by John Foster
‘Hearing is the last sense to go,’ she said, and I marvelled at how much there was still to learn about death.
Bach. Rachmaninoff. Handel. A few bars into the Handel there was static on the radio, and I reached across to adjust the dial. When I turned back to Juan, he had died.
The news spread, and a small crowd gathered in the room by the time that Jim came to read the prayers for the dead. The palm cross was still tied with its ribbon to the bed. I thought about the heavy-duty plastic bag, and asked Arlene how we could be sure that he would have the cross in his coffin. Untying it, she placed it in his right hand, and clasped his fingers around it. The blood had drained from his face which was now a pale olive, and the African in him seemed to give way to the Latin. He looked, I thought, like a Spanish nobleman.
A similar thought must have occurred to Ann.
‘We should bury him in his fur,’ she said. And so I came home to collect the fur coat and made my last trip, on his account, back to the hospital.
They had already removed his body.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Let no one think,
because I am no longer crying ...
—Humbert Wolfe, ‘First Memory’
We buried him, as I had arranged, at Kew. On the high ground, near the wall, in the shade of the pittosporums we buried him with our own hands. As we brought the coffin to the grave, some parish children followed the procession. Nobody asked them to come, but they were there, as if to say that death, this death, had touched us all. And so we committed his body to the earth from which it came. With rolled-up sleeves, and sweating, we shovelled the yellow clay. ‘You can see who comes from peasant stock,’ one of the women said. And the gravedigger, who leaned against a fallen tombstone and watched from a respectful distance, told me that he couldn’t have done a better job himself.
It was more than a year before I was able to fulfil the final obligation that Juan’s death laid upon me. I flew to New York, and then to Montreal to catch the weekly Cuban Airways flight to Havana. The passengers were mainly holidaymakers, from the cheaper end of the market according to the travel writer with whom I found myself seated. He, of course, was travelling free as the guest of the Cuban government, which was attempting to remedy a chronic shortage of Western currency by carving out for itself a niche in the Caribbean holiday trade. Tourism, they had discovered, was compatible with socialism after all.
We off-loaded the sun-seekers and scuba-divers, along with the travel writer, at Varadero. The few remaining passengers were mainly Cubans, privileged travellers who were coming home with half a department store of loot among them. Otherwise, there was only a Canadian couple, frowsily middle-aged, but purposeful in their way. Had they been to Cuba before? Indeed they had. Often. They translated in a voluntary capacity for the Ministry of Information in Havana. It was their contribution to the Revolution.
‘How interesting,’ I observed, unsure why they unnerved me. ‘What kind of things do you translate?’
The woman pursed her lips as though she were guarding a state secret. But the man was more forthcoming. Actually, he said, they had just completed a small book dealing with the threat of AIDS, for distribution in the Anglophone countries of Africa. This puzzled me. What did the Cubans know about AIDS, or el SIDA, as he preferred to call it? It was true, he agreed, that the Cubans had only a limited experience of the disease. However, in contrast to the West, they had developed an energetic and progressive policy for dealing with it. The protection of public health was the number one priority. AIDS cases in Cuba were interned. Homosexuals. Soldiers. It made no difference.
‘Interned?’
‘Yes,’ said the woman, her zeal for the Revolution still burningly intact. ‘Interned. It is the most humane policy.’
I felt sick in the stomach.
At Havana I made arrangements to travel on without delay. I would go direct to Santiago, to Santiago where the poet Lorca heard the palms sing in the wind. From Santiago de Cuba the road runs east along the central valley of the province. The earth is red there, and over the emerald hills there rises a darker canopy of royal palms.
AFTERWORD
On John Foster
by John Rickard
WHEN Take Me to Paris, Johnny was first published, in 1993, the AIDS crisis seemed to be at its worst. Many of us had friends and acquaintances who were dying. One began to notice men who, thin and haggard, one feared were suffering from AIDS (women victims being relatively few in number). There was no sign of the drug therapies that would, towards the end of the decade, begin to transform the treatment of AIDS. Only the symptoms could be treated, often with difficulty. Yet, as Robert Dessaix puts it, ‘AIDS is a disease that excites narration’. Internationally, the AIDS memoir had already emerged as a genre of testimony, sometimes characterised by anger—particularly in America, where President Reagan had been slow to even acknowledge an AIDS crisis. At least in Australia there was a political consensus in the development of policies to deal with AIDS, to which the embattled but increasingly proactive gay community contributed (though, as John Foster records, the thoughtless 1987 Grim Reaper advertising campaign left him feeling, on Juan’s behalf, ‘ambushed, stunned’).
