According to an exhaustive biography of Andy Warhol, Drella began stalking Truman Capote as soon as he moved to New York City, eventually befriending the cherubic wunderkind's mother and illustrating this gothic, coming-of-age novel without permission in a fawning bid to seek attention. The gorgeous prose reads like a lyrical fever-dream journal (attempted molestation on a ferris wheel by a female midget!), populated with ghosts, enormous snakes and several Southern caricatures (a tomboy based on Harper Lee ) but the summer-long story barely hangs together. Still, Other Voices, Other Rooms does yield this highly resonant nugget for an inchoate fairy, perhaps the first affirmation (albeit veiled) of homosexuality in American literature:
The brain may take advice, but not the heart, and love, having no geography, knows no boundaries: weight and sink it deep, no matter, it will rise and find the surface: and why not? any love is natural and beautiful that lies within a person's nature; only hypocrites would hold a man responsible for what he loves, emotional illiterates and those of righteous envy, who, in their agitated concern, mistake so frequently the arrow pointing to heaven for the one that leads to hell.
Sorry, Andy, In Cold Blood is more my cup of tea.
I knew Wallace Stegner's name but hadn't read any of the Pulitzer Prize winner's work. A recent appreciation in the New York Times steered me toward The Big Rock Candy Mountain, a grueling family saga set west of the Mississippi at the turn of the 20th century. Initially, Stegner's lush descriptions of life on the prairie and the hopeful pursuit of romantic love and material success in simpler times felt like balm. There was somewhere, if you knew where to find it, some place where money could be made like drawing water from a well, some Big Rock Candy Mountain where life was effortless and rich and unrestricted and full of adventure and action, where something could be had for nothing.
Then actual history, resonant and chilling, intervenes. The Spanish Flu afflicts a tiny town despite social distancing and mask wearing. Three members of the Mason family get it--and are isolated along with other cases in an old schoolhouse-- but survive only to face even greater hardships.
"Funny," Elsa said. "Once it comes right into your own house you're not scared any more. It's just like any sickness, and it doesn't paralyze you the way it did at first."
Stegner's stream-of-consciousness account of a graduation ceremony vividly captures the promise of a life eventually cut short by forces beyond a young character's control.
That was the cream of the assembly [earning a letter sweater at graduation] as far as Chet was concerned, but there were a lot of other awards, pins for publications and opera and glee club and student offices. Chet was up twice more, for opera and glee club, and there once again with the glee club when it sang. Then the speakers, the valedictorian and the salutatorian and the Superintendent of Schools and the Commencement speaker, and the long queues forming for the passing out of the diplomas, and that was the end of that. That was the end of school, of stinking chem labs, of physics classes where you experimented with the laws of the pendulum, swinging plumb-bobs on strings down the stairwell from the third floor to the basement so that girls going into the door of the girls' gym could be bopped with them. Now was the end of practices after school, of showers in the steamy old locker room and towel fights between the lockers, of snake dances through the streets to celebrate victories, of operas in the old Salt Lake Theater where you sang tenor leads in Mademoiselle Modiste or The Red Mill. This was the end of lunches on the lawns while the gulls flew over crying, of butts snitched behind the corner of Mad Maisie's, of hot dogs and mustard and root beer over her messy counter, of toting a gun in ROTC drills and marching on hot spring days up through the Lucerne toward the mountains, a whole battalion breaking ranks sometimes and tearing through the alfalfa when a racer snake slid from under the file-closer's feet, all of them chasing the shift snake while the student officers yelled their heads off and howled commands that nobody minded and tossed around demerits that nobody listened to, and the commandant started back from Company A to see what was the matter. Now was the end of a lot of things.
Stegner's casual racism--writing from the perspective of the father, Bo Mason, a bootlegger built like a brick shit house, he slurs Blacks, Native Americans and Jews--probably wouldn't have raised an eyebrow when the novel was published in 1943 but today it argues against his deep understanding of the human condition. Two passages reflect the thirty-something author's struggle to find his place in a world of modest white privilege long before it was recognized as such.
Well, where is home? he said. It isn't where your family comes from, and it isn't where you were born, unless you have been lucky enough to live in one place all your life. Home is the place where you hang your hat. (He had never owned a hat.) Or home is where you spent your childhood, the good years when waking every morning was an excitement, when the round of the day could always produce something to fill your mind, tear your emotions, excite your wonder or awe or delight. Is home that, or is it the place where you want to be buried yourself. Or is it the place where you come in your last desperation to shoot yourself, choosing the garage or the barn or the woodshed in order not to mess up the house, but coming back anyway to the last sanctuary where you can kill yourself in peace. * * * Perhaps that was what it [family history] meant, all of it. It was good to have been along and to have shared it. There were things he had learned that could not be taken away from him. Perhaps it took several generations to make a man, perhaps it took several combinations and re-creations of his mother's gentleness and resilience, his father's enormous energy and appetite for the new, a subtle blending of masculine and feminine, selfish and selfless, stubborn and yielding, before a proper man could be fashioned.
A superbly written, if limited dissection of the American dream at the precise moment when a young man could no longer just "go West" to achieve it!
The drive to the beach with Thom took us under the subway in Long Island City.
Buildings there keep popping up like reflective mushrooms with a dirty little pandemic secret: a vacancy rate of 60%. Do you want to share an elevator at least twice a day?
An amazing billboard, a sign of the times.
I won't lie. I looked forward most to the resumption of my swimming routine. The warm, shallow water of the Great South Bay proved more tempting than the ocean's rough, chilly surf.
Bad weather kept our guests home until Saturday morning. But they brought the mixin's for Aperol spritzes. Our hors d'oeuvres matched, of course.
Thom made a deelish panzarella salad for lunch on Monday. Don't ask how much the shrimp cost. The Pantry has never felt more like a rip-off, now that you have to rely on employee whims to fill your potentially vague order. We paid $7.98 for two ears of "bicolor" corn!
Randy, Thom and I visited Tommy & Victor late Monday afternoon.
We made it back to our house for the ho-hum sunset.
Immature pine cones off the Cherry Grove boardwalk to the beach.
Black Lives Matter lip service in the Grove
. . . and in the Pines.
A freshly christened house in the Grove.
Late afternoon clouds obscured the sun on the remarkably wide beach
. . . while Thom channelled Chris.
Gorgeous skies preceded an intense and unanticipated squall that soon forced us inside for dinner.
You can't beat the light at this time of year.
Thom parked his car in the LIRR lot, saving $93. I strolled unnoticed through the lovely neighborhood on my way to retrieve it. This lawn ornament was new and probably functional in 1948.
Oliver Stone shot the parade in "Born on the Fourth of July" on Sayville's Main Street. I wondered if a Black man enjoys the same roaming rights in Sayville that I do?
