Reading Robert Glück
Yet another of my essays has been rejected! Well, here it is. Below I ‘read’ (as in, reading) Robert Glück, the gay Jewish poet and novelist. In critiquing him, I make a case for something like a post-Oedipal identity politics against the postures of the Left, ‘Theory,’ and the ‘avant-garde.’
It’s also something of a response to Brandon Taylor’s Substack rant against the very idea of gay criticism, A Little Life is not Your Father, by which I counter that actually (gay and Jewish etc.) literature is (as the kids say) Mother… -and-Father, fit object of love, resentment, identification, demands, disillusionment, and our grateful or angry address: “I learned by watching you!” Here goes…
More and more, Robert Glück (b. 1947) is recognized as one of the most important, exciting experimental writers in America. After a long career publishing chiefly in Bay Area avant-garde venues like Small Press Traffic, or specifically gay male ones like the now-vanished Gay Sunshine Press and Gay Presses of New York, Glück stands at the front of the line for canonization. His 1994 novel Margery Kempe was republished by NYRB Classics in 2020; they’ve just published his latest, About Ed.
Glück has written some brilliant, searing and stylistically playful meditations on desire, pleasure and heartbreak. His short story “Denny Smith,” an account of a breakup first published in Edmund White’s Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction (1991) is a masterpiece. Between its stark, brutal sentences ring strange transitional silences in his trademark disjunctive style (suddenly I was no longer your business. I was alone, waked from a spell. I wondered if this would be as grueling as my loneliness before I was detained by you four years ago. We didn’t grow old and night never fell). A tone of bleak pomposity plays against a pained goofiness (The End: a dialect was lost—no more Nadia Comaneci in bed, no more ‘Four Last Songs.’ You replied, ‘What’s Nadia Comaneci?’ I tried to seize a last opportunity to be who you are). Tragic Wisdom from the Borscht Belt, as mincingly, wrenchingly maudlin as Zero Mostel preparing his suicide in The Front.
Glück at his best indeed recalls Woody Allen (who plays The Front’s protagonist) knowing how to put all his comic technique—irony, pastiche—and desire to be seen as “intellectual” (fourth-wall breaking chatterbox reflexivity) in service of a personal-therefore-universal story. At his much-too-frequent worst, however, he is continually getting in his own way, landing in a slough of high-Theory and pop-cultural references (the pages on Mickie and Minnie Mouse in his 1985 novel Jack the Modernist should be in a museum exhibit of post-modern aesthetic atrocities along with John Ashbery’s sestina on Popeye in Double Dream of Spring and any of the “The Simpsons Visit ___” episodes) subordinated to no purpose other than ruminations on non-concepts like “community,” and “time.”
Best and worst are on display, sometimes within the same paragraph, in About Ed, a tribute to his former partner Ed Aulerich-Sugai, an artist who died of AIDS three decades ago:
Ed reorganized my imagination by dying in the first weeks of February 1994. It’s April 2023, and the greatest difference between us—he’s dead and I’m alive—has as expiration date. Reader, allow me to erect a monument inside you. Life can’t last forever but memory can. Writing that banality does not alter the hope that Ed won’t die, will stop being dead. Mourning occurs in the wasteland between the crowded past and the crowded present.
The overall initial effect is touching (given the elegiac subject, we are committed in advance to being moved). Short sentences exhilaratingly cancel each other in succession. None are followed by something we might expect—a master is dramatizing the Writing Process (“oh you liked that sentence? Well, it’s a banality! Not good enough! Now here’s a real pearl…”). Perhaps the reader is even shocked and shocked-to-be-pleased at being bent over and filled by the author’s… monument. But on second thought, irritants accumulate. The slogan-like little sentences we are commanded to uplift and then reject bong out like someone is ringing the old bells of Beckett’s Three Novels, clanging grimly defiant little apothegms that function for people with master’s degrees as “Live Laugh Love” does for their suburban moms. Buy a copy for your friend who subscribes to the Paris Review.
Glück does not want to be read as one of the popular post-modern comic-romantics, who, from Allen to John Barth to Thomas Pynchon and Matt Groening, are the mainstream of contemporary American culture. He positions himself—and is consistently positioned by his students, fans and imitators—as doubly un-mainstream, with an avant-garde aesthetic and a communitarian commitment to his audience, whom he takes to be, as he has put it on a number of occasions, “gay men” in the same way that for La Fontaine or Molière their audience was “the French court.”