As one writer of an American AIDS memoir has put it, there was a sense in which, as he recorded the decay of his own body, the book was ‘closing in on me’. ‘The death of the author’ now had a grim, personal significance. In Australia two other important memoirs published at this time make interesting comparison with Take Me to Paris, Johnny.
Eric Michaels’ Unbecoming: An AIDS Diary (1990) is his own account of the last year of his life, the diary ending just a fortnight before his death in 1988. Michaels envisaged its being published and nominated the title, Unbecoming, which grimly suggests the process of decomposition he was experiencing, as well as the stigma attached to the disease and its sufferers. On the cover is a painting by the American painter Hugh Steers of someone giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a naked man in a dirty bathroom. Steers himself died of AIDS in 1995. The diary begins with Michaels recognising the Kaposi sarcoma cancers on his skin, the first real symptom of AIDS he encountered. The book is deliberately confronting, and is introduced by a photograph of Michaels taken two months before his death—naked from the waist up, his mouth open as if in an angry scream, his face, tongue and body covered in lesions. ‘What a nasty, nasty disease this is,’ he writes, ‘relentless in its strategies, and always a step ahead of you, winning against any minor attitudinal or medical successes one tries to claim’.
Michaels, described in Simon Watney’s Introduction as a ‘gritty, stubborn, difficult man’, was an American anthropologist who came to Australia in 1982 to research the impact of television on remote Central Australian Aboriginal communities. In 1987 he took up a lectureship at Griffith University. However, like Juan in Take Me to Paris, Johnny, he was battling the Immigration Department about his residency status. According to Paul Foss, ‘Hounded by Immigration to the very end, he found himself quarantined in hospital under direst threat of expulsion from the country’. This bureaucratic cruelty haunted his last days.
On the other hand you wouldn’t realise, judging by its first cover, that Timothy Conigrave’s Holding the Man (1995) had anything to do with AIDS. It carries a romantically blurred image of two young men loosely embracing, with David Marr’s tribute, ‘A fine, tender and sexy book’, under the title. Although the blurb on the back cover makes passing reference to HIV, it sums up the book as being ‘as refreshing and uplifting as it is moving; a funny and sad and celebratory account of growing up gay’. Not that Conigrave avoids the harsh and painful reality of AIDS at this time, but it is always in the context of a gay love story, his fifteen-year relationship with John Caleo, whom he had met at Xavier College, Melbourne. And Conigrave, who was trained in theatre and had some experience as a playwright, writes the story like a novel, with plenty of imagined dialogue. Holding the Man has been a publishing phenomenon, and in 2006 made the transition to the stage,
playing here and abroad, and in 2015 to the screen in a successful film directed by Neil Armfield.
Conigrave knew nothing of this, having died a few months before Holding the Man was published in 1995. A month or two before his death the Melbourne Theatre Company staged Tony Krushner’s celebrated American response to AIDS, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, a seven-hour long juggernaut, actually comprising two plays, Millennium Approaches and Perestroika. This was two years after the Los Angeles premiere of the complete play. Although Angels in America confronts the horror of AIDS, particularly represented in the alienated, Satanic figure of Roy Cohn, it is also determinedly optimistic in its belief that American values can transcend it. The New York Times reviewer Frank Rich hailed it as a ‘true American work in its insistence on embracing all possibilities in art and life’.
It would have been possible for Conigrave to have seen Angels in America before he died. I think he would have approved of its daring flights of fancy. And, indeed, near the end of Holding the Man an angel does make a guest appearance. Conigrave may also have read John Foster’s Take Me to Paris, Johnny, a book written in a very different style from his own memoir, yet he would have appreciated that it, too, was rescuing a gay love story from the tragedy of AIDS.
