I Have Secrets

Of course everything he ever told us was a lie: as a homosexual in the fifties and sixties, he learned early to hide the truth about himself. And of course he always told the truth: he couldn’t help it. And yes, the difference between truth and falseness mattered to him, perhaps more than any other artist of his generation. But that didn’t mean he troubled himself about it in his art. Public speech acts are above all performances, elaborate sleights of hand in which the target is the audience’s mind. The writer, actor, photographer, filmmaker—and Gary was all of them—worms their way into our heads for the sake of replacing material reality with a fantasy of it. Let phenomenologists and existentialists trouble themselves over tragedies of perception, mis-, missed, or otherwise. Gary was a New England moralist, caught between Jonathan Edwards’s fire and brimstone and Emerson’s methodical transcendentalism. An egomaniac (definitely), guilt-ridden (probably), an emotional black hole prone to rejecting anyone who showed him love (sadly). A Dimmesdale on the scaffold, compelled to confess over and over until someone heard.

When you don’t give a damn about the fate of the soul, however, the focus shrinks; and in the absence of a universally agreed-upon concept of the good, the judgments become relative. Rather than measure humanity’s inadequacies with a Puritan yardstick that was as much paddle as ruler, Gary concerned himself with marginal acts of succor and relative failings, usually among a group of morally compromised, cloistered actors: lovers and love objects, criminals and the people they transgress, artists and the audience they seduce. The backdrop was a Western culture whose baseline attribute was corruption and whose m.o. was greed, and what’s new about that? Nothing. But also everything. Which is to say: Gary had no apocalyptic/apotheotic conception of the times he lived in. Unlike the postmodernists and the posturing intellectual cabal who succeeded them, he didn’t need to pretend that the present moment was a historical nadir, the ne peius ultra of politics or art or philosophy, just because he was living through it. But as a materialist who always brought things back to the body—its capacity for pleasure and pain, its ability to impress itself on the external world, but above all its transitory nature, its temporariness—he invested his intellectual and imaginative energy in lived experiences unique to our time, whether they were frontiers lost to history (absence as defining trait), or sensations only recently made possible through chemical or technological innovation (the shared solipsisms of altered states and virtual realities). The only absolute was relativity: it all depends. That kind of thinking can drive you crazy after a while, or, if not you, then the people who have to put up with your bullshit.

I’m talking about the tension between self-presentation as confession and misdirection: Caitlyn Jenner’s athletic prowess as the fleshly shield for the woman she hid for sixty-five years as well as the muscular embodiment of a truly monstrous ego. Or Joan Didion’s almost pathological insistence on her physical and emotional ineffectualness as the engine of one remarkable accomplishment after another: if the latter is true it stands to reason that the former must be false, but in order for the latter to be true the former must be as well, which renders the latter impossible. Art as the false made true through misrepresentation; this-is-not-me-but-it’s-me. Any working artist realizes pretty quick that the self—the artist, or the body bearing the artist’s name—is the lens through which an individual subjectivity becomes comprehensible to a mass audience, and they neglect that construct at their own peril, or the work’s. But these artifices of personhood inevitably mislead the reader into thinking they have an understanding of or even a relationship with the artist. Shakespeare, Pynchon, Ferrante, anyone with the last name Brontë: it happens to everyone who publishes, maybe because the rational part of readers’ minds needs a quantitative link between the real world and the imagined alternatives they spend so much time in, or maybe readers just need to circumscribe those limitless universes before, like Borges’s Tlön, they encroach too far on reality.

The defense against art is almost always an attack on the artist, which in Gary’s case led him to reposition himself vis-à-vis his audience over and over, if not to keep us guessing, then at least to keep us at bay. The media changed, or the focus within them: his body, or costumed images of it, or a cloak made of words. Roman à clef yielded to true crime, reportage to memoir; when all else fails, throw up a picture of a penis, preferably erect, preferably not white. The mirror becomes a window becomes a shard of glass that slashes and stabs. We think it’s cutting him when actually it’s cutting us; he thinks he’s cutting us when actually he’s dissecting himself, serving himself up one piece at a time. We might rationalize this as a democratic gesture—aesthetic parity or, I don’t know, karma—but if it is, it’s less a balancing act than the revelation of the violence inherent in any push toward equality or consensus, the neuroses born of the social compact. Lop off a few inches from the top, a few feet from the bottom, and we’ll finally all be the same . . .

For an artist whose work seemed in the broadest possible terms to be dedicated to cutting the mighty down to size and giving a voice to the disenfranchised, that seems fitting enough, but for an artist who fronted hyperbole as a defense against reductiveness, it also seems way too easy. So did he want to level the playing field, or did he want to expose the folly of thinking the world could be improved, by art or politics or any other socially minded endeavor? Or could it—again—be both? The only way some people can abide freedom—their own as well as others’—is by exposing it as fantasy, utopia, an impossible state in the geopolitical as well as psychological sense of the word, a nowhere place where no one can live, but we’re all still looking for it. I can’t go on, I’ll go on. He went on.

Beckett, Thomas More, Hawthorne. All strike me as perfectly legible forerunners to Gary’s brand of liminal sermonizing, and perfectly inappropriate as well. Not that he was sui generis, let alone ignorant of or averse to canons. The aesthetic palette he drew from was as deliberate as they come, and as limited. Provincial even. The European art novel. The novel for people who don’t like fiction—who don’t like pleasure. But for someone as linguistically gifted as Gary, the aesthetic techniques and tropes were all but pro forma, leaving him with the task of bringing the blood back to deracinated prose. The blood, the sweat, the semen, the shit. His project was nothing less than the humanization of the epicurean novel, and for Gary the human always expresses itself operatically, with violence and lust and maudlin displays of emotion and constant invitations to annihilation. (Another word for this is camp, but it was, queerly, a straight man’s camp, camp entered through the back door as it were, and achieved not through artifice but soberness: Welles’s Lady from Shanghai, Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Anderson’s Rushmore.) Perhaps he wanted to shake us from our torpor, or perhaps he could only appreciate life when it was on the verge of being lost, but the tension thrummed in his writing, restoring a pallid art form to what it had set out to be a half century earlier: a radical record of the human condition, not just mind but brain, body, whose material continuity is as indisputable as its inability to perceive itself accurately or honestly.

So. The only way he could tell us about ourselves was by talking about himself, and the only way he could tell us about himself was by talking about anything but. Within the dioramas of his novels, where people of nearly identical character and station assert their individuality not by claiming that they’ve been made in the world’s image but that the world has been made in theirs, he managed to make the most trivial moral distinctions seem crucial to an understanding of the eternal present, the now that always is, was, and will be to anyone afflicted with the curse of mortality. I’d call this the writing’s triumph, but it’s Gary, it’s art, it’s life, where no one stands in the same river twice, or recaptures the bliss of that first high, or reads the same novel after they’ve finished it. We return in search of the certainty we found at an earlier moment only to discover that our conclusions have changed with us, with the world. Gary understood history’s linearity if not time’s, which is to say that he wrote his books to a changing world whose one constant was that he was always part of it, and now that he’s not they mean something very different to what they did when he was alive. “I have secrets!” he said when, about fifteen years ago, I asked him if I could write his biography, but only now am I realizing that he was speaking of his art as much as his life. I suspect I’ll spend the rest of mine trying to figure out what he wanted to hide, or wanted to say.