by Emil Siekkinen

In his metaphysical essay “The Enigma of Edward FitzGerald,” Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) claims, “the poet must be prolific.” With this in mind, Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer would not qualify as a great poet. Since his debut, 17 dikter (17 Poems) in 1954, Tranströmer has published roughly 250 pages of poems, but his slender output proved to be enough to lead to one of the great literary honors of the world. It is not every year—or every decade, even—that a poet is awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, but in 2011 it happened. What was it the Swedish Academy awarded, then?

Tranströmer’s poetry is bare, elegant, precise, and serene, much like the verse of Saigyo (1118–1190), Basho (1644–1694), and Ryokan (1758–1831). And just like in the poetry of these three Japanese masters, nature is important to Tranströmer. Nature, of course, uses many different dresses—be it the gently melancholy of the Swedish summer, or that country’s stern and majestic winter—but its underlying essence remains the same, namely: it is.

Tranströmer belongs to a Germanic tribe that has been where it now is for at least 5000 years—only a few European tribes have remained true to their land for so long—and this has created a close and intimate relationship between the Swedes and their land. Swedes tend, generally speaking, to be children of nature; when English hymns are translated to Swedish they sometimes become hymns to nature instead of to God. Then again, it is not much of a stretch to claim that God can be found in nature. In Hebrew, God is known as Ehyeh (I am) and YHWH, two words that both have their roots in the copulative verb hayah, “to be.” It is safe to say that the Christianity of the North European countries is firmly rooted in this Jewish notion, for Jesus himself repeatedly uses the name Ehyeh.

Den stora gåtan (The Great Enigma, 2004) is Tranströmer’s latest collection; the poems appear to be about the wonder of existence, and they display gratefulness for what life has given and continues to offer. In The Great Enigma, the presence of God is more obvious thanever before, but the poet is not preachy—all he is saying is that he, even as death is drawing near, is deeply thankful for being part of being.

But the existence of God can be palpable in Tranströmer’s earlier verse, too. In “Svenska hus ensligt belägna” (“Solitary Swedish Houses,” 1958), the poet pleads that mankind “without worries feel / the camouflaged wings / and God’s energy / coiled up in the darkness.” God calls out from the depth, “Liberate me! Liberate yourself!” (“Inomhuset är oändligt” [“The Indoors Is Endless,” 1989]), and in “Guldstekel” (“GoldenWasp,” 1989), it is stated that the divine touches a human and then withdraws. Why is that? Tranströmer asks.

It is, however, more common that God—or at least religion—is hinted at: churches and cathedrals are frequent images, and there are crosses, angels, icons, and statues of saints. In “Balakirevs dröm” (“Balakirev’s Dream,” 1958), the Balakirev of the poem tells a sailor, “cross yourself like me, cross yourself!” Another poem, “I det fria” (“In the Open,” 1966), describes how the shadow of a low-flying airplane casts a cross-shaped shadow over a meadow, and for a brief moment a man is in the midst of the cross. The image sends the thoughts of the observer elsewhere, as he recalls the cross under cool church vaults—“it sometimes resembles a momentary image / of something in swift motion.” “Många steg” (“Many Steps,” 1983) tells the tale of icons that, face up, have been buried in the soil, whereupon “ten thousand doubters’ heavy steps” walk over them, and suddenly the teller of the tale is underground himself: “What a strong longing! What an idiotic hope! / And over me the steps of millions of doubters.”

And then there is the graveyard, Jewish or Christian, even though the latter may have a strong secular touch, as Tranströmer, after all, is Swedish. Those who are dead and buried tend, for now at least, to be just that—dead and buried. They are not resting or waiting for the resurrection—they are dead. Unless they are undead, for in “Från vintern 1947” (“From the Winter of 1947,” 1978), Tranströmer says: “I read the books of glass but saw only the other / the stains seeping through the wallpaper. / It was the living dead / who wanted to have their portraits painted!”

To say that death and the dead are obsessions of Tranströmer would be an exaggeration, but the presence of death can often be felt and observed in his poetry. Does the poet fear death? In “Snö faller” (“Snow Is Falling,” 2004), he says, “The funerals keep coming / more and more frequently / like the traffic signs / when approaching a town. [- - -] A bridge is building itself / slowly / out into space.”

