Soon Art gives in and acknowledges his fascination with Arthur and his homosexual desire: “My position was that I was crazy about him. I wanted to be like Arthur Lecomte” (49). Later Art decisively admits, “I was in love with Arthur Lecomte. I longed for him” (163). This admission manifests in active desire, forcing him to redefine his understanding of sexual cathexis to encompass the possibility of women and men as love objects:
I had never before given a man’s body the regard I now gave his. . . . I did not have the vocabulary to describe it, as if such words as thigh, breast, navel, nipple, were erotically feminine, and could not apply here. . . . I realized that in looking at him I was trying to subtract the hair, the pads of muscle, the outline of the cock between his legs, the glittering stubble on his cheek. I stopped doing this. (162)
Once Art abdicates his usual role as dominator he is ready to partially let go of his hypermasculine socialization: “My sides ached with rapid respiration and this feeling of a heedless desire to be fucked. . . . I asked him not to stop, and he did his best, but then I started to cry. He held me” (215–16). Even after sex with Arthur, Art does not consider himself to be homosexual, suggesting that what he desires is something beyond sex, perhaps a relinquishment of his dominator thinking, a reconfiguring of how he operates in the world as a man: “As often as possible, we went to bed. I did not consider myself to be gay. . . . I was always nervous, full of energy, afraid. The city was new again, and newly dangerous” (241).
Art’s relationship with Arthur compromises his relationship with both Cleveland and his father since neither one approves of the relationship. At one point Art is on the phone with his dad, the last time he talks to him in the novel, while Arthur performs oral sex on Art, symbolizing the severance between Art and his father: “‘I’m sorry, Dad,’ I said, feeling myself slip, slip, through fingers and fingers, into the pitiless wave. I fell back onto the bed; Arthur very precisely hung up on my father. He stood, wiped the corner of his mouth, then put me back together and zipped me up” (245). Cleveland’s death signifies another break with patriarchal masculinity for the narrator, as Cleveland dies mishandling a baby doll, a symbol of his association with Art’s father:
He lost his footing and fell head over heels over head, the spotlight hit him strangely, and he threw a brief, enormous shadow against the perfect clouds, and the hair seemed to billow out from the shadow’s head like a black banner. For one second Cleveland stood higher than the helicopter that tormented him; he loomed over the building, over me, and over the city of secret citizens and homes beneath his feet, and the five-foot shadow of the doll kicked and screamed. (286)
The death of Cleveland and symbolic death of Art’s father as an influence on Art leave Art feeling lost: “I no longer had a clear impression of where the alliances and fissures lay among the people I knew, of who stood on which side of me and in what relation; which was tantamount, when you consider it, to my forgetting who I was” (289). He realizes that a side of him if not dead is severely diminished and that “there’s going to be. Well. A funeral” (293). Art’s alienation from his former life and eventual lackluster relationship with Arthur leaves him feeling asexual: “I was beginning to doubt that I now had sexual feelings at all, of any prefix” (279). Consequently, Art vaguely realizes that the turn his life has taken is not really just about sex:
I know I loved Cleveland and Arthur, because they changed me; I know that Arthur lies behind the kindly, absent distance I maintain from other people, that behind each sudden, shocking breach of it lies Cleveland; I have from them my vocabulary, my dress, my love of idle talk. I find in myself no ready trace of Phlox. . . . But as I have found that I may fall quite completely in love with a man—kiss, weep, give gifts—I have also discovered the trace a woman leaves, that Phlox left, and it is better than a man’s. My father I will never see again, Cleveland is dead, Arthur is now, I believe, on Majorca. But because I can find them so easily in myself, I no longer . . . need them. One can learn, for instance, to father oneself. (295)
This passage delineates a new way to live in the world that can best be described as a sort of feminine masculinity or queer masculinity that is not dependent on patriarchy and does not necessarily have anything to do with whom one decides to have sex. Rather, queer masculinities depend on an acknowledgment and embracement of multiple gendered and sexual selves.
