All That Glisters Is Not Gold

Recently a friend of mine who was raised in England denounced the prime ministerial reign of Margaret Thatcher, describing from his own experience how the newly privatized telephone company saw to it that the telephone service was immediately available to the businesses of the financial center of London, the so called City, whereas others, including my friend, suffered a series of delinquencies.  He ascribed a kind of conspiracy in which Mrs. Thatcher was determined to reward only her friends and cronies who were the larger corporations and businessmen.  But, I countered, couldn't we argue that her philosophy of humankind was based on the profit motive?  That all human activity that counts, would be for her, something that led to a profit.  I tried to put her into a bigger perspective.  Ancient heroic epic, for instance, isn't it about powerful people who plunder, who conquer and exploit?  Don't we have Odysseus in the second book of the Iliad striking Thersites with his staff for speaking out against Agamemnon and his shameless exploitation of the army and his greedy profit taking?  Doesn't the poet and by extension the poet's audience believe that the mighty are the glorious?  I once read an interesting anthropological account of the Aztec period in Mexico in which the authors pointed out that a priestly caste came about when men of power, strength, and imagination realized that this was a way to dominate the masses and exploit them for their own gain.  Can we not see the same thing in the workings of the Roman Catholic Church where an elite clergy has made a handsome living for themselves from the offerings of the many who have been led to believe that their salvation is determined by the priestly caste?  We live in a time when the newspapers are filled with the outrageous profit taking by banks and the directors and senior officers of corporations against whose sometime illegalities the government does not seem to make a move.  It seems that this is because in our time no one seems to argue against the notion that profit, gain, and wealth are absolute goods.  Isn't "Downton Abby" a kind of elegant statement of the virtue of exploitation?  So Mrs. Thatcher was not evil, she was true to a conviction firmly held, learned in the home of her childhood, that the individual's first obligation is to make a profit.   My husband, on whom I tried out these ideas at lunch, countered with the idea that humanity must base its raison d'etre on improving the condition of society as a whole.  Of course, Mrs. Thatcher would have immediately come back at him with her famous "There is no such thing as society, only people."  I think back to the Christian teachings of my youth where, yes, the well being of the whole of mankind was always in the thoughts and prayers we heard or internalized.  I was raised to believe that those who sought after wealth and power were likely to lose their souls, and while one could not stop them in their perverse and ugly desire for profit and gain, one knew that they were corrupt in heart and soul.  I guess I really do believe that, it's why I am thankful that I had the chance to make my life's work as something that was a service to others, glad that I have never had to measure it all out in dollars and cents, why it is, I suppose, that my instinct is always to shun people who labor for gain, rather than for service.  I imagine that Mrs. Thatcher could look back on her role in making the City of London the financial center of the world and take pride, and not look to the misery she helped to create elsewhere in England.  Many are called, few are chosen.  It's an ugly truth she was enunciating, one that is very much the mantra of the rich and powerful today.  But I am not sure that they are to be damned for thinking only of their profits, since I am not sure that there is any other philosophical or moral position out there to subscribe to in this day and age.  Certainly there seems little impetus in the belief that since the many cannot function an adversary or entrepreneur manner like the few they must support wholeheartedly an instrument of government that protects and promotes their interests against the rapacious few.  That is not vicious class war, as so many decry; it is a common sense procedure to maintain some check and balance in the flow of wealth as it circulates through the population of the nation.

Ernie, Scott, Move Over, Guys!

