New Tales

Armistead Maupin puts his own life at the center of ‘The Night Listener’

By Gina Arnold

WHEN PEOPLE the world over picture the city of San Francisco, they think of many things: the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, Victorian houses, earthquakes. Then they people this pretty portrait with a bunch of kooks–drunks, hippies, gays, and liberals. And who can say they’re wrong?

It’s traditional. As far back as 1873, Jules Verne, in a passage in Around the World in Eighty Days, referred to it as “a legendary city of bandits, assassins, and arsonists, who had flocked to the city in search of gold.” Jack London took over duties as chief chronicler of its vices at the turn of the century, while in the ’40s and ’50s, Herb Caen and Jack Kerouac helped turn the place into a hothouse of eccentricity.

Then came the ’70s, and San Francisco’s already wacky reputation turned decidedly pink. It was then that the Castro District’s role as a haven for homosexuals became widely visible–thanks mostly to Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City, a daily serial that began appearing in the San Francisco Chronicle circa 1976. Any thought city residents might have had of escaping their legacy as a city of fruits and nuts came to an end.

Indeed, it’s hard to exaggerate the effect Maupin’s tales have had on San Francisco’s public relations. His eight books have achieved that rarest of statures–world acclaim–and have remained in print for the past two decades. Three movies have been made of the series, with the result that Maupin’s point of view–witty and trenchant and unabashedly sentimental–has come to color even the city’s perception of itself.

Now Maupin has a new book out, The Night Listener–his first in eight years. The book introduces a new set of characters, but through them it continues to chronicle the City by the Bay as it grapples with new problems.The Night Listener reads like a memoir, and it certainly must be in parts, but it is also–like Tales before it–a real page turner, a perfectly paced mystery of sorts, permeated by Maupin’s patented light touch.

He is, as he himself explains, “kind of like a comedian who can’t use all his best material for fear of losing the audience.” That’s why reading aloud, on his many book tours, is one of his favorite things.

“Bliss,” Maupin calls it, speaking from home just before departing on a book tour of England. (The author makes an appearance in Sebastopol on Saturday, Oct. 21, at an event benefiting Face to Face/Sonoma County AIDS Network.)

The city has undergone some changes in the years since Tales characters had freewheeling sex in gay bars and paid minuscule rents for fabulous apartments in the Marina. But Maupin’s light, dry authorial voice remains the same.

That voice is gentle, courtly, and still touched with the Southern accent. Maupin grew up in Raleigh, N.C,, where his patrician (and very right-wing) father rubbed elbows with the local gentry. After a stint in Vietnam and a job as a TV reporter at a station managed by none other than Jesse Helms, Maupin moved to San Francisco. There he began writing the soon-to-be smash serial that celebrated (among other things) the free and easy gay lifestyle of the Castro District.

Tales chronicled the lives of a group of twenty-something characters on the north side of the city. The protagonist of The Night Listener, however, lives where Maupin does, in a western neighborhood called Woodside that abuts Twin Peaks.

The character, whose name is Gabriel Noone, is a 54-year-old gay man who grew up in the south. He did a stint in Vietnam, worked in TV journalism, and made his name in the ’70s with a serial that celebrated gay life–albeit one that appeared on radio, rather than the newspaper. “I am,” says Noone at the start of the book, ” a fabulist by trade. . . . I’ve spent years looting my life for fiction.”

The sentence inspires one obvious question: Is Gabriel Noone a thinly veiled Armistead Maupin, and if so, how much loot is in here?

“Well, I’m just not going to tell you,” Maupin says. “No, I’m not trying to be coy, but my best material has always arisen from my reactions to actual experiences. On the other hand, I like to manipulate the circumstances and characters to make sense of them: real life is haphazard and tedious and often contradictory. But you step into really uncertain territory when you start trying to unravel the two things. You’ll forgive me if I don’t tell you quite how I do it.

“I’ll say this much,” he adds, referring to several plot points in the book. “I did break up with my partner four years ago, I do have an aristocratic Southern past and an 85-year-old father who still practices law and hobnobs with Jesse Helms.”

So what part of Night Listener is fiction? “I do make some things up out of whole cloth,” he adds. “I just spoke to my sister, who runs a bed and breakfast in New Zealand, and she’d just spent an hour on the phone reassuring my brother that I hadn’t had sex in the cab of a truck in a snowstorm.”

He laughs delightedly. “Of course, in many ways I wish I had!”

Another way he differs from Noone, he adds, is that “I am considerably more confident about my writing abilities than Gabriel is. But confidence isn’t an interesting thing to explore.”

