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. The
characters in both of Miller’s books save their
lives through the connections they make, but
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