Death is active and takes the measure of man (“Svarta vykort” ["Black Postcards,” 1983]), and even though the dead usually are passive, their very passivity speaks volumes. They are not going anywhere, and they do not actively intervene with the world of the living, but theyhave a lot to say, as they speak from a destination that no living creature can avoid. Is it the final destination? No one knows, but in “Svar på brev” (“Answers to Letters,” 1983), Tranströmer speaks of a place, possibly New York City, which is beyond death:

Sometime I will reply. Once when I am dead and finally will be allowed to concentrate. Or at least so far away from here that I can find myself again. When I, newly arrived, walk in the big city, on 125th Street, in the wind on the street of dancing garbage. I who love to wander and disappear in the crowd, a letter T in the everlasting mass of text.

So, yes, in Tranströmer’s poetry death is the final destination, and yes, Tranströmer’s poetry suggests that there is something beyond death. What exactly? Read and find out for yourself.

Books by Tomas Tranströmer currently available in English:

The Sorrow Gondola (translated by Michael McGriff, Green Integer, 2010)
The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems (translated by Robin Fulton, New Directions, 2006)
The Half-Finished Heaven: The Best Poems of Tomas Tranströmer (translated by Robert Bly, Graywolf, 2001)
Tomas Tranströmer: Selected Poems, 1954–1986 (translated by Samuel Charters, et al., Ecco, 2000)
For the Living and the Dead: Poems and a Memoir (translated by Joanna Bankier,et al., Ecco, 2011)
Windows and Stones: Selected Poems (translated by Leif Sjoberg and May Swenson, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972)

Click here to purchase The Sorrow Gondola at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase The Great Enigma at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase The Half-Finished Heaven at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase For the Living and the Dead at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase Windows and Stones at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2011/2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011/2012

"Everyone knows the sensitive topics," says Twin Cities-based Chinese artist Meng Tang. Taiwan, Falun Gong, Tibet, the Uighurs—all are strictly off limits to artists in China. But as artist (and international cause celebré) Ai Weiwei discovered this spring, those who challenge the Chinese government on other issues can just as easily find themselves in the government's crosshairs.

After the "Arab Spring" spread across North Africa and the Middle East earlier this year, the Chinese government moved quickly to silence voices of dissent, including Weiwei. Two dozen other artists and lawyers who’d spoken critically of the country’s policies were also arrested or just disappeared. For his part, Weiwei has criticized the Chinese government’s handling of the devastating 2008 Sichuan earthquake as well as its rampant corruption and human rights abuses; as a result, he had come under increasing scrutiny. In April, Weiwei was arrested and detained without charges for two months; he was eventually charged with owing unpaid taxes.

"The government realized art is dangerous," says Tang, who notes that the country’s weak legal system and state-controlled media leave few venues for addressing China’s social and political problems in a public forum.

But China’s relationship to the arts is paradoxical. Case in point, a recent New York Times headline declares “China’s new cultural revolution: A surge in art collecting.” The accompanying photo shows Christie’s employees taking bids under Andy Warhol’s “Mao.” Even as stories like this pop up about the surge in Chinese art markets and the “sense of liberation” among the nation’s collectors as they venture into new aesthetic territory, Chinese artists walk an increasingly precarious line between censorship and persecution by their government.

Tang doesn't consider herself a political artist, but her art does have an activist bent. Her work focuses on the fraught domain of gender and communication, between men and women, and across language and culture. While this may sound almost quaint in our post-post-feminist society, the personal is indeed political in China.

“Chinese women artists have more challenges than men,” says art critic and curator of the China Central Academy of Fine Arts art museum Wang Chunchen. “But some of them are very strong in their thinking about gender and social status, which produces shocks to orthodox and conservative ideology.” Chunchen praises Tang’s “courageous reflections on Chinese society,” which he compares to the Weiwei.

Tang admits that even though she steers clear of hot-button big political issues, she feels pressure all the same. "A lot of Chinese artists make art on [political] issues, but as a female artist I have things to say about gender and communication,” she says. “Still, politics is the elephant in the room for Chinese artists.” And lately, in trying to capture the complexities of cross-cultural communication and understanding, the artist has tapped into a rich vein of political subtext with Land of the Free, one of the pieces she showed in October at a group show at The Soap Factory.