Noone, who suffers from writer’s block in the novel, feels, “as if I’d broken into the Temple of Literature through some unlocked basement window.”

Maupin denies feeling that way–although one can’t help but wonder if he has suffered from the malady in question, since The Night Listener is Maupin’s first book in eight years.

“I’m not a compulsive worker,” he says with an audible shrug. “Also, I like to have a long period of letting my life fill up so I can tap into it for ideas.”

THE NIGHT LISTENER is an updating of the San Francisco zeitgeist–although the two main things that dominate the city’s life right now–i.e., the profusion of dotcom businesses and the soaring price of real estate–are not mentioned herein.

Instead, the novel concerns the effect of AIDS, not just on those who’ve contracted it, but on those who haven’t. Noone’s live-in lover has had AIDS for years, but protease inhibitors have eradicated the virus from his body, a circumstance that alters each man’s attitude toward the other, their relationship, and even toward life itself.

Just before Maupin finished the book, his–‘whatdoyoucall it?” wonders Maupin aloud, “former significant other? business partner? friend? ex-lover?”–Terry Anderson came up with the idea of marketing The Night Listener online, as the first spoken word serial available on the web via streaming audio.

In September, each chapter, read aloud by Maupin, became available for direct downloading on Salon.com. Was the author embarrassed to read the sex scenes aloud? I ask.

Maupin roars with laughter again. “In a single word: YES,” he shouts. “I kept wondering if the engineer could see me blushing behind the panel.”

“But then, I’ve been afflicted by a perennial mild embarrassment my entire life. Sometimes,” he adds, sighing, “I think I’ve deliberately put myself into situations to get past that–because I really believe we should be proud of who we are and what we do. If we aren’t, we shouldn’t be doing them.”

From the October 19-25, 2000 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Theology for Atheists

Yehuda Amichai’s poetry of paradox

By STEPHEN KESSLER

UNTIL HIS DEATH last month in Jerusalem at the age of 76, Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai was a strong contender for the Nobel Prize in literature. His books were translated into 37 languages beyond the original Hebrew, and Amichai has long been one of the planet’s pre-eminent poets. The evidence in English is abundant, most notably up to now in two substantial volumes: The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, translated by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell (Harper & Row, 1986; revised and expanded edition, 1996), and Yehuda Amichai: A Life of Poetry, 1948-1994, translated by Benjamin and Barbara Harshav (HarperCollins, 1994). As if that weren’t enough, last spring we were given what the jacket flap touts as his magnum opus, a tightly integrated sequence of poems translated by Bloch and Chana Kronfeld, Open Closed Open (Harcourt; Brace; $25).

Amichai is a connoisseur of the paradoxical. By turns, and often at the same time, erotic and metaphysical, devout and skeptical, earnest and ironic, grief-drenched and dryly witty, his poems investigate contemporary realities from a biblical perspective and rethink biblical stories from a contemporary angle. Jewish down to the bones, his humanity is broadly universal, obsessed as he is with time and death, war and peace, love and memory, joy and suffering. Zionist in his attachment to the rocks and sand of his homeland (Amichai immigrated to Palestine from Germany in 1936 at the age of 12), still he is not a nationalist in the political sense of that word.

Rooted in the geography of the desert landscape, its physical details and sensations, its ancient and modern history, its cosmic mysteries, Amichai is also the most intimate of love poets, as passionately entangled with his woman as with his country. He finds in the lover’s embrace both evidence of the divine and consolation for its absence. The human body–his own, his lover’s–is a garden, a battlefield, a sanctuary, an oasis, a meeting place of the temporal and the eternal.

As a Jewish atheist Taoist existentialist, I am not favorably predisposed toward theological discourse. Religious orthodoxy of any kind, with its authoritarian overtones, tends to provoke my inner anarchist. But Amichai’s poetry, religious as it undeniably is, cultivates such a shrewd irreverence and is so alive with insight, so earthy and individual, that it’s irresistible even to a disbeliever. In a poem called “Gods Change, Prayers Are Here to Stay,” he offers this lesson in comparative religion:

The God of the Christians is a Jew, a bit of a whiner, and the God of the Muslims is an Arab Jew from the desert, a bit hoarse. Only the God of the Jews isn’t Jewish. The way Herod the Edomite was brought in to be king of the Jews, so God was brought back from the infinite future, an abstract God: neither painting nor graven image nor tree nor stone.

