THE BOOK OF LIES
by Felice Picano
Best Gay Men’s Fiction
Lambda Literary Finalist
ReQueered Tales
Los Angeles • Toronto
2020
The Book of Lies
by Felice Picano
Copyright © 1998 by Felice Picano.
Foreword to 2020 edition: copyright © 2020 by David Bergman.
Afterword to 2020 edition: copyright © 2020 by Felice Picano.
Cover design: Dawné Dominique, DusktilDawn Designs.
First American edition: 1998
This edition: ReQueered Tales, October 2020
ReQueered Tales version 1.45
Kindle edition ASIN: B0xxxxxxxx
ePub edition ISBN-13: 978-1-951092-31-3
Print edition ISBN-13: 978-1-951092-32-0
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Also by FELICE PICANO
NOVELS
Smart as the Devil (1975)
Eyes (1975)
The Mesmerist (1977)
The Lure (1979)
Late in the Season (1981)
House of Cards (1984)
To the Seventh Power (1989)
Dryland's End (1995)
Like People in History (1995)
Looking Glass Lives (1998)
The Book of Lies (1998)
Onyx (2001)
Justify My Sins (2018)
OTHER FICTION
An Asian Minor (1981)
Slashed to Ribbons in Defense of Love (1983)
The New York Years (2000)
Twentieth Century Un-limited (2012)
MEMOIRS
Ambidextrous: The Secret Lives of Children (1985)
Men Who Loved Me (1989)
A House on the Ocean, A House on the Bay (1997)
Fred in Love (2005)
Art and Sex in Greenwich Village (2007)
True Stories: Portraits from My Past (2011)
True Stories Too: People and Places From My Past(2014)
Nights at Rizzoli (2014)
FELICE PICANO
Felice Picano is the author of more than thirty books of poetry, fiction, memoirs, nonfiction, and plays. His work has been translated into many languages and several of his titles have been national and international bestsellers. He is considered a founder of modern gay literature along with the other members of the Violet Quill. Picano also began and operated the SeaHorse Press and Gay Presses of New York for fifteen years. His first novel was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Since then he’s been nominated for and/or won dozens of literary awards.
A five-time Lambda Literary Award nominee, Picano’s books include the best-selling novels The Book of Lies, Like People in History, and Looking Glass Lives as well as the literary memoirs Men Who Loved Me and A House on the Ocean, A House on the Bay. Along with Andrew Holleran, Robert Ferro, Edmund White, and George Whitmore, he founded the Violet Quill Club to promote and increase the visibility of gay authors and their works. In 2009, the Lambda Literary Foundation awarded Picano its Lifetime Achievement/Pioneer Award. Originally from New York, the author now lives in Los Angeles.
Praise for THE BOOK OF LIES
“The Book of Lies is funny, dark, sexy, shocking, and yes, smart. Set in the near future (‘decades after Stonewall’), the novel tells of a young scholar trying to make his academic bones on the literary bodies of the ‘Purple Circle’. Picano skewers the pedagogically pretentious with ease and wit. A wonderful novel, with some of Picano's best writing.”
— Bay Area Reporter
“Overall, the mature writing of Felice Picano and fellow ex-Violet Quill member, Edmund White, confirms what has been long suspected: the gay writing that has emerged from America over the last three decades is as consistently brilliant as writing has got. As a critique of the catastrophic changes undergone by the gay community, The Book of Lies is fascinating; as a brilliant story with a vicious twist, it’s superb. A highly recommended read.”
— George Lear,
Purefiction.com
“Based on Picano's involvement with the Violet Quill Club (which included Edmund White and Christopher Cox), this is an absorbing Henry James-style comedy of manners about how even when some writers find their way out of the closet, others still get left behind.”
— The Mail on Sunday
“Leave it to Felice Picano to add a walloping dose of melodrama and intrigue to a tale already redrawing genre boundaries … What Picano does is take an academic mystery (subject matter that might have proved tedious or solipsistic in lesser hands) and morphs it into something new – a page-turning, often campy, occasionally serious critique of academia and historical truth, literary celebrity, and the imminent future of America.”
— Philadelphia Tribune
“Picano treats his nonpulpy subject matter – grieving, the book business, the teaching business – in a pulpy way, and the results are surprisingly entertaining.”
— The New York Times Book Review
“Felice Picano’s Book of Lies has something guaranteed to please just about everyone ... an engaging, metafictive, literary whodunit ...”
— Lambda Book Report
“Felice Picano's new novel, his 19th book, is a story rich with history – a history that Picano himself was part of and helped shape ...”
— The Washington Blade
Felice Picano has cunningly sidestepped the pitfall of ‘writer as hero’ in his latest creation, The Book of Lies, and added a further twist, examining not only a group of writes and their work, but taking a hard look at the validity and integrity of literary criticism. Readers will immediately be reminded of Henry James’ The Aspern Papers, as well as touches of Passolini’s Theorem, in this thoroughly engrossing tale of literary and academic intrigue. The theme of coping with the mass loss of the 80s and 90s is subtle and well handled by Picano, and he's also thought-provoking on the issue of ghetto writing: The Gay Lit. world can't, on one hand, complain about marginilisation, and on the other, whine that straight people have neither right to study, nor any understanding of, gay literature. Most of all, he demonstrates the impossibility of empirical history: all is agenda.”
