Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

by Paul Monette

  And I got what I wanted. They all decided to cheer me up, make sure I felt like one of the guys, no more the outsider looking in. They also encouraged me mightily in my writer's vocation. Half of them were on the track to law school and med school themselves, and having a poet around was a nice diversion. So I wagged like a puppy when they stroked me, spoke from the windswept hill of Poesy if the mood was right, one-on-one by the fire in the Tap Room. For they tended to draw toward me when they were depressed themselves, now that I was the resident expert on melancholy. And I would do somersaults of empathy, the candle in every brother's darkness.

  All of which was so much more satisfying than sending in applications to grad school. My professors in the English department assumed I would go for a Ph.D., and so I took the Graduate Record Exam in case, but grudgingly. Various fellowships for study abroad dotted the bulletin boards along my daily route, and I let my name be nominated here and there, maybe even went after a couple. But the whole scenario gave me a queasy feeling, as if graduate school of any sort—but especially in England—would feel like those five weeks across from the nun at Cambridge, till I gradually turned to stone.

  Something would doubtless turn up, I remember thinking, as long as I was true to my writing. I was back to poetry again, in the grip of Sylvia Plath, Ariel having just appeared. What a thrill—/My thumb instead of an onion, she gasps at the cut of a kitchen knife, mesmerized. To a whole generation of 60's depressives it was a siren call to play chicken on the tracks. The blood lust cries to the father and the husband, flaunting her death, daring anyone to stop her. In fact I didn't read her very carefully, just obsessively, using Sylvia to tap into a rage I couldn't name, where the eros of self-destruction was better than no eros at all.

  There was never any real danger that I would turn on the gas myself, having chosen instead a living death, the inchmeal route of the closet. But that's why the poise of the kitchen knife felt so thrilling, even if I was only pretending for the sake of an overwrought poem. Just look what I can do—bleed. There might be no way out of the queer closet, but this courting of insanity and annihilation meant that every other door of feeling blew its hinges. Suffering had a purpose if you could get a good line or two out of it. Besides, when you're working so hard on keeping your wounds raw instead of doing your Stanford application, you can pretty much shrug the future off.

  I call it a breakdown, but that's just guesswork. More than any other year since puberty, the details blur. All I can recall is constant motion, running around that Gothic maze of a campus, endlessly performing, working at being everybody's idea of a poet. Somehow I've always blamed Yale for that, but really, what was the college supposed to do? Get me into therapy? Also, I can't think how else I would have ended up a writer without that year of proclaiming it at the top of my lungs. The breakdown's built in.

  Yet I still can't look back without pleading for the pain to stop, even from this distance—longing for some bolt of courage or madness to drag me out of the closet before I graduated Yale. Then at least I could say I got something out of those four cloistered years besides a worthless diploma. For when that longing gets its hooks in me, aching for so much lost time, I think I would have gladly given up being a writer if I could've been queer out loud. Not that it had to be either/or. But another eight years would go by before I understood I could have it both ways: queer and a writer.

  I remember only a single conversation from Christmas that year in Andover. I suppose my parents had asked me before where I was going after Yale, and I'd probably answered with a certain vague superiority, the whole question beneath my notice. But now they meant to pin me down, especially when I ticked off the schools and careers my friends were getting ready for. "We don't care about them," my father declared, never late for work himself in forty years. "What about you? You must have some idea."

  "Of course. I'm going to write."

  A pause, in which you could hear the fizz of the lights on the Christmas tree. "But that's not a job," my mother finally sputtered. "It's—it's a hobby. What's all this education been for? You have to do something."

  Oh I did, did I? The cold defiance must have been naked in my face. My parents probably wanted to beat the bejesus out of the little snot. In retrospect I can hardly blame them. But there are subtler ways, stitched with infinite patience like a crewel sampler. "Paul, don't you understand," my mother intoned with a trace of pity, regaining her footing nicely, "if something happens to us, you'll have to take care of Bobby."

