CRUEL SUMMER

I was excited to find a copy of Luis Negrón's first collection, Mundo Cruel, translated into English by Suzanne Jill Levine, the fantastic biographer and translator of Manuel Puig's, especially considering the short blurb on the back by Antonio Jiménez Morato: "Negrón is perhaps the most intimate and unsuspected heir to Manuel Puig," an assessment I find partially offensive and distracting. This smart collection of short fiction put out by Seven Stories Press looks and feels like a poetry collection--it's a mere 91 pages of fairly large and easily read font, 24 lines to a page, a good 10 to 15 lines shorter than most contemporary books of poetry. Still, it's size is part of its appeal. I love it actually. You can carry it around with you. You can hide it under your pillow for a night.

Jiménez Morato's assessment is bothersome because once you begin to read Negrón's collection, perhaps the only solid similarity between he and Puig is the fact that they're both gay. I'd have to think more about this, but my initial reaction was irritation. The only story in Negrón's that even approaches a stylistic inheritance is an epistolary one, "For Guayama," in which the writer is leaving letters and messages for a friend who owes him money, money he needs to pay to have his dog's fur coat treated so that it can be embalmed and stuffed. Otherwise, the stories are built on the clear voices of its characters who tell them. He might have some debt to Puig there, but I thought more of Reinaldo Arenas' great tragicomedy, The Color of Summer, a scathing depiction of gay life under Castro in which all our homosexual versions are caricatures running around in the flamboyant madness of a persecution from which the only escape is death, or America. It's dark humor is funny and terrifically sad at the same time, everyone, including Arenas, is laughing at the monstrous condition of the world in which identity itself is heroic, and the punishment for difference is extreme suffering. What can we do, but put on our wigs and pull down our pants and give in to the pageantry of our inner lives and laugh loudly in the face of it?

So too, the characters in Negrón's stories are themselves. The whole book is set in Santurce, Puerto Rico, Negrón's hometown, and he does a stunning job of opening the doors to private conversation, private lives, and he transforms the town into a complicated maze of brutality faced with exuberant promiscuity. This is a portrait of the gay life of Santurce, and I'm so grateful for it, mostly because it feels like a portrait of my own gay life here in the states. This is the genius of Negrón's work--he's given voice to the gay kid beaten up at home and at school, voice to his fearful homophobic religious zealot relatives, voice to the gossipy wit-lipped queen, voice to the insecure and overly-quaffed and unloved, voice to the man who's lover dies, voice to the macho father who loves his gay son no matter what. These are touching vignettes, striking for their stark humor and the vulnerability of characters who you both like and dislike at the same time. Take the old gossip of "La Edwin," who can't wait to call every friend he has and tell the story of La Edwin, the closet case, who tries to seduce a straight man and fails:

"He said the part that bothered him most was all that wasted energy. . . You know he talks that way. Waste? Waste? Girl, you don't know what waste is. But, I'm going to tell you. 1985. Seven. Not one, not two. Seven of my best friends including my lover--and no more and no less than 8 months of being in a relationship--all died! Pum, pum, pum! One after the other. That, honey, is what I call a waste. So, girl, stop with all these experiments and nonsense and accept what you are. Queer. Q-U-E-E-R. Your'e a queer. 100%."

As a collection, Negrón's builds quickly and hits its peak with the penultimate story, "The Garden," the story of a man who lives with his lover dying of AIDS and his sister. You'd think with such a morbid topic these stories would be bereft and sentimental, but no, they're filled with sharp portrayals of real people who have to face the real miseries of life with laughter, in love with their own perfections, and he makes a celebratory condition of the monstrosity of our "unacceptable" lifestyles. Negrón isn't afraid of complication, and his portraits illustrate without judgment, giving us depictions often opposing viewpoints without allowing any of them to have complete power over another. In the title story he revels in the juxtaposition of two friends, one vain and insecure, the other melting into this first lover in a public parade kiss.

Mundo Cruel is an excellent read. I'd love to give you a copy. My hopes are that Negrón will continue to write, and to sustain the voices of his stories. If I had a criticism, it might be that the book is prematurely published, it goes down fast if memorably. I can imagine it 400 pages long, a novel comparable to something Puig or Arenas would have written, so that the portrait of Santurce takes on the dimension of the pageant our private lives deserve.

Steal it if you can.
. . . . . . .

LOVE, WOUNDS and CLOWNS OF WAR: Dunstan Thompson

Lately I've had some time to think about gay relationships and what they mean to me as an adult. How many of us have something like an extended family, a constellation of burning, sustaining friendships that carry us through sickness and happiness and the dark aches and sobrieties, and how often the myth of the "one", the idealized, if strange marriage that straight men and women seem to have a natural trajectory, a pole to which they are drawn to or repulsed by, a kind of moon that is a moon that eludes me. I feel more catholic than ever. Love, as Iris Murdoch philosophized, is the dream of something more than ourselves. Because we are compelled and we never find it. Human destiny, I find myself lost, like a character in Cocteau's White Book, or Reinaldo Arenas' Color of Summer, one of the many failed minstrels of longing and desire, one of the countless broken-hearted clowns on night parade, Picasso's sad version or Hernan Bas' sexy, heroine sheik hooker in the garden with a terrific and absurd belief in love. 

