Lambda Rising
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A Contemporary Review o f Gay & Lesbian Literature
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The Reader Alone Redeems the System
TELLING STORIES ABOUT
WRITING AND PUBLISHING
by John Preston
I became a writer because I love telling people stories.
I ’ve been lucky in my career and I Ve been able to publish in
many different areas, but no matter what kind of writing I
do, the interchange between myself and an audience must
always exist if I am going to practice my craft with any skill,
certainly with any of that care which readers want, and
whose presence--or absence-they are so good at sensing.
When I’m writing historical essays, I speak with the
voice of a professor, conscious of a class of students in front
of me, If I’m creating adventure novels for young men, I
picture a group of them sitting cross-legged with me on a
lawn, waiting to hear how the hero is going to rescue the lad
in distress. And when I’m writing erotica, I have about
myself the air of one sharing whispered secrets in a lover’s
ear.
The complaints about publishing today strike home
with me because of these very needs of mine. It seems the
industry makes us forget too often the importance of that
intercourse between author and audience.
Books are caught in high-level negotiations between
agents and publishers; and percentage points of royalties and
the split of subsidiary rights-things most readers aren’t even
aware of-seem to become the overwhelming factor deciding
their fates. Corporate publishing has created a gauntlet
which a writer must run. There are editorial departments
which seem to store up arsenals of insensitivity and publicity
offices in which only the most callous functionaries seem to
thrive.
I have actually been blessed with much good luck in
my own publishing career and have avoided experiencing the
worst of the horror stories. Still, I have enough scars to
understand full well why writers spill their bile in columns for
“My Say” in PUBLISHERS WEEKLY and the one member
ship I never allow to lapse is the National Writers Union.
What makes the publishing process feel all the more
grueling to writers is the fact that it usually takes at least a
year to go from manuscript to the bookstore and, during that
year, the author may only hear the reponse of the people in
the publisher’s office. Instead of being able to wonder at the
magic of storytelling, an author is faced with requests to cut
out five pages to save on paper costs. Rather than receiving
response to ideas and emotional support for writing the next
book, the author gets memos explaining why there will be no
advertising for the first.
Then, finally, there is actually a book. And, of course,
then there are the critics.
Nothing I have ever read has communicated well
enough the brutality of contemporary American book cri
ticism. When one of our books is published, I and every writer
I know has shared the wonder of holding that volume,
realizing that we created those words that readers might find
them. It’s a heady experience, to have that first copy in one’s
hands, and it’s a moment of pleasure that is negated by the
reviewer who takes it upon his or her self to question its very
right to exist.
By this point the author has lost all sense of why he or
she has even bothered to write the book. The pressures on us
to see ourselves not as artists, and not even as craftspeople,
but as commercial entrepreneurs is tremendous these days
and it comes from the experience of having gone through
these obstacles. Our work no longer seems to be anything
special, it’s become labor from which someone else wants a
profit and which might hopefully produce an income for us.
It is the reader alone who redeems the entire system.
What consistently reminds me of my original purpose-
-that desire to be a storyteller-are the letters I receive from
readers. I have wanted to give in, there are many invitations
to venality, to thinking about my work as only the way I earn
my salary. Readers are the ones who bring all of it back to me,
and who demand my best work.
Even when I’ve written pseudonymous mass market
novels-something I have, in fact, done for the money at times
when I needed it—I have gotten fan mail from high school boys
Continued on page 10
One Hectic Romance, One Delicate Life
by David Bergman
Gay writers have been afflicted with
what could be called the St. Sebastian
Syndrome-dying just when their genius was
coming into full bloom. Christopher Marlowe.
Hart Crane, Rene Crevel all suffered the St.
THE ORTON DIARIES, edited by John Lahr (Harper & Row, 304 pp. $19.95).
JOURNALS OF DENTON WELCH, edited by Michael De-la-Noy (Penguin, 378 pp. $10.95).
THE STORIES OF DENTON WELCH, edited by Robert Phillips (Dutton, 377 pp. $24.95).
THE COMPLETE PLAYS OF JOE ORTON, by Joe Orton (Grove Press, 448 pp. $9.95).
Sebastian Syndrome along with Joe Orton
and Denton Welch whose diaries have rec
ently been published. These journals testify
to their genius and vividly recreate the last
years of their lives.
Orton's life, no doubt, is the more sen
sational and has recently been turned into the
movie PRICK UP YOUR EARS, based on
John Lahr’s excellent 1978 biography. At 34
with two West End hits to his credit and
having completed his masterpiece WHAT
THE BUTLER SAW, Orton was bludgeoned
to death by his lover of 16 years, Kenneth
Halliwell, who then took his own life. Now the
diaries in which Halliwell claimed “all will be
explained” have appeared. They explain a
good deal, but hardly make plain their
hideous end.
Of the two, Halliwell was the older,
better educated and wealthier-at least at
first. However, as Orton became more succ
essful, Halliwell seemed to regress. Hall
iwell's wit, intelligence and literary skill
(Orton relied on his criticism up to the very
end) faded, and he became increasingly a
“middle aged nonentity,” as a friend dared to
call him to his face. Orton enjoyed humi
liating Halliwell. ridiculing his increasing
sexual difficulties, bating him in social situa
tions.
One senses in the diary (which closes
just a few days before the murder) that Orton
is aware of his doom and is inviting death.
“Life is difficult,” he writes “but not altoge
ther intolerable...provided one spent the time
drugged or drunk.” And in the last months,
Orton and Halliwell went off to Morrocco
where Orton engaged in a perpetual orgy of
drug taking and sex with teenage boys. At
one point he downs two Nembutal, which he
prophetically calls “Kenneth’s secret suicide
pills,” for it was Nembutal that Halliwell
used to kill himself. When Orton leaves Morr-
occo, the young boy whom he has fancied
weeps, certain that Orton never would return.
Yet it would be a mistake to overlook
Orton’s genuine love of life and peculiarly
melancholy affection for the beauties of the
world. “How incredible,” he writes, "to really
see a nude fifteen-year-old. The small waist,
sudden jutting of the bum; it wasn’t just sex,
it was the aesthetic experience...as if he were
on a canvas by a French impressionist-some
painter of the stature of Renoir. There was a
faint flush of hair in the small of his back,
spreading out to the top of the buttock.”
Nor should Orton's sensational end
divert attention from his remarkable plays.
WHAT THE BUTLER SAW is the finest
English comedy since THE IMPORTANCE
•
OF BEING EARNEST, and it would be a
pity if the twentieth anniversary of Orton’s
death passed without a major revival of it.
Denton Welch died nearly twenty
years before Orton, but it might as well have
Continued on page 10
Tee Corinne on Women in the A rts - page 3
(Tra* THE ORTON DIARIES)
(Tnm THE JOURNALS OF DENTON WELCH)