In Manhood for Amateurs Chabon’s feelings about gender and sexuality are dramatically more certain than they were when he was writing The Mysteries of Pittsburgh reflected in the narrator Art Bechstein. No longer does Chabon seem to be searching for a comfortable identity that reflects the way he feels. Instead, he confidently attacks hypermasculinity and offers up feminine masculinity as the better alternative. Similar to Art Bechstein, Chabon associates his own father with an outdated hypermasculinity: “My father didn’t hug me a lot or kiss me. . . . When I got older and took an interest in the art of being a grown-up, it proved hard to find other, nonphysical kinds of intimacy with him. He didn’t like to share his anxieties about his work, relationships, or life” (Manhood 15–16). Chabon describes his father’s very American male behavior as “an essential element of the business of being a man: to flood everyone around you in a great radiant arc of bullshit” (129). For Chabon the stakes are grave:
I have no doubt that the male impulse to downplay his own lack of fitness for a job, to refuse to acknowledge his inadequacy, insufficiency, or lack of preparation, has been and continues to be responsible for a large share of the world’s woes, in the form of the accidents, errors, and calamities that result from specific or overarching acts of faking it, a grim encyclopedia of which the G. W. Bush administration readily affords. There is also the more subtle damage that is done repeatedly to boys who grow up learning from their fathers and the men around them the tragic lesson that failure is not a human constant but a kind off aberration of gender, a flaw in a man, to be concealed. . . . We are born lost and spend vast stretches of our lives on wrong turns and backtracking. In this respect, male fronting resembles a number of other behaviors typically ascribed to men and masculinity, in that it proceeds by denying essential human conditions or responses—say public displays of mutual affection, grief, or triumph—marking them as feminine, infantile, socially unacceptable. (129–30)
For Chabon, being a good man and father requires one to embrace those traditionally feminine qualities associated with femininity and motherhood: “I define being a good father in precisely the same terms that we ought to define being a good mother” (18).
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh represents a sort of abreaction of the implied author Michael Chabon as he works through his sexual and masculine insecurities. Rigid sexual and gendered binaries restrict the narrator Art Bechstein from embracing his multiple gendered and sexual selves embodied in the novel in the characters: Arthur, Phlox, Cleveland, and his father Joe, the latter two representing hypermasculine Wild Men described in Robert Bly’s book Iron John. Art eventually disavows his father as a symbol of hereditary patriarchy and embraces both Arthur and Cleveland as important aspects of himself with which he can enact a third option for a gendered and sexual self, a sort of feminine masculine man. Chabon’s first novel lays a foundation for his later work, particularly his nonfiction essay collection Manhood for Amateurs, in which he confidently impugns hypermasculinity, exhorting men to open themselves up emotionally or risk contributing to the world’s and their own assured destruction.
Notes
Works Cited
Bly, Robert. Iron John. 1990. New York: Vintage, 1992. Print.
Chabon, Michael. Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son. New York: Harper, 2009. Print.
———. Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing along the Borderlands. San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2008. Print.
———. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. New York: Harper, 1989. Print.
Colbran, Louise. A Dangerous Fiction: Subverting Hegemonic Masculini
ty through the Novels of Michael Chabon and Tom Wolfe. Bern: Peter Lang, 2012. Print.
Kimmel, Michael S. “Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame, and Silence in the Construction of Gender Identity.” Feminism and Masculinities. Ed. Peter F. Murphy. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. 182–99. Print.
Paz, Octavio. The Labyrinth of Solitude. Trans. Lysander Kemp, Yara Milos, and Rachel Phillips Belash. New York: Grove, 1985. Print.
Toombs, Charles P. “Black-Gay Man Chaos in Another Country.” Re-viewing James Baldwin: Things Not Seen. Ed. D. Quentin Miller. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2000. 105–27. Print.
Warner, Michael. The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life. New York: Free P, 1999. Print.
