The Fame Lunches

by Daphne Merkin

  I first fell in love with gay men through reading novels and essays by writers like Henry James and E. M. Forster, who happened to be gay but seemed to have an astonishing amount of insight into women. Given a choice between macho Ernest Hemingway and spinsterish Forster, for instance, I would have picked Forster every time, both as a man and as a writer. Then, after I discovered the Bloomsbury set and immersed myself in their lives and writings, I became enamored of their freewheeling and somewhat confusing domestic arrangements, in which gay men lived with straight women (Virginia Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell, and the artist Duncan Grant) and even occasionally believed they were sufficiently in love with one of the women to propose marriage (the writer Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf). Strachey, of course, was “out” in a time when being closeted was the norm; he was openly attracted to men yet had close friendships with a number of women. He eventually set up a household with the painter Dora Carrington, with whom he lived until his death. Carrington, who married another man to keep Strachey happy, was so distraught after Strachey’s death that she killed herself shortly thereafter. I remember being shocked when I read of her suicide—they weren’t lovers, after all—but also feeling a bond with their singular pairing and the unique passion it might have inspired.

  Which brings me back to my dislike of the term “fag hag” (or Haggus fagulous, as Simon Doonan once coined it) and everything it implies—including an ostensible fear, on the hag’s part, of straight men. In a virulently homophobic article I read, “The Fag Hag: How a Girl’s Misguided Friendship Choices Can Lead to a Lifetime of Loneliness,” the author conjectures that acne (!) is one reason an adolescent girl will seek out gay male friends and asserts the following: “Homosexuals of all ages and young women share many similar obsessions—clothes, gossip and melodramatic TV shows—and this is what draws them together.” Although all stereotypes have bits of truth to them, I, for one, have never watched Glee or dyed my hair an outrageous color.

  “You’re so not a fag hag,” my daughter says to me when I tell her what I’m writing about. I guess I know what she means, if by “fag hag” one is thinking of Liza Minnelli, but even though I detest the moniker, I find myself brooding at being excluded from the category. The closest I have come to having what could be called a classically fag-hag type of relationship was with a man named John, whom I met in my early thirties. The first time I saw him, he was wearing a wig and very black mascara, the better to highlight his siren-blue eyes. I’d become acquainted with him through his partner, who sang in the chorus of the Met, and discovered that John had a wicked sense of whimsy—early in our friendship, he painted a sky with clouds on the roof of my balcony—and I also loved (there go all my protests to the contrary) his interest in the finer points of skin care and makeup.

  It was John who introduced me to the pore-tightening capacities of a certain white lotion by Janet Sartin and the necessity of using an eyelash curler. There was something infinitely pleasurable about sharing my interest in such beautifying concerns with a man. Men usually seemed immune to these sorts of anxieties, after all; they were supposed to be the object at which such obsessive female primping was directed rather than a partner in these very rituals. It felt cozy to be part of a coed team when agitating about what pair of shoes looked better on me as I sat trying them on in a department store—less lonely than being sequestered on the girls’ side of the playground. After his partner died, John moved to Florida, and we fell out of touch, but to this day I can’t buy a new lipstick without wondering what he’d think of the color.

  An article I read recently in a teen magazine took up the subject of the GBF (Gay Best Friend) phenomenon, noting that “being part of a GBF couple has become the new platonic ideal”—as crucial an accessory to Gossip Girl tweens as a Mulberry bag on one arm and a preppy jock on the other used to be. But much as it may fill the pages of magazines and style sections to ruminate on gay guys as trendy appendages, it seems to me that the more serious story underlying these relationships is that they allow for an escape from the constriction of gender binariness—from defining oneself along a limited spectrum of acceptably female roles. These friendships speak, that is, to the sexually androgynous aspect that is a part of many women’s personalities, distinct from our socialized “feminine” selves. What I have in mind has less to do with a specific trait and more with a kind of brainpower—a penetrating analytic bent, say, or a corrosive wit—that makes straight men feel uneasy or downright threatened. My gay friends, by contrast, seem to enjoy precisely the “strong” or “ornery” sides of me.