My recent reference to novels I have written pushed some of the many psychological buttons attached to my over-sized ego which propelled me to try to remember them.  Like all novice fiction writers I took my own life as the carapace upon which to hang the story's details.  My first attempt recalled a student in my class at Yale who in real life had suddenly before my eyes grown truly ill, dramatically declining by the day, so that I intervened, and when he confessed to his feeling sick hustled him off to the student infirmary where he was discovered to have diabetes, whom I met on a train platform years later, a married man in the suburbs.  In my novel of course it is all different, I really can't remember much about it although the title came from a song Perry Como used to sing "Everybody Falls In Love With Someone", but my intervention had to do with discovering that the kid was suicidal because he realized he was gay, and then later when he has grown up and started work, the two meet again, and of course, guess what? Cupid strikes with his arrow!  The next written in 1980 or so was situated in Ibiza where I had spent part of the previous summer staying with two fifty something Italian sisters adjacent to another house full of Madrileño friends.  The title "Provide Provide" alludes to Robert Frost's poem of that title, I believe, which ends "better to go down dignified/with boughten friendships at your side/provide, provide!"  The narrative line has to do with the jealousy of the one sister that the other has formed a close non-sexual bond with a young girl from Madrid who is taking over the familial function, becoming daughter, sister, friend.  Another plot line involves this vivacious young thing who is also secretly sleeping with one of the young marrieds in the party, and still another depicts a fiftyish American gay professor (now who could that be?) who frets with worry that he might have AIDS when he is not moaning over his loneliness.  The professor was added in a rewrite to give a more serious tone to the narrative, and it was a mistake; he is tiresome and lugubrious throughout.  When I was fifty five, teaching in New York, and working several mornings a week as a volunteer in the kitchen at Gods Love We Deliver, I wrote a novel about a young straight couple, he a cook in such a place, an Italian-American from Staten Island, she working as a volunteer, a WASP debutante from the Upper East Side, oh, god, you can see where this story is going, right into one of the greatest clichés of all time, so it got spiced up a little with the introduction of a flamboyant queenie sort of manager in the kitchen, who eventually dies of AIDS, causing a reunion of the couple who are of course in the grand tradition of Boy Meets Girl, Boy Breaks Up With Girl, Boy Gets Back Together With Girl.  The last time I found a paper copy of this (entitled Kitchen Duty) whilst organizing (what a laugh!) my files I teared up as I read it.  Last of all I wrote a shorter novel about a teenaged gay boy whose silver cigarette case, a family heirloom, is stolen from him by some townies when he is having sex with them, and the desperate measures he goes through to get it back.  It is a study in his courage and perseverance as he goes to the police and they help him with a sting operation since they want to get something on these early onset thugs before they get dangerous, and at the same time a mordant look at the social structures in a small mid western town where an upper class boy can break the law engaging in sodomy and feel free to go to the police about it who use the situation to gain control over some lower class troublemakers in the town. It was called "Give or Take."  I still think it is a wonderful story and very well written.  Gee Willikers, I clean forgot about the novels about Medea and Clytemnestra.

Saturday In The Country

I woke up in my bed here in Hull on Friday, 26 April; I had flown from Sarasota to New York City, then after a few days come by train to Massachusetts.  Although it seemed excessively cold after Florida I was ready to begin to tackle the garden.  Last November before leaving I had pretty well cleared out what could be brought to the ground, so the work ahead of me did not seem to be excessive.  Apart from a day at the dermatologist in town, I kept at it, each morning and each late afternoon, sparing my skin as best I could from the midday sun, and indeed was happy because the doc had not found any insidious new growths which usually flourish after a winter in Florida.  My gardening friend Sally shared the labors on that first Monday, well, did most all the work, transplanting two rose bushes and lots of purple aster and some other tallish thing, forever nameless to me, which has a beautiful purple bloom in late September into October and at the same time somehow dries up into the ugliest brown stalks.  I was going to pull it out until someone suggested hiding it in the midst of the phlox plants, so all one would see in autumn would be the resplendent purple. By mid-week I had become entirely feeble.  I discovered that I have lost strength over the winter even though I have been faithful in going to the gym.  Still I was happy that my tendency to topple over as I bent to prune or pick or pull at weeds in cracks between the paving stones was considerably diminished.  Hoorah for balance exercises!  Early this morning I finished preparing the garden, and surveyed the fading daffodils and jonquils, the forsythia turning just a bit to green, and the late blooming tulips all in their prime and saw that it was good.  I entered the house to tackle the backlog of mail in my study, mostly the journals and books that have arrived since April 20th, the cut-off date when our friend stopped forwarding to us.  It has been a horrendous experience.  The two issues of Vanity Fair to which I subscribed one day on impulse when I read an offer for 12 issues for 12 dollars, reeked as usual of some obnoxious perfume, were nearly too heavy to hold, and almost impossible to maneuver to what is there to be read, as one fights his way through so many ads of so many boys and girls, with mouths half opened and eyes half shut.  I was angry at myself for subscribing, angry for looking into it, angry for getting sucked into an account of a fistfight in some glitter society bar in the meat packing district!  I turned to the pile of New York Review of Books, and my heart sank at the titles of the articles.  Somehow I knew before looking that they would all be so earnest, so full of moral condemnation or praise.  I had to look away, and there was the New Yorker Magazine, five or six perhaps, and again, the gorge of satiety rose.  I looked at the cartoons in a couple of them, noted some clever film reviews, realized that I no longer knew which films I should be seeing, too long too far out of the loop.  Could not face those long intelligent well written articles, because, my god, there would be hundreds and hundreds of pages.  I looked further and saw two hefty copies of The Art Newspaper.  Did I really care about whether China was buying half as much from the galleries as last year, which the headline of one proclaimed?  No, I didn't.  And there at my feet were at least nearly a dozen of the Times Literary Supplement and The London Review.  My stomach turned.  As God is my witness, I cried out I'm never going to read the printed word again!

