The Book of Lies

by Felice Picano

  According to the De Petrie journals, Damon Von Slyke confided in him that their old friend Rowland was ‘fooling around with the idea of a satirical novel about the New York literary scene’. Sensitive to the many personal and professional complications inherent in their by now much altered positions, De Petrie moved with extraordinary caution. First he’d approached Tobermann, who agreed to quietly slip him a few chapters of the book on the sly. Liking what he read, De Petrie then accepted a grant from a state agency that had been hoping to include his publishing company on their list for years. He used that grant money to open up a competition for new work, to be called the Symonds Award, and made certain Etheridge received an invitation by hand over dinner in a local restaurant. A year later, the Casement Press catalogue announced the winner of the Symonds Award, and publication of what would turn out to be Rowland Etheridge’s last finished work.

  Titled On Buzzard’s Bay, the novel – or novella, as it was barely 60,000 words long – was the story of a group of homosexual writers at a New England summer resort who have gathered for a decade to estivate, carry on romantic affairs and sexual escapades with each other’s lovers, and with various young and older locals, and, when all else fails, to write. What makes this summer different from previous ones is that one of their number has died, of an unspecified disease (perhaps AIDS), and following the instructions of his will, they’ve agreed to hold a reading of his final play as a memorial. The play, naturally enough, highlights each of their personal foibles and how badly each one has treated the dead author while he was still alive. The play-reading erupts into mutual recriminations among them and an intense awareness of their loss now that their friend is dead.

  By the time the book was published, Mark Dodge, Jeff Weber, Mitch Leo, Frankie McKewen and Cameron Powers were all dead as a result of AIDS. Even so, the dead member who allegedly dominates the group’s consciousness and consciences is clearly not based on any of them, but is rather an idealized version of Rowland Etheridge himself. Among the other writers, all are subject to his sting. Worst treated are the surviving three, Axenfeld, De Petrie and Von Slyke, all of whom in real life not only stood by Etheridge but aided him, indeed got him published.

  Looking back, one can only wonder at the three of them being so open and accepting of their colleague’s caustic portraits. Axenfeld fares best. He’s merely selfish and peace-loving; so aloof he can hardly bring himself to engage in sex lest it cause a ‘relationship’ to blossom and drive him out of his narcissism. The character based on Von Slyke is pictured as nakedly ambitious. Not only does he invite three Nobel Prize-winners into the group’s little summer community, he goes out of his way to fawn upon one of them, a bad-smelling, unpleasant old lady novelist, and it’s even hinted at that he has sex (of an unspecified kind) with her, thus ensuring for himself a complimentary blurb (which he himself will actually pen) for his next novel. Perhaps worst of all is the De Petrie figure, who in the novella not only manages to sleep with every half-attractive man of any sexual persuasion on Cape Cod, but then makes certain they’re all brought together in the most embarrassing circumstances. If he’s not pictured as openly brown-nosing, it’s because he’s too busy screwing around to have time to do the dirty work himself. He merely holds on very tightly to the Von Slyke character’s coat-tails and is content with the substantial crumbs that come his way. Needless to say, the dead author, based on Etheridge, is a saint, with no apparent flaws save for his excessive love and forgiveness of these insalubrious pals.

  When published, On Buzzard’s Bay received what would have to be considered ‘mixed notices’. It was widely reviewed in the gay media, possibly as a result of having won the ‘competition’ De Petrie set up, possibly as a result of it being published by the company responsible for much that was new and intriguing in lesbian and gay lit. of the time. Only a few reviewers knew what to make of it. Those who realized exactly who was under attack either hated the book or overpraised it. The Advocate’s reviewer wrote that it was ‘a necessary corrective to the cult of personality of certain gay authors’, then complained that ‘the book’s provenance throws the question of exactly whom these targets are’.

  Among the remaining Purple Circlers, the book’s targets were obvious, and generally more openhandedly received. De Petrie’s own press release called the book ‘chastening and hilarious. So on the dot as to cause instant reform.’ After reading the book, Axenfeld wrote to De Petrie, ‘It’s awfully funny. He’s pinned me, at least, into the specimen book with the most secure of clasps. I do think either you’ve lied to him a great deal or he’s fantasizing your sex life if he really thinks you’re that promiscuous.’ Von Slyke too was delighted. His note to Etheridge read, ‘Great comic characters. I laughed and laughed. You make so much more of me than I am, I’m planning to study your character to learn how to really do it right, to be more myself than the vague sketch I’ve foolishly settled for.’

