My walk on the beach yesterday was arduous enough: the tide was high, and the waves broke onto a slope. I had to walk along the ridge just above, where the sand was not quite so densely packed as makes for easy ambling. Then, nearing my turnaround point at the edge of Lonelyville, I encountered a swarm of small flies. They made a misery of much of the return home.

The smart thing would have been to drift into the surf for a while, and that’s what I’d have done if I’d been able. But I haven’t forgotten the terror of last year’s tumble. If I am knocked over, I cannot get up. Just last week, a wave of greater strength and volume than foreseen knocked me just enough to heighten my caution. So I was condemned to splash a bit in waves that barely covered my slippers, and to put my hat to tail’s use. This afternoon, I shall carry a small bottle of repellent.

When I got home, my brother-in-law informed me that ants had gotten into the doughnuts.  

***

Orley Farm is an old friend: that is how I am reading it, because I don’t know what kind of novel it is. Trollope seems to be, deliberately, an anti-novelist. It is not that he interrrupts every now and then with personal views, although of course he does that quite often. It is, rather, that he stage-manages the plot according to the principles of a rigorous morality that allows for very little actual development. Only his unformed young men — the rat-catching Peregrine Orme, in this case — are permitted to stumble into danger. But they are always rescued in the end, just as wickedness is always punished. There is a Biblical accounting going on at the back of the operation. What saves it from fustian is Trollope’s writing, which makes his characters interesting and amusing, an even tragic. Lady Mason is a good woman who has done a terrible thing — a very terrible thing in the eyes of all propertied Englishmen, no matter what the cause. We want her to “get away with it,” but the forgery of a codicil is a black sin that, if it can be forgiven, cannot be overlooked and not quashed.

(The difference between Trollope and Jane Austen, who also adheres to a rigorous morality, is that Austen’s novels are largely concerned with the personal discovery of right and wrong — the rights and wrongs of advanced civil intercourse. There is nothing in Trollope to compare with Emma’s sublimely humiliating recognition that she has played the part of an interfering old maid. There could be no Emma in Trollope; his heroines are all good girls, like Jane Bennett.)

Anyway, I have just passed the grand scene in which Mr Furnival reconsiders his old client’s virtue. Lady Mason has just been to see him (aware that it is irregular to visit barristers without the company of solicitors), and she has all but convinced him, simply by confessing her great uneasiness, that the trial twenty years past, at the end of which she was awarded Orley Farm, was a miscarriage of justice. “If there had been a fraud, if there had been a forgery, it had been so clever as to merit protection!” So muses Mr Furnival, with the sort of shocking impropriety that Gilbert and Sullivan could make funny. Mr Furnival, however, has already been marked as a dubious number himself. He has all but abandoned the wife who comforted him through the lean early years of his practice, and he has fathered a daughter who may — we wouldn’t be quite sure, if we hadn’t read so much Trollope — be too clever by half. The admiration of Mr Furnival for Lady Mason is therefore unwholesome even before the lady lifts her veil in his chambers.

***

I’ve just read Ryan van Meter’s lovely memoir, If You Knew Then What I Know Now. I don’t know how I missed it — it came out last year — but miss it I did, until I read something about it yesterday at The Rumpus. Two minutes later, it was on my Kindle. I was interested to read it because I, too, am working on a memoir that touches on growing up in a place of strong defaults, where the expectations that cascade from perceived identity are rigid and unspoken, not to be thought about.

Van Meter grew up in Missouri — “rural,” it says, but not too far from St Louis — and started being called “faggot” in the fourth grade. That would have been about 1986, a few years before growing up gay, at least in the more cosmopolitan parts of the country, would begin to be less problematic. By 1986, being gay was certainly not the big deal that it had been until recently, but growing up gay was still undesirable. His story captures a moment in time that, one can only hope, will pass completely. One of the reasons why The Family Stone has become my favorite Christmas movie is that I’m so roused by the backward confrontation at the dinner table in which Sarah Jessica Parker’s character asks, with genuine doubt, how anyone could wish her child to be gay, and the Family Stone gathers in storm clouds gathers round and expels her. I hope that everybody’s watching that triumph of family love. Being gay, growing up gay, whatever — it is nothing to be ashamed of.

Van Meter grew up marinated in shame, and sexuality was the least (or at least the last) of it. The older son of two athletes, he was scrawny and not good at sports. If anybody but his grandmother had known about his wearing a dress that his aunt had worn as a girl, he would have been seen to be a sissy. There are rare sissies who, with great courage, insist upon the right to be as flaunting as they want to be, but Ryan Van Meter belonged to self-hating norm. He tried to be like the regular boys whom he saw every day at school, only dimly aware that, because they were motivated by desires that he did not share, he would never be like them.

His tale of childhood wretchedness is a classic, but there’s another tale that seems, in retrospect, just as much a classic, except that I’ve never read anything like it. That is the account of the breakup, after eight years, of his life with his first boyfriend. “Account” is very much the word. “Things I Will Want to Tell you on Our First Date, but Won’t” is a string of relative clauses addressed to all the men who just might be his next date.

That I hate when I tell people we were together for eight years and now we’re not, and they put their hand on my shoulder and say, “Oh, I’m so sorry,” as if somebody died. That sometimes it feels like somebody died. That even my therapist said, “What you need to do is mourn the loss, to give yourself permission to grieve for the relationship.” That months later, I was teaching a poem about death and grief to a room full of nineteen-year-olds, and I asked, “So how to we bring an end to mourning?” and one of my students said, “Eat lunch.” That I think this kid should be my therapist. That I never say the word “dumped.” That I always say it was my ex’s decision.

That if he hadn’t broken up with me, I would have stayed with him forever.

God, that’s heartbreaking! Shattering, really. Is it the worst that can happen in life? It can be.

If You Knew Then What I Know Now is beautifully written, but one would expect no less from a writer with Van Meter’s credentials. What’s remarkable is the book’s kindness. Little Ryan’s character put him in a somewhat adversarial relationship with everyone around him, including his parents, but his parents, especially, come off as good people. Even Ryan’s younger brother, Garrett, who grows up to fill the expectations that his parents had for a manly first-born, emerges as a likeable chap. There is not a single bitter word about the ex. Is this Midwestern niceness to be credited? Van Meter persuades me that it is. That makes his book a true work of art. 

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 29th, 2012 at 7:47 am.