WILD AND LOVELY THINGS

EUDORA WELTY, E.M. FORSTER, "MAURICE," "A WORN PATH," AND YET ANOTHER CHRISTMAS

(Above: In Eudora Welty’s home on Pinehurst Street in Jackson, Mississippi, reading a letter written to her from E.M. Forster which she had framed and hung on a wall in her front parlor.)

The photo above came up recently on my Facebook page and made me think about not only the film Maurice, which is based on the novel by E.M. Forster and tells the story of gay love at the turn of the 20th Century, but also about my gay Mississippi youth yoked to Eudora Welty’s wondrous talent and kindness, both attributes that deepen with my memory of them and which she invoked in regards to Forster himself. The film and the novel of Maurice hold up remarkably well within their fascinating not-quite-as-good-as-they-might-be craftiness. I recommend them for those who've never seen nor read them. Forster, who was gay himself, based Maurice on the love affair - well, marriage in its way before we were allowed legally to take matrimonial vows - between the mystical socialist poet, George Carpenter (who was a great friend and admirer of Walt Whitman) and George Merrill, the working-class lad who grew up in the slums of Sheffield and whom Carpenter met on a train in 1891. A few years later he moved in with Carpenter and they lived openly - and bravely - as lovers and partners for 30 years. In 1912, Forster visited them and Merrill pointedly touched Forster “just above the buttocks,” he wrote in his diaries 50 years later. “It was as much psychological as physical. It seemed to go straight through the small of my back into my ideas, without involving my thoughts,” he, the diarist, claimed to himself, which could be the way Maurice itself was manifested and written, viscerally without the thoughtfulness or even mindfulness of his other novels which are filled with metaphors and mystery and subterfuge and the intricate structures of the well-laid lies which are finally the constructs with which all novels are built, the careful architecture of connivance. Once Forster began to live a more honest life himself - or a less carefully connived one - he ceased to write novels and for his last 46 years never published another after A Passage to India in 1924.

Forster wrote the first draft of Maurice in 1914 in the same kind of, yes, visceral heat that he felt at Merrill’s momentary yet purposeful touch. He did a revision around 1939 - and yet another around 1960. He died in 1970. The novel was published the next year. I remember the stir it caused even then. When I was 16 in 1972, I bought a copy of it and read it in one weekend. It helped to assuage the abject loneliness that I was feeling as a gay teenager living outside the "city limits" of a small Mississippi town of 4000 people with my grandparents and two younger siblings after our parents had died a decade before, a place as constricted in its social mores as Victorian England. I was the kind of 16-year-old southern lad full of well-laid lies who not only read Forster but also knew about the homosexual angle of the book and its history - and also knew I could read it right under my grandparents’ noses because I was always reading something and they just learned to live with a teenage boy more interested in books than girls or those godawful balls of any size or shape needed in order to play the sports that all the other boys were playing. Some of the sports I did go ahead and play - and played rather well. My dead daddy had been a basketball and track coach so I had a genetic predisposition physically to excel in certain sports especially for which speed was an enabling element. But I bucked at the construct of having to play them and finally quit them all in order to graduate early from high school so I could head to college at 17 and create a life manifested from a different sort of construct for myself. Indeed, I am still manifesting a life by redefining the constructs within which to live one. I most recently had the courage to chuck it all and set out to live a grand life in a simplified way as a pilgrim in my 60s because when I was 16 I chucked the shame of being gay after having read Maurice by quitting sports and setting out on my own self-defined life, this pilgrimage that began really back then in Mississippi. I have been defining my life - and, more important, redefining it - ever since, a life always being shaped by a not-quite-as-good-as-it-might-be craftiness.

(The letter I am reading on the wall in the photograph that opens the column.)