Travelin' Light

Brian Sewell remarks in his autobiography that he intends to burn his and his mother's diaries because "to keep for an unknown posterity too many papers is an insidious vanity."  I could not agree more.  I remember when I left my position at Boston University I threw out every lecture note, every draft of a scholarly article, well, just everything in my files, even though I still had a decade of teaching left for me.  I just could not face hauling this stuff on to a new location, and, okay, it was time to become a new Charlie.  Fate or sheer cosmic malevolence had already helped me understand the importance of "travelin' light," as the song goes, when someone got into our house as we, my wife and I, headed for different destinations following a divorce, and took all the twelve place settings (ten or so pieces to a setting) of sterling silver which had been wedding gifts. At the time I thought it was sentimentality that forced the wrenching grief upon me, but later reflection suggested it was caused by the sheer loss of so much value; still I was relieved by the freedom it gave me, and I was thoroughly instructed into a new way of approaching possessions. Way back when I was in graduate school, and my mother died, my wife and I in our makeshift tiny apartment were in no position to take on possessions so we passed on what might have been my share of the ancestral family paintings, rugs, and furniture.  Now I look at every piece of furniture we own as though it came from Goodwill; indeed when my wife and I furnished our gigantic Brookline home, we went out Thursday nights and cadged some really great stuff the rich burgers of the town were tossing out for trash collection.  Later when my husband and I moved out of our house in Cambridge, we went from a fifteen room house to a five room apartment, and sold three thousand or more books, and had a two day yard sale that was legend, if not for the throngs shopping up a storm on the first day, then for the sign of desperation tacked to the tree at the curb on the second which read "Everything free, take what you like." Helping my daughter empty her grandmother's house of almost one hundred years of accumulation, and in the same years dismantling my sister's home of nearly half a century has helped me to realize how much I loath possessions, especially when they can be so loaded with associations, some of them heart aching, but some of them bringing back nightmare memories.  And yet, and yet . . . . I can't seem to empty my dresser drawers and closets of so many, many pieces of clothing that will never grace my body again. I keep thinking I have lightened up, but there they are, all those T-shirts, pieces of underwear still in their wrappers. Why especially do I stop at Brooks Brothers in the Factory Outlet out in the Berkshires to buy more underwear?   I look at all the artworks I have acquired since 1948 when first I paid my then brother-in-law, David, $45 for a painting he had turned out at The Art Students League in New York, a very imperfect allusion to the painting style of Roualt, something I treasure to this day.  What will happen to all this stuff when Richard and I--I will not say "pass," sounds like we are playing a hand of bridge--die, and my kids have no room to house it all, and it has no monetary value?  Hey, I'll be dead, not my problem.  A friend from graduate school days who passed his life in some kind of sterile and wretched observance of service to "scholarship" whatever that might be, always used to say that a man's posterity is measured in the entries in card catalogs and bibliographies, ever sneering at baby makers and householders.  Well, poor guy, he is now utterly demented and I guess thus blissfully ignorant of the fact that most of what he spent his life on has been quite superseded by contemporary notions of what the requirements of the field are all about.  Will a memory of him survive beyond a decade as more than a subject of witty academic anecdotes?