“I think China needs to change, but what is the solution?” asks Tang. “Land of the Free is about asking people [that question]. I want to provide a pure, free space for people to speak up.” And speak up they do, in sometimes political, sometimes random ways: “Free Tibet,” “Keep Chinese artists free,” “Don’t worry be happy.” These messages, scribbled on colorful post-it notes, punctuate the 298 red flags (the color of the Chinese Communist Party) planted in a wooden map of China; each flag represents a mid-size or large Chinese city. It’s a subversive notion for a Chinese artist, but also a remarkably hopeful gesture for one whose work is absorbed by the hopelessness inherent in humans attempting to grasp one another’s meaning and intent.

Born in 1971, Tang grew up in Tian Jin, a town a bit less than two hours north of Beijing. Though she showed early promise, the idea of actually becoming an artist was another thing altogether. The Cultural Revolution, which began just before Tang was born, left a strong imprint on the arts (and every other aspect of society). Many traditional artists were publicly humiliated and even tortured. Those who wanted to continue making art had few options aside from teaching at state-run schools or producing propaganda.

“In China, the definition of an artist was blurred. We didn't have art at all at that moment,” says Tang. “[After the Cultural Revolution] no one really understood what the life of an artist would be like.” But Tang was determined, and eventually she won entrance to the prestigious Beijing Film Academy where she studied cinematography. Zhao Liang, who was a visiting artist at the Walker Art Center in 2010, and Jia Zhake, an avant-garde figure in the world of Chinese cinema, were among her contemporaries. (Weiwei and Zhang Yimou, the director of Hero and the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, also spent time at the school.)

Tang went on to join the faculty there, but ultimately felt stuck. Her own art at the time was all style and no substance, and the demands of teaching and working on film production crews in the summer took a toll. Chinese artists cannot rely on government or foundation support, which leaves little time for independent work.

“I didn't think of myself as an ‘artist.’ . . . I started to feel tired. Life had become too routine and predictable,” says Tang. “It's kind of like you can see the end of your life.” So, she left China to pursue a master’s degree in photography and media arts at New York University, and last year she completed her MFA in experimental and media arts at the University of Minnesota.

While at NYU, she became the go-to person for a series of collaborations between colleagues in the United Sates and China; it was a role that left her highly attuned to the limitations of language, which she describes as the “home and prison of one’s experience.” It was that difficult time which led to the creation of Babel, a video installation that was also part of the recent Soap Factory show.

Imagine being in a dark room, an infinitely dark room populated by a changing cast of newspaper-shrouded figures murmuring messages just on the cusp of audibility. What language are they speaking? It’s hard to tell. What are they saying—who knows? Yet while the content of what they’re saying is unclear, these transitory figures are speaking so earnestly. Babel creates a sense of uncertainty and confusion that is compounded by the messages themselves—opposing statements such as “you are so good, you are so bad” and “I am deep, you are shallow.” Which is true? Perhaps it all depends on the perception of the person receiving the message. Tang explains the impulse behind the work as a kind of meditation on misunderstanding. “The problem is not translating, but understanding,” she says. Wang Chunchen compares it to the state of China itself.

“If you observe China carefully, you will find it is a totally different place [than American culture] . . . multiple-party elections, expression of speech, the establishment of foundations and private organizations, and so on, are impossible,” says Chunchen. “Truth and lies are mingled and mixed together, just as in Babel.”

The yearning for understanding and open, honest dialogue that infuses Tang’s work comes through poignantly when she talks about home. Though she has no immediate plans to return, China remains her touchstone. “Maybe I am more Chinese,” says Tang. “I miss China. I like old friends. I love my parents,” she pauses, then reframes her thoughts. “When you are really hungry, you want Chinese food.”

Click here to visit mnartists.org and read more!

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2011/2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011/2012

by Yahia Lababidi

The Irish writer John Banville is a novelist of ideas whose prose aspires to the condition of poetry. Whether meditating on the truths of art or science, investigating the nature of reality or mortality, or forever trying to pinpoint the elusive self, this modern master demands to be read slowly and thoughtfully. Of course, Banville is hardly unknown, but until he won the UK’s Man Booker Prize in 2005, for The Sea (Vintage, $13.95), Banville labored in relative obscurity for around three decades, his finely-wrought thirteen previous novels selling fewer than 5,000 copies in hardback. To be sure, this has something to do with his uncommercial concerns and purportedly “difficult” style.

