  —The New York Times Book Review, October 15, 2006

  BOYS WILL BE BOYS

  WHEN EDMUND WHITE writes an essay like this one—a consideration of the work of another contemporary author—he often finds a way to include an anecdote that shows that he has some personal connection, some social or even sexual history, with the writer in question. “I first met Chatwin in 1978 in New York,” he writes, not untypically, at the beginning of a 1997 essay about Bruce Chatwin for The Times Literary Supplement. “Maybe it was the excitement of druggy, sexy New York before AIDS or of the Mapplethorpe connection, but we were still standing seconds after he’d come into my apartment when we started fooling around with each other.” Not all of White’s encounters with literary eminences, of course, were as steamy as that one—although his latest autobiography, City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and ’70s, rattles off a Don Giovanni-esque list of alleged conquests that includes John Ashbery, Robert Wilson, and Mart Crowley. But the precise nature of the relationship in question isn’t really the point. The point, which is made again and again in Arts and Letters, the 2004 volume in which the Chatwin essay was collected along with nearly forty other articles, lectures, and occasional pieces, is simply that White was there—was part of the scene to which these eminences belonged. What’s at stake for him, in writing ostensibly about arts and letters, is the artists and the lettrés, the social and personal aspect of literary production, as well as the (merely) aesthetic or abstract.

  White was born and raised in Ohio—growing up gay in and around Cincinnati in the 1950s furnished him with the material for the most affecting and effective of his several autobiographical novels, A Boy’s Own Story (1982)—and it occurs to you, at first, that a lingering consciousness of having been a wide-eyed midwestern immigrant to New York City persists in the way that he repeatedly spotlights the moment when he first made contact with this or that famous writer or musician or artist (even after White had become an eminence himself, as the increasingly impressive settings of these encounters suggest). “When I first met Rorem in the 1970s I had been awed in advance by his legend,” he recalls in City Boy; “I first met [Foucault] in 1980 in New York when I was a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities”; “I first met Grace Paley in Paris, where I was living for many years and where she’d come to a giant feminist powwow.” Much to his credit, White—whose penchant for drawing his readers to the self-deprecating or even embarrassing autobiographical detail has something almost aggressive about it; it savors, somehow, of the ritualized eagerness for punishment that is found in S&M, a practice that he wrote about in his 2005 memoir, My Lives—is willing to admit that he wasn’t always as memorable to his subjects as they so clearly were to him. “I was introduced to him at least ten times,” he writes at the beginning of an appreciation of Edwin Denby, “though he never remembered me from one time to another.”

  But of all the key people White met and of all the significant moments at which he managed to be present (not least, the Stonewall Riots in June 1969, now seen as the beginning of the modern gay movement), none was as historic as an encounter he had in his early thirties that would have immense importance for his life and work—or rather, for the way it changed his thinking about the relationship between his life and work. In City Boy, the author recalls a heated exchange that took place not long after Stonewall between himself and the late scholar and editor Richard Poirier, one of the quietly gay older literary figures of the time in whose reticence about his sexuality White, h
alf a generation younger, saw a kind of hypocrisy. Like so many ambitious young writers newly arrived in New York, White was desperately trying to get some literary recognition; unlike many of those other writers, he was unabashedly living an openly gay life in the city, and had begun to wonder why the life he was leading couldn’t be the subject of his writing.

  Or indeed, the basis of a whole new kind of writing. During his visit with Poirier, White recalls, the older man was “furious” because White insisted that there was “such a thing as gay fiction, even gay poetry—worse, a gay sensibility!—and that at the very least works by gay people could be read in a special light, to illuminate them.” Poirier recoiled from this idea, arguing that White’s vision would mean isolating gay writers from the mainstream of a larger literature:

  “But things do change,” I said confusedly. “There are always new movements in fiction, aren’t there?… Why not have a gay school of fiction? Is there any harm in that? At least it’s exciting and new.”

  “Exciting! But it’s a betrayal of every humane idea of literature. Have you never heard of universalism?”

  For Poirier and like-minded critics, the “harm” lay in the possibility that, while profoundly gay-themed books such as James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room could, through their artistic merits, attain transcendent, “universal” appeal for all readers, a literature by and for gay people would be diminishing for the writers and, too, for the readers. But for the young White, the niche represented both an ideological battleground and an interesting opportunity. This is undoubtedly the most important of the many scenes of self-positioning you keep coming across in White’s work: a scene that places him at the moment when gay lit—the niche genre of which he himself would become the acknowledged leader—was created.

  White has always been interested in people, personalities, and personas—and, I suspect, would argue that his interest goes beyond mere gossip or self-aggrandizement. For the encounters with writers and artists so amply recorded in City Boy remind you vividly that every author is also just a man or a woman, every eminence just a person—and that everything is, therefore, specific and personal: the first step on the journey from the personal to the political. In the new memoir he reflects on the sometimes disorienting tension between public personae and private selves:

  I suppose it’s always strange to know in the flesh someone who is destined to be “immortal,” or at least studied and analyzed long after his death.… They were once young, uncertain, had a roll of fat about the waistband, one nostril bigger than the other, a shifty look that gave way to a wise stare.… They were breathing, digesting animals as vulnerable to injury as the next creature …

  This interest in the concrete and often unattractive details of lived lives is, White implies, not so much a matter of prurience (or, when the unappealing details are about himself, exhibitionism) but part of a literary and, indeed, even political project that has special resonance if your subject happens to be gay people and their lives. “I’d say that gay lives are not like straight lives,” he writes at the beginning of “Writing Gay,” the manifesto with which Arts and Letters begins—a discussion of gay biographies and biographers that serves as a kind of apologia pro opere suo. (White is deservedly celebrated, outside the gay literary scene and its readership, for a prizewinning biography of Jean Genet; his brief biography of Arthur Rimbaud is by far the best introduction to that complicated figure’s life.) “One must know them intimately from the inside in order to place the right emphasis on the facts.”