Once Upon A Time In Ancient Greece

Friends have raved about two productions at Emerson, an adaptation of the Iliad which began its life in a theater in Princeton New Jersey with Stephen Spinella, no longer the wispy, Waspy youth he portrayed in Angels in America, but a solid, middle aged Achilles, and a variation on Euripides' Trojan Women with a few bells and whistles brought in from other works, both of which--I was about to say, sadly enough--I did not get the chance to see.  I am not sad at all actually; I have resisted seeing An Iliad (as indeed it is called), mainly because I don't ever want to see or hear another masterpiece of Greek antiquity, particularly not a dramatic rendition of a 16,000 line dactylic hexametric poem.  I very rarely find ancient Athenian tragic drama the least bit dramatic or compelling when done as the text suggests, and the "enhancements" as some might call it, only offend me.  T'was not always thus, of course, and I have even played Menelaos in a student/faculty outdoor production of Trojan Women at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, to me memorable for the moments at the very beginning when I was secreted in the bushes--our "offstage"--with the student playing Hecuba and struggled to control myself as she--for my benefit alone, there in the bushes--improvised her opening speech "Lift up, o stricken head . . . " in a combination of Yiddish and just off the boat immigrant Jewish English, the language of her father.  My friends tell me that Emerson did The Trojan Women as an anti-war tract, and that is generally what the world imagines was Euripides' idea when he created the play.  I don't think so.  First off, the fact of war is such a given in ancient society, and for a people whose view of life derives from an inherent tragic sensibility, the endless woe on display or forecast in Euripides' play is merely the inevitable background before which the characters do their thing. War is a horror, life is a horror, the language of the play does not take a position. What is extraordinary here, as in so many of Euripides' plays, is the sensational dramatization of the plight of women, the playthings of males, the victims of direct prosecution or the mistaken targets of careless by-blows. Cassandra soon to be raped, Andromache soon to be forced into bed with the son of her husband's killer, Hecuba queen and now led off in slavery to a man she despises and who despises her, that's what this play is all about--written by a male, for a male audience. It's about what it means to be a woman in fifth century BCE Athens.  I cannot resist mentioning a total irrelevancy that stays in my head along with the humorous moment in Norton whenever I think of The Trojan Women, and that is a Harvard-Radcliffe student production a million years ago when a very young, but totally accomplished Stockard Channing played Cassandra and made that long monologue speech something to remember.  The play's grim vision of things is not intolerable because of the distancing achieved by the elaborate formulaic tragic language and by the rigid structure of scenes and dramatic progress; furthermore, violence never takes place enacted for the audience.  Likewise, the Ilad is not an anti-war piece; the males portrayed in it gain glory, stature, identity, and of course more often than not suffering and death from wars and battles; it's what defines them.  I imagine that the early audiences for this poem sat in recital instantly alert and interested in the mayhem told about, their capacity for identification and hence suffering filtered through the scrim of that incredible rhythmic language which offers everything no matter how awful in a sensuous hypnotic beat that intoxicates.  But make no mistake: when Hektor and Andromache discuss the horrible future that awaits them both, at the moment that they are dandling their little darling son on their knees, Hektor cannot resist ending his litany of woe with a prayer to the gods that the little tyke will grow up to be as much a relentless killer as the father.  Vito Corleone, Tony Soprano, Hektor, go for it, kill, kill, kill.  Contemporary film and television rubs the viewer's face in the psychic muck of the violence and sadism on offer in the story line.  The idea has recently been addressed yet again in a book coming out from Brett Martin (Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution) who takes as his starting point the moment when Tony Soprano strangles an informer he chances upon in rural Maine.  I was fascinated by The Sopranos, all five years, but stopped watching violence after that.  Too close, too many bad dreams, too urgent an invitation for my complicity because visuals are so insistent.

