Kid Gloves

by Adam Mars-Jones

  The play was Terence’s Eunuchus. I imagine female roles were played by girls borrowed from other schools, Westminster being single-sex then. However backward in such matters, I feel sure I would have noticed if the women were boys cross-dressed.

  The plot isn’t what anyone, even Frankie Howerd, could call sophisticated. A young man obsessed with a beautiful woman poses as a eunuch so that he can be taken on as part of her domestic staff, presenting no danger because he lacks the wherewithal to take advantage of her. Once alone with his mistress (though offstage) he brandishes the wherewithal and takes advantage. Coming onstage after the act, he’s exhilarated and grins all over his face. Good heavens, I thought – it’s supposed to be fun! This had not been mentioned in the sex talk given by the headmaster of the Under School, Mr Kelly, whose admirably brisk opening words had been ‘The penis is a splendid dual-purpose instrument.’ I recoiled from such frankness. As far as I was concerned, one purpose was more than enough.

  I got my sex education where I could. The later novels of Kurt Vonnegut wouldn’t normally qualify for instructive status in this area, being so droll and sardonic, but my need for education was great. I read his Breakfast of Champions soon after it came out (which was in 1973, so I was nineteen or so), and was intrigued by one of the crude drawings, the author’s own work, which illustrated an ‘asshole’ – the body part rather than the term of abuse. The drawing was essentially of an asterisk. I asked myself if the anus could possibly look like that, and the answer was that I had no idea. I knew my digestive system ended at a certain point, and I was willing to accept as a technicality of physical life that I possessed an anus, or I would have exploded long ago. But I had no visual information on the subject. Did it seem likely that my anus resembled a piece of punctuation? No it didn’t, but I had no counter-theory with which to contest it.

  I’m reminded of the very touching moment in Tarkovsky’s Solaris (perhaps it goes back to Stanislaw Lem’s source novel) when the hero is reunited with his dead wife, Hari, on a space station, thanks to the intervention of the sentient planet below him. They start foreplay, and he tries to take her dress off, going round the back to unfasten it. There’s no zip. There are no buttons. The dress is impossible to take off, just as it was impossible to put on. This new Hari has been made directly out of his memories, and though he remembered the dress he didn’t have a specific memory of the back of the dress and how it fastened. He has to get some scissors to help with the task of undressing her. Tenderly he vandalizes the dress he remembered only as a mystical whole.

  At the age of around twenty I lived in a thinly imagined replica of my own body, and the orifice Dad took for granted as the central focus of homosexual desire was like the zip on Hari’s dress. It wasn’t on my map. I had to crouch and use a mirror to inform myself of the accuracy of Kurt Vonnegut’s drawing, showing a little more diligence than Dad did when checking the underside of his Audi estate for explosive devices. It did look rather like an asterisk! I couldn’t have been more surprised if the folds of this unimagined tissue had formed an ampersand or a treble clef.

  If Dad ever blamed Mum for the way I had turned out, he was sensible enough to do it out of my hearing. The surprising thing was how little changed. My role as family peacemaker and lightning-rod was intact. It hadn’t been displaced by revelation of my apostasy, and there were still altogether too many late-night conversations started by Dad with the formal opening, ‘I’m very worried about Tim / Matthew …’ Where is he going, what is he doing with his life?

  It would fall to me to set out the case for the defence, in front of a presiding judge who would often simply set aside the evidence and give me his ruling on the facts of the case. We were all failing to live up to Dad’s expectations, and logically my own falling short should have secured me some sort of exemption from generational-spokesman duties. I wouldn’t have minded a sick note that excused me from going in to bat for the brotherhood, but I was returning to Gray’s Inn from Cambridge on a regular basis, and the others were based elsewhere, so perhaps it was partly how I paid the rent.

  My Cambridge rhythms with Mike altered after Christmas, though not (I don’t think) because of the stresses and strains of his stalking-horse duties. He was starting to work. The Mike Larson I had known in his first term had hardly attended a lecture, spending most of the day with me in coffee shops or cinemas. He claimed that this was his real Cambridge education, and though I take flattery well it may also be that he thought the architecture faculty a little underpowered, compared with what he was used to. Now he buckled down, and mighty were the charrettes. Architecture even gave him an indirect way of describing our relationship. This was the ‘creative use of interstitial space’. The phrase made sense, since he was just passing through Cambridge on his way to a life and a career, though it didn’t make my heart leap.

  The subject Mike chose for his dissertation was ‘James Stirling and the Art of Rudeness’. It anatomised Stirling’s famous V-shaped History Faculty building, which Mike saw as a V-sign offered to the university and its traditions. He asked me to help him with spelling and grammar, which I did very happily. It didn’t occur to me that he might be dyslexic, though the way he ran at language was all his own. In those days dyslexia was an all-or-nothing category, and Mike could clearly make his way in the world of the written, though there was still a certain amount that I could tidy up.