Like his professed mentor, Samuel Beckett, whom he has written about perceptibly and whose shadow is never far, Banville, too, for all his arsenal of jeweled words, seems always to be straining at the limits of the sayable. ("So much is unsayable: all the important things,” he writes in The Newton Letter (David R. Godine). Also, as with Beckett, it is not an ethical truth (moral, value judgment) that can be trusted, but an aesthetic one (form, language) that we return to time and again. Only describe might be the mantra here, as faithfully and truly as you possibly can. This is, at most, what the artist is capable of. “You cannot even speak about truth. That’s what’s so distressful. Paradoxically, it is through form that the artist may find some kind of a way out. By giving form to formlessness. It is only in that way, perhaps, that some underlying affirmation may be found.” This is Beckett in conversation, but it might as well be Banville.

Besides describing, there’s imagination—perhaps the artist’s version of compassion. In Banville’s morally ambivalent universe, it is failure of imagination that permits one of his sympathetic monsters, Freddie Montgomery, to take a life in The Book of Evidence (Vintage, $15). Passionate as Banville is about the life of the mind, the drama to be found in his work is, generally speaking, internal, as his articulate characters strive to eavesdrop on their soul’s dialogue with itself. In Eclipse (Vintage, $15), for example, one of his typically introspective male narrators, actor Alexander Cleave, retires from life and the stage to his childhood home to do just that: better overhear himself. When he turns outward, his ambitions are at once modest and profound; he is after the essence of things.

As Cleave sets about to study commonplace things—an open window, a chair, flowers—he finds “the actual has taken on a tense, trembling quality. Everything is poised for dissolution. Yet never in my life, so it seems, have I been so close up to the very stuff of the world . . .” This tremulous awe in the face of the ordinary is reminiscent of Rilke, who in the ninth Duino Elegy, asks: “Are we, perhaps, here just for saying: House, Bridge, Fountain, Gate, Jug, Fruit tree, Window—possibly: Pillar, Tower?” In so doing, Rilke does not believe he’s merely mouthing names, but almost mystically endowing things with a special life force ("such saying as never the things themselves / hoped so intensely to be”). Banville, also, shares in this concept of the artist as a sort of mystic. In an interview at Powells.com (April 5, 2010), he illustrates his “method” in these memorable words: “You know, the artist concentrates on the detail of the object until it blushes in the way the love object blushes when a lover gazes at it with that particular intense gaze. That is what art should do. It should make the world blush and give up its secrets.”

Style is not merely a superficial concern in Banville, it is how he conjures the secrets he is after. He approvingly quotes Henry James: “In literature, we move through a blessed world, in which we know nothing except through style, and in which everything is redeemed by style.” As a novelist slightly irritated with the form and limitations of the novel, Banville has defiantly expressed disregard for most aspects associated with it, professing “little or no interest in characters, plot, motivation, manners, politics, morality or social issue . . .” In their stead, it seems that his abiding interest is nicely suggested in the opening lines of Czeslaw Milosz’s magisterial “Ars Poetica”: “I have always aspired to a more spacious form / that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose.” This “spacious form” is one that Banville inhabits quite well in his oeuvre, which is rich, allusive, playful, and existential at the same time.

As a barely closeted aesthete, and also in his capacity as a long-time book reviewer (for theNew York Review of Books, etc.), it is evident Banville believes in the civilizing influence of beauty and literature. It was his stated duty, for example, as editor for the Irish Times, “to get people to read good books.” In fact, more than once, Banville has confessed: “The world is not real for me until it has been pushed through the mesh of language.” However, such an aesthetic sensibility is not antithetical to reality, but complimentary, in the sense Joseph Brodsky meant when he wrote: “Art is not an attempt to escape reality but the opposite, an attempt to animate it. It is a spirit seeking flesh but finding words.”

Which is why finding the right words is paramount for Banville. In further defense of the importance of style, here is Nietzsche—whom Banville quotes, often and admiringly, referring to him a “superb literary stylist.” Far from being a trivial concern, the philosopher writes: “Improving our style means improving our ideas. Nothing less.” And elsewhere, Nietzsche effuses lyrically: “Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live. What is required for that is to stop courageously, at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearances, to believe in forms, tones, words and the whole Olympus of appearance. Those Greeks were superficial out of profundity.”

