Read Online Coming into the End Zone by Doris Grumbach - Free Book Online

her constant funeral-going, she knew, and much admired, the frugal Orthodox practice of using a pine box instead of an expensive ‘casket.’
    She added with evident pleasure, ‘It will be a long and very sad event. A lot of crying. All in Hebrew, the prayers I mean of course.’
    She went in. I went home.
    The day after. I have survived the twelfth. It is a clear and lovely early morning. I am, kindly, left alone on the deck. In my nightclothes I sit here and watch the light grow stronger. I too grow stronger as I drink coffee and consider this new day. The day after. I have survived that day, I have made the turn.
    I begin to read galleys of a novel I brought with me, The Swimming Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst. It is an account of gay life in Britain in the sixties, when sexual activities were free, joyous, unshadowed by the specter of fatal disease. The characters are cultivated young upper-class men who speak affectionately about well-known homosexuals and go to baths seeking constant stimulation with young boys, handsome blacks, other beautiful young men of their own class.
    Hollinghurst describes their unending sexual adventures most graphically, in pickup motion-picture theaters, in salons of great private houses, at pools and body-building spas. The narrator, William Beckwith, is the grandson of a judge-aristocrat, Lord Denis Beckwith, for whom he has great affection. At a bath, William saves the life of aged Lord Nantwich, and thus becomes involved in his life and the proposed editing of his diary.
    His grandfather tells William about being at the first performance of Benjamin Britten’s opera Billy Budd , and hearing E. M. Forster criticize some of the music, especially Claggart’s monologue:
    â€˜He wanted it to be much more … open, and sexy, as Willy puts it. I think soggy was the word he used to describe Britten’s music for it.’
    Years later, the young narrator, his lover, James, and Lord Beckwith see the original tenor of the opera at a performance: ‘Pears was shuffling very slowly along the aisle toward the front of the stalls, supported by a man on either side. Most of the bland audience showed no recognition of who he was, though occasionally someone would stare, or look away hurriedly from the singer’s stroke-slackened but beautiful white-crested head.… James and I were mesmerized, and seeing him in the flesh I felt the whole occasion subtly transform, and the opera whose ambiguity we had carped at take on a kind of heroic or historic character under the witness of one of its creators. Even though I felt he would be enjoying it, I believed in its poignancy for him, seeing other singers performing it on the same stage in the same sets as he had done decades before, under the direction of the man he loved.’
    Hollinghurst manages to suggest in this passage a parallel between Pears and Britten, Captain Vere and Billy Budd. This performance of the opera, ‘an episode in his [Pears’s] past,’ is somewhat like the elderly captain’s memory of the blessing of Billy Budd. But I may be reading this into it; Hollinghurst may not have intended the suggestion. More than this, the portrait of sick and aging Pears being almost carried to his seat by aides is as poignant for the reader as the opera must have been for the tenor.
    The old, gay lord’s diary contains a moving portrait of dying Ronald Firbank: ‘I had noticed a solitary figure sitting across the room, also drinking freely, even heavily. He was slender & beautifully dressed, of indeterminate age but clearly older than he wanted to be. He must in fact have been about 40, but his flushed appearance & what might well have been a discreet maquillage gave him an air of artifice & sadly made one feel that he must be older, not younger. He was not only by himself but in some heightened, almost dramatic way, alone. He squirmed & twitched as if a thousand eyes were upon him, & then