  By June his money had come through at last. He paid his debts, and even took me and Mum out to dinner and a show, Tom Stoppard’s Every Good Boy Deserves Favour at the Mermaid Theatre.

  He had a farewell gift for me too, an inscribed hardback of John Fowles’s Daniel Martin. The inscription compared me to Henry James’s Maria Gostrey and speculated that one day I might try a novel about an Englishman and an American. I have to admit that I didn’t get very far with Daniel Martin. Come to that, I’ve never read The Ambassadors, though I know that Maria Gostrey introduces Lambert Strether to the Louvre and the Comédie Française and is generally a civilizing force.

  Another memento he left with me was an item of clothing, which I had always liked on him, a cotton sweater of multicoloured stripes. Just as British body language can seem unmasculine to the American eye, particularly the habit of sitting with the legs crossed and the knees close together, closing up the crotch (a posture known in some US circles as ‘gin and tonic’), so this item of clothing stood out as rather too-too in a society not yet indoctrinated with the dress code known as ‘preppy’. Perhaps Mike left it with me because it had fallen short of the desired effect when he had worn it in Cambridge. A raised eyebrow can do a lot of damage.

  In one of our first conversations post-Christmas I had let slip Dad’s verdict on him – the passing comment (obiter dictum is the technical term, when a judge’s casual remarks, not binding in law, are being referred to) about his being ‘small beer’. Let slip gives the wrong impression. I passed on the information without hesitation, confident that Mike would find Dad’s blindness as comical as I did. It never occurred to me that this well-defended man might want to be approved of, even by people who didn’t matter to him in any real way. He was mortified, and in all the years of intermittent contact since then the phrase has never been properly exorcised.

  By this time I had decided that spending time in America would do me good. I applied for a Harkness Fellowship, a sort of contraflow Rhodes scholarship enabling British students to attach themselves to American academic institutions. The protocol was for applicants to approach their university of choice directly to arrange possible admission, and the obvious place to go was the University of Virginia, where Alderman Library had a
major collection of Faulkneriana, Faulkner being the subject of my supposed PhD.

  Geography is hardly my strong suit, but I realized that Virginia was not close to California and to Mike. Obviously I hoped to see him again. I also felt that exposure to a more energetic set of manners would be good for me.

  The Harkness selectors turned me down, I imagine because my proposal was rather feeble. American Literature was a paper I had done well on at Cambridge (where it had only recently been introduced), perhaps because it was a literature, at least in the nineteenth century, unconfident about its relationship with the English canon. As a refugee from Classics, lacking an English A-level, I shared that unconfidence. Faulkner was not by a long chalk my favourite American writer, but at least his output wasn’t conclusively ranked, as Melville’s and Hawthorne’s were, with Moby-Dick and The Scarlet Letter making their other work seem inconsequential. There was work to be done. How was I to know that at the time more American PhDs were undertaken on Faulkner than on Shakespeare?

  My acceptance letter from U. Va arrived weeks after my rejection from Harkness. I showed it to Dad in a spirit of wry amusement, but he told me I should take it up anyway. He would supplement the little stipend I was given by the Department of Education and Science. I tried to make clear that this acceptance was not the accolade he assumed, what with American universities being businesses in a way alien to our domestic assumptions, but he repeated his offer. And I accepted it.

  I don’t think for a moment that he was treating me as a remittance man, to use the traditional word for the unrespectable family member who is paid to keep a suitable distance from those he might embarrass. I was a functional part of the Gray’s Inn household, someone he could rely on to be cheerful company for Mum while he was away on circuit, as he so often was.

  Virginia was the first place where I was able to present myself as gay from the outset. Charlottesville was symmetrically Anglophilic and homophobic (Alcoholic Beverages Commission statutes made it illegal for gay people and other prohibited groups to be served alcohol), so some people had a silly prejudice in my favour and others had a silly prejudice against me. I made women friends, which was intoxicating, and much easier with any ambiguity dispelled. I involved myself in the Gay Student Union but didn’t have a sex life to speak of. Gay students tended to drive to D.C. at the weekend for their pleasures, and the bicycle was my only means of transport. There was an underworld, but I didn’t explore it. I remember a graduate student saying, after the sauna at the University gym was destroyed in a fire, that on the whole he would rather that the Parthenon had fallen down. I knew nothing of that.