  Another way of putting it might be to say that such men draw on the inner nonconformists that reside next to our groupthink identities—the ways in which we depart from the norms of our gender and class. To the extent that you don’t have to be gay to feel like an outsider—you can feel like an outsider and be a functioning heterosexual—there is a feeling of relief that comes with having a common take on things, which is usually that of the ironic observer. I have aired some of my best renegade thoughts—I can’t stand Jon Stewart, I miss typewriters—on my gay friends, safe in the knowledge that they won’t immediately regard me as an alien.

  These relationships also encourage an experience of intimacy with a male that doesn’t balance precariously on an erotic fulcrum, the all-or-nothingness of sex. Although there is always the possibility of a sexual charge hovering in the air even between gay men and straight females, the charge is usually faint by virtue of being ignored or sidestepped. Its absence provides a freedom of sorts; in its stead can be found a more relaxed atmosphere of mutual recognition that manages to draw on the native differences that exist between men and women without being filtered down into the ultimate test of sexual desire. Although friendships with gay men have some of the easy camaraderie of those with women, they’re often blissfully free of the competitive edge that marks the latter, the constant impulse to contrast and compare.

  In the past year and a half, I’ve become close friends with a gay man whom I knew in passing while we were both growing up. He got in touch with me after a decades-long relationship with a partner painfully ended, suggesting that we might get to know each other better. We’ve since spent a lot of time together, going to movies and plays, eating out, having intense conversations about everything under the sun. Through M., I’ve come to better understand the complexities that define homosexuality, the many varieties of gayness that coexist. Not long ago I went to a dinner party at his apartment, the first gathering he’d hosted since his breakup. The table was beautifully set, the food impeccable, and the talk lively. The company was a mix of straights and gays, and at some point someone asked me what I was working on. I mentioned this piece, which immediately propelled the conversation into an impassioned discussion of whether there existed such a thing as a “gay” sensibility, whether it was all culturally dictated or whether there was an inherent proclivity toward certain traits. At the end of the dinner, an elegantly dressed, good-looking man wearing several bracelets, with whom I had chatted over hors d’oeuvres, walked me partway home. When it came time to say good night, he kissed me on both cheeks and proposed that we meet soon for dinner. “We’re going to become the greatest of friends—I’m sure of it,” he said in his animated way. To which I can only say, “Bring it on.” The world would be a paler, emptier place without my gay friends; that’s all I know, fag hag or not.

  A MATCHED PAIR

  (TED HUGHES AND SYLVIA PLATH)

  2003

  Them again. Just when you thought there was no more to be said, the ransacked remains of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath float to the surface once more. The occasion this time is Diane Middlebrook’s Her Husband, which offers up yet another look at this much-prodded-at, larger-than-life marriage. Middlebrook, whose most recent book was a biography of the cross-dressing musician Billy Tipton, has also written an excellent biography of Anne Sexton, so she knows from self-destructing poets. And as with the Sexton book, which ignited controversy at the tim
e of its publication because it drew upon confidential psychiatric records that were made available to Middlebrook by Sexton’s daughter, she has again benefited from access to previously off-limits material, including letters and manuscripts by Ted Hughes. Still, one would be tempted to groan at this latest exhumation—if only it weren’t so transfixing a tale.

  He was the “black marauder,” as Plath called him, a gorgeous hunk from a working-class Yorkshire background, who dressed in raggedy black and wanted to wrench modern British poetry from its fuddy-duddy moorings. She was the genteelly raised girl from New England, a bottle blonde with long legs and a sterling “bobby-sox” education, as Hughes would later describe it in Birthday Letters, the collection of poems about Plath that he published shortly before his death in 1998.