May Day

On the first of May the workers of the world are supposed to unite and march in solidarity and remind the other classes of their societies how they are the backbone upon which is constructed their well being.  We see less and less of that across the world and certainly the idea scarcely ripples through the United States, where demonstrations in support of labor unions and the laboring classes are not existent; certainly there seemed to be no report of May Day activities in today's New York Times.  One can of course argue that the decades of almost religiously fervent hostility directed at the Soviet Union made exalting the working man difficult, since he was the poster boy for the Socialist Eastern European and Russian states.  But I always think back to the thirties and an incident when my little sister and I, accompanied by our uniformed nursemaid, had stones thrown at us by other children when we were out walking in the park of our small mid-western town and when we tearfully inquired of our mother why this might have happened, she replied quietly: "They hate us because we are rich."  And that always seemed to me just.  When some people who have done all they can and forces totally beyond their control keep them from improving their lot, then they might focus their anger and resentment upon those who have so much and seem to be doing to nothing to help those less fortunate.  I always welcomed the idea of labor unions and labor movements for that reason--well, also because my older sister authoritatively directed me to think positively about socialist values and goals when I was still a simpleton teenager.  But I always knew that I was something different; I was not working class.  My sissy manners certainly were not like the rough and tumble jumble of kids in my high school with whom I became friendly in an odd way over the years.  And they knew that I was not them.  We had what was called class consciousness, and they knew that I and my family were not in the grander sense of things their friends.  Where has that gone today?  I live in a small town with a large working class population, where many men go off at dawn in pick up trucks to construction jobs, where somewhat later their wives or sisters wait for the impossibly bad bus service to take them to the nearest malls where their employment ranges the gambit from cleaning services to sales clerks.  So much unemployment down  here, so many mortgages in default, yet the local paper which will give front page coverage to a bake sale for a benevolent organization and make the local crisis of sand dune damage the focus of their editorial page, will never mention the subject of banks and their role in the housing crisis, or how the national legislature quickly jumped through a hoop to restore air travel controllers to their pre-budget crisis level while they could not, would not move to restore, let's say, monies going out to pre school education or any of the other services that benefit the young of the working class.  When first we moved here, and I decided to buy another new car, mindful of those days of my childhood and the stones thrown in the park, I anticipated at least a few barbed comments from my neighbors who not only rarely ever refresh their stock of cars and when they do so select a late model used car at best, but, no, nary a word, as we sit here fat and sassy, comfortable, for the foreseeable future up to the grave.

Steam In The Locker Room

Well, well, well, a professional athlete has announced that he is gay, and he will continue to play professionally, a piece of news that merited even a call from President Obama.  When I think back over my youthful years when I had such notoriety as a flaming queer in my hometown I have to remember the great number of athletes who sought me out for sexual satisfaction, man to man, albeit, they more generally receiving and me giving.  But there were the university swimmer and the track star who startled me by taking on the passive role, there were boys on every team in my high school who routinely engaged in heavy necking and kissing before we got down to their business, and their was the basketball whiz who couldn't get enough of me, again performing the passive role, even after he married his childhood sweetheart.  And of course the black football player who probably sought me out because the racial mores of the day forbade him approaching any of the town girls with an amatory signal.  Many years later, when I could no longer be called a thing of beauty, I hooked up with a gentleman, a professional athlete of considerable fame, a friend of friends, from whom he had learned that I was gay, and since we happened to be in his hotel suite for morning coffee, he suggested that we put our cups down, and get better acquainted, as his extended exhibition tour of Europe had left little time for as he put it "sexualizing," and he was horny, even if I were clearly not, by gender or by age, the most exciting fruit to pluck from the sexual tree.  The youthful years of exaggerated promiscuity have left me in no doubt that gentlemen who do sports are more likely than not to be willing to engage in some form of sexual amusement with another male.  And, if you think about  it, why not?  Most sports involve constant body contact, require changes of costume in communal areas where extended periods of nudity are the norm, often demand teamwork that makes for emotional and intellectual bonds that could be the intense prelude to more engagement or indeed offer a substitute for emotional and physical involvement that society inhibits the guys from exploiting.  I have always considered the aggressive and outspoken homophobia of athletes no different than that coming from religious leaders who usually weeks later are found in a public restroom with some guy or are accused by the local hustler of engaging their services.  Years ago I had a gay friend who was a cop, a big burly typical Irish cop, right out of central casting, who was unabashedly gay.  And I asked him once if he had come out to the guys in the precinct, and he said no, explaining that they needed to bond closely if they were to maintain their esprit in the violent and crime ridden area where they practiced their calling, and this involved hours of horsing around in the showers and locker rooms, nude or semi-nude, in a series of high jinks, and jokes all of which were intensely homoerotic, as he saw it, and not for nothing would he destroy their bonding games by letting on that a real live gay male was in their midst.