George Stambolian, Part 2

Getting out of the gooncave, making gay friends

In his prefaces to the three Men on Men anthologies he lived to see through publication, George Stambolian outlined his sense of what the canon-to-be of gay literature, in its modern, short, post-Stonewall life, and in its relation to the older, longer tradition of homosexual writing of Proust, James, Mann, etc., was accomplishing. Central to his vision was the idea that gay literature is about friendship—not only as a theme treated in narratives, but as something enacted in writing and reading: When writers in the 1970s began showing gay people in groups, as friends and as members of a community, that same emerging community was also the primary audience for their work.

And it’s true of the novels of Andrew Holleran and Ethan Mordden, of Larry Kramer’s Faggots—and of slightly later books like Mark Merlis’ An Arrow’s Flight (published by Michael Denneny; in the UK, it’s called Pyrrhus), which I’m reading now and is absolutely wonderful even though a plot summary will suggest it’s retarded. These are novels about groups, circuits, friends, much more than they are about coming out, love, or death.

This also makes them significantly different than novels, before and since, that treat homosexuality or queerness primarily as a matter of personal suffering or circulating transgression—a point made by the great, and it seems quite neglected, gay critic Reed Woodhouse in his study Unlimited Embrace, who notes that Dancer, in particular, is really about Malone’s friendship with Sutherland, and the friendship of the two letter-writing queens who frame the novel… and you’ll see more later, at the end of this post, about Holleran’s real-life queeny correspondence with Stambolian—I was the Baroness Putbuss’ maid—itself modelled on Proust, who did the same with Reynaldo Hahn.

But before that, and before some of the highlights from Stambolian’s prefaces, I want to start by looking, please don’t be bored, at Stambolian’s first book, an academic monograph Marcel Proust and the Creative Encounter (1972), which argues against friendship, love, and mundane life, in favor of what could be called the queer gooncave, a retreat from the world into the singularity of art.

Like Naomi Kanakia in a recent post, Stambolian makes autism into a kind of critical method, taking at face value that what Proust’s character Marcel ‘learns’ over the course of In Search of Lost Time does in fact form a coherent and true set of philosophical lessons, by which the character—and the attentive reader—are led out of the distractions of the everyday to the private seclusion within which alone he can become an artist, transforming remembered life into pure, enduring literature. This of course raises the question why Proust didn’t simply write a pamphlet—and forgets that characters (even narrators) are not directly identifiable with the ‘views’, systematic or not, of their author. What we read, I hate to have to remind you, are texts, in which all sorts of strange things are happening, things which we have to interpret and are always re-interpreting, excitements and confusions never quite cognizable. We are not downloading anyone’s true, or even anyone’s coherent, opinions about anything.

But, Don Quixote-style, readers love to mistake novels for guides to life! So here’s Stambolian quoting what ‘Proust says’ (i.e., what his character ‘discovers’) about the disappointments of love and friendship, which the artist must escape to pursue his vocation (which, of course, involves remembering love and friendship, crystallizing his memories into self-complete works of art):

Stambolian’s monograph is a painstaking working-through of Proust’s novel, based on the premise that there is nothing funny happening here, that it is a happy story of moral-aesthetic self-education. Which is itself very funny! His mistake is aligned with what Arendt saw as the massive, fundamental error of philosophy—it’s taking the normal world of chattering people as a ‘cave’ from which a few special geniuses flee into the real thought. She argued (and I’ve discussed the connections between Arendt’s argument and queer theory here) that the real cave was just this withdrawal characteristic of intellectuals—the ones who, in fact, delight themselves with the shadowy appearances of things in what she was, unfortunately, not historically capable of calling a gooncave.

If in the early 70s Stambolian was arguing via Proust in favor of staying home to be a queerly unworldly aesthete, by the middle of the next decade—having gotten into New York’s gay party scene in the meantime, and then by extension its literary scene, becoming friends with its major writers—he was turning his original argument inside-out, in a move that marks, precisely, the difference between a homosexual (or, today, a queer) literature, or a homosexual vision of literature, and a gay one, between writing that reflects the precious, distanced, subjectivity of the artist out of place in and through art exiting an ultimately unsatisfying everydayness, and, in contrast, writing that plays with/in/back the energy of a world that includes the writer. Here’s Stambolian from the preface to Men on Men 1 (1986):

In the prefaces to the following two issues of Men on Men, Stambolian linked this sense of gay writing as a social practice, a way of befriending—of speaking to the sort of person who appears in the writing, without the need for justification or explanation aimed at an ‘other’ who would not be a friend—to the idea that gay critics and scholars needed (and, he implied were failing) to read any particular work of fiction in dialogue both with other such works and with the forms of life in which they participate. The question is not, he insists, one of having literature that secures politically appropriate representations or displays ethically useful model-lives for gay men—it is rather of showing how artists create work that is at once singular and emblematic, drawing from and giving back both to a lineage of fellow-artists and of community-specific life-practices:

Finally, I want to end on a hilarious and poignant section from Andrew Holleran’s afterward to Men on Men 4, written just after Stambolian’s death—it gives so much of the tenor of their friendship, and their mutual passion for literature, dancing, sex— their sense that these are not different things, that they are not obstacles to each other, that creating great work and writing and thinking well are not a matter of getting out from life into somewhere quiet (how much has Holleran’s writing suffered, indeed, by the four decades of quiet he documents in Kingdom of Sand?):

Finally, a note to grad students: someone should write a dissertation connecting Stambolian’s evolving notions of friendship and its relationship to writing (is friendship a friend or an enemy to art?) with Derrida’s Politics of Friendship, and its appending essay, “Heidegger’s Ear,” which does a reading of Being and Time to show that subjectivity is necessarily grounded in friendship (or at least the possibility of friendship—even you friendless losers are subjects! just in a deficient mode…). I dream of “Heidegger’s Asshole: The Procto-ontology of Gay Friending,” but I’ll settle for re-reading the delightful chapter on Will and Jack’s friendship in Christopher Reed and Christopher Castiglia’s If Memory Serves.