  Subsequent critics have been less fond of the book. St George called it ‘a piece of out and out spite. The work of a failure against those he knew who hadn’t failed. The only good that could possibly be said to come out of the entire distasteful book and surroundings must be our renewed love and greater respect for Etheridge’s unwitting, accommodating targets.’ Fleming had to agree, finding the book ‘unkind, ungenerous, after Larry Kramer’s execrable Faggots, this is possibly the most purely evil production of the first quarter-century of gay literature.’ Cummings suggests ‘extenuating circumstances may exist to explicate this unfortunate work.’ He goes on to suggest that Etheridge’s alcohol consumption had by this time already caused ‘severe physical and unconscious mental duress’. Investigating the last years of Etheridge’s life, the group biographer finds ‘circumstances during the composition of the book suggesting to those familiar with early stages of disease that the author may already have been suffering from the effects of the cancer that ultimately led to his demise’.

  Despite his remaining friends’ aid and good wishes, On Buzzard’s Bay succeeded no better than any of its predecessors. Its initial sales were not enough to put it into a second printing. Although in later years De Petrie claimed that all the Casement Books were successes, when asked about this particular title, all he would admit to was that it had ‘sold its initial printing over the years and earned out its advance for the author’. Given that was true of less than a quarter of the company’s titles (most did far better) it was an admission of if not failure, then at least not great success. The book remained in print until Etheridge’s death in 1995. Along with remaining titles, it fell out of print when De Petrie officially disincorporated his press a year later.

  After the novel, Etheridge continued to write: screenplays (including one about a vampiric baseball team, wonderfully titled Bats), stage plays and teleplays. To Axenfeld he even wrote that he’d begun a ‘new book project. Very feminist, with much promise.’ It’s likely he was sounding out De Petrie’s interest in it as a future publication. When asked by Von Slyke, then residing in Europe, De Petrie wrote to his colleague that Etheridge’s new book project had ‘all sorts of wonderful possibilities. It’s about a young woman of the Confederacy who passed for a man, becoming a noted colonel and helping to win a battle. She might even have been a distant relative of his.’ Among the Purple Circle critics, only Reuben Weatherbury seems to have bothered to look up what existed of this final Etheridge work in the Timrod Collection. What he found, according to his introduction to the second Reader of 1999, was ‘sketches, notes, several outlines for a book, a few newspaper reports of the time, including one rewritten, with some embellishments, in Etheridge’s hand, and a letter from one of his forebears to his grandmother, telling the story. An unfinished chapter, possibly to be inserted somewhere in the middle, is written in language of the time, and details the capture and hanging of a Union spy by the observant, intrepid woman. Unfortunately,’ Weatherbury concluded ambiguously, ‘while the chapter hangs together, it’s somewhat outside the purview of this volum
e.’

  It was Dominic De Petrie, still partly living in Manhattan at the time, who ended up seeing and continuing to encourage Rowland in his final years. And writing about him in letters to the other remaining Purples. Etheridge had never left the rent-controlled, one-bedroom flat on West Charles Street he shared with his lover. But De Petrie’s own fortunes had gone so much further up and down by then, he’d ended up residing nearby instead of around the corner as in the past. And following the deaths of those close to him, De Petrie had begun spending longer and longer periods outside of New York: entire summers in Cape Cod, all winter in California. Even so, whenever he was in Manhattan, the old friends met, lunched, commiserated. It is De Petrie’s mentions of Etheridge’s terrible pain, depressions and difficulties with chemotherapy and surgery we turn to for details of his last days.

  Not one of the three – not De Petrie, Axenfeld nor Von Slyke – were at Etheridge’s memorial service, as all three were by then living miles away. Yet all sent words to be read at the ceremony. On the other hand, all three of Etheridge’s former Stillman Hall, Yale Drama School, and Gramercy Park apartment roommates were present, to mourn and remember the old Eli. Yet it was De Petrie’s words about Etheridge that everyone remembered afterwards: ‘Whatever one wants to say about him, one thing is apparent: Rowland was the last Virginia Gentleman. That most unlikely of creatures, an Etheridge in Manhattan.’

