Celebration for the nonce vs. the anguish of ardor: "Bronze" by Jeffrey Eugenides

Quick anecdote: I've had to go through a lot of psychological tests for job suitability in my life. Twice, after taking a battery of tests, the psychiatrist or psychologist going over the results with me mentioned that my profile wouldn't be unusual for a gay man. After dropping this supposed revelation on me, the interviewer would look at me, a gravid pause in the conversation, as if half expecting me to come forward with some secret confession.

The first time this happened, I didn't really do much but shrug. The second time, I asked why the test suggested that. "Well, you noted that you're interested in things that often show up on the tests of gay men. You like poetry, for example."

Well, I don't know who I am to argue with science like that, but this reminds me of a classic Seinfeld episode.

To the best of my knowledge, I'm not gay. I mean, I've never tried to see. Maybe I'd try it and like it. But of the available items on the sexual menu, that one didn't appeal to me enough to order it, and now I'm in my forties and married and I'm not really interested in seeing if I might like other menu items. But I honestly think that if I were to go back in time and try more menu items before settling for what I eat now, the menu items in my current diet would have been my favorite.

Are you gay?

Maybe because I loved sports and was half good at them, I didn't have to face this question much, even though my teeth don't quite come together right, making me sort of sibilantize my "s" sounds. And I like poetry, or at least used to be interested enough in it I went to grad school with the original intent of being a poet. So I have faced the question a few times.

Eugene, the protagonist in Jeffrey Eugenides' "Bronze" has faced a lot of the same thing. It's a much different question for him, though, because it's 1978 and he's in college at Brown, which makes his possible identity as gay more of a physical threat to him as well as less politically and socially acceptable than it has been in my lifetime.

Eugene isn't exactly making it easy for others to read him. He recently got stood up at the movies by the ballerina he's infatuated with and asked out, and it's led him to pick some rather garish clothing, "part glam, part New Wave." Getting rejected has made him see himself as ugly and freakish. He'd like to be beautiful, but now he doesn't feel beautiful, having just been stood up, so he's decided that "noticeable would do."

He's just spent a weekend in New York in his Elton John getup--pink sunglasses, scarf knotted at the neck, white fur coat. During his weekend, he was in the company of gay men going wild, although he doesn't seem to have participated in the bacchanalia himself. On the train back to Brown, he's getting a lot of smug "only in New York" looks. He's high, so he can't quite parse the looks he's getting, as they're blending into a weed paranoia. But it turns out, people were thinking he was gay before he started piercing his ear and unintentionally signifying sexuality through his clothing.

Society has a whole lot of stupid reasons it thinks someone is likely to be gay, both in the story and in real life. Eugene likes poetry. He was in the theater. He dresses flamboyantly. During a time when you couldn't just be out about being gay, dress was an indirect was to signify to others who knew the code what your intentions were. It was a Shibboleth. But what about someone like Eugene who is using that same signifier to mean something else? As a poet, he's going to embark on a lifelong quest to re-work the meanings of words. So it's little wonder he thinks he's saying one thing with the way he presents himself to the world, while the world is looking back thinking he's showing them something else.

Kent

While Eugene is stumbling around high on the train back to Brown, just hoping to find a seat where he can do his Latin homework, Kent sees him and offers him an adjacent seat. Kent, who is twenty years older than Eugene and an established actor, has just spent a debauched weekend of his own in New York, a weekend which included, among other things, climbing onto the back of a meat truck for a lights-out orgy with three dozen men, and a club where the urinals were combined with the desire of fetishists to be urinated on. Seated on the train, he sees Eugene, looking at himself in his reflection in the window, and Kent sees himself twenty years ago:

"That was when he saw the boy. In the Eskimo coat. And the Elton John sunglasses. Staring into the door window behind him like Narcissus into his pool.
Kent knew who the kid reminded him of. Himself, twenty years ago. Grow up queer in the sticks and it's like hearing a broadcast in the distance...so when you finally run away to New York, you end up dressing like this kid, in some wild approximation of flamboyant."

It's funny that Kent sees Eugene looking into his reflection like Narcissus, when it's really Kent who's the Narcissist here. Kent is the one who sees himself in the reflection. His self-centerdness is why he misreads Eugene. He's not only obsessed with his own reflection, like Narcissus was, he's so solipsistic, he actually erases Eugene's true reflection and replaces it with his own.

Kent spends the rest of the trip getting the kid drunk and talking to him about art and the theater. Eugene is fascinated to meet a real actor like Kent, and Kent helps Eugene to work on his delivery of poetry. At the end of the trip, Kent convinces Eugene to get in his car and come back to his house with him. Eugene gets sick and nearly passes out, at which point Kent tries to have sex with him.

