Martin Bauman: A Novel by David
Leavitt (2000)
Recommended by Nik
What
is your chief motivation for writing?
(a) Personal satisfaction
(b) Financial reward
(c) Public recognition
(d) Desire to communicate
(e) Other (please amplify below)
What is my chief
motivation for writing?
(a) Sort of, but I wouldn’t call it ‘satisfaction’. I remember after
finishing Seasons They Change I
wasn’t happy, as such (actually, I was decidedly miserable); but I was utterly fulfilled. This was a very
peculiar feeling as, prior to then, I had always found fulfillment and
happiness inextricably, and uncomplicatedly, linked.
(b) HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
(c) HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
(d) I wouldn’t couch it in those terms. I do believe that a writer, to
exist, needs a reader but – and maybe it’s the legacy of all those critical
theory texts (see last week) – I don’t see it as a simple relationship. The
writer doesn’t pour communication libations into a reader’s hungry mouth.
(e) This is what I would plump for, as does Martin Bauman.
The only answer
I could give to this question would be (e) other. Please amplify below, you
say; all right, I will. But I must warn you, it will take more than a
paragraph. Indeed, you may say this very novel is my amplification.
I might say that, on some
level, this blog has become my amplification. At a time when my creativity is
stuttering like a Geiger counter miles from radiation, I am using it a means to
keep up a regular narration of my world.
Anyway. I talk
to Nik a lot about writing. I talk to Nik a lot about everything. I see him virtually every week, usually at least twice;
we’ve holidayed together, I’ve stayed with his parents, we’ve applied to be on
Pointless (they didn’t want us), he made me the Madonna T-shirt in the photo, he’s
my named next-of-kin… in short, I couldn’t imagine my world without him.
The first moment
I really knew Nik and I would be close was during a visit to the West End. This
pub was two doors down from our office and Nik, Noshee (she’s coming up in a few weeks)
and I would often wander down for a drink after work. Nik and I played on the
pop quiz machine.
What came up?
Name the Louise
solo singles.
“‘Two-Faced.’”
“‘Pandora’s Kiss.’”
“‘Naked’, of
course.”
“‘Light Of My
Life.’”
“‘Light Of My
Life’ was crap, wasn’t it?
Inauspicious start for her.”
“‘Undivided
Love.’”
“Oh god, that cover of ‘Stuck In The Middle
With You’.”
We smiled at
each other. We’ve been smiling at each other for close on a decade now.
Nik, like Gary
in Week One, often claims he’s ‘not a reader’ yet regularly scouts for book
tips pre-holiday, loves certain authors (notably Alan Hollinghurst), and has always
offered very fair and insightful criticism of my own work. He specifically
picked Martin Bauman for me because
it was about writing.
Baumann, a young
Jewish gay man living in early 1980s New York, begins his story – that
‘amplification’ – with a creative writing course run by the
monstrous ego of Stanley Flint. I have always been ambivalent about creative
writing courses, and Leavitt’s portrayal of Flint brought out a lot of the
reasons why. The hysterical diva-ishness of Flint shrouds a deeply insecure man
who depends on the adoration of his class. He dismisses would-be writers on very little
evidence.
After
less than half a minute, he put the pages down.
‘No, no, I’m
sorry,’ he said, giving them back to her. ‘This is crap. You will never be a
writer. Please leave.’
The guru complex
is overt in Martin Bauman, but I’d wager a less extreme – and perhaps more insidiously psychologically damaging –
version of Flint is rife in the creative writing teaching industry. Writers are
notoriously competitive (Bauman himself certainly is) and a creative writing
teacher is usually one only because of a painful failure to carve out his or
her own full-time authorial career. This isn’t good seeding ground for impartial
and supportive development of others’ writing, and Leavitt brings this out
well.
The other aspect
of the writer’s life deftly tackled by Leavitt is the shift in American
publishing and the collateral damage it wreaked on writers. As the Reagan era
really chomped down, publishing changed from a supportive literary enclave to an
aggressive free-market. Bauman, writing saleable ‘gay stories’, initially
benefits from this. His work is snapped up and expectations are high. Bauman’s
first book, the story collection The
Deviled-Egg Plate, gets ‘favourable to mixed reviews’ but his next work, the novel The Terrorist, critically bombs. Bauman
hadn’t changed his style or his subject matter much, but his name no longer
offers the shock of the new. If one lives by the zeitgeist, one dies by it, too.
More poignantly,
since Bauman is writing about gay life in the early AIDS era, his position is a
problematic one (and emblematic of the different issues writers outside of the straight white male canon face). Bauman is a naturally personal writer and focuses on love,
eroticism, and family, but some see this as an avoidance of political
responsibility.
Seamus Holt
complained in Queer Times that [my]
‘wan, watered-down portrayal of gay life’ amounted to ‘the worst kind of
assimilationist nonsense.’
Holt, whom
Bauman meets, is considered by most in the gay community as a bore intent on
curbing people’s fun with his incessant AIDS harangues.
Thunderous
before a mob of perfectly coifed, elegantly employed young men, he would thrust
out his finger like a demonic preacher, and scream, ‘In five years half of you
in this room are going to be dead. In five years half of you in this room are going to be dead. In five years half of
you in this room are going to be dead,
dead, dead.’ […] In the end, of course, history did prove him wrong, though
not in the way his enemies would have predicted: five years later, not half,
but three-quarters of the men in that room were dead.
This aspect of Martin Bauman brilliantly evokes the
terrible human tendency for collective denial in the face of impending cataclysm.
Holt-like voices that speak of the real danger are ignored or ridiculed. I’m
reminded of one of my favourite works of modern non-fiction, Simon Garfield’s The End Of Innocence: Britain In The Time Of
AIDS, and its accompanying 1995 TV programme. These works, which I highly recommend, chart the condition’s social journey, including the way
AIDS was both minimised and exaggerated.
Martin Bauman is a book of
strong ideas rather than a captivating story but – as our narrator noted – that’s
its point. He’s trying to find out his chief motivation for writing. Does he?
Perhaps not.
Have I found
mine, within this blog? Certainly not. Yet am I, through writing this particular
blog entry, glad to remember that moment at the pop quiz machine, Louise’s
‘Stuck In The Middle With You’, and her Tarantino-baiting video? Damn right I am. Indeed, perhaps this is what I
have found via this blog: that picking
those delicate wild flowers from memory is as creative as scoping out the big existential
angst.
