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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (Dec. 1, 1986)
The gay lives we lead The Lost Language of Cranes by David Leavitt (Alfred A. Knopf, $17.95) By W.C. McRae David Leavitt’s book of short stories, Fam ily Dancing, was a wonderful collection of vignettes on modem American family life, often — but not always — dealing with gay themes. Leavitt’s first novel, The Lost Language o f Cranes, while disappointing, is an interesting youthful exercise on familiar themes that nonetheless reaffirms Leavitt as an honest documentor of the modem gay lifestyle. The Lost Language o f Cremes treats Leavitt's literary turf is not homosex fantasy, not the pre-gay homosexual underground, not the chilled, flip rituals of upper-class gay urbanity. Rather, Leavitt writes of workaday gays and straights, in workaday situations, condensing from it perplexity, pathos, and complexity familiar from lived experience. Leavitt’s considerable strength as a writer is to take the world we live in and the people we are, and put it through the literary mill, ex tracting from it forms and characters which are recognisably real. Leavitt’s work is inherently political because he destigmatizes the gay lives we lead by making the ordinari ness of these lives the subject — and object — of his writing. an element of tragedy still exists in the time and suffering spent because they have no way to benefit from similar struggles of wo men before them. This is particularly true in Patience and Sarah, where the lovers, hav ing no access to lesbian history, must estab lish a relationship for which they see no precedent As a writer, Isabel Miller has matured in the seventeen years since Patience and Sareih. She has significantly strengthened her use of dialogue, created a more diverse set of characters, and presented these characters with a subtle humor that sharpens the impact of their experience. Her male characters, though, lack depth. B ut as a woman who has adm ittedly enjoyed many "Great" male writ ers despite their depiction o f inauthentic, one-dimensional female characters, I found this weakness in Miller somewhat refreshing. In a society where isolation and silence pose a critical threat to the lives of women, Isabel Miller is a creator of models. Her characters are independent and willful, they are creative and resourceful, b u t most im portantly, they are women who love women. Whether the love among women is sexual or n o t it enables to understand, value and pre serve the gifts we bring to this world. Gifts that so often have been misrepresented, distorted or lo st For women, writers like Miller are not a luxury, they are a necessity. ' Among the company of women The Love o f Good Women, by Isabel Miller. (The Naiad Press [ 1986] Paperback $8.95) universal gay themes: coming ou t and look ing for Mr. Right in an indifferent world. In Leavitt’s variation, the “coming out” is done by the protagonist Phillip’s father. And the fairly predictable love ’em, leave ’em revile ’em rejection story has, as an added stinger, the recognition that Phillip probably didn’t really deserve his Mr. Right, anyway. After years of a quiet life in the closet and the porn theatre, Phillip’s father is forced to face his “ homosexual tendencies” when Phil lip avows his own gayness to his parents. Phillilp’s mother turns her back on her son, while his father beats an agonized retreat to the Bijoux. The reason for all this gay sounding-off is Phillip’s pride in his too- perfect-to-be-true boyfriend, the beatific E llio t But soon the ideal lover tires of Phillip’s bumptious energies and disappears to Paris with vapid aplomb, leaving Phillip high, dry, bitter, and in the midst of family turmoil. Leavitt’s characters inhabit literary New York: everyone either works in publishing or is finishing grad school. These bright young things, beneath the surface glimmer, are in secure, unhappy, and cynical. But rather than showing that their shared fantasies, lifestyles, or illusions are empty or false, Leavitt ham strings his characters by simply making them unworthy of their lifestyles. The problems with The Lost Language o f Cranes, which are considerable, have to do with character and plot For instance, there are incompatible functions that the character of Phillip must perform. Phillip is often too clearly representative of the author; he is given both fairly undigested clumps of politi cal idealism to recite to his family, and is allowed to wallow in the most depressing of realizations. And yet in social situations, Phillip is meant to seem the bumbling, over-compensating striver that alienates the too-good-to-be-true E llio t It’s as if he were at once a Ralph Nader- type gay idealogue, and a make-you-wince Gomer Pyle. These two symptomatic traits add up to more than one character. In his short stories, Leavitt created believ able characters. But here, the further the story gets from events in Phillip's head — and the more dialogue it requires — the less convinc ing it becomes. Unfortunately, many of Leavitt's characters are the sum of the words they have to say. Leavitt’s characters lack characteristics, and events exist in the novel, one suspects, simply because they happened to the author: the scenes in bars are stilted and uneasy; the scenes with Phillip’s parents are forced and didactic. Yet the novel remains affecting. Leavitt’s situations are very real. Parts of the novel make one cringe in recognition. You feel implicated. For instance, the sex scenes are diverting and arousing because they describe sex between recognisable entities, not sexual demi-gods. Gay literature has too long been the pro vince of sexual fantasy and social exotica. Just Out, December, 1986 Today, as in the past, women suffer an absence of models. Historically, our exclusion from academics and our isolation in the tra ditional role of wife and mother has under mined our growth by lim iting our ability to build upon one another’s visions. Women have not failed to contribute to the processes of cultural and social development but rather their contributions are seldom recognized and are not m et thereby, easily accessible. Isabel Miller understands that it is critical for women to share their visions and become models for one another. This understanding is at the heart of her newest book, The Love o f Good Women, and her earlier work, Patience and Sarah. Both books celebrate women, who through their relationships with one another find themselves a wealth of strength and creativ ity, but Patience and Sarah is the more lim ited in scope of the two. Set in an early 19th century New England farm community; P&S is a love story between two women who challenge not only the prejudices of their society but their own fears about their sexual desires for each other. The Love o f Good Women also contains elements of a love story and, in part, is the story of a lesbian's ack nowledgement and fulfillm ent of her sexual identity. But The Love o f Good Women pri marily tells of a camaraderie that develops among a group of women during the latter part of World War II, which changes their lives irrevocably. The Love o f Good Women contrasts the perspectives of two very different characters: Gertrude and Milly. Resourceful, hard-working Gertrude is devoted to her husband, Earl, who has abused and belittled her for so long that she has no sense of her own worth. Milly, a self-confident, self-acknowledged lesbian, wants to free herself from her marriage to Earl’s brother Barney. Gertrude takes a job at a factory where, among the company of wo men, she reclaims her self-esteem. Milly turns inward and finds the strength to main tain her sexual integrity in a society that con spires against her ever having a satisfying relationship with another woman. Through the eyes of these two women we see the ignorance, fears, and prejudices of an op pressive society, but we also see the strength that women bring to each other, enabling them not only to survive, but to grow. Gertrude and Milly’s struggle against mari tal and societal constraints in order to establish control over their lives is reminiscent of Mme. Pontellier’s struggle in The Awakening. This remains an important and recurring theme in women's literature simply because it contin ues to address a central conflict in the lives of many women. Unfortunately, Mme. Pontellier had no allies in her struggle, and her sense of isolation finally drives her to suicide. 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