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By Root 1157 0

his own those buried poems. Early on, in a scene that described an evening at Peggy’s without any recognizable details or anecdotes, I composed a sestina, just to keep myself awake. Later there was a sonnet, an imitation of a French poem, “Aux yeux de Madame de Beaufort.” In the last chapter I buried some couplets. This story of lost gay love and a Gothic childhood alluded throughout to saints and Sufis and to St. Gregory of Nyssa and to Solomon’s Song of Songs. I suppose I had learned from Nabokov to make literary allusions unobtrusive so that they might delight the initiated and not disturb anyone else. I subscribed to the baroque confusion between the spiritual and the sensual, though I believed in the spirit only as a word, just as Melville caressed (and didn’t believe in) the word mystic and Henry James spoke reverentially when he used the word moral, though one scarcely knew what he meant by it.

Readers (my few readers!) had spoken of Forgetting Elena as a “baroque” novel, although I now realize that it’s quite unornamented and syntactically modest. Baroque, I guess, was just a vogue word of that period for anything offbeat (and gay?). I took the description seriously, however, and wrote Nocturnes according to a genuine baroque aesthetic that stresses movement, above all, that proceeds through constant metamorphoses, that employs unusually rich materials and is designed to produce a single overwhelming theatrical effect—and expresses religious feelings through the erotic (Bernini’s St. Michael stabbing a writhing St. Theresa in the side, for example) or vice versa (all those old poems comparing the beloved to the Madonna or God).

Under all this elaborate theatrical machinery (one chapter had my characters actually living onstage), I was reenacting my thwarted passion for Keith McDermott and my intense, prolonged suffering over him. In the true baroque style of transformation, everything was converted into other terms. In real life I had spent a memorable night having sex with Keith, one of the half-dozen times that that occurred. Ever the formalist aesthete, he’d set everything up as a ritual by candlelight. I metamorphosed that experience into my chapter in the theater where the lover, me, was dressed as Bottom and the beloved, Keith, as Titania. Nor was it just any theater. It was a baroque theater, full of the machinery of the past, all of which I carefully researched.

I had decided that exposition “bored” me and looked for a form that would skip it—the letter! Yes, in letters people don’t spell out to the beloved the key moments of their affair but rather allude to them in shorthand. My novel would be addressed to a mysterious “you,” who might by turns seem to be Frank O’Hara or God—in any event, someone dead. Whereas countless gay poets had used the “you strategy” to avoid designating the sex of the beloved (it only works in English and Chinese, where adjectives have no gender), I would be quite clear that I was addressing a man. The “I” in my book, however, wasn’t me but rather Keith McDermott many years from now when he would mourn his lost lover—who resembled me, in a few ways. This was a sort of “Cry me a river/’cuz I cried a river over you” novel. Now that thirty years have gone by, Keith and I are best friends and all this spleen has withered away.

Nocturnes for the King of Naples came out in 1978, the same year as several other gay novels: Andrew Holleran’s lyrical Fire Island book, Dancer from the Dance; Larry Kramer’s clumsy, pleasure-phobic Faggots; and Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City. My book was the least noticed of the lot, though a certain kind of romantic lad still reads it from time to time. For some people it’s much of a muchness. I remember in the mid-1980s Italo Calvino’s wife, Chichita, read it in French and said to me dismissively, “It’s sentimental, Edmund, and you’re not.” My novel did have some nice blurbs from Gore Vidal and Cynthia Ozick, and it received few reviews but positive ones—except in the New York Times Book Review, where the critic said that I had been talented when