So it is I come to Pleiades Unsung Masters Series: Dunstan Thompson, On the Life and Work of a Lost American Master edited by D.A. Powell and Kevin Prufer.  Dunstan, a young poet in the 1940's and a vet from WWII, published two collections of poetry: Poems (1943) and Lament for the Sleepwalker, The Phoenix in the Desert, a travel book, and one novel, The Dove with the Bough of Olive. According to his ex-lover, he continued to write prolifically, though he never published again. Prufer, in the introduction, writes that Dunstan is "a poet weirdly attuned to the war even as he made moments of it complex, even baroque, beauty and sensuality. Here was a soldier who finds in the war not mere futility or valor, but desire, sensuality, and a kind of horror that is both deeply personal and all-encompassing." 

I feel as though I come to Thompson's early sonnets through the lens of say, Yusef Komunyakaa's meditations on war which are both violent and lush, sensually stunning. Take these lines from “Songs of the Soldier”, for example:

Death is a soldier and afraid

Like you. If he could talk, he’d tell

The world how he was hurt. This sad

Faced, grave eyed, beautiful as steel

 

Young man, his sex a star, has pride

That sharp, unshadowed, surgeon’s light

By which heroes are turned inside

Out, their flamboyant guts put straight

 

Or lopped off. His dripping wounds bleed . . .

 

At the beginning of the poem he writes, “Death blows boys to ribbons.” We couldn’t ask for a better line to describe the eros of Thompson’s strategies. A blowjob is deathlike celebration. Blood and his disrobement. Flesh that is style, and a wound that is surprise.

Here is the first poem of the book:

This Loneliness for You is Like the Wound 

 

This loneliness for you is like the wound

That keeps the soldier patient in his bed,

Smiling to soothe the general on his round

Of visits to the somehow not yet dead; 

Who, after he has pinned a cross above

The bullet-bearing heart, when told that this

Is one who held the hill, bends down to give 

Folly a diffident embarrassed kiss.

But once that medaled moment passes, O,

Disaster, charging on the fever chart,

Wins the last battle, takes the heights, and he

Succumbs before his reinforcements start.

Yet now, when death is not a metaphor,

Who dares to say that love is like the war?

 

 The last 6 lines of this sonnet strike me for their contemporary echo of the AIDS epidemic. For me they have an eerie resonance not of the literal war, the Whitmanian attentions to the patient, but of a more recent consideration of men in love in a time of sickness. Mortality becomes a sobering charge for someone who realizes that the body fails, and its failure is an unpoetic reminder that we are alone.

There's something heightened here about the relationship between battle and health. Death is not a metaphor when it is death. This finality rips us from poetic reverie, the rivers of romantic idyllic intensities. Though Dunstan has his share of them in lines like, “Only the cold phantasmal rose burns out-of-doors. / Inside, the lamps are lit.” and “Too little time / Is left for love. When we come back, what welcome home / will he award our wounded eyes?” Some moments are wrought with beautiful melodrama and are arguably delicious and t00-heady, self-indulgent, as “That, lately lying altar for his ardor, / Uncandled, scandalizes him, afraid he / Has lost his lifetime in a moment’s murder: / He is the sinner who is saint instead”. But Thompson balances them with strikingly contemporary starkness: “the heart is worn / Out among whores and storefronts and the lack of you.” And “swear / Love to the dead. A war means this.”

Though the introduction makes an argument for the innovations of his poetry, one disappointment is that the folio of Thompson’s poetry is short, a mere 42 pages, and 20 pages of that is a late, previously unpublished long poem in sections, a meditation on the Biblical figure Mary Magdalen. Apparently, the reason his 2 collections have not been reprinted is a stipulation by Phillip Trower, Thompson's long-time lover and companion and literary executor, as per the poet's own wishes. The rest of the book is an involved collection of essays, both reflective and critical. Though I'm grateful for having all these voices in a single place, I wish I could get my hands on a xerox of a single collection. There's something sad to me that I can't get the poet in his own version of himself, even if he came to a point in his life where this version embarrassed him. Who can say who we are when we are unfathomable. I also lament the story of his born-again-Christian tendencies, the monastic celibacy he and his partner maintained through his later years when he wrote more “Christian” verse. I’d much rather read his accounts of growing old with someone, and what that must have been like after WWII, instead of his laborious account of a dead saint. I long for the version of himself that could have spoken more deeply to someone like Thom Gunn than Hart Crane.