Illusions Perdues

The young handsome would-be author Lucien in Balzac's Illusions Perdues reminds me so much of myself at various stages of my life.  It is a marvelous portrayal of simple provincial snobbery at work as the young man tries to make his way in his small town and later when the local society woman who takes an interest in him brings him to Paris.  I grew up in a small Iowa town in the upper reaches of its social order--for what that's worth--only to be surprised first at Andover by  all the self assured and very wealthy boys, then later at graduate school at Harvard which was so much more luxurious than the State University of Iowa, and where my fellow students had all been studying the classical languages since the early days at prep school, and whose knowledge of each other and their teachers was gleaned from summers on the Cape, the Vineyard, and Nantucket if not Maine.  When I went off to Manhattan at eighteen I had every opportunity to make something of myself--handsome, intelligent, and witty, and what was the calling card that would have gained me entrée to every level of society was that I was gay.  But I was too shy, too provincial, I did not know how to work the gay bars to meet the right (read powerful) males, I did not know the lingo and the references.  Poor Lucien!  I felt for him on every page as he stumbled and mumbled and revealed what a provincial dolt he was.  Now after having lived on and off in Manhattan for years, having held an important post in the teaching profession there, having lectured at non academic locales where social status matters, having been received at extraordinary addresses, I still feel that I am the inconnu from Iowa, utterly at variance with the smooth and knowing persons who surround me.  Part of it is I have never really been to the Hamptons, never been to Fire Island, have never really found my place in this great city with its many over lapping social milieux.  Lucien is an intelligent lad and he recognizes very quickly that his benefactor whom he thought very grand back in the village is a provincial nobody, and that he himself is a laughable joke in pathetic clothes, but he has a rage to break into the game.  I wonder if turning to the field of classical languages and literatures, becoming a professor, was not in some real sense opting out of the game.  And what was this aggressively gay guy getting married all about?  Now in my dotage in my new life in Florida my husband and I live very simply in a most unpromising site, between the parking lot for a high end mall and the local middle school, chosen because of its proximity  to so many important destinations available by walking.  But "nobody" would live where we live.  Because we donate a considerable sum to support a student at the Asolo Repertory's Dramatic School, or whatever it is called, we are thrown in with the other donors for whom dropping ten thousand or so on a philanthropic project amounts to something like a checkbook error, if they even notice it. Still provincial, still trying to make my way.