He means gay men are his audience (more on this disputable claim and the polemics it entails later), but we might also take him to mean that his gay/avant-garde literary circle, like the French court, is a cliquey private-public network in which individuals display their relations to each other with coded preciosity to confer obligation and patronage through what strike the outsider as stagily obsequious flattery. Take for instance a blurb to Glück’s recent book, I, Boombox (2023), a two-hundred-something page poem consisting of at-best mildly humorous nonsense, puns and malapropisms, such as:
Ne’er the twins shall
meet. Wet Cadiz,
penile Seville
for so long been
decimated
variations
on the baseball
cap. Or the Boone
period can
coast here at my
place, Garden of
Gross. Fishwacker
inspired residents
with ambulances
who populate
Impatience Hospital.
Who could read two hundred more pages of this with attention, let alone pleasure? Apparently fellow gay poet Shiv Kotecha, whose blurb on its back reads in part (in part!):
In I, Boombox, Robert Glück makes it clear that dreams are as real as the spurts of sentences we use to discover them. Scoring the “umbilical/ indescribalia” that accompanies unconscious feeling into a thin strip of thickly montaged verse, the “invisible speakers” that populate Glück’s poem—their misreadings and cant half-truths, their headlines and lies—turn dream’s content into poetic foam… It suggests that desire without sense is desire nevertheless—and this is a delight to understand.
(“Delight” and “understand” were the furthest words from my mind…)
Such a rush of heady piffle was inspired by Glück’s own emptily ecstatic blurb of Kotecha’s 2018 book of poems, The Switch, in which the author apparently:
does for the word fucking what Catullus did for the word kissing. In The Switch desire travels everywhere to its surprisingly specific destinations—to body parts aroused in their fashion, like a saint’s skull or a cock. Here love is as artificial as courtly dialogue, and deeply felt, even spiritual. Here the arousal of the fragmented body is contemporary practice. Is one allowed to write such a book? Among the spectacular effects and turns and startling intimacies in The Switch the most daring is its no-holds-barred pursuit of love.
The blurbs indeed reflect a shared membership, if not in a “community,” then certainly a “court,” with a common fund of themes (desire) and tics (the dash), as well as a single drive towards the sententious, telling us, with emphatic pomposity, about the reality of dreams or which of our contemporaries is the equal of an immortal poet. Their authors belong to a demi-monde in which Glück is a senior aristocrat and Kotecha an ambitious parvenu. Their language of mutual esteem—its frothy, thrilling excess (see how easy it is to imitate!)—genteelly avoids saying much specific and potentially refutable about the features of the text.
To write this way endangers, or rather sacrifices, some irrecoverable portion of the writer’s integrity.
I, Boombox is a regrettable reminder that Glück began his career as a poet. As he writes in About Ed, his poetry in the 70s “sprang from a literary school that underwrote its psychedelic surrealism with strong emotions.” That’s one way of describing “SPACE POEM,” excerpts of which were published in a 1976 issue of New, a journal published by the Los Angeles-based Beyond Baroque Foundation:
Gus follows his erotic dreams
through the darkness like a flashlight beam
to the figure of love, an ordinary citizen
who had completely gone over to sex
his every gesture alludes to extravagant sex
sex like a body torn into existence…
Don’t try to fuck me, I’m 2 dimensional
your cock would come out the other side
The last man put his cock in his hope chest
and left for Pluto…
The sky is blue, a sea horse
curls its tail around the blue of an aquarium
as the monster habituates himself
to an absolute sexual current.
By the end of the 1970s, the leading figure at Beyond Baroque would become Dennis Cooper, then a young poet working on his surprisingly tender collection Idols (1978). The future fellow-traveler of Glück’s would turn increasingly from poetry to what would become his own signature disjointed aging-punk prose about screwing and murdering teenage boys—the worn-out postures of transgression learned from a French tradition (Sade, Lautréamont, Bataille, Genet) that was already stale, classic, academic, boring.
