 | A WRITER'S WIT |  T. De Quincey |
MY BOOK WORLD
Plante, David. The Catholic. New York: Plume, 1987 (1985).
I first read this book in 1987 when American companies were just beginning to publish gay men’s fiction in what seemed like large numbers. I now believe I read it rather hurriedly, paying close attention to the sex scenes often written in great detail. I did this novel a great disservice. I now view it as a wonderful portrayal of a young man in the 1960s struggling not so much with being with men sexually but being with them in the world, his Catholic world in particular.
Dan, a young man teaching public school in Boston, narrates his short past: his father, his mother, his sister, their upbringing. With regard to his high school education, he tells of what seems like raping his good friend Charlie—an event they never mention again, even though they do remain friends into their twenties. Dan frequents the Boston bars where men meet men to have sex, and he goes home with a similarly aged man named Henry. In what may be one of the longest sex scenes I’ve ever encountered in a novel, Dan and Henry hungrily and repeatedly devour one another until early in the morning there is little left of either of them. At the same time, the chapter, as is the book, is full of Dan’s intellectualization or rationalization of the experience that he is tempted to think of as love:
"I wondered how many people he had made love with on this sheet. It was penetrated with the presences of how many lovers, their sweat and saliva and whatever sperm hadn’t been wiped away by the towel? I smoothed out the wrinkles between our bodies and was reminded of the sheets I used to see in the college dormitory pulled from the beds by women every Monday morning and thrown into piles in the corridors. As I passed them I used to imagine they retained the impressions of all the bodies that slept in them, had jerked off and maybe made love with others in them, and I wanted to fall into one of the piles” (31).
Dan thinks this deeply and philosophically about everything including the religion he claims to have abandoned. Near the end of the novel, the following idea occurs to him:
"If what I was struggling for was faith, I had not even reconciled in myself how that faith was to be achieved, through my own will or a vast will-lessness. I would never reconcile these. I was struggling both to overcome and to be overcome, and in doing this I was struggling for the realization of my greatest desire, for belief” (146).
Up until the end, Dan’s beliefs subliminally lace his thoughts:
"I wished I had drawn blood from Henry, just a little, then drawn blood from the same part of my body, from our arms or chests, and pressed his blood into mine” (150).
The phrases that ring of Genesis—"bone of my bone” and “flesh of my flesh”—seem to imbue Dan’s desire to make Henry’s blood his as well. It seems that once a Catholic always a Catholic, but that aphorism may be too simple. Perhaps, once human, always human is more like it, and that concept seems to be what Dan cannot learn or accept.
Up Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Frank McCourt
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Anne Edwards
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Alexander Chee
FRI: A Writer's Wit | Dorothy Parker
I first read this book in 1987 when American companies were just beginning to publish gay men’s fiction in what seemed like large numbers. I now believe I read it rather hurriedly, paying close attention to the sex scenes often written in great detail. I did this novel a great disservice. I now view it as a wonderful portrayal of a young man in the 1960s struggling not so much with being with men sexually but being with them in the world, his Catholic world in particular.
Dan, a young man teaching public school in Boston, narrates his short past: his father, his mother, his sister, their upbringing. With regard to his high school education, he tells of what seems like raping his good friend Charlie—an event they never mention again, even though they do remain friends into their twenties. Dan frequents the Boston bars where men meet men to have sex, and he goes home with a similarly aged man named Henry. In what may be one of the longest sex scenes I’ve ever encountered in a novel, Dan and Henry hungrily and repeatedly devour one another until early in the morning there is little left of either of them. At the same time, the chapter, as is the book, is full of Dan’s intellectualization or rationalization of the experience that he is tempted to think of as love:
"I wondered how many people he had made love with on this sheet. It was penetrated with the presences of how many lovers, their sweat and saliva and whatever sperm hadn’t been wiped away by the towel? I smoothed out the wrinkles between our bodies and was reminded of the sheets I used to see in the college dormitory pulled from the beds by women every Monday morning and thrown into piles in the corridors. As I passed them I used to imagine they retained the impressions of all the bodies that slept in them, had jerked off and maybe made love with others in them, and I wanted to fall into one of the piles” (31).
Dan thinks this deeply and philosophically about everything including the religion he claims to have abandoned. Near the end of the novel, the following idea occurs to him:
"If what I was struggling for was faith, I had not even reconciled in myself how that faith was to be achieved, through my own will or a vast will-lessness. I would never reconcile these. I was struggling both to overcome and to be overcome, and in doing this I was struggling for the realization of my greatest desire, for belief” (146).
Up until the end, Dan’s beliefs subliminally lace his thoughts:
"I wished I had drawn blood from Henry, just a little, then drawn blood from the same part of my body, from our arms or chests, and pressed his blood into mine” (150).
The phrases that ring of Genesis—"bone of my bone” and “flesh of my flesh”—seem to imbue Dan’s desire to make Henry’s blood his as well. It seems that once a Catholic always a Catholic, but that aphorism may be too simple. Perhaps, once human, always human is more like it, and that concept seems to be what Dan cannot learn or accept.
Up Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Frank McCourt
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Anne Edwards
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Alexander Chee
FRI: A Writer's Wit | Dorothy Parker
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