When I first read Plays Well with Others (Allan Gurganus), my first explicitly gay novel, and as I have continued to think about the book over the past eight or nine years, what stuck with me most poignantly was one of the many off-the-cuff statements about New York and it’s Mecca-draw for young gay men: the City is full of boys who believed themselves to be pretty because their mothers told them so. This hit me hard (That’s me!). It prefaced how I came to regard gay New York’s pecking order when I moved here a year later, and it saved me—in theory at least, or probably to my detriment—many years of cultural misunderstanding and self-delusion.
I’ve read the book again, and now I can’t find that passage. In fact, I think I may have misinterpreted one where Hartley, the narrator, describes what he perceives as the gays’ collective outlook, everyone at the time (the early ‘80s) “still very much guy-guys, the more so for youth’s stubborn cockiness. Butch and jawed and proud and hung, our mother’s favorites” [emphasis added. Sigh. Let’s not pause here to draw conclusions about my powers of deduction.]. He continues: “Here, on glossy streets—one glance at any other slim tailored dude was returned with interest, a brazen unharmed ‘Yes?’ . . . . We had come this far to be ourselves. We would not hold back. There were hundreds of thousands of us.”
Does it come as any surprise that it’s an AIDS novel, with such a binary already asserting itself—that star-spangled “before” bracing itself for the counterweight of “after”? Hartley Mims, Jr., arrives from Falls, North Carolina, in 1980, an aspiring fiction writer with a new historian’s interest in the South. He befriends Robert, a beauty-god and composer who is a pastor’s son from Iowa, and then Angie, a driven painter and failed debutante from Savannah; the three form a triumvirate united by horniness, unfettered affection for one another, a magnet-draw to the City, and thirst of fame. Hartley is something of a Carrie Bradshaw among his friends, in the way that he is not only the narrator, but basically the middle child, the midpoint among extremities, the one we’re asked to relate to the most. He does not claim to share Angie’s talent or Robert’s beauty, and his modesty in this regard is largely what makes their friendship possible. There is a sense of time passing, but it’s hard to tell—in the first half, at least, it’s only marked by career advancements and perceived changes due to getting older—because story-wise, the book is pieced together like a journal or diary, formed of incidents and insights that cohere in a spiraling fashion.
It might be a dated book, and the characters’ affectations—they speak a strange hybrid of Twitter and Henry James (“Love you? Love you! If I ever create a masterpiece, it will be convincing you I do. Earth to Angie: I am already your friggin’ slave. The only thing I haven’t done for you is oral sex because I have no aptitude for working with that little. I do convex only.”) might be occasionally grating, but Plays Well is an overwhelming tale of devotion: to each other, but also to the non-native’s New York, and to gays, and, of course, to the nebulous notion of “family.” (Clearly I am in love with this book.)
I often think about how great it was to be young and to “surrender” to everything: impulses, but also to New York, to Virginia Woolf, to my friends, to my ideas of being in love (not that I had anything but fevered wanting at the time in my life when I might have been living “with complete surrender”). You can only appreciate it in retrospect, and that version of events is usually more a fantasy of surrender, anyway. In Plays Well, at least in the “Before” part, Hartley, Robert, and Angie take surrender to a whole new level.
Sex is easy. Squalor is elegant. Parties are always gotten into. And of course they are all bone fide “artists.” Angie calls Hartley one morning at a payphone outside an antique shop wanting him to buy a “faded Southern Gothic” harp that has “three vestal virgins dancing on the wide part down near the bottom.” Does one cater to this impulse IRL? (He can’t afford it, but maybe regret is also a form of surrender?) At one of their coffeehouse gatherings, Robert assigns each of his friends an artistic rendering of “heaven.” Hartley writes a story entitled “Toward a More Precise Identification of the Newer Angels” and Angie paints a canvas depicting “a manhole cover that soon became the shieldlike pattern from a tortoise’s shell.” When Robert, beauty-god, homemade angel wings affixed to his shoulder blades, plays his two-part composition on the piano, it’s a silently agreed to be a failure. But Angie sweeps in with a correction—turn it into a “triptych,” she says. Suddenly his “Paradise Lost Then Corrected” is personified rapture: “The way you know true things in your very follicles, in the basis of your next breath . . .we all gained what we had earlier suspected: how gifted Robert was, how right our Angie had just been.” The few road bumps on the course of this collective ecstatic surrender—Angie’s drive for fame knows no bounds, Robert has a society life that exists outside the others, Robert and Hartley get mugged, Hartley witnesses a somewhat crippling infidelity (I'm sparing you a spoiler)—do little to detract them.
Even their work is a kind of surrender. “We wanted our lives to be representative; we wanted our experience to go all dramatic and to become unique; we still expected to be known as our age’s record-keepers in paint, word, and permanent eighth notes, full-stops.” He writes, “I could not explain my faith in what I did. It was not yet even faith in my own work . . . It was more a faith in the right to work.” Can one only identify this in retrospect, after mortality is prematurely within view?
[Also: Seriously? Did they really work so hard? And if they did, do people still do that? Maybe this is more a testament to my social circles and my perspective than it is a representation of my greater milieu, but: Did/do we ever work so hard? Did/do we ever want something so bad, especially something that is contingent on the value bestowed on it by a third party viewer? What a handicap it must be, the “ambition” for such success (being famous). In yoga the other day, while the teacher was walking us through a pose that maybe two people in the room could do (the instructor was not one of them), she said, “It’s not just about the physical practice, it’s about the longing.” I’m a sucker for statements like this. Virtuous longing, the longing itself being a form of fulfillment (because it happens on the inside, see): that’s something I can get behind. But maybe when I get older, and I experience more tragedy and am contextually fluent in my life’s trajectory, I will look back on this period of my life very differently. I digress.]
I think I’m probably missing the most important parts about this book. It’s so much bigger. Hartley pays tribute to his somewhat distanced father very movingly. And the book is basically a memorial to the idea of the gay urban family and its circumstantial codependency—the origin myth happens here. And then the collective reckoning that takes place in the second half, despite its metaphors—the USS Titanic, extensive quoting from Robert Defoe’s account of the Black Death (Journal of a Plague Year)—has no precedent. I’m struck by the same harrowing aspects of the AIDS experience again and again: the resilience of the surviving and survivors, the scale of tragedy, and then of course the sanctioned contempt and disregard outside gay culture (lest one forget what an unforgivable asshole William F. Buckley was). I wonder if it’s ever been a question in queer studies circles: What exactly makes an AIDS novel? Well, yes, AIDS, but could Plays Well carry itself without AIDS? And is this a question to concern one’s self with? It’s like the Before cannot fully exist without the After, and if that is true, and if we’re part of the After, and cannot really lay claim to the Before, then an off-balance/ambivalent feeling is to be expected, yes?
You ought to read it.
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