— Gay Times
“An exciting plot, believable dialogue and interesting characters ensure an entertaining read.”
— Gay Community News
“... Picano is successful in his gossipy recreation of the group of gay literary innovators.”
— Publishers Weekly
“... [A] novel that is smart and sexy and funny and historically compelling ... the best and most entertaining novel of 1999.”
— Bay Area Reporter
“Stunning Writing ... Part literary mystery, part history lesson, Felice Picano’s The Book of Lies, turned out to be a surprisingly engrossing read ... full of wit and humor, the dark tone of the ending caught me by surprise. I highly recommend this book.”
— Josh Aterovis, Killian Kendall series
THE BOOK OF LIES
by Felice Picano
Another Truth in The Book of Lies
Before The Book of Lies appeared in 1998, a friend – I think it was Richard Howard, the Pulitzer Prize-winning-p
oet – gave me an uncorrected proof of the book with the ominous advice that I had better read it. And so it was that with a certain trepidation, I began The Book of Lies.
What was I afraid of? That I might be pictured in an unflattering light in the book. The narrator of The Book of Lies is Ross Ohrenstedt, an ambitious academic. I was an academic with certain ambitions. In The Book of Lies, Ross is at work on a doctoral dissertation on the first important group of gay writers to emerge after Stonewall called the Purple Circle. In 1993, I published The Violet Hour, the first full-length study of the Violet Quill, the first important group of gay writers to emerge after Stonewall. As I read on, I discovered another character, Reuben Weatherbury, edits a two-volume collection called The Purple Circle Reader. In 1994, I had brought out a single volume entitled The Violet Quill Reader. One of the repeated subjects in The Book of Lies is that a foundation is buying the papers of all the members of the Purple Circle. At the time I was doing research, the Beineke Library at Yale was acquiring the papers of the Violet Quill. In fact, I found Chris Cox’s papers in the process of researching the book. Only the lamest reader could miss the comparison between The Violet Quill, of whom Felice Picano was an important member, and the Purple Circle, the subject of his novel. In short, I feared that Felice might have done what the Purple Circle author, Rowland Etheridge, did to his other Purple Circle members, that is write a roman-à-clef in which the members of the Purple Circle are “queasily” portrayed in a combination of “high satire and affection.”
I soon learned I had nothing to fear. The Book of Lies is all affection. For example, when Picano mocks Andrew Holleran’s notorious untidiness in Aaron Axelfeld’s Fibber McGee closet, the jokes are in good fun, poking at a foible that Holleran is the first to acknowledge. When the narrator finally visits Axelfeld, he finds that Axelfeld is not at all the hoarder he has been led to expect. I’m happy to say that Picano makes clear that I have nothing to do with Ross Ohrenstedt in the first few pages when Ross meets Damon Van Slyke, who bears a certain resemblance to Edmund White (but bears a greater likeness to Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams). Ross shakes hands with the elderly author, who gushes over the young man who will be preparing his papers for transport. “You’re even handsomer than I remember from our former meeting. And such a butch name: Ross Ohrenstadt! Not that you don’t look butch enough to carry it. You unquestionably do.” No one has ever thought my name or my person particularly butch. But Ross could not be me because of the question of age. I’m only six years younger than Picano. If not from the same generation, we share a similar cohort. Ross is clearly a young man, perhaps not as young as he appears, but young nevertheless. Then, am I the model for Reuben Weatherbury, the editor of The Purple Circle Reader? The answer is equally clear no. When Ross first sees Weatherbury, he finds “a middle-aged, heavy-set, man with tons of gray-flecked hair in a tank top, running shorts, and air shoes.” I have never owned such clothing (until very recently, I avoided exercise as much as I could) and went bald before my hair turned gray. Besides Weatherbury is much nicer guy than I am.
What can we make of this? On the one hand, I am nowhere in The Book of Lies. On the other hand, pieces of me float up from time to time. Ross thinks of himself as a “literary detective,” and Picano knew about my detective work to find Chris Cox’s papers. He gave me advice about how to handle Robert Ferro’s family when I spent nearly a week at Ferro’s father’s house going through the papers in the attic or the books in the basement. Felice and I had talked about that even when graduate schools teach you to do archival work (mine didn’t), they never give a hint about the diplomatic efforts needed to deal not just with living authors, but also the far more difficult, literary executors, who can be simultaneously exuberant and suspicious, defensive and intrusive. One of the major achievements of The Book of Lies is how well Picano depicts what it means to do the literary work I spent decades doing. So I am spread out between Ross and Reuben Weatherbury and maybe some of the other minor characters.
