Ardent Spirits

by Reynolds Price

  I’ve mentioned that those last two years of my three-year appointment were so outwardly uneventful that I have few memories which seem either interesting or revealing enough to record. A few other realities were sizable, though, and seem worth recording. I’ve noted that my sexual life was all but nonexistent (with anyone but myself). For the first time, however, I did begin to acquire a few queer friends of a sort I’d never had before. The first, and most enduring, of them was a grad uate student in English named Jim Boatwright. Jim was almost exactly my age. He’d grown up in Augusta, Georgia in a middle-class home that was slightly better-heeled than mine (I once met his father, a kind-seeming insurance agent; but his alcoholic mother never made it to Durham). Jim had attended the University of Georgia, come to Duke on a handsome graduate fellowship, and I met him when he joined several others of us in the warren of freshman-English offices.

  He and I were much the same size as to height and weight; and Jim had an intelligent face, already tending to plumpness as the result maybe of his early liking for drink—a liking that had not then begun to affect him otherwise. Despite a pair of pale eyes that tended (in repose) to an inexplicable mournfulness, Jim mainly loved laughter and had a likable tendency to sweeten his gift for well-aimed satire with a steady turning of the gift on himself—he was the ultimate butt of most of his own jokes. In early manhood, he seemed, in the best sense, a fine Southern gentleman—socially adept and graceful, benign and thoughtful, a deeply intelligent student and critic of poetry and drama, and a much-loved teacher. Inexplicably, though, such very real gifts would be increasingly valueless to Jim himself.

  Only his very few closest friends—and for years I was glad to be one of those—knew how deeply he deplored himself, how he distrusted each of his own strengths to the point of steady self-sabotage. But that eventual near-suicidal damage had only begun to affect him in his years at Duke. And when we met—first at work, then in my house or in Jim’s apartment—we circled one another gingerly in our conversation before we played, on the table between us, the identical face-cards of our sexuality. Each of us was queer and had known it forever, so long in fact that it appeared neither of us was worried about the reality. Jim still had occasional dates with women; I didn’t (and hadn’t since high school, apart from evenings with Dorothy Roberts). Whether Jim had ever thought of heterosexual marriage, he never said and I never asked. I myself had had no such thought, not for a good while.

  * * *

  Soon after we’d shared that confidence, I began to meet socially with a few other queer graduate students—all of them friends of Jim. They lived in small frame houses near campus, and most of them also taught freshman English. Our evenings consisted of a few drinks—wherever Jim was, a gin and tonic was likely at hand—followed by an often adventurous meal cooked by one of the friends. Since they were even nearer destitution than I, the ingredients were inexpensive and the ingenuity considerable—variations on beef Stroganoff, chicken Tetrazzini, or spaghetti putanesca (“whore’s pasta,” a hearty Neapolitan dish alleged to fortify the waterfront hookers of that strenuous port).

  The talk at those small gatherings—five or six men and a dog or two—included dead-earnest and decidedly opinionated discussions of British and American literature (in the eminently sane and useful framework of the New Criticism of that era), head-knockingly intense arguments about the latest Italian and Swedish films that were then reaching the States, the usual academic gossip, plus a fair amount of queer wit. And though we still called ourselves queer, it was at one of those dinners, in about 1960, that I first heard the word gay applied to homosexuals.

  Gay struck me at once as merely inaccurate if not seriously inappropriate. I saw none of us as especially carefree. I can’t recall ever using the word then, to apply to myself and my friends; and it was more than two decades before gay would gain an upper hand as the accepted name for male American homosexuals. Through these years I’ve continued trying to avoid it. The supreme Oxford English Dictionary gives the date of its earliest such use as 1935, and the OED’s source is a dictionary of underworld and prison slang; the Oxford American Dictionary now says “Gay meaning ‘homosexual,’ dating back to the 1930s (if not earlier), became established in the 1960s as the term preferred by homosexual men to describe themselves.”