  When they met at a Cambridge literary party, he already had a rep as a magnetic womanizer, and she already had a hair-raising psychiatric history. Their first kiss drew blood, and for the next six years they combusted their way through love, marriage, and the birth of two children. For a while they appeared to have it all, starting with great sex—in bed they behaved, as Plath modestly put it, “like giants”—which seems to have been stoked by their mutually aggressive erotic styles. She brokered his poetry—Plath typed and submitted the manuscript of The Hawk in the Rain, Hughes’s first, prizewinning collection—and perfected her culinary skills. (She packed the Joy of Cooking, which she once described herself poring over “like a rare novel,” in her honeymoon luggage, along with her Olivetti portable.) But she was also determined to become a famous writer in her own right. “It is sad,” Plath observed in her journals, “only to be able to mouth other poets; I want someone to mouth me.” Hughes cheered her on through her despairs—the “blank hell in back of my eyes,” as she called it—and despite his complaints to his friends that she never sewed on buttons, divvied up the domestic chores so that each could get a fair share of unencumbered writing hours.

  At the time of Plath’s suicide, however, there was no contest as to which of the two geniuses (if they agreed completely upon anything, it was that each of them was married to a genius) had triumphed. Hughes was a heralded poet, surrounded by bohemian buddies and infatuated women, including the stunning femme fatale Assia Wevill, whom he had dumped his wife for. Plath, by contrast, had been left to fend for herself and their two young children during a brutal London winter—the coldest in half a century, as we have repeatedly been told. Nearly friendless, she was further isolated by the toxic atmosphere of gossipmongering that surrounded the dissolution of her marriage. Plath was also relatively unknown as a writer—she had published one slim, unearthshaking book of verse, and her novel, The Bell Jar, had come out a month earlier, under a pseudonym, to little notice—except for a few, like the critic A. Alvarez, who sniffed her bonfire talent. The last person to see her alive was the grouchy downstairs neighbor, who reluctantly entered into conversation and sold her stamps so she could mail a final letter to her mother. At a small gathering after the funeral, Hughes blurted, “Everybody hated her.”

  The trouble with the foregoing, however, is that it is but one cobbled-together narrative among many possible narratives, all of them jockeying for centrality. There are Plath’s own accounts, of course; whether in the form of poetry, fiction, or journals, they are imbued with a kind of feverish authority, as much because of the power of their witnessing as the vividness of the prose. Then there is the chirpy, bright-eyed plotline relayed by the dutiful “Sivvy” of Letters Home, who sounds, with her incessant busywork and her annoyance at her mother-in-law’s “sloppy cupboards,” like a gushing precursor of Martha Stewart.

  There has also been a trove of Plath biographies, including Anne Stevenson’s much-plagued Bitter Fame and Ronald Hayman’s empathetic and considered The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath. The poet Elaine Feinstein weighed in with a judicious biography of Hughes two years ago, and his own moving but also shrewdly self-exculpating version of the story is presented in Birthday Letters, where he is featured as a long-suffering husband who was helpless against a doom foretold before he ever arrived on the scene. There are, as well, a growing pile of competing memoirs (the latest of which, Giving Up, is by Jillian Becker, the woman whose house Plath retreated to on the weekend before she died); a novel about Plath’s last days, called Wintering; psychoanalytic studies, such as Jacqueline Rose’s The Haunting of Sylvia Plath; and Janet Malcolm’s cool-eyed telescopic take in The Silent Woman.

  Given that there is so little agreement on the details—whether, for instance, the headband Plath wore on the night they met was red, as she had it, or blue, as Hughes recalled—it is all the more surprising that Middlebrook’s overarching interpretation of the marriage as a partial triumph, rather than a wholesale tragedy, makes as persuasive a case as it does. Instead of ascribing blame or censure, she focuses on the ways in which the union of these two gifted and complicated people was, for a sustained period, a singular creative partnership—a “productive collusion”—that led to an almost magical symbiosis. “They were a matched pair,” Middlebrook writes, “as country people used to say of horses … Each was the other’s best critic of their writing.” Despite vastly different upbringings and influences, she suggests, Plath and Hughes connected at the deepest level from the moment they met, recognizing in each other a force—half-demonic and half-angelic—to be harnessed and reckoned with. “The sense of being bonded to each other through their instincts was one element in their compatibility, not only as lovers but as artists.”