Although Kent has been portrayed sympathetically, he's a sexual predator. There's no other way to look at it. And we learn, as something in Eugene screams at him to get out, that the boy's been victimized by older male sexual predators before. These were other men who read what they wanted into the boy and justified getting what they wanted to themselves by saying they were playing the role of an older male mentor who would help show him the way and unlock a door for him. After Eugene leaves, Kent calls his former lover to tell him what just happened, only Kent says that he never touched the boy and has made a resolution to be Platonic with young gay men learning their way. The reader is left with the impression that Kent might even believe his own lie.

Eugene's real quest for identity: sensitivity, ardor, celebration

Often, fiction about young, gay men comes down to nothing more than the simple quest to uncover one's true sexual identity. Lately, I've read some good gay fiction that complicates this basic formula. Matthew Lansburgh's Outside is the Ocean was not so much about the difficulties of a young man discovering he is gay but about the dangers of cutting too loose and living for the moment once he knows. It is also about the troubles of a mother who understands, but is kind of terrible for reasons that have nothing to do with her son's sexual identity. Jacob Guajardo's "What Got Into Us," from last year's Best American Short Stories, was about both the sweetness of discovery and the bitterness of mistakes made while making the discovery.

"Bronze" isn't gay fiction, because its main character isn't gay. But it is about identity, including sexual identity. What it does differently is put sexual identity back in its proper position, which is only one piece in the larger puzzle of personal identity. To be sure, for men who had to grow up at a time when it was literally a risk to your life to be openly gay, it was a very important piece of the puzzle, and one that was more difficult than necessary to get right. But solving this one part of the puzzle isn't solving the whole thing.

For Eugene, his search for identity is expressed as his search for the right word to describe himself. Eugene is obsessed with words, and he habitually meditates on the resonances of words to determine whether he likes them. ("Gruel was like 'gray' and 'cruel.'") A friend of a friend asks him to pick from three words which one most describes him, like the words are tarot cards that will determine his future. The words are "sensitivity," "ardor," and "celebration." He originally rejects sensitivity, because he thinks too many people have called him sensitive, and not in a good way. He also rejects ardor, because "it's like odor and armpit." He chooses celebration, both because it is Latinate and because it suits the current version of himself he is trying to create, the one that dresses like Liberace.

I love this alteration to the basic gay coming-of-age story. Rather than a massive hide-and-seek game for a sexual identity that is hidden from him, Eugene's search is more of a game of courtship with various future paths that offer themselves to him. Each will effect how he approaches his desire to be a poet. "Sensitive" is one kind of poetic identity, but he rejects it, perhaps because he sees it as too obvious. It is too much the version of himself that others lazily assign to him without Euguene feeling it is really his true self.

"Celebration" fits what he finds appealing in some poets, and it fits how the world seems to him when he goes to New York to be around (but not so much participate in directly) a certain end-of-the-world debauchery:

"New York was dying. But that was OK. It was in dying empires that the greatest poets appeared. Virgil in Rome. Dante in Florence. Baudelaire in Paris. Decadence. Eugene liked that word. It was like "decay" and "hence." Things falling apart over time. A sweet smell like that of rotten bananas, or of bodies ripe from iniquitous exertion, could pervade an entire age, at which point someone came along to give voice to how messed up things were and, in so doing, made them beautiful again."

This is what Eugene sees as his aesthetic philosophy of poetics as he is traveling back to Brown after his weekend in New York. This is a philosophy which stresses the ephemerality of things. It is, it so happens, exactly how Kent, the man he has now bumped into, lives his life.

If you were wondering, this song didn't come out until 1980, two years after the setting of this story.

But ardor, the third of the three words which he originally rejected without much of a thought, finds a way to silently sneak into his consciousness and woo him. As he translates Horace on the train, he is intrigued by by how Horace boasted of creating "a monument more lasting than bronze" through his work. As conceited a boast as that sounds, Eugene thinks, there is no denying that Eugene is there, on a train, translating Horace 2,000 years after he wrote it. Eugene scrawls a few lines of his own as the train passes some poorer homes.

As much as Eugene wonders if it is even possible, at this point in history, to think of someone reading your work 2,000 years in the future, he starts to realize this is what his true poetics should be about. He realizes that getting rejected by the dancer has awoken something in him. "It didn't feel good, exactly, but it was familiar. It felt as if there were a drain inside him, as in a bathtub, and being stood up by the ballerina had pulled the rubber stopper out, so that Eugene's blood drained away. It drained out from a spot right under his armpit and above his ribs--the place of ardor. Maybe that was his word all along. Ardor sort of hurt."