  Why would it be more important to know a gay life (by which he seems to mean emotional and sex life) more intimately than a straight life, in writing about that life? Why—as he suggests in this essay and as his own autobiographies, filled as they are with the minutest details of his sexual and sentimental history, make clear—are sexuality and the details of a writer’s sex life as important to emphasize as is, say, an evaluation of the writer’s work? In some cases, White observes here, it’s simply that straight squeamishness about gay sex lives can result in bald factual errors. He cites as an example the way in which some journalists lambasted the late Michel Foucault for having “knowingly” infected his partners with the HIV virus: but Foucault, White asserts, was an “S&M bottom” (that is, he enjoyed being the passive partner in rough anal sex), and passive-to-active infection was thought to be very rare if not impossible. And anyway, “since he was a friend of mine I can attest that he guessed at his diagnosis only five months before his death.”

  But for White, there is a far larger issue at stake here. For him, the entire fabric of gay men’s lives, socially as well as sexually, is radically different from that of straight people: whereas the contours of a straight life are, according to him, conventional in a way that filters into heterosexual writers’ writing (“a straight writer,” he startlingly asserts at the end of City Boy, is “condemned to show nothing but marriage, divorce, and childbirth”), gay men’s lives—characterized by unrestricted sexual play, serial rather than monogamous erotic involvements, and a correspondingly high valuation of friends over erotic partners—don’t follow a straightforward (or at least conventionally mainstream) narrative. They therefore merit a different kind of narrative altogether: the gay lit that White helped create.

  This is the point of his defense, in “Writing Gay,” of City Poet, Brad Gooch’s 1993 biography of Frank O’Hara—a book, White writes, that was unfairly attacked by critics who complained about Gooch’s emphasis on the poet’s sex life, at the expense of a corresponding emphasis on his work. “But in fact,” White argues,

  O’Hara, the founder of “Personalism,” wrote poems to his tricks and had such an active sex life, one might be tempted to say, in order to generate his poems, which are often dedicated to real tricks (who were all also his friends) or imaginary crushes. When Joan Accocela [sic] in the New Yorker complained that City Poet was too “gossipy,” she missed the point. O’Hara’s grinding social schedule and hundreds of sexual encounters offend people who want his life to be like a straight man’s of the same period. If O’Hara had one or two gay marriages and had made his domestic life more important than his friendships, then he would have seemed like a reassuring translation of straight experience into gay terms. But O’Hara’s real life was messy and episodic in the retelling, even picaresque … not what we expect in the usual literary biography.

  And yet despite its lively allure, this argument is sentimental and unrigorous, built as it is on unexamined assumptions and impressionistic logic. It is not entirely clear, for one thing, what “the usual literary biography” might be, and why White thinks such works can’t handle messy or episodic or picaresque lives. (Richard Ellmann’s biography of Oscar Wilde seems to have no problem doing just that.) Nor is it clear whether White thinks that straight poets (or whoever) who had messy and irregular lives filled with sexual adventures—there are more than a few—deserve “gossipy” biographies, too. But then, the word “gossipy” does not, in fact, occur in Joan Acocella’s long and thoughtful essay on O’Hara; nor indeed did she complain at any point that O’Hara’s life wasn’t enough “like a straight man’s.” Although White wants to cast her as a prig, the fact is that she’s not shocked at all: if you actually read her piece you can see that she makes the very sensible argument that, given the well-known sexual and romantic excesses of downtown bohemians, both gay and straight, in the 1950s and 1960s, O’Hara’s habits were simply not worth noting in the excessive detail in which Gooch’s book indulges, at the expense of a full consideration of the poet’s work—the thing that makes his life worth writing about in the first place.

  Still, despite the wishful arguments and a certain casualness with other people’s words (habits that recur in City Boy), there can be no doubt about the genuineness of White’s impassioned defense of specifically gay writing. He has, indeed, chafed at characterizations of his own work as narrow or small, a criticism that he sees as coded distaste for homosexual writing itself. “When I wrote my Pengu
in life of Proust,” he recalls in “Writing Gay,” “I decided to discuss his homosexuality … but I was attacked for this approach in the New York Times Book Review and in the New York Review.” (“How else could I make my book different from the hundreds that had preceded it?” he adds, an aside that, it must be said, makes you wonder what other biographies he had consulted.) He doesn’t go into the details of the criticisms in question, but his paraphrases make clear the lineaments of what is, essentially, a political argument. The Times critic “took me to task for reducing Proust to his sexuality”; the late Roger Shattuck, in The New York Review of Books, “struck a blow for Proust’s universality against my supposedly narrowing view.”

  “Universality” brings us back to “universalism,” the word that cropped up in Poirier’s critique of White’s advocacy of “gay writing” many years before White wrote his Proust biography: you could say that the whole of the author’s career has traced an arc from one of these poles to the other. His first couple of novels, Forgetting Elena (1975), a witty experiment with a fabulously unreliable narrator, and the plotless but oddly mesmerizing reverie on lost love that is Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978; it might remind you of Marguerite Yourcenar’s Alexis), were idiosyncratic and coolly stylish, with a pungent whiff of chloroform that betrays the influence of White’s idol, Nabokov. Forgetting Elena fuses an arch haiku sensibility to a plot involving amnesia, set in a Fire Island–esque colony of excruciatingly status-conscious gay men. It’s interesting to speculate how the young White, who was capable of an impressive elegance and was clearly preoccupied, too, with interesting formal questions, would have evolved.