  Like the clanking shut of a prison gate. I nodded and mumbled yes, of course I understood that, when in fact I'd never given it a thought. I'd left the world of Stratford Road a million miles behind me, all its certainties, everything taken care of. Not that I wasn't always glad to see my brother when I was home. We made marvelous mischief at the dinner table, trading riffs of rock 'n' roll, talking in circles above the parents' heads. To me Bob seemed completely independent, a kid with his own opinions, unbowed by life in a wheelchair.

  He'd finally been sprung from the David Copperfield School, thrown in with the able-bodied masses at Andover Junior High, whose prewar edifice was all vertical, upstairs and down. For Bob every day it was like climbing a mountain hog-tied. Forced to take classes on the ground floor, no matter how inappropriate. For one course he had to sit in a janitor's closet, listening in with an ancient ear trumpet that snaked upstairs to the science class on the floor above, like playing telephone with two Dixie cups and a length of string. Education by obstacle course.

  And he had his own ache of longing now. Just recently I learned that he used to crawl into my room and rifle through my jerk-off drawer so he could look at the Playboys. Now I realize I desexualized him as completely as I had myself—too threatening even to think about. But he was wheeling through those snot-green halls at AJH—where Vinnie O'Connor once made Austin Singer eat a lugie—and gaping at all the nubile girls in the first flush of womanhood, his hormones as wired as any of the other boys'. Except in his case the rattling heat was accompanied by a terrible sinking dread, that none of these laughing girls would ever look at him that way. And it left his heart as paralyzed as his legs.

  I bought all the clichés instead: the brave little cripple, the tortoise overtaking the hare. He'd sit in his room playing his guitar for hours on end, singing softly to himself, and I liked the romantic image of that. It seemed Poetic, like me and my pen full of blood. But I hadn't a clue what he felt about anything, and made no effort to find out. If I couldn't face my own demons except in a haze of metaphor, all evasion, there wasn't even an outside chance that I'd confront my brother on his. I mean, what if he asked me to help him become a man? I couldn't be that kind of big brother—couldn't even begin to ventriloquize it.

  I suppose it must have made me angry, the prospect of giving up my own life to take care of his. But we weren't very skilled at anger in those days, not where I came from. We were into bearing it silently, like good Episcopalians. (You can always tell how much anger one of them has buried by the crosshatch lines on the upper lip, like a lemon pucker that froze—the opposite of smile lines.) I couldn't cry out the rage, but in January I went back to Yale more committed, not less, to going nowhere. If my brother's well-being depended on my finding a nice safe situation with regular hours and a good health plan, they were putting their money on the wrong horse.

  The first half of my Tennyson thesis was due at the end of January. It was still mostly a disarray of 3 x 5's and fragments spilling off my desk. For the first time I can remember, I played the card of my brother. I went to the college dean and told him Bob had almost died over Christmas, reaching back a half-dozen years to the fevers that broke the thermometer. I had otherwise been so pathologically punctual and perfect in my coursework that the dean was on the phone in a flash, getting me three weeks' grace from the department chairman himself. All through the rest of the year the dean would stop me in the hall to inquire how my brother was doing. A little better, I said, till it finally dawned o
n me that he might ask Paul and Jackie the same thing at graduation. All better, I hastily revised, pulling my brother back from the brink of the grave.

  As for the anger I felt toward my parents for saying that writing wasn't a life, the only person I can recall expressing it to was Hilgendorf. By now I was feeling closer to my brothers in Elihu than to anyone else, reading and writing there nearly every evening, always ready to fling my work aside and get into a little soul talk. I tried to give equal time to all fourteen, like a floating delegate at a convention, charming them and interviewing them by turns. But the one who fascinated me most was Bill Hilgendorf, because the realm in which he moved seemed the most unattainable, as far outside Yale as I wanted to be.

