I found myself falling in love not only with this scamp, but with the writer. Eagle, and it was by Andrew Sinclair (Little, Brown & Company, 1988). As I was struggling through this briar-patch of complexes and repressions and hidden childhood scars, I recalled a biography I read years ago, one about another complex character - the producer Sam Spiegel.
My take on it is that one who presumes to write the life of another (especially a fellow writer) should stay away - far far away - from his subject. Biographers, he says, are "literary liars." Amen. From the get-go, Rechy tells us that the only honorable writers are those who make fiction. Which is strange, since we know he isn't a complete dolt in the Truth department. The surprise in all this is that Rechy opens the door to this speculative brain-pain nonsense. On street corners he felt strong and in control." O bother. Why does he still on occasion have to step out of the board room or the fancy study and turn a trick or two for some bucks?Īccording to the author, it's all a matter of faulty wiring in the writer's psychological fuse-box: "As in the past," he tells us, "when feeling particular defenseless, Rechy turned to hustling. In Casillo's hands, Rechy comes across as a veritable cornucopia of psychological torment.īut where, we may ask, does all this hustling - outlined for us in lurid detail - come from, anyway? He's successful, famous, respected in certain circles, has enough to live on. I had to have had sexual feelings for those actors, but I think it was all so repressed and contained. Unlike some homosexual men who never had sexual feelings for women, John always had just a little touch, and I think it confused him sometimes.Įven Rechy joins the psychological merry-go- round by speculating on his affection for the movies of Alan Ladd, for god's sake: Melodie Johnson Howe, on the other hand, gives with the "little touch" theorem: It was hard for John to establish a romantically emotional attachment with any woman because that would be a threat to the loyalty to his mother. Rechy's friend Marsha Kinder is quick to find not smoldering talent but Oedipal shadows under the bush: Rechy, says Casillo, turned to literature "in order to express his unique and smoldering talent." Smoldering talent! This often perfervid writing put us in mind of Mark Twain's sage advice, "When you catch an adjective, kill it." Or maybe it's his Mexican background, with its fallen nobility? Could it be growing up in depression El Paso - not only with a blustering father and a mother who wanted to own him, but the poverty, the wind, the dust? Did Roberto, Rechy's unloving dad, scar him fatally by having him sit on his lap when he was ten? Why is Rechy the Hustler so stand-offish to those who pay him for his favors, declining even a simple buss? Why doesn't Rechy like for people to put their hands on him - not there, but on his neck, his shoulders, his arms? What's going on with him and those women he hangs out with? And howcum he looks so buff when he should be wheezing around like the rest of us geriatric cases?Ĭasillo dwells lovingly on "Rechy's exterior persona" as contrasted to the sensitive, hurt, lonely boy within. Unfortunately, this one is heavy, I mean leaden, with neo-Freudian speculation. Maybe this guy has some tricks to teach me, I thought, my proximate decade up there in the high sixties breathing heavily down my neck.įor that reason, if for no other, I gave Outlaw my all.
Did my eyes bug out at that one (he was born two years before I was). It was a photograph from five years ago, and he looked like he was just inching past forty. Nor was it one of those leather- and- navel shots from the City of Night era. It wasn't a photograph of him in briefs, posing for one of those thinly disguised hunk magazines from forty years ago that he so favored. Whatever it is, Rechy is not my kind of guy, although I must say, the picture of him facing page 137 quite knocked me off my pins. So I should be a sucker for Rechy's writing, no? Where does he go wrong? Maybe it's the way he writes "didnt" for "didn't," "hes" for "he's,""youll" for "you'll." Things like that can get to us English majors.
0 kommentar(er)