Something of this paradox is at the heart of Banville, who claims only to concern himself with the world of appearances yet is clearly enmeshed in the mysteries of consciousness. This aesthete’s philosophy, being “superficial out of profundity,” seems at the root of his thought-tormented, solitary heroes. Mostly outsiders, these scientists, artists, murderers, spies, and actors are taunted by intimations of transcendence or transformation. In their desperate pursuit of clarity and understanding, they seek far and wide for, as he puts it in Kepler(vintage, $12.95), “world-forming relationships, in the rules of architecture and painting, in poetic metre, in the complexities of rhythm, even in colours, in smells and tastes, in the proportions of the human figure.” But first they must wrestle with themselves, these unreliable filters of reality, and here is where the emphasis on style comes into play:

When we were children, we used to say of show-offs in the school playground they were only shaping; it is indeed something I never got out of the habit of; I made a living from shaping; indeed I made a life. It is not reality, I know, but for me it was the next best thing—at times, the only thing, more real than the real.

This is Cleave from Eclipse again, musing on his professional, and personal, tendency to fashion masks (“a making-over of all [he] was into a miraculous, bright new being”). The same desire for self-fashioning, or re-creation, could apply to Cleave’s fictional predecessors, such as Freddie Montgomery in The Book of Evidence or Victor Maskell in The Untouchable (Vintage, $15). In an aphorism titled, “One Thing Is Needful,” Nietzsche summarizes this art of living thus: “To give style to one’s character. A great and rare art. He exercises it who surveys all that his nature presents in strength and weakness and then molds it into an artistic plan, until everything appears as art and reason and even weakness delights the eye.” Of course, this aesthetic project extends past simply giving style to one’s character (or characters) and ultimately to life itself—which appears in need of order and harmony, amidst so much absurdity or chaos.

Throughout it all, there is no escaping the sheer pleasure of Banville’s singing prose—his wondrous-strange manner, which boasts a profusion of gifts and an uncommon sensitivity to the ineffable. We’re confronted with the work of a muralist and also a miniaturist, someone equally at ease tackling the large themes—time, memory ("The past beats inside me like a second heart,” he writes in The Sea), authenticity, alternative existences—as he is capable of devoting loving attention to the details that make up our world. We emerge from his novels, senses tingling brightly, somehow more aware of our possibilities. And Banville honors “the ordinary, that strangest and most elusive of enigmas” through his allegiance to indeterminacy, often content to leave mysteries unresolved, thrumming.

In justifying the existence of the controversial Western Canon, critic Harold Bloom states that a key facet to great writers “is strangeness, a mode of originality that either cannot be assimilated or that so assimilates us that we cease to see it as strange.” Banville, whom Bloom admires, is eligible by these standards as a distinguished heir to a tradition of great European prose stylists. As a novelist, he seems to write with his entire nervous system (rendering country light, for example, as “the hue of headaches” in The Infinities (Vintage, $11.25)), and as readers we are deeply rewarded by paying close attention to his considered and concentrated writing.

Click here to purchase The Sea at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase The Newton Letter at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase Eclipse at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase The Book of Evidence at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase The Infinities at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase The Untouchable at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase Kepler at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2011/2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011/2012

by Claude Peck

NEW YORK CITY—In January 1959, David Susskind hosted this dream lineup of writers on his TV talk show: Norman Mailer, Dorothy Parker, Truman Capote. Mailer, the macho blowhard, sought to monopolize the conversation, but eventually fell silent, as Capote, who was making his first appearance on live television, shook off his nervousness and unleashed his inner quipster on an unsuspecting audience. Capote delivered his wry observations (Jack Kerouac’s work “is not writing. It’s only typing”) in a “voice full of snide rustlings and unforgiving nasalities,” Mailer later wrote. “It was a voice to knock New York on its ear.”

Summarizing the Susskind episode and Mailer’s essay in his new book, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America, Christopher Bram gets off a great line of his own: “Where other people heard only a freak or a fag, Mailer heard the mystic androgyny of a new Tiresias.”

For many Americans, regular television appearances by Capote, Gore Vidal, and Tennessee Williams in the 1960s constituted their first exposure to gay people. While these men rarely mentioned homosexuality on the air, they were known as gay writers, and their soothsaying about politics and art were given equal weight with straight writers in this “golden age of the public intellectual.”

In Eminent Outlaws, Bram charts the growing impact of gay writers after World War II, beginning with the publication of Vidal’s The City and the Pillar and Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms in 1948.

Of the great American postwar playwrights, Albee and Williams were gay, a fact that created a vicious backlash among the critical establishment in the 1950s. That decade also saw the rise of a remarkable new talent in James Baldwin and a high-visibility obscenity trial for Allen Ginsberg’s incendiary poem “Howl.”

