"Until death it is all life."
When I was younger I made a practice of kissing great men. I don't mean I ever had sex with anyone famous. Never did. Might have done if it had been on offer but it never was so, alas, nothing very saucy for the memoirs. Sorry. I wouldn't call the kisses innocent either as I was young and rather brassy, but nothing really came of them in that way and my motives were, I suppose we could say, pure. (Allen Ginsberg kissed me once and that was not at all innocent or expected and he had a chest cold at the time and it was not pleasant, but that's a story for another time.)
Walking back to my friend's apartment after the 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation -- that was the full title, the alphabet was less inclusive in those days -- I saw an old man on the sidewalk ahead of me. He was in a small group of friends. I was with a different group. I was pretty sure I knew who the old man was and so I ran up to him and asked if he was, in fact, Harry Hay. He was. I asked if I could kiss him. He said yes and so I did. We hugged and he smiled and waved as I returned to my somewhat aghast young friends. Now for any who don't know, Harry Hay was a great gay activist, a founder of both one of the first gay rights organization in the United States, The Mattachine Society, and The Radical Faeries. He was an actor, a communist, a labor organizer, and is widely consider the father of the modern LGBTQIA+ movement. I'd read his biography, studied his work, and always remembered his explanation that the secret history of gay people was "a history of kisses." I kissed Harry Hay. He had kissed this one and that one and someone who had kissed Lord Alfred Douglas and so though Harry's kiss I had a direct connection to my hero Oscar Wilde. See how it works? Further, though most of our history has been hidden and intentionally destroyed, by this same chain of kisses we are connected in a direct line of affection back and back to Socrates, to "the apostle beloved of Jesus," to Achilles, Alexander, Gilgamesh. I think it is a beautiful idea. And so I kissed Harry Hay when he was eighty-one and I was twenty-nine and I am proud to speak my lineage of kisses.
That idea has influence my whole life, that theory of connection that links me to Edward Carpenter, connects me to E. M. Forster, to Auden, to Truman Capote and on. Humans have evolved by and for connection, it is how we survived and why we've got our lovely, big, often neglected brains. "Just connect."
It has also shaped how I see my reading life and provided a way to understand the connection of this book to these, this author to that, to me. I can't justify calling this anything so grand as a theory, it's more an entertainment, a game, but it does offer interesting and sometimes unexpected glimpses into my past. One book led to the next, and the next and if I could remember all the connections there would be a kind of autobiography in it, not so much of kisses now but concepts, ideas, art. I have writers in my library of whom I speak as "my household Gods," some going straight back to childhood like L. Frank Baum, and Mark Twain, and Charles Dickens, and some who came later and by other ways like Dr. Samuel Johnson, and dear Charles Lamb, and Edmund White who we just lost this year. I sometimes try to track back through my books to find my first meeting with Dumas or Miss Maria Edgeworth or this year's Nobel winner for Literature, Lazlo Krasznahorkai.
There is one book I know exactly when we met.
I recently had a boy in the bookstore, college boy with whom I had a brief conversation in which I mentioned my favorite translation of Don Quixote (it's the current Penguin edition, translated by John Rutherford because I think it the funniest.) The boy was taken back a bit by that word, "favorite" and asked how many translations I could possibly have read. Five sounds very very impressive but I was quick to amend this by saying "whole or in part" which is all too true of the way I read now anyway. No apologies. Life is short.
Anyone remember Mr. Magoo? If you don't, Quincy Magoo was a nearsighted, elderly gentleman who bumbled through a series of short subject and feature length animation and even appeared in a whole series of literary adaptations that ran and reran as primetime television specials in my childhood. Most famously, he starred in a version of Dickens' A Christmas Carol that still plays somewhere every December. I loved those shows and one adaptation in particular was, I now realize, my very first encounter with Don Quixote.
And so, age probably nine or ten, I made my way to Grove City Public Library to find and read this book where, spoiler alert, Mr. Magoo dies at the end. In order to understand this part of the story, you need to know that I did not grow up in town but four miles down the road in an unincorporated village not covered at the time by any agreement with the town library. So, in order for me to check out books, we would either have had to pay a fee or I had to pretend that my home address was actually my grandmother's house in town. That's what I did. Always felt like shaky ethical ground at the time but then I was a nervous, already quite class-conscious child, as little queer country boys must inevitably be in the surprisingly stratified society of small American towns.
I walked to the library after school, found the book in the adult stacks and sat and looked at the Gustave Dore illustrations until it was time for my mother to come pick me up on her way home from work. At the time she was cleaning dormitories at Slippery Rock College. It was filthy work for low wages done for ungrateful, often rude kids who thought nothing of leaving chicken bones under their beds and condoms on the floor. She needed the job though because we needed the money. Both my parents worked at the time at jobs they did not love so that their children might have more comfortable lives; plenty to eat, clean clothes, a bit of pride.