This need for a positive dimension influenced the presentation of the first edition of Take Me to Paris, Johnny, its cover featuring a subtitle, ‘A life accomplished in the era of AIDS’ (though it did not appear on the title page). This is a reference to Juan’s sad lament that ‘I have accomplished nothing’, to which John replied, ‘with a grace that is breathtaking’ (Robert Dessaix’s words), ‘There has been us’. The blurb sees the book as describing ‘the possibilities of joy, compassion and solidarity in the face of tragedy’. I remember John agonising about both the title and the cover, and I think it was the publisher who wanted ‘A life accomplished in the era of AIDS’ on the cover. Ten years later this kind of explanation was not deemed necessary and Black Inc.’s 2003 edition discarded it, though it saddled the book with a cover design which implied that this was a travel book about Paris.
Although not enjoying the popular success of Holding the Man, from the beginning Take Me to Paris, Johnny had its admirers. Dessaix hailed it as ‘a superb literary accomplishment’ which ‘confronts the reader with what it means to be human’. Peter Craven saw it as bearing comparison with David Malouf’s acclaimed Johnno: ‘Indeed, in its sustained elegance, its relative freedom of form and its easy command of dialogue and anecdote as well as its absolute credibility, it can sometimes seem superior’. For Dennis Altman it bore witness to ‘the complexity of relationships in a world of growing interconnections and the simultaneous strength and fragility of love’.
Foster’s memoir has also has been noticed abroad. In America the Australian-born Ross Chambers wrote extensively about both Take Me to Paris, Johnny and Michaels’ Unbecoming in Untimely Interventions: AIDS Writing, Testimonial, and the Rhetoric of Haunting (2004). And in 2009 Take Me to Paris, Johnny won a place in the American-published Fifty Gay and Lesbian Books Everybody Must Read in an article by the English writer Rob Beeston.
Within a year of the publication of Take Me to Paris, Johnny, John Foster had died. Writing the memoir had consumed much of his time and energy in the years after Juan’s death on Good Friday, 1987. He had earlier declined to have the AIDS test, not wanting to burden Juan with any pointless sense of guilt should the test have proved positive. Indeed, when, later, he did take the test, he still nursed a small hope that he might escape that diagnosis. It was not to be. Given that his immediate outlook was now at best uncertain, the need to tell the story of Juan became his primary concern. For John it was important to ‘accomplish’ the book, as if to assuage Juan’s desolate sense of failure.
It was necessary to go back to the beginning of it all, to make the trip to Cuba to meet Juan’s mother, in preparation for which he learnt some Spanish. As he relates in the book, he came bearing a copy of my Australia: A Cultural History, a symbolic gesture because of its dedication ‘To John and Juan’.
Writing was never easy for John—yet he wrote so well—and when he was struggling with the first draft he was greatly concerned that his family and straight friends might be offended, perhaps even shocked, by its depiction of gay life. There was the further problem that in writing about Juan he could not help also writing about himself, and he was not, by nature, given to self-disclosure. And as a historian he was not used to foregrounding himself in the narrative. Having read the first draft, the publisher encouraged him to put more of himself into the text. John made a few conciliatory amendments but held back from revealing much more of his own story. It was, after all, Juan’s book. This element of quiet reserve gives the memoir much of its distinctive character, yet in telling Juan’s story we are also seeing John through Juan’s eyes. And as Dessaix points out, as a first-person narrative it is ‘brimming over with details of daily life—meals, smells, dress, telephone calls, precisely described locations’.
If, however, it remains true that ‘Foster manages to keep his distance from the reader’, a careful reading of Take Me to Paris, Johnny tells us much about John, his personality and preoccupations. Its very tone—the subtle balance of formality and intimacy, of rationality and passion—conveys a real sense of the man, the historian, the teacher, the lover.
John had a secure suburban childhood, but it was one he reacted against in adult life. Close as he was to his mother, he did not have happy memories of the family household. There was an atmosphere of penny pinching—understandable perhaps in a family of five children, with John the second eldest—and he would recall with a shudder the pudding-basin haircuts their father imposed on the three boys. He looked back at their home as being culturally deprived: his father never read a book, took the Sun, and had few interests. A scholarship enabled John to move from Elwood Park Central School to Wesley College. He had been baptised an Anglican, but had been sent to a Presbyterian Sunday school because it was closer, a common enough example of the Australian habit of regarding religion as a social convenience.