Is nothing sacred to this wise guy? Well, yes and no. Perhaps the poet’s imagination is what it takes to revitalize exhausted dogma. A little further along in the same poem Amichai suggests this himself:

We are all children of Abraham but also the grandchildren of Terah, Abraham’s father. And maybe it’s high time the grandchildren did unto the father as he did unto his when he shattered his idols and images, his religion, his faith. That too would be the beginning of a new religion.

This sense of a faith at odds with itself, of a person wrestling with his own belief in search of spiritual truth, gives the religious dimension of Amichai’s poetry far greater weight and resonance than more conventional affirmations of piety.

The political slant of these poems is even more elusive. Fraught with history, violence, and the ongoing geopolitical (and theopolitical) arguments that have wracked his land since long before it was a Jewish state, they almost never address directly the “issues” we see debated in the newspapers. Unlike such leading Palestinian poets as Adonis and Mahmoud Darwish–who, exiled from their home and constantly trying to correct that loss, invoke a collective nostalgia, defiance, and urgent thirst for justice–Amichai seems to see war and peace, terrorism and coexistence, even borders, as difficult realities endemic not only to the region but to the human condition. He reflects on his own combat experience, the fear and courage of soldiers, his son and daughter being drafted and disappearing on buses with their faces “in the corner of the window like a stamp on an envelope,” and “the thud of the censor’s seal like the hammerblow of fate,” but the only explicit protest in his poetry–and even that is muted by a sigh of resignation–is not against the censor or any government or enemy, but against fate itself, or God, or whatever demonic force it is that causes humanity to lust for its own blood.

Like an archeologist, the poet excavates and sifts the subpolitical evidence for clues to the deeper dynamics driving human conduct. “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Why Jerusalem?” should be read by anyone seeking to understand why it’s so vexing for any government–let alone two or three governments and as many religions–to resolve the question of whom that city belongs to. “I always have to go in the opposite direction to whatever/ is passing and past,” he writes. “That’s how I know I live in Jerusalem.”

Going “against the tide of pilgrims,” swimming upstream against “the joy- parades,” thriving on the principle of opposition, the poet is divided against his own people, who are in turn divided among, and sometimes within, themselves.

How could he or anyone expect whole states to agree on anything?

As usual, it is the lovers who offer a glimpse of relief from such madness, albeit with their own brand of fanaticism:

Two lovers talking to each other in Jerusalem with the excitement of tour guides, pointing, touching, explaining: These are my father’s eyes you see in my face, these are the sleek thighs I inherited from a distant mother in the Middle Ages, this is my voice which traveled all the way here from three thousand years ago, this is the color of my eyes, the mosaic of my spirit, the archeological layers of my soul. We are holy places.

Is Amichai being allegorical? Could these lovers be Jew and Arab? Are the bodies, animated by history and desire, mystically related to a body politic that might transcend hatred and ideology, united by Eros–praise Allah, thank God, “amen and may it come to pass”? Or is it only that he sees in sexual love a kind of redemption, though not without its own struggles for power and sovereignty?

The poignancy of our earthly sojourn, its ephemeral sweetness, the pregnancy of the smallest human gestures, the haunted beauty and richness of the most mundane things and events–none of this is lost on the poet. He dares to tackle cosmic themes in domestic terms, as in “Houses (Plural); Love (Singular)”:

We lived in many houses and left remnants of memory in every one of them: a newspaper, a book face-down, a crumpled map of some faraway land, a forgotten toothbrush standing sentinel in a cup– that too is a memorial candle, an eternal light.

If even a toothbrush, in Amichai’s universe, can be a sacred object, how much more sacred then must be the hand that holds the toothbrush, and the lovers’ hands caressing each other, and the disembodied memories themselves, and the minds remembering. With Amichai, ripples of implication set out from the simplest phrases and spread indefinitely.

His lines are almost prosaic in their conversational quality, and yet they are subtly rhythmic, lyric, layered with associations. I don’t read Hebrew, but in these English versions by Bloch and Kronfeld I feel I am getting the mood, the tone, the pace, the punning wit, the linguistic mischievousness of the original, or as close an approximation as one could hope for. They catch, in colloquial English, the contradictory currents and emotional riptides under the calm surface of Amichai’s measured voice.

“Real meaning, for Amichai,” Bloch and Kronfeld wrote recently in The American Poetry Review, “resides not in language . . . but in the ‘soul-stutterings’ of human emotion.” It must be that subterranean stutter that paradoxically informs these expert translators’ eloquence in representing not just the words but the spirit of this extraordinary poet. *

From the October 12-18, 2000 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.