Glück never fell quite into Cooper’s Grand Guignol rut, but for much of his subsequent career he has been wearingly close. Take the prose poem “Hitler” from his 1989 collection Reader. It begins with a long quotation from Mein Kampf, then turns:
Hitler is a wild exasperation he will transcend by proclaiming “the victory of the idea of the creative work, which as such always has been and always will be anti-Semitic.” The words of the Jews, the works of Hitler. Hitler sets an equal sign between anti-Semitism and creativity—the camps aren’t punishments, they’re Parthenons. For the first time I think I understand—I could never from the faces in my family album.
This might seem shocking stuff if one had never read Jean Genet, whose Funeral Rites (1948) imagines Hitler ejaculating his soldiers across Europe in a dark cosmic expression of deathly fecundity and artistry. For that matter the sense that creativity means above all a betrayal of one’s Jewishness was the central theme of the domestic melodrama My Name is Asher Lev (1972) in which Chaim Potok imagined a young painter seduced by art away from his Orthodox upbringing, breaking with his family by painting his stereotypically worried and suffering mother crucified. The post-modern avant-garde, unable to catch up with its European predecessors, can hardly keep pace, transgression for transgression, with middle-brow best-sellers.
Self-consciously experimental authors, in fact, fail even to keep experimenting. With his 1982 collection of short stories Elements of a Coffee Service, Glück had already worked out the patterns, themes and forms that have since dominated his stories and novels. There are throughout the book, as throughout his whole body of prose, some wonderful lines (“The candle melted into a Ludwig’s castle”) and some unpardonable groaners (“The poets were dinosaurs showing their ice age”), but the most characteristic story—the one most loaded with the future, better and worse—is “Night Flights.”
After preliminary scene-setting at the Left Writers Union Glück he had co-founded with Bruce Boone, Glück as protagonist and narrator begins recounting “my lovelorn complaint about Felix,” one of the many unavailable love-interests around whom his fictions pivot. “My lament bored even myself since it was all feeling and no real information, no plot at all… tedious and repetitive.”
It was a version of the problem that everyone unhappily, one-sidedly in love faces as they try to recount their love-trouble to friends: there’s nothing in the way of a story, no motion to a tragic or happy end, only one day after another of anxieties and hopes (“will he call?”) that loop back around and begin again. It was, more specifically, a version of the problem faced by Roland Barthes—one of Glück’s literary and theoretical models—in the mid-1970s as, in the midst of his own pathetic obsession with a disinterested man, he began writing his most lyrical, intimate and enduring book, Fragments of a Lover’s Discourse (1977). Observing that obsessions like his were essentially unnarratable Barthes organized the book around several dozen fragments in ostensibly random sequence, swinging among the moods (jealousy, despair, temporary elation) of the unrequited lover, informed by citations from the lovers’ canon, from classical Arabic and Troubadour poetry to the German Romantics and contemporary popular song.
Glück hit upon Barthes’ techniques, crossed with the sort of literary parody that Donald Barthelme had played with in stories like “Eugenie Grandet” (1968). In a “makeshift solution” to the challenge of narrating the essentially un-tellable tension and tedium of being alone in love, Glück “borrowed a plot from Sade,” working the content of his feelings into a pastiche of eighteenth and nineteenth century French novels translated into a wooden, high-faluting English. His not-lover Felix thus confesses, in mock translation-ese: “My family is unknown to me. I was found in a green taffeta bassinet on the Saint-Prats’ doorstep… the impure air I breathed began to pollute my soul.”
This might get a dry laugh the first time, but becomes almost immediately grating as it continues for several pages, periodically interrupted by Glück showing off other verbal registers he must have taken himself to have mastered and which, like that of pastiche, have continued to mark—or rather be—his mature style. For example, an anticipation of Theory as practiced by trendy American humanities departments:
I reminded Bruce of the new Semiotext(e). The issue’s theme is ‘Polysexuality.’ On the front cover, in color, a beef-cake scowls on a motorcycle… modern times provides its residents with a sexuality whose private nature can lead to a death frightening in its sordidness and isolation. Let that describe my solitude as a pretext to show it to you, a pretext to colonize some outpost of interior life with the ferocity of an army of names… Until death has a socialized meaning we substitute an interiorized experience, distorted and feverish—it bursts out of our sliver of a body as a gorgeously ugly flower.