Wilchins, Riki. Queer Theory, Gender Theory: An Instant Primer. Los Angeles: Alyson, 2004. Print.
1. Michael S. Kimmel defines hypermasculinity as a form of U.S. American masculinity based on racism, sexism, and homophobia and marked by violent rapaciousness (191–92). Riki Wilchins equates hypermasculinity with “emotional toughness and sexual virility” (114). Charles P. Toombs notes, “Super-masculinity” stems from “the dominant culture’s superficial and inauthentic definitions of manhood and masculinity,” resulting in “a lack of tolerance, respect, or acceptance of difference” (109–10). Bly’s vision of ideal masculinity is essentially hypermasculine.
2. Heteronormativity denotes the idea that heterosexuality is normal and other sexualities are not. Michael Warner says of heteronormativity, “Why would anyone want to be normal. If normal just means within a common statistical range, then there is no reason to be normal or not. By that standard, we might say that it is normal to have health problems, bad breath, and outstanding debt” (54).
3. Chabon’s choice to name both his protagonist and his protagonist’s male lover as variants of the same name suggests that perhaps Arthur represents an aspect of Art himself and possibly Chabon, too.
4. Hegemonic masculinity refers to the notion that prevailing definitions of manhood, often hypermasculine, stem from accepted images of maleness and male behavior vectored by multivalent forces such as the media and other men. These definitions also provide the margins in which nonhegemonically masculine men exist, oftentimes in states of otherness.
Part IV
Chabon’s American Expression
Chapter 14
Write What You Don’t Know
David McKay Powell
Wonder Boys and Therapeutic Creative Writing
In the afterword to Gentlemen of the Road (2007), Michael Chabon notes that Gentlemen was an odd story for an individual of his “literary training, generation, and pretentions” to write (199). A swashbuckling adventure story set a millennium ago in Khazaria on the Caspian Sea, written under the working title “Jews with Swords,” it was clearly at odds with the mode of his earlier career: no divorces or creative angst—but ample horseback swordplay. Chabon had cut his teeth—in The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), Wonder Boys (1995), and the stories of A Model World (1991)—writing about “the eternal fates of contemporary short-story characters,” which he describes as “disappointment, misfortune, loss, hard enlightenment, moments of bleak grace. Divorce; death; illness; violence, random and domestic; divorce; bad faith; deception and self-deception; love and hate between fathers and sons, men and women, friends and lovers; the transience of beauty and desire; divorce” (199). In other words, stories based on his own life. In his early writing, as per the self-touring prime directive of twentieth-century writing instruction, Chabon was writing what he knew.
The “write what you know” dictum has deep roots in modern creative writing pedagogy, and Chabon, who took his MFA from the University of California at Irvine, spent his early career doing exactly that. In the Gentlemen afterword, he claims repeatedly that by writing about the long-ago-and-far-away, he wasn’t in any way disowning his earlier method. Rather, like many of his characters, he was simply heading out “in search of a little adventure” (200). Interestingly, in the course of this defense, he suggests that Gentlemen was his first foray into speculative fiction and that his pre-Gentlemen works are best characterized as “late-century naturalism.” But Gentlemen of the Road was not Chabon’s first foray into speculative, fantasy, or genre fiction. The Final Solution (2004) is a detective story, as is The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007)—a detective story in a parallel reality, no less. While The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) is faithful to its historical context, New York City at early to midcentury, the rich fantasy lives of its title characters are essential to understanding the levels of reality that permeate that world. And the stories of his second collection of short fiction, Werewolves in Their Youth (1999), while frequently visiting the themes and events common to his earlier work—coming of age, father-son dynamics, and, of course, divorce—they do so with a much freer imagining of real life; they aren’t naturalistic so much as they are concerned with the intersection of the psychologically real with the really real—the trials, as per the title selection, of being a juvenile lycanthrope in the modern world. While in the Gentlemen afterword Chabon suggests that that narrative was the moment in his career that he chose to go “off in search of a little adventure,” it wasn’t. His work had become increasingly speculative for the decade prior to Gentlemen. In describing how he came to the Khazar story, Chabon lumps Wonder Boys in with his naturalistic narratives, though he distinguishes it by noting that it is the novel that he “may always be most fond of” because it “saved [me]” from creative struggles that nearly brought his career to a halt (200). But Wonder Boys saved him, not only by allowing him to prove to himself and others that his career had not stalled, but also apparently by freeing his creative energy to write beyond his personal experience. Writing Wonder Boys, the story of a foundering writer passing the torch to the next generation, allowed Chabon to pass the torch from his first career—Chabon writing veiled renderings of his own experience—to his second—Chabon unbound, writing whatever he very well pleased. And if he seems to have been slowly making his way back to the mode of his earlier career with his recent Telegraph Avenue (2012)—middle-class angst, marital strife—the dozen or so years after Wonder Boys saw Chabon experimenting radically with his subject matter, spurning the primacy of personal experience and recognizable landscapes to seek truth in fantasy.