When I took the big book to the counter and gave the volunteer librarian my card she seemed not best pleased. She scrutinized the book, and my card, and me and then asked where I'd found it. It was not the first book I'd taken out from the adult section, but for the first time I was told I could not have this one, that it was not "appropriate" at my age. It was made very clear that I had done something wrong, that the book was adult not only because it came from those shelves but because, I was pretty sure, the librarian thought it was dirty and that I wanted it for that reason. I blushed to the roots of my hair, retrieved my library card and fled outside to the steps here I had to stay and wait for my mother to fetch me.
Eventually she did, pulling up in yet another car inappropriate to a respectable married cleaning lady; some slightly sporty old wreck my father was probably fixing up in order to sell it in the yard. My mother drove many such cars. I can still see her bucket and brushes and gloves on the console between the bucket seats. Doubtlessly she was exhausted after a long shift and glad to be headed home. She noticed pretty quickly that I was uncharacteristically quiet. She asked what I got at the library and when I whispered, "nothing," she knew something was wrong. She asked me what and when I wouldn't say, she pulled over and parked and asked again. It was then, in tears that I explained about Mr. Magoo and Don Quixote and the Adult Section of the library. I will say bluntly that I don't know that either of my parents ever felt the need of a library. It was as I've said a small town and thus a small library and one can't spend every hour of childhood reading the same Lives of the Great Inventors or In Washington's Youth or any of the like dusty children's volumes otherwise intended for boys my age. Sooner or later, sooner in my case, one has to head out for fresh pasture.
Another thing about small towns? Everybody pretty much knows everybody.
I don't know what my mother made of my muddled telling of having been refused a book, but something in the way of it being done struck a nerve and so before I understood what was happening she had turned the car around and we were back in town and back at the library. I wanted to crawl through the floorboards and disappear. When my mother got out of the car and told me to come with her I was contemplating faking a heart attack or running away from home, anything to avoid the humiliation of going back inside and or being confronted about my status as an illegitimate user of the institution. I was sure we would be jailed for fraud at least. And yet I was a good, well brought up little puss and so in she went and after her I followed, eyes cast down to the creaking wooden floor.
Everybody knows everybody, remember? So even though I don't know that my Mum had ever set foot in that library before, up to the counter we went and she greeted the librarian by name and the librarian returned the greeting.
And then my mother, my shy, tired, unkempt mother wearing a snap-front apron and a headscarf tied in a knot asked to see the book I was trying to check out. It was still on the desk. My mother looked at it and asked the librarian why I couldn't have it. The librarian explained in low tones what the objection was. I couldn't quite hear over the blood roaring in my head, but I did hear the word "prostitution" at one point and the suggestion that I was too little understand the book anyway. The librarian addressed my mother familiarly as "Stella," not "Mrs. Craft" as she might have done with a regular patron or fellow church-goer. I suspect that pissed Stella off too. Whatever was said, I remember my mother putting one chubby fist against the bone of her hip -- never a good sign -- and then, calling the librarian by her full married name, telling her roughly the following:
"You know who I am. You know where we live. You don't have to let my kid take out books at all if you don't want him to. He has for years now and he always treats the books respectfully and he's never late bringing them back, is he? No. And you know he can read already better than most and already reads beyond his grade and that, so I'm going to tell you what: like I say, you know who I am and you know he's my son and I'm telling you right now he can read any goddamned book he wants as far as I'm concerned and its is not your place to tell him he can't and if you tell me I'm wrong we will go and we'll have to just figure out how to get him what he wants somewhere else, but what he reads is not now and never will be up to you. Am I understood? Now, either give him the book or don't. I have to get home and start supper."
And I went home with my first Don Quixote.
What I was actually able to make of a thousand page novel originally published in Spanish in 1615, I couldn't tell you now. Probably not all that much. I can tell you that it was the first book I studied on my own as close as a Bible. I can tell you that I made sure that I stopped frequently to understand the English (it was probably either the Smollett or Ormsby translation.) I confess I do not think I finished it despite checking it back out twice. In fact I don't think I read it straight through until I read the Samuel Putnam translation -- still good! -- in my early thirties, or roughly the time I was still kissing great gays, just to come full circle.
And so our heroes can be, among other things, long dead, fictional, foolish, kissed, forgotten, but always and sometimes unexpectedly brave. That's the whole point of them. The great critic and essayist Simon Leys in a lovely essay title Quixotism says this lovely thing:
"When Don Quixote lay dying, sadly cured of his splendid illusion, ultimately divested of his dream, Sancho found he had inherited his master's faith; he had acquired it simply as one would catch a disease -- through the contagion of fidelity and love.
Because he converted Sancho, Don Quixote will never die."
Isn't that lovely?
As Ive mentioned before, my mother died earlier this year. She was ninety three years old. If I owe my survival and my sense of hard-won self-worth to Harry Hay and all the old queers who came before and fought so that I might live aloud, if I can trace my love of serious literature to that first, forbidden book and count among my first teachers Miguel Cervantes, a busted, broken old veteran and 16th Century hack who in late middle age wrote one of the humane masterpieces of fiction, then I must close with a word of thanks to Stella Cookson Craft, my shy, brave, feisty, fierce little mother. She gave me life, her unconditional love, and my best example of what it means to stand up when needs be. In closing then, I stand as she taught me to, and thank you all for coming.
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