In its combination of latinate academic-political jargon and gushing purple pseudo-urgency, and proud of its slummingly low cultural references, this is already the voice that would ruin many graduate students. In another story from Elements, “When Bruce was 36,” Glück adumbrates recently deceased Theory Queen Lauren Berlant’s trademark way of backing into a crash of abstractions with an unnecessary “It’s…” : “It’s scandal’s way of defining boundaries that interests me, what is inside and what is outside—it’s one way a community organizes itself.”
Semiotext(e), name-dropped in the story, published Glück’s collected essays Communal Nude in 2016. It has done perhaps more than any other publisher to create and disseminate the combination of vacant Europhile abstracted musings on our contemporary situation with supposedly experimental pseudo-transgression, making fashionable a kind of first-personal thinking-through-writing that is so often neither thoughtful nor writerly, and forming an audience of humanities majors from elite colleges so educated as to find in Glück an inspiration.
Elements also includes, in the story “Violence,” one of Glück’s most sustained and poignant reflections on his Jewishness—and the Jewishness/anti-Jewishness of his literary method. He begins by remarking on his attraction to the themes and images of medieval Christian piety as an escape from his family, its religion and identity. “Judaism didn’t provide a place to hide away,” he complains; and perhaps a perennial attraction of Christian mysticism for one raised in another faith is that its stories of ecstatically sexual visitations and flamboyant sadomasochistic martyrdoms seem like personal, chosen, private and unique forms of suffering, ways (of course, illusory and unsuccessful) to escape the self and the history behind it.
Glück longs to hide in particular from the sort of talk that suffused his childhood—the American Jewish male “verbal exercise” of joking, pontificating, quarreling:
Like dogs they went through the motions of aggression, chase and lunge for the jugular, preparing their real fight to subdue the world, because most of these men used words to earn a living, whether as teachers, salesmen or lawyers. So the Old Testament arms deployed by my heroic forefathers became a verbal tournament staged by my less heroic but more recognizable uncles in the 2nd century—Rabbi Josei the Galilean, Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Akiba… foregrounded… is the thrill of verbal manipulation. They withdrew the motion from the content and applied themselves to form.
But as he recognizes, such a withdrawal, the “distance” between form and content, is what allows for the very possibility of “art,” particularly for the sort of experimental literature Glück favors. And the content is not after all the mere pointless wrangling disputation it seems to be: I thought all these men were windbags. The sweetness of their discourse was lost on me… their conversations were studded with subterranean ‘I love yous.’
In “Violence,” Glück sees a passion for verbal play as a frustrating, puerile expression of Jewish, or Jewish American middle-class male, culture—a culture he alternately wants to flee, into the foreign spiritual-sexual vocabulary of Christian mysticism, or, with an effort of empathy, appreciate as an oblique expression of otherwise unspeakable love. Of course, he himself is a Jewish American middle-class male windbag, whose whole prose oeuvre retells stories of romantic longings and disappoints as if they were comic ‘bits.’
Some of our best artists are obliged by a psychological quirk to condemn the style they actually practice; it might seem cruel not leave Glück in peace to try (and so obviously fail) to overcome what he takes to be stereotypically Jewish windbaggery. But his attempts to theorize, and write his way out of, a problem he elevates to the status of a political-aesthetic dilemma, are unfortunately worth attending to, since Glück, in his self-struggle, advocates dubious practice and charts baleful genealogies of contemporary literature, from which only a new, clarified cultural politics—unashamedly identitarian and post-avant-garde, up to the challenge of inheriting, without contempt, from its assimilated parents—can escape.
Verbal gamesmanship struck Glück not only as frustratingly Jewish—too much like what his dad’s friends did—but as inadequate for the realities of gay life (too much a part of one “community,” and not enough of another). Elements began and ended with stories about homophobic violence in San Francisco—written just before the AIDS crisis would overshadow those everyday indignities, fears and deaths with viral catastrophe—and Glück’s insistently reflexive concern that his post-modern technique, and the philosophy behind it, was inadequate or inappropriate for the challenge of contributing to a gay culture: “College and my literary education agreed that I should see myself as a random conjunction of life’s possibilities, luxurious point of view. But it’s hard to draw on that on a model when four men are chasing you down the street. What life will that model sustain, and when aren’t we being chased?”