This is not to suggest that Wonder Boys itself is fantastic. It isn’t. On the surface, the novel follows the mode of Chabon’s earlier career. It is the story of a fallen idol, Grady Tripp, once an up-and-coming giant of American literature whose career has hit a standstill. He tries to mask his failure from those around him—his agent, Terry Crabtree; his boarder/groupie, Hannah Green; his student, James Leer. But the story arcs so that he must inevitably reveal his failure to all. This trajectory follows Chabon’s own career to that point: young success with The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and his early short stories, and a career stunted by an abortive attempt at a follow-up novel, Fountain City, unfinished at more than 1,500 pages of manuscript, that he officially scrapped in 1992. But in Wonder Boys, Chabon offers up a requiem for his early career and reinvents himself. In the novel, Tripp’s decline parallels Chabon’s early career, and the ascent of Tripp’s ablest charge, James Leer, is a prelude for the direction in which Chabon would proceed. James is starting to build a promising career not writing strictly from personal experience, but rather writing a romance titled The Love Parade, wherein a young man on the lam for murder finds himself in the thick of Hollywood’s yesteryear.
The “write what you know” principle is connected, as Mark McGurl describes it in The Program Era, with the principle of reflexive modernity, allowing student writers to “understand themselves to be living, not lives simply, but life stories of which they are the protagonists.” “To be subject to reflexive modernity,” McGurl claims, “is to feel a ‘compulsion for the manufacture, self-design, and self-staging’ of a biography and, indeed, for the obsessive ‘reading’ of that biography even as it is be
ing written” (12). In other words, writing helps us understand our place in the world by helping us write the metaphorical texts of our lives. It is a principle much taken for granted among the institutionalized methods of creative writing instruction, and it is a therapeutic rationale for creative writing as an academic endeavor. But an established literary novelist writing of Khazars with swords flies in the face of reflexivity just as much as an undergraduate in the early 1990s writing of murder and silver age Hollywood.
Chabon is among the most successful of writing program graduates, with a Pulitzer Prize and a string of critically lauded, commercially successful novels to his credit. He comments regularly on his experiences in a graduate creative writing program and wonders why people question such an institution, “as if [his] having come through one were a fluky detour like doing a hitch in a Goofy suit at Disneyland, and the institution itself a compound of rumor and scam” (Manhood 231). His first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, was his thesis at Irvine. One of Chabon’s professors recommended Mysteries to an agent, who agreed to represent it, and it was published to quiet acclaim. “I’m kind of a poster boy for the more tangible benefits that a good writing program can bestow,” he writes:
But the most important thing that happened to me as a graduate student in creative writing had little directly to do with writing or publishing or agents or subject matter or style. When I started the program in 1985, I was a little shit; by the time I left Irvine, I was not just a published novelist, I was something that had begun, inwardly, to resemble a man. (232)
Michael Chabon's America Page 30