In an amiable, opinionated literary and social history, Bram steers his narrative through six momentous decades, seeking connections between gay writers and the ways in which these writers connected with an audience that was coming into fuller political, sexual, and cultural openness.

Just as the modern novel came into being to satisfy a growing literate class eager to read about itself, the gay novel exploded in part to meet the demand of a newly galvanized gay readership desperate for stories in which they didn’t have to transpose genders to find themselves.

Bram writes about ex-pat novelist Christopher Isherwood, playwright Mart Crowley, the prolific Edmund White, poet James Merrill, and activist/writer Larry Kramer. He examines how gay liberation created a huge new market for books and ideas, and how the AIDS crisis brought early deaths to some writers as it heralded a new literature of tragedy, including Tony Kushner’s landmark Angels in America.

“We should not be surprised that so much of the gay revolution was accomplished through storytelling,” Bram writes. “It played a larger role for us than it did for the civil rights movement or even the women’s movement.”

Of Bram’s nine novels, the best-known is Gods and Monsters, originally published as Father of Frankenstein and made into an Oscar-winning movie with Ian McKellen in 1998. Raised in Virginia, Bram graduated from the College of William and Mary and has lived in New York since 1978. We met at a diner in Greenwich Village as Bram was on his way to NYU, where he teaches writing.

Claude Peck: How long did it take you to research and write Eminent Outlaws?

Christopher Bram: I worked on it for two years. When I was done I realized, “My god I’ve been preparing my whole life to write this book.” I read so many of the writers as they were published. The older writers were the writers I read when I first came out myself. I did do research, but a lot of it was connecting dots that I already had in my head.

CP: You must have re-read a lot of the books and plays you discuss.

CB: I re-read all the books, which was a real pleasure. I worried about that: Will they hold up? And a couple didn’t, but most of them did. Most of them were even better than when I first read them. Then I would fill in the gaps. I read books I meant to read and have never gotten to. A couple of books I hadn’t read because I found them chores and I forced myself to read them and I’m glad I did.

CP: What books were a chore?

CB: Caracole, by Edmund White. It’s his adult fairy-tale straight novel. And written in this very mannered prose. It’s always pretty, and it doesn’t go anywhere. Very few people finish it. It’s famous now for ending White’s friendship with Susan Sontag, who appears as a character in it. Hats off to White for trying it. It’s an experiment that didn’t work.

CP: How did you cover all this ground—six decades, more than a dozen major writers—in such a relatively short book?

CB: I knew from the beginning I would not be doing an all-inclusive history of gay men’s literature. I didn’t want to do an index-card narrative. I stuck to those writers I needed to tell the story. Writer A would lead to writer B would lead to writer C. And I just let that naturally unfold.

CP: Were you surprised by the tone of some of the negative reviews given to gay writers, even in such well-established publications as Harper’s, the New York Times and the New York Review of Books?

CB: Some of them were quite brutal. It was amazing how ugly they could be, how condescending and contemptuous. And from people that you would expect better of—I mean Philip Roth attacking Edward Albee with a phrase like “pansy rhetoric,” Elizabeth Hardwick being very condescending toward Christopher Isherwood’s novel A Single Man. They were creatures of their time, and that could not help express itself in these reviews. Some of them were just plain poisonous. And the editors had no problem with that.

CP: Did you find it easier writing about the dead writers, or the living ones?

CB: I found it easier writing about the dead writers. The first half of the book is almost all dead writers. I was able to discover my tone for the book there, without worrying about running into them on the street. In the second half I was dealing with several writers who I do actually run into on the street sometimes. Larry Kramer lives on 5th Avenue and I walk from my office to NYU right past there. I will encounter him from time to time, to say hi and speak. Whatever I say about Larry, many worse things have been said of him.

CP: You assert that a gay writer must be free to use gay content in his work in order to fully succeed. Is this always true? One thinks of great works by Albee, and even Capote, with no gay content, and one also can recall plenty of unsuccessful books with gay content.

CB: Capote has gay themes right up front in Other Voices, Other Rooms, and then he was secretive about it, or just quiet about it. Because of his persona, because he was very effeminate, everyone just assumed he was gay, and he knew that. At a certain point it began to block him. He didn’t know how to express the gay side of himself well. There’s a chapter in his unfinished novel, Answered Prayers, that is very gay—it’s the gayest thing he ever wrote, and it’s awful. In a way it’s fascinating, but it’s this ugly, mean portrait of Tennessee Williams. And it’s painful to read, because Capote is a much better writer than this.

