The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered (17 page)

Indeed, every interaction in Berlin is so loaded for La Vine, that the book has no space for a traditional plot. The complications begin with the most innocent of questions, the one a foreigner always gets asked, “Where are you from?”

It’s important to note that Marcus’s narrative is a reflection of a particular consciousness and not a documentary. Isherwood’s rather dubious claim of “I am a camera” does not apply here. A short-sighted reviewer for
The New York Times
complained that observations like the ones above merely rehash generalizations about Germans rather than present a fuller picture of the true German character. But that complaint misses the whole point of the book, which is not to look at Germans but to look at one American Jew looking at Germans, trying to understand himself as he navigates his highly-charged surroundings, and constantly failing:

Marcus’s voice is so crisp, thought-provoking, funny, and above all deeply poignant, that it lodges itself inside your head and stays there. Indeed, when I finished his book, I felt as if I’d just woken from a vivid dream. I wanted to hear more, so I tried to buy a copy of the novel to own and discovered that it was out of print. I searched for other books by Marcus. There was an earlier story collection,
The Art of Cartography
, but nothing after
The Captain’s Fire
. I looked for Marcus’s email address, but couldn’t find it again, so I contacted the editor of the anthology
Wonderlands
to ask for it. It turned out the editor had lost Marcus’s contact information too.

Knopf, 1993

Timothy Young

There are some books you read
out of obligation, in the same way you go on a blind date with a friend of a friend. In both cases, though, it’s natural to harbor a bit of hope that love may well peek through the blinds.

November 1995 — My boyfriend and I are staying at a friend’s apartment in New York, everything is the same as I remember, except there is a book on the pillow:
Time Remaining
by James McCourt. It is inscribed to me. Why? I helped fix his computer — over the phone. There was a time when it seemed that every writer I knew was accidentally erasing his almost finished novel and I was called, in a panic, to suggest a way to resurrect faded words from stubborn hard drives. I had never met James, but he responded with gratitude — and, having been the previous overnighter on 16
^th
Street, he left me a present of his last novel.

What could I do with it? A box of chocolates, you can eat or regift, but a book is a commitment. I put it on my bookshelf until one day, waiting for my online service to complete a download, I was hypnotized by the dialog window – a slowly creeping status bar and the words: “time remaining.” It was a sign. I put the novel in my bag as I headed for my Friday trip on the Long Island Railroad from Penn Station to East Hampton, a regular commute when my boyfriend lived there full time. As I started to read, I discovered the second sign. The novel takes place on the very train route I was following. The main characters chat and tell stories as they pass through Jamaica, Speonk, Quogue and the progressively distant Hamptons. I read. I co-existed. I fell in love.

What is the book about? Categorically, it is a collection of two tales — an introductory story followed by a novella, but they are the same narrative line, so let’s call it a novel. Nominally, it concerns the reminis-cences of an aging performer, Odette O’Doyle, who has returned from an extended European trip, the purpose of which was to scatter the ashes of her departed fellow travelers in the great, historically meaningful rivers of the continent. The Eleven Against Heaven, an opera-loving, female-gender-appropriating (in pronoun references, clothes, mannerisms) group has been reduced by AIDS to two survivors, the aforementioned Odette and her traveling companion and interlocutor, Delancey. But before Odette can begin recounting her adventures, Delancey gets the first word, in the brief introduction to the book and to the world they inhabit, in which he/she recounts her most recent success, a one-woman show, “I Go Back to the Mais Oui,” a performance/memory piece that evokes, and thus sets, the scene for the long second act.

When the two principal characters board the milk train to the East End, the action begins in earnest. Lives are delineated. Anecdotes tumble like unsecured luggage. References — classical, pop-cultural, many obscure, but enough of them parseable for the average reader — cascade from the lips of the inimitable Odette.

The language of the book is its primary beauty. McCourt uses words to make jokes and puns with an incisive and intellectual edge. He writes with real sound and fury. The narrative doesn’t flow as much as it swerves and dodges and glances. Clichés are turned at right angles: “Sic transit Gloria Swanson” is heard at the end of a long anecdote. The ur-source for much of the thematic construction of the book is grand opera. The stories of each of the dear departed follow the overwrought dramatic arcs of booming stage works. One queen is poured into the Rhine; two garrulous friends/enemies are committed to the Buda and the Pest under bright moonlight by a pair of hunky hotel clerks recruited for the task; another precious character is cast into a fjord in Norway.

These concrete actions are the pinions that anchor the rambling story that encompasses Odette’s life, the lives of her friends, and . . . well, it is a mini-encyclopedia of gay New York life in the second half of the 20
^th
century. It’s all there — sex, drugs, cross-dressing, politics, psychoanalysis, poetry, movies — everything that makes life worthwhile — or keeps you alive. McCourt went on to write a true encyclopedia of the sort — the incomparable magnum opus, “Queer Street” — a work that must be read almost randomly, so dense is it with facts and observations.

But what is
Time Remaining,
as a special beast among these special gay books? It’s a book about faggotry — the celebration of the best qualities of gay life — self-amusement, defiance, an aggressively earned comfort with the world.

