Andrew Holleran’s nameless alter-ego can’t move past his own Grief

“Old age is no place for sissies.” —Bettie Davis

Over the course of a few weeks the homo-neurotics traded emails about Andrew Holleran’s latest novel, Grief, in which the narrator makes it painfully clear that middle age is excruciating for gay men.

MWH: Aging is an important, almost anxiety driven, theme in Grief. Is that a departure from his previous books, The Beauty of Men or Dancer from the Dance? In both novels youth and beauty are coveted and central themes—Isn’t Grief the next logical progression?

RB: I think you’re right in a way, although Beauty is certainly age-obsessed. Live by the body, die by the body. In writing, time and age are supposed to improve things. Holleran has been at it for a while. And I think he does get at some hard truths about love, loss, and the unmoored-ness of gay relationships—stuff you don’t talk about in bars—they’re such a turn-off.

MWH: But in TBOM, Lark (the protagonist) does his most profound thinking while cruising though a bathhouse.

RB: Yeah, but he’s not getting off, remember. So he has time to think and feel about what it’s like to be invisible because you’re too old. It’s like a kind of death—he’s dead to the young. Maybe that’s why that chapter is called Il Paradiso —he’s seeing a place you can only see after death. Or maybe that’s ironic, since it seems a lot more like a purgatory.

MWH: Holleran is older than when Dancerdebuted in 1978 . It seems like that’s evident in his writing.

RB: Grief feels like an older person’s novel. And that’s not a criticism. It has a concentrated intensity, focusing on the months of winter and spring that the nameless middle-aged narrator spends teaching college in DC, following the death of his mother. There’s hardly any background from his earlier life, loves, interests, hobbies, etc. But that makes sense.

MWH: He could be Lark, from Beauty , caring for his paralyzed mother in Florida, or the narrator of Dancer , almost 30 years later.

RB: Sure. But he doesn’t really need a name. Names are for others to call us by, right? And this novel is not really about being with other people. It’s about the solitary single-minded- ness of mourning—sort of the dark twin of love—where every sensation, thought, and feeling expresses loss. He takes a room at the top of an old house near Dupont Circle, rented out by a 55-year-old government worker who, like him, is a veteran of the belle- epoque of the 70s and survivor of the holocaust of the 80s. And he ruminates.

MWH: The landlord reminds me of someone I can’t place, but know I’ve met. Holleran describes him beautifully, “He is his house.” He goes on…

“My landlord was…like many gay men of a certain age, celibate—because of AIDS, or an inability to attract the partners they wanted, or simply diminishing interest…He no longer had sex, but he got all the more angry when anyone challenged his right to do so.”

RB: Right. And the plot is really shaped by the narrator’s feelings, not his actions. It follows the unfolding of his grief for his mother, through conversations with his landlord and his friend Frank, who’s somehow kept a much younger lover for sixteen years. And he wanders the streets and buildings of DC, a kind of city of the dead, inhabited by bureaucrats by day and almost no one by night except history’s ghosts and society’s outcasts.

MWH: But he has his grief to keep him company. Holleran is as poetic as ever.

“Grief is what you have after someone you love dies. It’s the only thing left of that person. Your love for, your missing them. And as long as you have that, you’re not alone—you have them…Your grief is their presence on earth.”

RB: But such cold comfort! Since you don’t really have them. It’s interesting—I feel Holleran means this as a kind of meditation on literary grief as well. The other thing the narrator does is read crazy Mrs. Lincoln’s letters, as she wandered America and Europe in the wake of the Civil War, like a trashy-tragic Jackie O: obsessed with fashion, over-spending, an emotional wreck, eventually committed to an asylum by her son Robert.

MWH: Oh god her! What did you think about that parallel?

RB: Well, the issue is pretty obvious: can the narrator move away from loss or make something out of it better than Mrs. L’s pathetic camp routine of mourning.

MWH: I suspect Holleran knows a lot about camp with the kind of faggoty panache I loved so much in Dancer : “My face seats five, my honey pot’s on fire.” I quote Sutherland almost daily.