  The degree to which it still seems to me a bad misnomer was clarified, above all, when the AIDS plague hit the nation full-stride in the mid- to late 1980s. As more and more thousands of men were vanishing into HIV infection and rapid death, gay as a common label for homosexual identity became not only a cruel joke but also a political error at a time when federal money for research and treatment was desperately needed. The enemies of homosexuality were handed, gratis, a name which suited their contention that homosexuals were giddy irresponsibles, negligible creatures; and one of those creatures—a man as gifted and generous as Jim Boatwright—died of the plague in 1988.

  Queer may not be the best conceivable other slang name, though it’s returning to use as a description of homosexual art and artists; but at least queer is exact, in the sense of eccentric (as a final observation on gay, a queer acquaintance of mine says “Please don’t call me gay. If you need an adjective, call me morose”). I have no expectation whatever that gay will fade from use anytime soon, and who knows what word might replace it, but I’ll go on using the word queer whenever possible to describe male same-sex attraction and consummation.

  * * *

  Whatever we called ourselves at those small evenings in the late 1950s, our conversation almost invariably wound down, by late evening, into lengthy circlings of queerness—jokes, guesses, warnings, universal rejection of the Freudian theory of excessive mother-attachment, but never (as I recall) an articulate sentence from any of us as to why we were queer and how difficult a fate it might prove to be. What I also have no memory of our discussing was the criminality which the entire nation ascribed to our deepest physical and emotional propensities; and I’m sure that none of us had ever known a man who’d been arrested, not to mention imprisoned, for the crime, though such penalties were far from rare, as any daily paper would reveal (I’ve noted Jim’s death of AIDS in ’88; another of our friends would be murdered by a partner-gone-mad).

  Succeeding years have shown, thank God, that none of us had the slightest attraction to the very young, a propensity which is surely the most awful of human compulsions. And as for any suggestion of self-obsession in our talk, I’d long ago learned in my undergraduate fraternity years that straight men—in locker rooms, bars, wherever—are equally committed to obsessive concern with sex talk. American men in general appear to think—and talk among themselves—about active sex considerably more often than the majority of women, and the hours devoted to such exercise can grow wearisome fast unless the degree of wit is high and keen and is mostly turned on the men in the room.

  * * *

  In the summer of 1960, all my Duke friends and I encountered real calamity (the following account comes entirely from my own memory and a single important obituary; one other friend’s memory differs from mine only in minor details, so I rely on my own). On the evening of July 20, I went to a picnic in the backyard of a colleague and his wife. With us also were the Quaintances, Jim Boatwright, and one or two other friends. It’s my present memory that our hosts had also invited the one older colleague who seemed friendliest to us and the most accessible in his wit and charm. His name was Charles Fenton; he’d joined the English department at the same time as we, and he made a thoroughly likable presence at our parties, despite the fact that he and his wife were inclined toward unnervingly audible wrangling once a few drinks had gone down.

  Charlie was forty-one years old—tall, lean, almost handsome—and a widely respected scholar of the works of Ernest Hemingway, a giant who was still alive. For an academic, Charlie’s past was complex and interesting. He’d grown up at the Taft School in Connecticut where his father taught; he’d left Yale in 1940, his junior year—and before the Unit
ed States had entered the war—to join the Royal Canadian Air Force (as an eager young Hemingway had joined the American Red Cross Ambulance Service). Charlie served honorably for three years as an aerial gunner, hardly a secure job. Then he worked for several years as a journalist before returning to Yale. By 1949 he was a member of the faculty there.

  He came to Duke with two solid books behind him—a life of Stephen Vincent Benét and The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway, two very different writers. Charlie’s subsequently published correspondence with Hemingway about the study of his literary apprenticeship is fascinating in what it shows of the younger man’s pugnacity in defense of his work-in-progress and the famous author’s part-ferocious, part-sympathetic defense of his own privacy. Charlie was hardly installed in Durham before he won the special admiration of us doomed younger colleagues—doomed to brief terms at Duke. From his position of tenured security, he was perfectly prepared to express his opinions of our more pompous colleagues in the full professoriate (the department was then entirely run by the “fulls”; no younger members had any power whatever in such decisions as hiring and firing).