From this perspective, a style that embraced fragmentation, pastiche and incoherence, although adequate to the standard set by second-hand European literature and theory, was a luxury that people on society’s margins could not afford. The abject—gay men in this case—need a somewhat dumbed-down literature that represents their lives as they are, and offers images of how life could be: literature as politics and therapy for those not materially comfortable enough for the bracing anti-relationality of the avant-garde. It seemed that there was an inescapable conflict between the demands of aesthetic experimentation and the needs of the community.
Much of Glück prose spirals around restatements of these central contradictions between community and literature/theory. The former needs plausible narratives to perpetuate itself; its authors must give their readers models for making sense of their lives, linking individual selves to a shared endeavor through emblematic stories (“this is what it’s like—or could be like—to be one of us,” literature says). The latter, in our era of late capitalism and concomitant de-centering of subjectivity (hadn’t you noticed? I’ve been dizzy all morning myself) has moved past these reassuring patterns, and accepts that ours is an age of dispersed attention and multiple, fragmented selves.
The painstakingly detailed and ostensibly realistic depictions of psychological processes and domestic commodities that fill the old bourgeois novel are now impossibly retrograde, and can appear in real literature only parodically, or as a kind of community-service to the marginalized. In this version of the dilemma, the terms on which Glück had criticized his male family members’ aggressive verbal play is reversed—now the community requires straightforward, clear, relatable content, while art requires innovative forms.
A particularly tortured expression of the line of thought already rather tortured above appears in Glück’s 1983 essay “Caricature,” which originally appeared in the experimental literary magazine Soup. It begins with a swipe at “communities” (gay, Jewish, or anything else) which tend—in what for Glück, with his horizon of leftist politics is self-evidently a condemnation—to be “conservative.” Horrors! They want, after all, to preserve themselves, not least from the future and its potentially annihilating changes (one wonders where Jews—and for that matter gays and anyone else—might get such a crazy desire as staying alive together?).
Conservatives expressing this wish for collective self-preservation, Glück asserts, are drawn to satire as a mode of critiquing the present—not, as the left would, on behalf of an open-ended egalitarian future, but to shore up a specific, disintegrating form of life that is becoming the past by disseminating recognizable images of its inhabitants and its enemies.
Satire is founded on “type and caricature” and refuses to grant psychological depth to its deliberately shallow characters. Here it has something to teach the left’s “movement writers” who also present themselves, in their personal struggles, as instances of larger social problems and “extensions of this idea of type.” Political writing, for Glück, is a way of saying “I am a representative member of my group” (and thus the reader, publisher, grant agency, etc., ought to reward me with attention, esteem and money because, after all, my success uplifts a whole group of people). Wresting “type” back from the right, the leftist writer can use in “pastiche” to generate “great energy” while simultaneously “embracing and disclaiming” the social material it organizes. Writing about a type can both affirm one’s membership in a group (I am a typical gay man; my experiences are emblematic) while also putting an asterisk to say “this isn’t exactly me either.”
“Types, caricatures, narrations, satires, which depict social rather than psychological relations,” might, in the hands of a properly avant-garde leftist, become something more than tools of reactionary wit to be the “literary strategies of a progressive community.” In their break with conventional psychology and the inheritances of novelistic ‘realism,’ they might organize an alternative kind of fiction freed of the weight of individual biography and circulating both instead stray fragments of real incidents as well as deliberately flattened models drawn from the patterns of activity and discourse of the particular groups to which the writer belongs, in a “truly collective writing.”
Thus—in a convoluted reach-around—satire, the aesthetic instrument of conservative politics with its dehumanizing reduction of people to stereotypes, can be appropriated by leftist writers to reconcile progressive politics with post-realist literary experimentation.
These claims, building through a cacophony of clashing abstractions to an optimistic call to writerly action (Hey kids, let’s put on a show… for the Left!), lent the appearance of political purpose to Glück’s writing strategies, by which he told stylized stories about his life and the gay culture of San Francisco, spinning them out through parodies, pastiches and refractions of the conventions of various other forms of writing, from classic novels to erotica to personals ads to Theory-ese. Such writing appeared, at least to Glück and his coterie, not as sometimes delightful, sometimes irksome literary routines, but as exercises in minoritarian world-making that were somehow preparing a new collective subject of marginalized groups to replace, as the historical agent of the left, the abandoned proletariat (I’m not being a clownish windbag like my dad… I’m doing the new Marxism!).