I remember a scene, decades ago, in the bathroom of a gay club in Oklahoma. Dressed in acid-washed jeans, sporting a feathered-haircut, thinking I was desirable, I entered the bathroom to use it for its intended purpose — only to find a gaggle of drag queens occupying one of the corners. As I strained to be nonchalant and go about my business, one of them made a pronouncement in my direction, “Don’t be afraid of us honey, we’re just drag queens.” I couldn’t piss to save my life. And so they, elegantly, effortlessly, gained dominion over me and the space. I assumed a bathroom was a bathroom, but in the gay world, it was a private boudoir for cool glamazons. Drag queens claimed and repurposed that little space and with a few slight words, they caused my inner organs to shut down. I began to understand.

What power did they (do they) have? Do drag queens hold sway over a middle territory, a sort of psycho-gender limbo? They understand the tears of a woman and they know the desires of men. I respect drag queens and I have learned to listen to them. Odette distills the wisdom of the ages in the pages of McCourt’s book. And what wisdom it is: the history of Greek statuary; the accomplishments and entanglements of the New York School and the Abstract Expressionists, the oeuvres of Claudette Colbert and Jackie Curtis, the works of Gabriel Marcel, Leon Edel, and Alec Wilder, lives of divas and prima ballerinas (real and imagined), the geographic courses of great rivers — all subjects related to drama, eros and art, of course.

Odette claims for herself, “the lifelong necessary faggot-survival technique: knowing as much as ever you could about what
everybody
was up to — in the house, on the block” and, ultimately, in the world, it seems. What better way to gird your delicate, lady-like loins than to become a walking reference work of both popular and intellectual culture? So whether or not you get picked up and taken to a dingy dive bar or to the top of the Ritz, you can make good conversation. Fine manners, indeed. The desire for knowledge should come naturally to gay men. With so many narratives in our lives — truths, lies, soap operas, deceptions, personae — formed by Biblical stories, conflicting philosophies, and T-cell counts — who can blame us for making a few things up in our search for the truth?

Didn’t Frank O’Hara desire (for all of us) “Grace, to be born and live as variously as possible?” Odette O’Doyle is living that promise. She has seen life from both sides, like Tiresias, as a man and a woman. She has been a performer and a voyeur, a maker and a recorder. She has taken in the capital letter NEWS as well as the ephemeral details of life over six decades and reassembles it in a
collage particulier
that the reader is privileged to receive.

Pity the dull majority of the world who will not receive it, the throngs waiting in airports for the next flight to . . . somewhere. If they’re reading, it’s some limp-covered tome by the likes of Stephen Grisham or James King or Nelson Baldacci or David Patterson or some other blended Anglo-Saxon thriller-er. How un-various can a novel be? They could be reading about a cross-dressing performance artist on a death march across the Olde World! (In either case, the theme is death — straights obsess about murder; fags about loss.)

Odette claims, early on in her narrative, that she needs only three things for a performance: “sufficient gravity, sufficient reflection, and the full consent of the will.” If this statement were to feature prominently on the cover of the book, many a reader would be turned off, for it makes the story sound oh-so-serious. Admittedly, there is a strong thread of thanatology coursing through the book. Odette
is
recounting her experiences gathered while disposing of the remains of her closest friends. She has experienced enough deaths to have sufficient gravity, indeed. To quote one of her paraphrases, making reference to losses during the height of the AIDS crisis in the late 1980s/early 1990s: “There’s people dyin’ now that never died before!”

Speaking of death. There is a curious narrative device that turns up now and again in the book, mainly at the beginning — interrupting the story at odd junctures in the same way the train conductor’s voice breaks Odette’s story with the barked-out names of the stops. It’s the re-telling (and re-re-telling) of the circumstances of Jackson Pollack’s death (summer night, convertible, excessive speed, oak tree, sudden loss). Why does it appear? To let us know that non-faggots die, too? To mark a moment in 1956 when New York culture shifted, unalterably? To mark the place where death waits — that is, the end of the long train line on which Odette is traveling?

But back to the personal aspect of this critical narrative. Once the novel had made its way onto my all-time “best of” list — and after I had begun to buy copies as gifts for friends (finding them on discount remainder tables for a pittance — equally thrilled at the thrift, but annoyed that the book had been, for all practical purposes, cast aside), I felt I needed to be in contact with the author. I wrote him a series of letters — under the pretense of thanking him for the book, but, as I reread those letters today, I understand that I was posturing wildly, filling my paragraphs with convoluted and studied sentences I hoped would convince him that I, too, was a man of elegant verbiage. Was I sincere? Yes, but just a bit of a blowhard. I ended up sending James McCourt a draft of a novel I had written. I don’t remember his response — probably polite indifference, which was a common reaction to that stillborn over-extended short story.

I eventually made a date with him in Washington, DC — a year and a half after receiving the novel. We met in a weathered old steak house off of one of those Avenues that radiate from the capitol out to the suburbs. I was still in my vegetarian phase, so I sifted through some semblance of a salad while Jimmy made his way through an impressive piece of beef. He humored me, chatting about his work, about the world of publishing, about gay life in general and in specific. I listened, as an acolyte should, and awaited whatever epiphany he could provide. He didn’t give it up easily. I knew I had to work through his dense conversation as I had to work through his dense writing. He chewed his fat and I stuffed my face with lettuce leaves. I did realize something — that he was as full of life as I wanted to be. That’s why we read books, right? To experience a part of life that we wouldn’t otherwise have a chance to?