  The rented ranch house with its pale yellow siding and gray slate roof was at the very end of the long, twisting, indifferently packed-down dirt road, fairly high on a rise above thick foliage. I parked the Celica next to a beat-up-looking Jeep Wrangler that sported the identical burled-edge, extra-thick tires and canvas siding of my students’ off-track vehicles. Unlike their toney urban transports, however, this one actually looked as if it were used off track, the wheels and sides sporting overlapping, differing shades of yellowing mudsplashes, the canvas sides dotted with rips and tears only partly duck taped over. Inside, it was far from the vacuumed Brentwood and Van Nuys Jeeps of my acquaintance: the front seat covered with clothing, notebooks, an old laptop, uncomfortable back seat rigged to hold wood cages.

  I checked the view. Down several ridges left, the roofs of the small town. Everywhere else green with splashes of beachplum and chokecherry. The ocean’s steel blue. The closest house must be miles away.

  ‘You made it!’ Christian Tobermann stepped out of his garage carrying traps. ‘Any trouble?’ and when I said none, he said, ‘Why not go on in and use the john if you have to and get something to drink. If it’s okay with you, I thought you’d like a break from doing the driving.’

  ‘Where we going?’

  ‘I’m a field biologist,’ he said, as he wangled the cages into the back seat. ‘Headed to the field. Have to check my area.’

  Tobermann was tall, narrow-waisted and narrow-shouldered, but sturdy-looking despite that, with long knotty arms. His unbrushed, abundant hair had once been blond and was now going gray. His face was surprisingly unlined, although loose-skinned and jowelly, like one of those men Peter Bruegel the Elder paints carrying pheasants in a cage across the foreground of an autumn landscape. He wore a wrinkled long-sleeved shirt over a warm undershirt, thick twill bush shorts with lots of pockets, canvas belt with gadgets on strings and leather thongs, knee-high boots covered with the same three-toned mudsplatter as the Jeep.

  I got my bottled water in the Celica. ‘High-tops okay for where we’re going?’

  ‘No problem.’ He whistled and a large, fluffy, tortoiseshell-colored tomcat sidled around the corner of the house. ‘I’ll be back before dinner,’ Tobermann announced and the cat mewled, then sat down where it was and began grooming its ears. Among the many objects on the floor and in the semi-open glove department of his Jeep was a plastic tube he tossed into my lap. It read ‘Blood Protection Unit. People’s Republic of China.’

  ‘No saying what’s biting today. I’m used to it all, but …’

  The Jeep started after a strangled ignition. We backed out of the garageway at thirty miles an hour, swung a down-angled reverse arc, stopped for him to shove into first with a multitoned complaint from the gearbox, and chuttered forward in three distinct, equally nasty-sounding gear-changes. ‘If it don’t die the first mile, it’ll carry you to Alaska,’ he explained cheerfully in response to my unspoken but all too-obvious concern.

  We got back on the freeway for several exits north and ramped onto a coast road that changed direction, size and paving every half-mile. Just before the road committed suicide by diving back into the freeway, we swung onto an official looking dirt road which ascended higher and deeper into pine scrub wood. This became more rugged as the surroundings developed into taller, mixed forest, ponderosa and looselodge pine. A few miles of twisting ascents and we reached a summit, and stopped.

  We faced miles of woods in all directions. I could make out an occasional shimmer of afternoon sun off ocean water, but it was far off.

  ‘What I’m doing,’ he explained as I helped him take traps out the back of the Wrangler, ‘is a population viability analysis on two particular local small rodents in the area. One’s indigenous. The other exotic. Exotic not in the sense that it’s from Burma or New Guinea, but that it’s not native here. Found mostly in the upper Midwestern plains states and wheat-growing areas of Canada. No clue how the exotic got here. Maybe among someone’s belongings when a moving van was forced off the freeway for repairs. Maybe someone’s pet. Once the back-door was open Mr Fieldmouse from somewhere else escaped. Rather Mrs Fieldmouse. Already pregnant. All I know is that her great-great-grandchildren settled and made a good living. At times, however, they’ve done so by filling identical environmental niches as Mr and Mrs Local Fieldmouse and their progeny, who’ve lived here during most of the Holocene, possibly earlier.’ He’d slung his laptop over his shoulder via a triply thick strap, and we took off, loping down through man-enchanced paths. ‘So what I’m trying to find out is, will the exotic drive out the indigenous rodent, which while not precisely endangered has a small population to begin with, is only found locally, and doesn’t appear to be as adaptive as the exotic? If it does drive it to extinction, then how quickly?’