Living in our present, the future of this essay, however, it hardly appears that progressive writers from minority backgrounds becoming ever more exquisitely sensitive to the ways that they are and are not representative of their “types,” trafficking in the dialectic of branding themselves as ____ Writers and disclaiming ___ness as a categorical straightjacket, and justifying themselves through a Theory-ese jargon now included in the standard packet of MFA training, has had positive effects either on the quality of our literature or of our political life. Nor indeed has it been good for the gay “community” in America, whose modern cultural history is increasingly forgotten and misrecognized, distorted by the imperatives of a political left and adjacent literary tastemakers.
In fact, although Glück presents himself as a champion, through his writing, of a gay community, his relationship with the founding generation of mainstream gay male authors in the 1970s and 1980s was as fraught—as seethingly Oedipal, although they were his contemporaries—as his relationship with the assimilated Jews of his parents’ generation. That’s no coincidence. Leading figures of that cohort of gay authors and publishers, such as Michael Denneny, were inspired by mid-century Jewish cultural and political activism as they tried to forge a movement that would speak to and for gay men on their own terms, without relying on the ideological structures of Marxism, feminism, or the cultural left. To the extent that they succeeded, they seem to have become, in Glück’s eyes, intolerably boring and compromised—like his parents.
In an essay “Bataille and New Narrative,” he argued that New Narrative, as his style and literary circle have come to be known, was a movement pitted against this gay mainstream. New Narrative included and had adjacent to it some women (Dodie Bellamy, Camille Roy, Kathy Acker) but was chiefly a project of gay or otherwise queer men—and appeared as such in one of its first major national expressions outside its original narrow set of California reading groups and small magazines, George Stambolian’s epochal series of anthologies of gay male writers, Men on Men, the first volume of which appeared in 1986.
Stambolian—who is bound one of these days to be the subject of some biography that will secure his legacy as one of the heroic figures of the darkest years of gay life—was a scholar of French literature versed in the emerging canon of post-modern theory, a contributor to the Michael Denneny’s mainstream gay magazine Christopher Street, and a central figure connecting various local scenes of gay writers into at least the appearance of a coordinated literary movement, even as its members and audience died in enormous, appalling numbers then still studiously ignored by the federal government. He shared Glück’s fascination with “types,” profiling a series of (questionably) representative men in a 1984 volume, Male Fantasies, Gay Realities (which includes such “types” as A Masochist and A Black Man)—and conceiving Men on Men as bringing together “types” of gay writers.
But Christopher Street’s vision of gay “community” was at home in American consumerism, and the formation of a gay literature that could earn a living for gay authors, in part through the rise of a nation-wide network of gay bookstores. It was not aligned with a broader left or cultural avant-garde, and thus with either the political shibboleths or aesthetic signifiers Glück might take to be signs of progress.
Glück lamented that gay writers outside his own network mostly “wrote coming-out stories that occurred in the family… an onslaught of coming-out novels.” This is, in fact, not true; the most memorable novel of the era, Andrew Holleran’s 1978 Dancer from the Dance, along with Larry Kramer’s Faggots and George Whitmore’s Confession of Danny Slocum, are novels of gay middle age, not the confusions of youth. But it is true that the family, like the nation, appears in Glück’s essays as something obviously undesirable, and as “strangely remote… in the lives of most gay men,” who were, of course, born nowhere and raised by no one. Proper and accurate writing about gay life, he argued, focuses on sex and its bracing experiences of the “annihilation of self,” the sort of “self-shattering” ecstatically theorized by a contemporaneous generation of gay male queer theorists like Leo Bersani and borrowed from the half-century-old fiction and theorizing of Georges Bataille.
One might note in passing that people who talk the most about self-negation tend to be the most relentlessly self-aggrandizing. In Margery Kempe Glück alternates between, and then fuses, the story of yet another of his obsessions with an unavailable man and that of a medieval woman’s erotic visions of Jesus, about which she is unstoppably vocal, annoying everyone from fellow pilgrims to Jerusalem to the local authorities. “I am the dust you trod!” shouted by the lover covers his ceaseless whisper “I must be very important.”