Part of that new construct when I was a teenager was deciding that I wanted to be an actor and the next year, 1973, I was cast as Toby, an exotic gypsy mute, in a production of Gian Carlo Menotti’s one-act opera, The Medium, at New Stage Theatre in Jackson, Mississippi, after having won the Best Actor award at the states’s high school drama festival held at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg for my performance in the one-act Impromptu by Tad Mosel, another gay man. It was at New Stage where I was brought into the fold of a literate liberal cosmopolitan set which orbited around the town's local literary legend, Eudora Welty. She was on New Stage’s board and supported its work which included evenings based on her own fiction. Indeed, the production after The Medium was New Stage’s own adaptation of her novel The Ponder Heart which was edited and revised by her great friend Frank Hains, one of the founders of New Stage. Being made a part of that world was both a cultural and personal salvation for me, and Frank, who was also the Arts Editor of The Jackson Daily News and its cultural columnist, became my first mentor. I rented a room from him my first summers living in Jackson during my freshman and sophomore years at Millsaps College. I worked at a Jeans West store at a mall in town those summers. I had a fake ID to get into the one gay bar in town, Mae’s Cabaret. I felt both free and rather scared of my freedom. I read more books. And I knew enough to listen to those who had read more of them than I had. I waited to be 20.

Forster was one of Miss Welty's favorite writers and she was composing an essay in 1973 for The New York Times Book Review about a collection of his short stories titled, The Life to Come. She brought over the first draft of the essay for Frank to read one night since she was troubled that she was going to criticize Forster slightly in it and wanted to know if she was getting the tone right. She trusted Frank to tell her the truth about such matters. I poured them each their Maker's Mark as we sat around Frank's big kitchen table - which was my function back then - and intensely listened (my other function) to them discuss Forster and his work. "I've read Maurice," I told Miss Welty. "It's the only book of his I've ever read though." Miss Welty downed the last of the Maker's Mark then tapped the rim of her glass three times with her finger, always her signal to me to hit her up again. "Of course you have, dear," she said, smiling and tapping my bottle-less hand comfortingly with that same finger as I poured her a bit more bourbon. "But he's written some other books you might want to read that are kind of nice." I often tell people that I was so good at my job writing cover stories at Vanity Fair because not only could I put sentences together but also because I was unintimidated by fame. Once you’ve sat around with Eudora Welty when you’re a teenager hanging out with Madonna (not to get too Christmasy) doesn’t mean that much in the great crafty scheme of your life.

Miss Welty wrote in that Forster essay that "it will be sad if the aspect of homosexuality, which kept Forster's stories from reaching print in his own day, turns out to be their only focus of interest for today's readers." Forster himself said that one of the reasons he stopped writing novels was that he could no longer bear to write about the one subject open to him, the love between men and women. Without commenting precisely on this, Miss Welty wrote that when the women went out of Forster's stories, they took the comedy with them. And Maurice for all its many strengths and even with the happy ending he insisted on writing for it is a rather witless affair and I’d like to think that his own affairs of the heart were filled with wit even if it sadly were too often a substitute for more moments of carnality however carefully crafted into his life they had to be.

Forster had two great loves in his life. As a young man traveling in Egypt, he met a tram conductor, Muhammad el-Adl. In a letter to a friend, Forster wrote, “I have plunged into an anxious but very beautiful affair. It seemed to me — and I proved right — that something precious was being offered me and that I was offering something that might be thought precious. . . . I should have been right to take the plunge, because if you pass life by it’s jolly well going to pass you by in the future. If you’re frightened it’s all right — that’s no harm; fear is an emotion. But by some trick of the nerves I happen not to be frightened.” It took a special kind of bravery to embark on the relationship with the greater love of his life, Bob Buckingham, whom he met in 1930. Buckingham then married a woman named May and yet somehow the three of them crafted - that term again - a way for both May and E.M. to love Bob simultaneously. On his death bed in Cambridge, it was May’s hand which Forster was holding after the couple spent his last months watching over him. Although there were rumors around Jackson of Miss Welty’s being in a discreet relationship with Charlotte Capers, a great wit herself who was the Director of the Mississippi Archives and History - and I always had hoped they were true since I longed for her to have that kind of relationship in her life - her one great love had been a young poet who Frank told me had been gay. It has always touched me in confusing ways that Forster’s great love was a straight man and Welty’s was a gay one. I have often wondered if that were their great unspoken unwritten connection. I wonder about it now on Christmas morning as I sit alone baking a cake to take to a friend’s family dinner to which I have been so kindly invited. I do wonder why I have never been able to craft a long-lasting intimate love with any sort of person within any of my lived-in constructs. Selfishness? Survival? An aversion to a risk of heartbreak that is embedded in the abandonment that embedded itself in me as a child when my parents died their consecutive deaths? Just not my luck? Or is it lucky to be so comfortable in my solitude before loneliness lopes into the room? Christmas mornings when baking a cake by yourself bring up such questions.