One person who has successfully sublimated and continued to do great work is Edward Albee. He keeps the gay card close to his chest. Yet he probably got attacked more brutally than most of the other writers I talk about, not for writing about being gay, but simply for being gay. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is a great play, and critics recognized that, but then it was like this homosexual panic crept into the theater world. They became really nervous over the fact that the great American playwrights were O’Neill, Miller, Williams, and Albee, and two of them were gay, and they thought, what does this say about us? It took them a while to get over that.

CP: You write more about Gore Vidal than any other writer. Yet the majority of his writing—his big historical novels—are not what you would call “gay books.” Why so much about Vidal?

CB: Partly it’s a matter of timing. Vidal was present at the creation, and he’s still around. He made a great through-line for the narrative. It was also kind of interesting tracking his zig-zagging back and forth. He wrote one of the first openly gay novels, The City and the Pillar, and then he kind of backed away from that as a subject, for years, then he came back to it with Myra Breckinridge [in 1968], then he backed away again. Along the way he would write these essays. He’s a great essayist—smart, funny, erudite, surprising. Some of the most important statements about gay sexuality and about sexuality, period, in America, were made by Vidal. His essay “Pink Triangle, Yellow Star” is a very important work, and still very readable.

CP: Is James Baldwin to be remembered more for his novels or his many nonfiction essays and his connections with civil rights?

CB: Baldwin’s fiction is better than his essays, by and large. I think he’s an amazing writer and an amazing person. Early on he’s the angry black man, he was kind of seen that way by both black and white friends in the ’50s, then the Black Power movement got started in the ’60s, and he’s treated as a sort of Uncle Tom, which was absolutely ridiculous. One of the ugliest anti-gay pieces I read was Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice and his attack on Baldwin. What’s shocking there is the white literary establishment bought it. They believed Cleaver. This nutcase. I mean Cleaver went on to become a born-again Christian and then a Republican. They bought it, and it really hurt Baldwin’s reputation as a black spokesman. The attack confused him and he never really found his feet after that. He kind of tried to deal with it with the novel, Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, where a character like Baldwin becomes friends with a black radical a little bit like Eldridge Cleaver, but it doesn’t really work. He never really found quite the right response.

CP: New York is the backdrop of much of your book. New York-centricity?

CB: New York has always functioned as a sort of a cultural magnet. In the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s it functioned as a sexual magnet. Whether you were literary or not, gay men would come here to explore who they were. Here or San Francisco. That brought a lot of energy. It also was the publishing capital of the U.S. I came to New York from Virginia in ’78, telling myself all writers need to live in NY at one time or another. I’ll meet people, I can network. Under that, I wanted to get laid. I wanted to meet other gay people. Luckily now, with the Internet, and the opening of gay life in general, you don’t have to come to New York to be gay, or to be published. You can stay where you are.

CP: You say gay writing “played a larger role for us than it did for the civil-rights movement or even the women’s movement.” Why?

CB: Reading is kind of a secret activity, as is being gay. It’s a very private activity, whereas race is much more public, and you don’t need the private act of reading to feed your awareness, or enable you to find community. The women’s movement is closer to the gay community model. There were some important women’s novels in the ’60s and ’70s, that were eye-opening, but not as often as in gay fiction.

CP: Some people think the generational shift has brought in a post-gay era, where old communities and distinctions are fading. If that’s true, is it good or bad for gay literature?

CB: I don’t understand the whole post-gay thing. It’s more a matter of degree than kind. Gore Vidal was a proponent of post-gay back in the 1960s. He said there’s no such thing as a homosexual, homosexual is an adjective, not a noun. Everyone is bisexual, and there’s no such thing as a gay identity. There’s always been that desire to break out of the box, to say categories only get in the way. How all this impinges on the literature now. . . . It’s a transition time. Nobody knows who wants to read what and how to sell it. Publishers are backing away from gay books, but they’re backing away from all mid-list books. They’re trying to appeal to as many people as possible. There are still terrific books being published. To me, the problem now isn’t the post-gay era, it’s the crisis of the mid-list book. Gay books are nothing if not mid-list.

Claude Peck is a writer and editor in Minneapolis. He is arts editor of the Star Tribune. CLICK HERE to see a list of Christopher Bram’s favorite books.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2011/2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011/2012