  Of course we relative youngsters relished such opinions as Charlie’s; they were much like what we heard simultaneously from Bill Blackburn, though shorn of Blackburn’s spooky air of omen. So on that July night in 1960, we ate our grilled chicken in the pleasant dark of our friends’ yard and waited for the long-delayed guest. When he hadn’t appeared by nine, our host phoned Charlie’s house to check on his coming but got no reply. Next morning I drove to campus to get my mail; and as I entered the postal station, my colleague Grover Smith—a noted T. S. Eliot scholar—met me head-on and asked if I’d heard the news. Well, what news? Grover rushed on to say “Charlie Fenton has killed himself. A few hours ago he jumped off the top of the Washington Duke Hotel” (the old Washington Duke, before its implosion).

  I took my mail and walked across campus to the main library. At once I saw Jim Boatwright huddled in the lobby with two or three other graduate students. I must have felt too stunned to join them, so I gave Jim a wave and started upstairs toward the card catalogue. Before I’d climbed far, Jim beckoned me back; and when we met I could see how sad he looked—was he that hungover from last night’s picnic, or had he heard the news?

  My mind has retained the next image—Jim standing two steps below me, looking up, very pale. By then his eyes were full.

  Needing confirmation maybe, I had to say “What?”

  “Charlie Fenton is dead.”

  It was still past belief. But I said “How?”

  “He killed himself at dawn.”

  I remember thinking how Hemingwayesque those five words sounded—though it would be almost exactly a year before Hemingway himself died, another dawn suicide.

  Jim and I sat on the wide stone steps, sandbagged by the news yet partly aware that, along with a powerful grief, we’d also acquired—in our own eyes—the fresh adult dignity that was rare enough in our shielded generation. We were now participants, however sidelined, in something truly large in the great world—our world, at least. We well knew that Charlie had hardly died to lend us that much. In time, however, I’d see that maybe his final unknowing act as a teacher was to set an example for his younger colleagues of the solemn duties of learning and teaching, the awful temptations of the job.

  Jim and I both knew at least part of the story; but what we’d learn in the numb days to come amounted to this—and a good deal of it came to me from an hour’s talk I’d had with Charlie early that summer, the two of us seated on those same library steps. In the spring the notoriously evil-tongued widow of a Duke English professor—a woman named Hessie Baum (the very name is a serpent hiss)—had phoned Charlie’s wife to say that she had seen, out her window more than once, Charlie entering the woods with a young woman. Soon thereafter Charlie came home from campus to find his house empty—while he was teaching one day, his wife had ordered a moving van, emptied the house, and departed with the children. “She didn’t even leave me a goddamned washcloth,” he told me. He also said that, though he’d begun to love the other woman (a graduate student), there’d still been no sexual intimacy between them.

  That relationship obviously intensified as spring moved into summer. By then Charlie and the young woman, whom I’ll call Nancy, were walking openly on campus together to the tune of busy gossip. I even saw them sitting together on the grass of the crowded quad in bright sunlight for an afternoon concert (an all-but-unheard-of gesture of openness for a senior professor in those days). I didn’t know Nancy especially well, but I liked her—she and Jim were good friends. Still, Charlie’s single episode of confiding in me had left me with the feelings of a well-wishing co-conspirator in their romance. Charlie went on with his plan to teach in summer school, after which he’d depart for a year’s research in Spain—he was planning a book on the Spanish Civil War. I think Nancy returned to her family home where she had a summer job. But Charlie went north to see her, and soon they were engaged to marry once Charlie’s divorce became final. Nancy would join him in Spain for at least part of the next year.

