Re-Print

The same day I picked up Robert Glück’s ‘Jack the Modernist’ I finished reading Alan Helms’s 1995 memoir, ‘Young Man from the Provinces: A Gay Life Before Stonewall’. No one ever mentions the profound influence one book can have on another, simply by the random shuffle of your reading stack. Yet it’s the same reason chefs serve an amuse-bouche before a meal, and why curators separate masterpieces in an exhibition room. Unfairly or not, one work casts a shadow on another, and that was certainly the case for me in the hour I switched from Helms to Glück.

‘Young Man from the Provinces’ involves Helms’s golden years as the most desirable man on the gay social scene, but it ends up as a rather bleak cautionary tale about the pitfalls of gauging self-worth on desirability. By the memoir’s close, all the writer wants is a boyfriend who honestly loves him. The protagonist of Glück’s 1985 novel wants the same, although we are in San Francisco instead of New York, and we are very much post-Stonewall, in the pre-Aids era of early ’80s try-it-you-might-like-it hedonism. In the first chapter, the main character, Bob (an obvious stand-in for Glück), meets a handsome theatre actor and director named Jack at a forum about gay rights, and they immediately start a hot-and-heavy relationship. It’s the kind of intricacy that so eluded poor Helms as we see him wrinkling into late middle-age. If only he’d stopped looking in the mirror all the time and attended more forums.

Glück’s mission in this slim, gorgeous novel isn’t merely to chart the course of Bob’s obsession with Jack from its promising beginnings to its painful resolution. His ambition is to yank all solid ground from beneath our feet and free us of the hackneyed literary conventions surrounding love, courtship and sex. In Glück’s hands, everything – every sentence – is an opportunity to destabilise our expectations. A penis, for example, is a “flesh peninsula.” A romantic connection isn’t described as “we started falling for each other” but rather “I opened up in Jack a territory named Bob; I anticipated in me a sister city named Jack.” Such a strange-new-planet-called-Earth, experimental approach forces us out of passivity and makes us active readers, and thus active participants in this complicated, often inscrutable love affair between Bob and Jack.

Before I began reading ‘Jack the Modernist’, I discovered on a web search that Glück is also a premiere “language poet.” Ugh. That was my least favourite week of my Contemporary Poetry seminar in college. The linguistic somersaults performed by the language poets tend to read like crossword puzzles where you aren’t provided the clues, which to my undergraduate self sucked all the romance out of poetry (and why read a poem if it doesn’t possess the possibility of damaging your heart?). Glück is having a lot of fun with language in ‘Jack the Modernist’, but it’s utterly exhilarating, and damaged hearts abound. The characters’ libidos are turned to full blast.

The sex scenes, especially, reanimate the act with all the excitement and weirdness of promiscuous encounters. I can’t resist quoting some of my favourite descriptions of man-on-man action. Here’s a blowjob: “I want him to suck for a long time, for hours, until he becomes completely identified with it – like a starfish whose grip on the rock makes up the better part of its being.” Or Bob’s feeling of loss when Jack calls it quits: “Jack’s cock was the toothpick that stabilized my club sandwich of being and nothingness.”

This fall, ‘Jack the Modernist’ is returning to print by New York Review Books. There aren’t many old copies of the book left around. I dug up a copy published by High Risk Press in 1995 (coincidentally the same year as Helms’s memoir). On the flap, the novel is praised as “a classic of postmodern gay fiction.” My instant thought was, “There’s a whole subgenre of postmodern gay fiction?” My mind conjured Dennis Cooper novels, and then I drew a blank. Did Genet’s ‘Our Lady of the Flowers’ count? I began to form a theory about gay literature that’s been rolling around in my head ever since. Was ‘Jack the Modernist’ a viable direction that gay fiction could have taken – untethered, challenging, refusing straight conventions – but because of the Aids crisis, it instead pivoted to a kind of elegiac realism of traditional novels because that form expressed the utter devastation and loss of the gay experience more powerfully and convincingly? In dangerous times, we cling to what’s safe. But because of this pivot away from postmodern experimentation, we are now living in a world of gay stories that hew to old-fashioned modes of literature (we have Alan Hollinghurst as our polestar instead of Glück), when we might have had more novels that punch fist-size holes in the walls of our consciousness. It does matter. Wittingly or not, we model ourselves after the stories we read, and I worried while devising this theory, that because of this path taken, we’ve cast ourselves primarily as gay romantic victims (Jane Eyres of the West Village) or suffering protagonists in sweeping melodramas, when we could have become slutty, clownish rebels, ones that might not have been digestible to a straight readership but could have made us into something so much less, well, tragic. I’m curious whether a new generation of gay readers will accept the path offered inside this novel buried for far too long.