RB: Only it’s smarter and tougher now. Like the narrator’s comment that his lan dlord , having basically given up hope of love, had become a “homosexual emeritus.” His house, impeccably redone, is really a lit up stage set, in which he sits waiting for audiences of admiring passersby. You can’t bring back your boy’s body or your dead lovers, and there’s no chance to of getting a new lover, it seems. But you can renovate a house like nobody’s business. No one will cruise you, but they might cruise your house.

MWH: I liked Frank. In my mind, he’s like an older version of Sutherland from Dancer . One of my favorite lines is him describing his boyfriend: “If your friends don’t want your boyfriend, what’s the point?”…more of that faggoty exchange I love.

RB: He’s as smart as ever. But there are other excruciating moments, with no sardonic campiness to make them bearable. Like when the narrator comments about music—the way the slightest fragment of a piece can speak to you in a way that is both wonderfully consoling (as if the composer knows just what you’re going through) and heartrending: “only this music—these few notes—recognized that everything else you had been doing, and would do, to fill up the time was meaningless.”

MWH: That’s part of the beauty of his writing, how he shifts from sarcasm and wit to introspection and self-pity.

RB: There’s an amazing scene at the National Gallery, where he stares at a painting depicting the desperate anguish of Venus as she stretches up to the gorgeous torso of Adonis, who’s gotten off and now taking off for the hunt. To the self-pitying narrator, “it is the moment we all fear, the moment of abandonment, when even after the most intimate of acts, you are left behind, with the torture of unsatisfied desire.”

MWH: I remember seeing a similar painting with you in London a few years ago. The narrator spends many hours in D.C. museums, and later Holleran compares them as morgues…”tombs containing art.”

RB: It true and sad. It’s also self-pitying for him. And he ignores an important irony—according to the myth, Adonis gets killed in that hunt, gored by a boar. A student in his class on AIDS in Literature, who appears unexpectedly in the gallery, gets it, because he’s looking at Adonis, not Venus, and looking through the lens of grief for his older brother, dead of AIDS:

“My brother was like Adonis,” he said. “He looked like the Adonis in this painting. But not towards the end.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yes, well,” he said, “you have to move on.”
“But you don’t,” I said. “You don’t have to move on.”
“Yes, you do. My brother would have wanted me to, I’m sure of that. My brother loved life. That’s why he got killed.”

The pain of grief, freezing you forever at the awful moment of abandonment—that’s one message of the painting. The need to move on, even if it kills you—that’s another. But either way, Holleran is not letting us off easy. There’s a cost to loving life.Sophocles gets to offer his two cents to those, like the narrator, whose grief is bound up with unresolved guilt: “We have all eternity to please the dead, but only a little while to love the living.”

MWH: The ancient Greeks understood grief well. Holleran has this remarkable line in Beauty “The Greek chorus to your search for love,” referring to the invisibility of old men. When MLK was shot, Robert Kennedy famously quoted Aeschylus, revealing a little about how he dealt with his own grief after his brother’s assassination.

“He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.”

MWH: Very different from Jackie O’s response.

RB: Hmm . I wonder. Maybe she actually understood Aeschylus, even if she expressed it differently? There are other voices in the novel that confront the narrator with the uselessness of his grief. The dead, after all, aren’t around to applaud our refusal to let go. We don’t really get to take star turns except in our own minds. I kind of think it’s as self-absorbed as imagining your own funeral.

AG: You’re saying grief is really about our own vanity? Does Holleran believe that?

RB: I’m not sure. At the end of the story the narrator’s lease is up, and he has a chance to stay in DC, not returning to Florida to continue grieving for his mother. Mrs. Lincoln offers one route for the middle-aged gay widow—a pathetic camp routine. But Jackie O took another. Those sunglasses may be a camp icon, but here’s their real meaning: she moved on.

Excerpts taken from GRIEF by Andrew Holleran published by Hyperion (2006).

• The New York Times review.
• What Salon.com had to say.
• The Washington Post write up.
• Holleran’s essay on Brokeback Mountain.

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