  Meanwhile we younger colleagues saw him as often as possible during the summer session; and he seemed the same jocular man, if sometimes a little abstracted. What we didn’t know, however, at the picnic was that, when summer school ended that day, Charlie stopped by the English office to leave his grades and tell a secretary that he was driving to Mexico the next day for his divorce. Later, the secretary said that, when she told him he needed to cheer up soon—he seemed depressed—he thanked her for the sympathy but added that he’d just taken his German shepherd to the vet to have him put down. I at least knew that I’d passed him that final afternoon in the swinging doors of the library stacks and exchanged a few words—no more than a brief summer farewell, I thought. So much for a young writer’s insight into terminal pain.

  A later investigation would indicate that, for whatever reason, at about eight that evening he’d checked into the old Washington Duke Hotel in the midst of downtown Durham and been given a room on the eighth floor (had he turned his house over to temporary renters, or was he already contemplating death, as the killing of his dog might suggest?). The police would discover that he’d spent a good part of the night covering numerous pieces of paper with words to this effect, typed on his portable—

  Charles Fenton is fearless

  charming

  likable

  stalwart

  magnanimous . . .

  All the pages had been discarded in the room’s wastebasket. Then before dawn he’d gone downstairs and checked out of the hotel, only to return a few minutes later and ask the desk clerk if he could have his key back—the parking lot wouldn’t open till six (other accounts said that his car wouldn’t start). The clerk gave him the key, Charlie went upstairs, entered the eighth-floor room to stash his luggage but soon went up to the twelfth-floor hallway, removed a screen from a window, climbed out onto a narrow ledge with no protective rail, and managed to work his safe way round the building to a point at which he could fall straight into the street without the interruption of a nearby building.

  In a last act of flawless bravado, he swan-dived down—or so said the two construction workers who were heading to their job in the dawn light and saw his unblocked descent into Chapel Hill Street. Also, behind in his room, was a plane ticket to New York. Apparently he’d called his estranged wife the previous day and asked her to meet him at the airport. When she inquired about his fiancée, she said that he told her those plans were off. He’d plainly been a man in agonized confusion till—maybe—a clear summer sunrise clarified his purpose. Apart from two distraught women and the children, he left a campus already stunned by the damp summer heat and silence of vacation time when no one’s at work but the minimal students of summer session and a few devoted scholars rapt in the stacks.

  Some of them were older colleagues who’d found his shoot-from-the-hip candor and his public affair with a student distinctl
y unacceptable, and one or two Yale colleagues who said that (once he’d accepted a chance to leave Yale) some such ending seemed inevitable. He also left his friends among the younger colleagues, some six or eight of us—casual friends who’d provided no help at all in his final pain.

  I never claimed to know him well, though we bantered for two years—with occasional glances in more serious directions. Dr. Charles A. Fenton’s obituary in The New York Times of July 22, 1960 says that he won the Twentieth-Century-Fox-Doubleday Award for a war novel entitled You’ll Get No Promotion. If I knew that before he died, I don’t know how much he achieved on the project. I do know however that, with no coaching from me, he’d tracked down my first story in Encounter and volunteered how much he liked it (which was more than a vast majority of my senior colleagues had done; I was learning that academics are at least as afflicted by professional jealousy as any other humans).

  This belatedly I realize that I might have, at the least, asked him out for a drink at my place and some supper in town (I’d even begun experimenting, on my tiny stove, with one or two of my own favorites—chicken cacciatore, for instance). But my English social training had expired apparently; and despite his opening up to me that evening on the library steps, I never considered that this man—some fourteen years older and enveloped in what seemed an effortlessly generated air of male glamour, glamour devoid of macho swagger—might have been in need of a friendly gesture from another male colleague who shared some of his interests, though I have no illusion I might have saved him.

  He died in desperate solitude; and for what it’s worth now, I can say that the circles spreading out from his ending surely darkened my fictional story as the pages came from me in the year and a half I’d still need to finish my account of the early adulthood of Rosa and Wesley. Even my very last pages darkened; and I’d known of their shape since the winter afternoon I conceived the whole so quickly—not entirely perceiving, that early, a final darkening tone—in my sitting room on Sandfield Road, Oxford, with a kerosene stove steadily choosing not to kill me, though five feet away from my sleeping lungs.