Glück singled out as embodiment of the pro-family, politically and aesthetically conservative gay male literary style he disliked and took to be nearly omnipresent Robert Ferro, who, having been dead of AIDS for several years, was a safe target. He framed the attack by contrasting Ferro, rather implausibly, with Edmund White, whose coming out novel A Boy’s Own Story (1982) Glück chose to interpret as somehow subversively (that is, laudably) anti-family. White had included a story of Glück in his own anthology of gay male fiction, praised him in essays and blurbed his novels—never mind that White’s traditionalist prose (sophomoric imitations of Proust) and his politics of social-climbing champagne-socialism are the antithesis of everything Glück, avant-garde True Leftist, claims to value. But White, a grande dame of gay letters, is a useful ally. A dead man is not.
Ferro’s first novel, The Family of Max Desir (1983), is indeed, as Glück charges, the story of how the title character “seeks to integrate his homosexuality and his lover Nick into his Italian American family.” It’s an imperfect novel; the first effort of a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop who learned his school’s characteristic faults. But the novel (did Glück read it?) more than alludes to the family-integrated couple’s non-monogamy, and includes a voodoo-practicing gay neighbor whose magical rites recall Ferro and his partner Michael Grumley’s interest in the occult (they co-authored a 1970 book about their search for Atlantis—inspired by an encounter with a witch in Rome)—Ferro’s later novels feature UFO landings and Masonic conspiracies. He was anything but a tepidly conventional realist churning out New Yorker fodder!
Max Desir begins with an abrupt and darkly hilarious car wreck (“An impact, to which last purpose a certain ancient apple tree had survived, threw him thirty feet clear. The coeds were student nurses at the university hospital nearby. Still, for five or six minutes he did not breathe, and in that time most of his brain died.”) rendered in just the sort of disjunct sentences, the poetics of parataxis, that Glück advocated—and ends with a shift out of the domestic register, out of the United States, out of the century and out of reality, into a dream of travelling upriver into the Amazonian jungle in some era past to meet uncontacted tribes, concluding with the lines: All that cannot be explained makes me holy—my arrival, my nature, my skin, my golden hair, my eyes, my placid acceptance of all attentions and offerings. This is wild stuff, and if one wanted to put on the guise of Semiotext(e) Theorist one could call it a vision of self-shattering or at least self-suspension, queerly out of place in a domestic American narrative and strangely erotic in its exoticizing fantasy.
Glück styles himself and his allies as community story-tellers, but also as the left’s political-aesthetic avant-garde. In truth his own writing is much more proximate to conventional fiction, from his dusty French sources to mainstream American post-modernists to Robert Ferro, than his polemics suggest—what are we ever polemicizing against (present company included!) than what we resemble or indeed are?
There is not much that is truly experimental about Glück’s style—a poetics of fragmentation and pastiche is as old as Rabelais and Sterne; parataxis, far from being a crowbar for prying open the future of literature, is perhaps most thoroughly practiced in American letters by obscurantist Straussian commentators like Eva Brann and Seth Benardete. It can be wholly conservative in its politics, to the extent style ever has a politics.
Glück’s self-stylization as a writer torn between the imperatives of community-building and of avant-garde writing capable of expressing the fragmentary nature of late capitalist subjectivity, seen in this light, is risible or lamentable. Neither of these imperatives are real—except in the subjective, psychological sense of seeming real to Glück—and his work does less either to represent gay male life to itself or to reveal new possibilities for the sentence than does that of some of the writers he scorns.
The clash of these imaginary obligations, the setting of a conflict between the aesthetic and the political, functions perhaps above all to secure Glück in his sense that he is not a normal, mainstream, un-radical Jewish, gay, American author, working well within the center of these three braided traditions.
What is it about these identities (ethnic, sexual, national—all, really and metaphorically, familial) that makes them so unbearable, acceptable only insofar as they can be mistaken as vehicles for ostensibly cutting-edge artistic and political projects—as substitutes for a revolutionary subject or objects of inclusionist pity? Why do our artists find themselves in Oedipal rages against identity and nationality, seething against their apparent conservatism and nationalism (words meaning only that these groups are not ready to dissolve), while throwing out sentimental cliches to about the ‘importance of community’?
These questions that arise reading the alternately brilliant and frustrating work of authors about to enter the contemporary canon are more than literary. The task of elaborating a vision of collective identity that would resist the sort of self-hatred and self-undermining polemic that characterizes Glück’s views of his Jewishness and gayness—of articulating a post-Oedipal identity politics—is desperately political.