  Not that he didn't have Yale in the palm of his hand. He was president of our class, respected unto veneration, a jock's jock. In football he was All-Ivy something or other—linebacker I think, but don't quote me—and managed to play a little of everything else, basketball to rugby. He'd lived two floors above me in Jonathan Edwards since sophomore year, unfailingly nice when we passed on the stairs, but I was too awed to engage him much. He looked like the steel engraving of Lancelot in Idylls of the King, the subject of the second half of my thesis. Wisconsin-born and rock-solid, Bill had no guile about him at all, and no arrogance either. Nothing to dilute the Eagle Scout mix of authority and decency. Too good to be true, perhaps, but they said the same thing about Lancelot at the Round Table, the envious ones anyway.

  Bill and I would walk together to Elihu on Thursday and Sunday nights for meetings, then home again, late, through the Old Campus, I trying to match my stride to his. He admitted to being unnerved by the black hole of despair in my autobiography, never having peered into such deep water himself. But he was convinced, ever the ball carrier, that it would only make me a greater poet, and urged me in his earnest way to charge down the field and run for daylight. So opposite to me, I had no idea what a fellow romantic he was till we got to his life story.

  Which sounded more or less like the youth of Apollo: cheering crowds in the stadium, his bedroom cheek by jowl with trophies.The middle brother of three, all football heroes, the pride of Whitefish Bay. If Bill had any problems—he groped to find one—it was a struggle with pride, and a certain doubt about being worthy of the pedestal the crowd was always lifting him to. A properly classical flaw, but one you could scarcely lend much credence to in his case, given the seeming total absence of narcissistic self-regard.

  I don't know how not to make him sound like a cheap paper saint. He wasn't stiff or holier-than-thou. The aura around him was a sunlit field in a winning season, but he somehow didn't consume the light himself. It always seemed to be shining back on the person he was talking to. Trust me, you would have voted for him in a minute. For that's how it ended up, his autobiography: he was going to be President someday. Understand that most of us around that oval table had a good deal invested in cynicism, especially concerning the powers that be. It was a tribute to Bill's unabashed idealism that we nodded our collective approval, as if we were all extras in a Capra movie, sure that Jimmy Stewart could save the bank if anyone could.

  By a curious fluke, lucky for both of us, I never fell in love with him. I worshiped him, but it wasn't carnal. And he wasn't afraid of me in the least, or of the wild swings of my feelings. I think he was so self-contained himself, so centered at the core, that he worried a little about being so normal. A restless talker, always stretching, in his way as much of an interviewer as I was. How do you think poetry helps people? he'd ask, wanting the whole thing quantified so he could compare it to digging wells in the Peace Corps. He had a missionary streak in him—Christian maybe, but no affiliation, thank you. With him it was more in the nature of a quest, at the end of which he would be a wiser leader.

  And, then, he had Star. They had just started seeing each other that year, but the dazzling pair they made seemed more heroic and inevitable than "dating." She was quite the most beautiful girl I'd ever met, maybe because she took to me so fast and wanted to read my poems, all of them. She'd grown up in Hawaii, tawny blonde with orchids in her hair, and was surely the most unlikely Wellesley girl around, no circle pin in sight and not a demure bone in her body. Star and Bill were king and queen of a larger prom than Yale, and already I could imagine them campaigning together for a House seat from Wisconsin, White House or bust. They didn't exactly radiate a smoldering sexual heat, both of them still in that astonishment of first love, and therefore somehow innocent. But here it may only be the skewed perspective of the overwrought poet talking, for I thought of her as Guinevere to his Lancelot. Just as I thought of myself as the Laureate of them both, ready to read a triumphal ode at Bill's inaugural.

  I'm not quite sure why I felt no jealousy or envy toward them. It's hard to piece it together so far back, since Star is like a sister to me now, the only person I still know from Yale. We've spent so much time since then shaking our heads and wondering: Was anyone ever so young? Trying to get over Bill in our separate ways, what we could've become and how much sooner but for the tease of fate, as Greek as our heroes.