  I went to Alderman Library, which unlike the University Library at Cambridge had open stacks – meaning that you could find things you didn’t know you wanted. I read Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Craig Raine, Michel Tournier, Mario Mieli’s Elementi di Critica Omosessuale, and other books in the same run of shelves such as Tearoom Trade and Nos ancêtres les pervers. I never even entered the room where the Faulkneriana was stored. Instead I Xeroxed The Times crossword from the copies of the paper which arrived in batches every few weeks, and solved the puzzle over a bottomless cup of coffee (meaning it would be refilled as often as you wanted) in the Virginian restaurant ‘on the corner’ – the designation of a particular stretch of street facing the university. At the bookshop on the corner I bought The World According to Garp, Gay American History and C. A. Tripp’s The Homosexual Matrix. I ‘audited’ a creative writing class, meaning that I attended without being assessed, since I wasn’t studying for an American degree. My surroundings suited me, and I managed to get a little writing fellowship (the Hoyns) for the next year, and taught writing at the modest 250 level in the year after that. By then I had a contract with Faber for Lantern Lecture, and Dad’s attitude towards me changed decisively. No doubt I had changed too. Meeting me after my first year in the States, Tim thought I had grown taller – unlikely – and much louder, which was certainly true, since I had learned to hold my own in a more raucous conversational tradition than the one I had been used to. Americans used to say that Brits weren’t ‘self-starting’, that they waited with pretended diffidence for the invitation to shine. I was now officially self-starting.

  It took Mike a little longer to get his career started. His big break was winning the design competition for California’s Vietnam War Memorial. This was a major enterprise, since one casualty in ten came from the state, the largest single loss. Partly for this reason there were issues of cultural politics involved in the project.

  Maya Ying Lin’s National Monument in Washington had been controversial from the moment her name was announced as responsible for the winning design. She was of Chinese descent, and she was female. She was also still an undergraduate at the time. (The competition was judged blind, with entries identified only by number, and she stood out in a field of more than a thousand.) Her outsider status might be an advantage in some quarters, but grief is territorial. Did she have a right to voice the national pain?

  Her design was un-heroic, even anti-heroic. Names of the dead were etched on walls of black granite, in chronological order of casualty, without any additional information – rank, unit, decorations. Visitors would see themselves reflected in the polished stone as they searched the roll-call for their loved ones. Remembrance of the conflict as a whole took priority over any individual combatant, so that if you wanted to find one particular name you had to consult a printed directory on the site, to cross-reference person with date of death and so find the right place in the chronological list. The visitor to the memorial, as Maya Lin has arranged things, goes down to a lower level to find a name, in some small way visiting the underworld.

  She chose not to represent human figures in the monument. This isn’t unprecedented (think of the Cenotaph) but was certainly the aspect of the design most strongly contested by veterans of the war. To resolve the deadlock, one of the competition runners-up was commissioned to design a statue of three soldiers in a group, though Maya Lin, realizing the danger that this might become the focal point of the monument, fought successfully to have it installed some distance away from her wall.

  Even so, the bareness of the memorial was hard to take for the visiting public, and objects began to be left behind to soften its edges (objects amounting to several thousand a year), not just flags and flowers but teddy bears and even a motorcycle bearing the licence plate hero. A separate display of medals was installed in the 1990s to recalibrate the all-important balance between grief and pride.

  Any sensible entrant in the competition for the California design would take note of these debates. It was unlikely that the judges would reward a confrontational approach. Including the human figure was a sensible decision, though it might be going too far to restore it to its place high above the visitor, as in the more self-confident nineteenth-century tradition. Doubt, fear, loneliness, all these could be acknowledged.

  Mike’s design solution was to devise a shrine-like space, in the shape of two half-circles, so as to offer visitors a sense of being shielded, though the memorial is open to the sky. On one side the gap between the half-circles is interrupted by columns taller than the walls, not supporting anything but providing the visual rhetoric of a gateway, flanked by free-standing decorative buttresses. There’s a central flagpole. The panels listing the dead, in alphabetical order of home town but also giving their ages and the relevant branch of the service, are hung on the outside walls.

  The outside of the memorial gives you the statistics, and the inside tries to render the experience. Reliefs on the curved inside walls show servicemen in combat and off duty, as well as plane
s, ships and aircraft carriers. There are five bronze figures on the site, four of them attached to the walls. The fifth is of a young soldier sitting at the foot of the flagpole. The intention is to produce a double-take effect on someone visiting the memorial alone, and thinking for a moment that there is someone already there. This fifth serviceman is bare-armed. He rests his rifle (an M16) against his leg, holding it steady with his left hand, while in the other he holds a handwritten letter from his parents. You can read it over his shoulder.

  The judges of the competition must have been overjoyed when they found that the winning design was actually submitted by a veteran. It was a gift in terms of public relations. Mike had certainly paid his dues, seeing Apocalypse Now again and again during its first run, gravitating towards his fellow vets where they had established themselves at the back of the movie theatre with their booze and their joints, hunkering down in the foxhole of shared dope and shared damage.