Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America by Christopher Bram

Author:Christopher Bram [Bram, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Gay & Lesbian, Literary Criticism, LIT004160
ISBN: 9780446575980
Publisher: Twelve
Published: 2012-02-02T05:00:00+00:00

White sustains this deadpan semi-comic tone for almost two hundred pages, creating a French nouveau roman fairy tale out of what is probably just a weekend on Fire Island. We never learn for sure—White never drops the mask. But his make-it-strange strategy enables him to describe a gay world of parties and dances without writing a gay novel. The prose has a stiff, English-as-a-second-language oddness that’s perfect for the brain-damaged narrator; there are no metaphors. The book is a genuine curiosity, but it works in its own strange terms. It’s not too long and it has a strong ending, reached with the help of suggestions from Merla and others. It’s a fable, yet one can’t help feeling a nervous autobiographical note in the young protagonist who doesn’t know who he is or what he wants, who anxiously fakes his way through life while hoping nobody sees through his act.

White was befriended at this time by the poet and French translator, Richard Howard, an energetic, generous man fond of flamboyant gestures—he gave poetry readings wearing old-fashioned pince-nez glasses. Howard was well-connected, and he helped White sell Elena. It was published in 1973 and received good reviews, but was too strange to attract many readers, gay or straight. (The book achieved some delayed fame when Vladimir Nabokov praised it in an interview. White learned Nabokov’s wife, Vera, had read Elena first and recommended it to her husband. When White later said his ideal reader was “a cultivated heterosexual woman in her sixties who knows English perfectly but is not an American,” he was thinking of Mrs. Nabokov.)

For his next project, White returned to realistic fiction with what he thought would be a commercial novel. He called it first Like People in History, then Woman Reading Pascal. The most commercial thing about it was that the chief gay character was only secondary. The protagonist was a woman like a modern Isabel Archer from Portrait of a Lady. White finished the novel, but nobody liked it much and he was unable to sell it.

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