  I only know that the two of them seemed to be my biggest fans, and that being a writer became as necessary as breathing when I was in their company. Anne Sexton's Live or Die came out that winter, and Star and I read it aloud to each other, loving its smutty vernacular, its snickering at death. She was even taking a course in the Victorians at Wellesley, thus full of questions about poor dreary Tennyson. At Star's urging I actually completed the application to the writing program at Stanford, my one post-college shot, though I can't recall if I applied in fiction or poetry. I certainly brooded long and hard about whether a real writer ought to be going to school to study how. Wouldn't it be better to live on three dollars a day in Nice and write what I wanted? Star responded dryly that what a real writer needed to do was avoid the draft.

  I kept forgetting that part. I was still sitting out the war in '67, totally abstracted from the flood of carnage on the nightly news, paying only the barest lip service to the anti-war. I hadn't anything that passed for a political conviction. It was in the nature of my particular closet that nothing would ever change, so what was the point of trying? I didn't even know I was oppressed.

  By March my life was insanely busy, as all the various arts festivals began to take shape in the twelve residential colleges. Where I wasn't actually responsible for mounting an event, my official czar's position demanded that I show up, at every reading and performance—or at least I was too guilty not to, knowing the feeling all too well of outnumbering the audience. The art itself has vanished from memory—the undergraduate angst, the neo-Pop defiance, the spluttering 8-millimeter shorts. But I realized that some of the younger artists, especially the writers, were looking to me for guidance and support. I recognized the neediness and cheered them on, usually coming home with yet another batch of bleeding poems and stories about deflowering. No time at all for my own work now.

  As much as I liked playing the mentor, I enjoyed even more the fact that they thought of me as an artist who'd made it, however small the pond. The one-eyed man in the country of the blind. I doled out fragments of my novel to the select few, accompanied by the travelogue of my days in Nice. I was dimly aware that the deadline for turning in my Tennyson thesis was fast approaching, but I kept putting off the revision and polish of my fitful chapters on the Idylls. I'd get home too late from the cast parties and be up half the night reading proof for one of my literary rags. As if Western Culture would grind to a halt if I didn't do it all.

  So I never pawed through my desk for the Idylls file, sixty or seventy pages already typed, if only half thought through, till a week before the thesis was due—and the file wasn't there anymore. Within an hour I knew the pages weren't anywhere in my room or Cody's, with Cody himself more amused than not by my sudden panic, scarcely having sketched the floor plan for his own senior project. But then he didn't have the Paul-is-perfect image to uphold. I began to tremble with fear
as I tried to reconstruct when I'd last seen the fateful pages. No luck: I was blank as the wall the hero of my novel woke to every day.

  I put notices on bulletin boards, but I knew it was a lost cause. I had to go to the chairman of the department and beg for leniency. Glibly he told me the story of Thomas Carlyle's only copy of his history of the French Revolution being tossed in the fire by a thoughtless maid at the house of John Stuart Mill. And the great man sat right down the next morning and started all over. Except in my case the file included not just my draft but weeks of glazed research across from the tight-lipped nun at Cambridge. I finally struck a bargain: I would expand considerably my not-so-brilliant remarks on In Memoriam and let that stand for the whole. More padding of what was already mostly pad, and I knew I had just kissed off my chance of graduating magna.[4]

  For years afterwards, I couldn't get over the feeling that I'd been about to say something profound about Arthur and Guinevere and Lancelot. But, unlike Carlyle, I never went back. As I lurched around trying to stretch eighty pages to a hundred and twenty, I got my rejection from Stanford, a chill form letter at the end of which someone had stamped Wallace Stegner's name upside down. A dread like a snake in my belly told me I was in deep shit, but during the last ten marathon days with my thesis I couldn't take a break to think about that. The margins felt about three inches wide on either side when I gloomily handed it in.