  The air was fresh, the day warm yet breezy, the walking stimulating, the forest interesting. Tobermann stopped to point out amphibians, birds, small mammals, insects, or to drop the cages, which it turned out were not baited for fieldmice of any kind but instead for local wild dogs and snakes, their predators. For the next two hours I was assistant to a field biologist, as he went about doing a population viability analysis of whatever the field mouse’s official name was.

  I quickly realized two things. What I’d thought from our brief telephone conversation was a stammer or stutter was instead a startling physiological tic Tobermann occasionally manifested. Its source obviously neurological in origin. Its manifestation a sudden turn of the neck and head, accompanied by a shudder or flutter of the hands no matter what they might be doing. The first time it happened, I was looking at something else and noticed it peripherally, unsure of what I’d witnessed. The second time, after ten minutes or so, I was looking at Tobermann and I not only saw the two-part physical tic, I also heard him stop in midsentence for the tic and go ‘… umm. Umm …’ just as he had done several times on the phone earlier.

  No matter, because by then I’d fallen under his absolutely indifferent, noncommittal spell. We might have been kids, he fourteen, I ten, he showing me how the world worked, how nature worked around us. It was a perfectly adolescent, unsexual enchantment I felt, not important, except I realized it at the same time he did and he was evidently enough used to it (from students?) to feel comfortable and slowly open up about his years with Etheridge. Not his relationship to Etheridge exactly. That he said little about. But almost anything else … all I need do was ask.

  I told him the first of his lover’s books I’d read was On Buzzard’s Bay. Had he read it?

  ‘Read ’em all,’ he said. ‘Not when they were p
ublished. Usually a while after. When Roll didn’t expect me to. He was always surprised. Because, you know, I was the practical one. The scientist. But sure, I read it. And I recognized the others. Is that why you’re asking?’

  ‘You associated with the other Purple Circlers?’

  ‘Not as much as Roll.’

  ‘What did you think of the book? How it treated them?’

  ‘Like shit. I told Roll. We both knew why. Didn’t have to say it. He did ask once out of the blue, “Do you think they’ll ever forgive me?” I told him they already had. He felt it was his last chance to make his mark. He never understood how it happened.’

  ‘How what happened?’

  ‘You know, that he was so blue-blooded and well brought up and Ivy League and all that, yet when he sat down to write, none of that came across on the page. Instead, it was that farmboy Dodge whose sense of being American and all of the good and bad that meant was in every sentence. Instead, it was De Petrie, who’d come from an immigrant family and had to put himself through City College at night, who wrote like a nobleman. It killed Roll. He’d read every Mark Dodge and Dominic De Petrie book as they came out, and I’d come home and find him staring out the window, and I’d know he’d been standing staring there for hours. When I’d try to get him to have a cocktail or make dinner, he’d ask, “Why was I led up the garden path all these years, only to find out the garden would never be mine?”’

  ‘It disturbed him that Dodge and De Petrie were fine writers?’

  ‘And that he was a mediocre writer,’ Tobermann said with startling honesty. ‘It gnawed at him. He’d forget for months, then … and it wasn’t just Dodge or even De Petrie, although because they were close … With Von Slyke, for example … umm. Umm … Roll could at least say, well, he’s like me, from a good WASP American background, from expensive prep schools and good universities … But they all moved ahead of Roll. Everyone knew it. He’d critique the hell out of their books to their face, tell them how upset he’d been by what he, not they or their editors, considered grammatical errors, lapses of taste. You know, the old schoolmarm. It didn’t make any difference. He’d end up standing at the window, and his fists would ball up, and he’d ask, “Why do you think I’ve been cursed like this?”’