  No matter that he was essentially undomesticatable, and that she was scarred by a furious negativity that had its roots in pathology as much as it had its flowering in her late poems. (“The one factor that nobody but close friends can comprehend,” Hughes wrote to his brother, “is Sylvia’s particular death-ray quality.”) To Middlebrook, what’s fascinating is not that the relationship failed but that their “dynamic of agreement and differentiation” lasted as long as it did. In much the same fashion, Hughes’s continuing dialogue with Plath, either directly in his work or indirectly—via the statements and letters he wrote over the three and a half decades that he and his sister, Olwyn, hawkishly presided over her literary estate—is a tribute both to the hold Plath had over his imagination and to his wish to break free from its entanglements.

  “It is only a story. / Your story. My story,” Hughes wrote in “Visit,” one of the poems in Birthday Letters. Umpteen books later, we have tried to make it our story, a paradigmatic instance of the relations between men and women, art and madness, passion and pain. By giving us a more mediated sense of the two poets’ life together than the victim/victimizer model, Her Husband enables us to move beyond the stagnant issues of how hopelessly nuts she was or how badly he behaved. (There’s no doubt that Plath was high maintenance, while Hughes seems to have tried in his way to make a go of the marriage, given that he was not built along the lines of the self-sacrificing Leonard Woolf.)

  Middlebrook casts a skeptical eye on most of the heartening postmortem conjectures that have been broached over the years; she doubts that Hughes was really planning to come back to Plath or that she believed she’d be found before she was dead. What I feel certain of is that her attentive and clear-eyed account won’t be the last. The saga of Ted and Sylvia is like a ballad that goes on and on, stanza after stanza, with no end in sight. Still, even Middlebrook’s inspiring slant can’t obscure the chill at the heart of this story. The blood-jet was poetry, and at some point it began leaking all over the place. “And everything holds up its arms weeping,” Hughes wrote in “Fate Playing.” Or, as John Berryman, another poet-suicide, put it, “All the bells say: too late.”

  THE CONSOLATIONS OF THREAD COUNT

  2005

  On a lazy Saturday morning not long ago, I was sitting at a neighborhood coffee shop counter with my fifteen-year-old daughter, enjoying a bonding moment over eggs and toast, when an attractive but slightly distraught-looking woman sitting on my other side started up a convers
ation. This woman, who had been feverishly underlining phrases in a dog-eared paperback, appeared, in spite of her waist-length hair and teenager-like outfit, to be in her forties or fifties. After commenting favorably on the sophisticated tone of our mother-daughter dialogue, she abruptly segued into a detailed account of her ill-fated romantic history, which had conspired to land her here, seeking salvation in a self-help book on the subject of (what else?) how to stop falling in love with the wrong men. I could sense my daughter, who is an empathic but not always patient soul, listening with rising anxiety to the woman’s Miss Lonelyhearts saga, and she soon began unsubtly signaling her wish to leave by pinching my arm. When I had finally extricated us and we were safely outside, my daughter went into a rant about the horrifying (indeed, from the evidence, traumatizing) sight of older women who sit by themselves in coffee shops. “Promise me you won’t do that when I’m gone,” she begged me. “It’s too pathetic for words.”

  What is it about the specter of a woman on her own, aging on the vine without a husband or lover or child in sight, that strikes fear and self-loathing in the hearts of females of all ages and persuasions—the liberated and enlightened as well as the old-fashioned and clueless? Why is there a mystique to the male loner in all his variegated and uncoupled forms—whether in the guise of the solitary cowboy, the bohemian wanderer, or the intriguing recluse—while the female loner is always a troubling, even freakish apparition, someone who appears to be independent-minded and strong-hearted but turns out to be so desperate for attachment that she is willing, like the Glenn Close character in Fatal Attraction, to go to any lengths, including murder, to hold a man? Is it true, as the poet Louise Bogan wrote in “Women,” her species-defining poem, that women “have no wilderness in them”? Are we hopeless when wrenched from a context of coupledness and set on our own two feet—despite having come a long way, baby, as the old Virginia Slims advertisement had it? Lacking as we do the friskiness of a Y chromosome, do our attempts at flying solo conjure a sight so inherently forlorn—a bleak image of incipient bag-ladydom rather than dashing Amelia Earhart adventurousness—as to send the spectator running in the other direction?