As it is, The Book of Lies is a big book filled with many characters. The Purple Circle has nine members; the Violet Quill had seven. In his afterward, Picano explains the addition. In both the fictional and the actual literary group all but three die of AIDS, which means the majority of the authors have literary executors that must be dealt with. So The Book of Lies involves fifteen characters directly involved with the Purple Circle. Then there is Ross, his students, his fellow graduate students, and his dissertation advisor, a hilarious portrait modelled on George Stambolian, “the elderly Franco-Armenian-American scholar” closely associated with the Violet Quill. The action moves around California, Florida and Cape Cod (but interestingly avoids New York). It is as far as I know, Picano’s densest and widest novel. But for me, the density is magnified. Aspects of the fictional characters keep reminding me of actual people. For example Jonathan Flitch, mentioned briefly at the beginning of the novel, calls to mind Patrick Merla, a wonderful but prickly editor discovered by Edmund White. While reading the novel the fictional characters are shadowed by actual people. It would be simpler if it were a one-to-one association. But Picano hasn’t made it that simple for us. The Book of Lies is haunted by the truth, but it is not an individual truth, but a group portrait. It is as if the writers of the Violet Quill came together and swapped parts of their personalities to make up characters that didn’t match any one personality exactly, but was the melding of the group as a whole. Say if Rembrandt, in painting The Night Watch, took the nose of one of the officers and placed it on a guard and then took the guard’s hand and gave it to the officer whose nose was stolen. Then Rembrandt took the nose from another guard and gave it to the noseless officer who switched hips with yet another. In the end you would get a group portrait, but not one of the figures would resemble any individual as they truly were. The Book of Lies, I think, aspires to be such a group portrait so that it can grow and grow until it becomes its own world.
— David Bergman
March, 2020
David Bergman is professor emeritus of English at Towson University. The editor of The Violet Quill Reader, he has won awards for his collection of poems, Cracking the Code, his book Gaiety Transfigured: Self-Representation in Gay American Literature, and for editing the anthology Men on Men 2000. He is the author of The Violet Hour: The Violet Quill and the Making of Gay Culture.
To Andrew Holleran
The Baron told her only Art meant anything.
– Edward Gorey,
The Gilded Bat
PROLOGUE
‘EVERY MAN OF SUBSTANCE AND IMAGINATION has his Dark Lady of the Sonnets,’ Mr Crassius used to tell us in English class. ‘She doesn’t have to be a lady. She doesn’t even have to be a she. Some time or other in the life of the fully lived man, someone will come along and seize the senses and the emotions so fully, you are left gasping, pleading for relief. It’s a roller-coaster ride. To heaven – and to hell! And if you haven’t been driven completely insane, in the end all you ask is to escape without too much humiliation.’
Mr Crassius would hyperventilate a bit as though words alone couldn’t adequately explain what he meant, his eyes would goggle out of his head, beads of perspiration would appear upon his usually blank face with its line-patterned forehead and along the side of his large, and very unRoman nose, which he’d quickly wipe off, and we students would sit there totally embarrassed yet secretly pleased, doing all we could not to giggle, until, as would invariably happen, Crassius would suddenly pop out of his self-induced trance, straighten out his tortoiseshell glasses, pat down the front of one or another of the several tweed vests he always wore over a starched white shirt to class, and once again he’d become our boring, middle-aged English teacher.
The result of these infrequent bouts would leave us boys in no doubt whatsoever that Mr Crassius himself had once had such a ‘Dark Lady’ in his life, and that he’d barely escaped her eldritch clutches with what he now (to us who knew its humdrum details as only students in such a c
losed world could) laughingly called his life.
On those rare mornings following such an outburst, we’d explode out of his overheated classroom at Lovecraft Hall, spill in a group across the icy steps and onto the poorly snow-swept paths of Tipton, asking each other in that half-mocking, half-sincere manner of all adolescents in all countries of the world and all times in history whether or not any of us hoped for such an all-encompassing love, such a thorough overhaul of our emotions, and we six closest – the little group that had come to hang out together the most often, known to ourselves and others on campus by the silly if not entirely inaccurate name of ‘The Thought Club’ (sometimes to our detractors as The Taut-Trousers Club’) – would debate this issue with complete thoroughness until we’d reached our next class across the quad or had otherwise broken up, headed variously on our own ways.
I was always the skeptic. I’d call Crassius an ‘old lameoid’ and repeat what my father always told me, ‘Men are ruled by money and power. Women are ruled by love.’ And Nicky Ballette would grab his crotch and say ‘I’m ruled by this!’ (So true, and one reason why we were known as the Taut-Trousers Club.) And we’d laugh and punch his arm and tumble with each other into the white, pure snow banks that seemed to fill the northern New England quad almost half of the school year, horsing around until one of us shouted, ‘Hey! This faggot grabbed my dick!’ or something equally offensive, and we would pile on top of the alleged offender for a free-for-all in which we managed to vent our aggression by punching someone while at the same time having the satisfaction of having our genitals handled, before one of us – Wayne or Herb – pulled himself out of the squirming mess, acting suddenly dignified, and said in his most manly fourteen-year-old tone of voice, ‘I don’t know about you queers, but I’ve got swim practice (or chemistry class or School paper) to go to.’ At which point we’d slowly unscramble from the heap, giving our closest neighbor a sneaky, final jab or knuckle-rub before straightening out our rumpled, snow-covered, hard-on-tautened Levi’s and corduroys, and split up into twos and threes to go off and do what was required by our prep-school careers for the next hour.
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