At Wesley a friend (now an Anglican bishop) introduced him to Anglo-Catholic liturgy and worship, to which he was immediately attracted. However, at school and Melbourne University he was also a committed member of the interdenominational Student Christian Movement. After gaining a PhD in the United Kingdom, he returned to a history lectureship at Melbourne University, while for a few years also living in a monastic community associated with St Mark’s, Fitzroy. The break with his suburban childhood could hardly have been more complete.
That brief dalliance with monasticism might, in the 1970s, have already marked him as an eccentric, but his return to the world did not signal a retreat from religion. As a student he had attended St Mary’s Anglican Church, North Melbourne, and in 1978 he rented a house (and later a flat) which was part of the parish property. He became much involved in the affairs of the parish—particularly the beautifying of its Eucharistic worship, which the recently inducted Father Jim Brady was developing—and John gave to the church candelabra, vestments, altar frontals, sanctuary lamps, a paschal candle stand (in memory of Juan) and much else. The importance for him of religion, and its expression through worship, permeates Take Me to Paris, Johnny, particularly in the way Juan’s dying is contained within the narrative of Holy Week.
With religion went history. John’s doctorate at the University of Wales, Swansea, was on the Anglican preacher and social reformer Canon Henry Scott Holland, but German history became the main focus of his research and teaching, in particular the experience of German Jews and the trauma of the Holocaust and its legacy. As a small child he had been fascinated by some neighbours, a couple who were German Jewish refugees and who took an interest in him: their flat was decidedly exotic, filled with strange furniture, rugs, china crockery, records and books, a foreign oasis in the suburban desert. In 1986, just a year before Juan’s death, he edited an oral-history collection, Commun
ity of Fate: Memoirs of German Jews in Melbourne, in which his childhood neighbours featured. His colleague and friend the historian Mark Baker has seen John’s passionate interest in the Jews as reflecting his embrace of marginality, but it was also for him a creative dialogue between Christianity and its source in Judaism. On his death a rosary and a Jewish skullcap were found, side by side, in a drawer.
He was, by all accounts, a remarkable teacher. There was his personal charm, though he studiously avoided addressing undergraduates by their Christian names, preferring the respectful if slightly tongue-in-cheek formality of ‘Mr’ and ‘Miss’. But there was also a sense of drama, an eloquence, and a total engagement with the historical reality with which he confronted students. In teaching a course on the Jewish Holocaust he did not forget its other victims, the gypsies, the Jehovah’s Witnesses—and the homosexuals who, with little sense of group identity, were particularly vulnerable to the Nazis’ persecution.
John’s homosexuality was central to his own identity. I don’t think that, given his religious temperament, he found it altogether easy to accept his sexuality, but he did, and he was honest and, at times, uncompromising about it. Many aspects of his personality make more sense, or perhaps a different kind of sense, when seen through the filter of his sexuality: his humour—and humours, his taste for the exotic, the interplay of strength and gentleness, his sense of mischief, his love of ritual. The ultimate expression of his sexuality was Take Me to Paris, Johnny, though it was not written for that purpose. But in telling the story of Juan, and of how the casual pick-up seamlessly became the affair and the lifelong commitment, he was also reflecting on his own needs, sexual and emotional.
Yet he was not by nature a gay activist. It was a little surprising, therefore, to find him turning up at a meeting in 1979 of the Gay Union of Tertiary Staff (GUTS proved, as it turned out, an inappropriate acronym), a Sydney-based organisation which was attempting to set up a Melbourne branch. I had heard about John Foster but not met him before, and indeed I had got the impression that he was rather antisocial—and here was this charming, engaging, youngish man, a bit of a spunk, in fact, with his neat, trim body, flashing smile, blue eyes and mop of blond hair. GUTS did not flourish, though for a time John had twinges of guilt that we were not doing more to sustain it. He was partly deterred by the ideological trappings the gay movement was acquiring, for which he had limited sympathy. Later, he did for a time convene a gay history seminar group, but there he was on comfortable home ground. And he enjoyed cultural expressions of gay life, whether in New York, Berlin or Melbourne, relishing the polarities of earnestness and outrageousness, of innocence and sophistication.