In the photo that opens this column, I am at Miss Welty's house in Jackson when I was on my book tour for Mississippi Sissy. Her niece Mary Alice - who called her aunt"Dodo" - opened the house to give me a private visit that day. I am reading the framed "fan letter," that Forster wrote to Miss Welty, as she deemed to call it herself that night at Frank's kitchen table when she brought it up while Frank and she were offering me their discourse on Forster. "Finding myself in your country, I feel I should like to give myself the pleasure of writing you a line and telling you how much I enjoy your work," Forster wrote to Miss Welty. "The Wide Net with the wild and lovely things it brings up, have often been with me and delighted me."

While I was standing there reading that framed letter the books on the desk behind me shifted and several fell to the floor as if the ghosts of Welty and Forster were sweeping through the room. Mary Alice and I were spooked by it. "Well, that's never happened before," she said. "That must be their spirits"

I helped her pick up the books. "Yeah, well, was that a sign that they are pleased or displeased that I'm here in this room?" I asked.

I felt their spirits this morning as I set out to write this column. I am pleased they are here in the room with me this Christmas since I was feeling those loping-lonelies here in London. Forster said, “I do like Christmas on the whole.... In its clumsy way, it does approach Peace and Goodwill. But it is clumsier every year.” So is loneliness. So enough of that.

There is nothing clumsy about Miss Welty’s short story, “The Worn Path,” which is set during Christmas in Natchez. I re-read it each year leading up to Christmas or on the morning of the holiday itself. I re-read it before I set out the ingredients to bake the cake, Miss Welty’s words the ingredients always of my life no matter its construct.

In the story, first published in The Atlantic in its February 1940 edition along with poems by W.H. Auden and Robert Frost, a determined old woman is on a pilgrimage of her own into Natchez to get her grandson some medicine and to buy him a paper windmill for Christmas. Its first paragraph: “It was December — a bright frozen day in the early morning. Far out in the country there was an old Negro woman with her head tied in a red rag, coming along a path through the pinewoods. Her name was Phoenix Jackson. She was very old and small and she walked slowly in the dark pine shadows, moving a little from side to side in her steps, with the balanced heaviness and lightness of a pendulum in a grandfather clock. She carried a thin, small cane made from an umbrella, and with this she kept tapping the frozen earth in front of her. This made a grave and persistent noise in the still air that seemed meditative, like the chirping of a solitary little bird.”

I am more meditative than usual this Christmas morning after the year I have had which ended with my breaking my shoulder and spending these last months healing from that brokenness that seemed to be manifested from a deeper brokenness I have carried around with me waiting finally to fall headlong into such a construct, a metaphor embedded in my body with an insistence to be healed. My broken shoulder and how I went about the business of healing was the biggest gift I received this year. I continue to open it this Christmas morning.

In “The Worn Path,” Miss Jackson through Miss Welty - or it the other way around? - says to the nurse who is giving her the medicine for her grandson, “‘I never did go to school — I was too old at the Surrender. I’m an old woman without an education. It was my memory fail me. My little grandson, he is just the same, and I forgot it in the coming.”

Each Christmas something new in this dignified slightly confused old woman’s pilgrimage deeply moves me. This morning it was her term for the end of the Civil War: “the Surrender.” Each morning I ask Whoever It Is Who Listens that the construct of my life be about the balance and not the battle. But what I do first, no matter what, is to surrender. In that, Christmas is like any other day, any other morning: surrender is the gift that once more arrives. It arrived this morning. Part of the unwrapping of its construct this morning - its clumsy mystery - was writing this column. So here’s to Welty and Forster. Here’s to writing. To reading. Here’s to wild and lovely things arriving within the latest construct of one’s life. Here’s to not letting life pass you by. Here’s to not forgetting in the coming. Here’s to being one’s own phoenix.

Here’s to surrender.

To Christmas.

The pilgrimage.

Onward.