Whatever else choosing ardor over celebration means, it means he is not choosing a life of temporal pleasure over a commitment to what will last. He has chosen "the pain of ardor" over celebration.

"For the Nonce"

This philosophy is the exact opposite of how Kent lives. Kent is, tragically, living how many gay men were living in New York at this time. Kent's former lover, Jasper, gives the reason why. "Age isn't always kind to our kind." Jasper is himself dying when he says this. Given that Kent can't imagine the long term, he lives "for the nonce," or for the moment. He is living the decadent life that Eugene wanted to memorialize.

"That was all there was. The nonce. And then, Curtain," Kent thinks to himself after Eugene has left his home. Kent's reaction to the ephemerality of things is to "play ice," a trick he learned in acting school. He detaches himself. It's the opposite of accepting the "pain of ardor," because ice cannot feel. Ardor is fire, and not just etymologically.

This is the story of a young man who learns to accept the pain necessary to create something worthy of the long haul, and his story is counterpoised by the story of a middle-aged man who sinks further into his habit of making the pain go away by detaching and living for the moment.

Two possible objections to this reading

Objection One: Eugene is really gay and is just in denial

Nearly everyone who comes into contact with Eugene seems to think they've got him pegged. It's so prevalent, it's got him confused about himself. When Kent takes an interest in him, the first thing Eugene thinks is, "not again," because society so often reads him as gay. There is a list of the number of times an older man has assumed something about Eugene he himself is not aware of. Men who pick him up when he's hitchhiking. Men at a party who give him weed by holding it to his mouth instead of passing it to him. He's not sure why they see this in him. "Did Eugene give off some kind of signal or something? Was it his earring?"

The people around Eugene are sure they understand him better than he does. I know there are a lot of people in real life like this. They say things like, "Oh, he's gay. He just doesn't know it yet." Kent takes this approach in veiled form. He touches Eugene's coat and comments that he hopes no polar bears died to make it. Eugene says it's fake and Kent replies, full of double meaning, "Could have fooled me." Kent thinks he can read Eugene better than Eugene can. 

But every bit of evidence Eugene produces for himself suggests he is more aware of his identity, sexual and otherwise, than others give him credit for. When Kent tells him to think of someone he cares about to imagine himself reading poetry to, Eugene spontaneously says, "There's this girl..." And even while drunk and sick, when Kent starts to try to undress him, Eugene is aware of just one thing:

This wasn't at all what Eugene wanted. If he had arrived at (Kent's house) unsure of that, he was unsure no longer.
He didn't like his fur coat all that much. He didn't want to mislead people with his earring. He still wanted to write poetry, but that was about it. 

I think we should believe Eugene when he tells us who he is, especially when it comes during a critical scene where his emotions are raw and he is likely telling the truth. I don't think there is much ambiguity left by the end of the story. He seems to be genuinely interested in the ballerina when he finally gets back to his dorm. 

There's one final reason I think we should believe him, and this one, in keeping with his character, has to do with the resonances of words. I think Eugene is about the worst disguised auto-biographical character ever put into a story. For Jeffrey Eugenides to put someone with his own name into a story, and give the kid a background very close to the author's, leads me to believe we ought to read Eugene's journey of discovery as an artist as a reflection of the author's own.

Objection Two: The story paints an unrealistically ugly picture of gay men

This one's a little harder to reject out of hand. Eugene certainly faces more than his share of sexual predators in the form of older men who see in him someone they can take advantage of while he's still figuring himself out. The gay men in Kent's circle, anyway, are debauched and catty and superficial. Only his old lover Jas seems to have acquired some wisdom, and that has come at the cost of a terminal illness.

One could read the story as somewhat painting homosexuality as a temptation into which Eugene almost falls, one that would have distracted him from his real purpose in life. Homosexuality is tied to the debauchery of Rome and America. It is for people who don't take themselves seriously. Heterosexual love is adult and mature, while homosexual love is for man-children who want to keep partying long past the time they should have grown up.

I don't deny that there aren't really any counter-examples to this in the story, except maybe for Raphael, the gay friend of a friend who tries to give Eugene his fortune in the form of a single word. Raphael objects to being treated "like a slut." But this isn't really much of a counter-example.

I think the best one can say as a response to this objection is that this depiction of New York gay culture in the late 70s might not be totally inaccurate. But it isn't that gay men are incapable of more meaningful relationships, of creating something "more lasting than bronze." It's that in that one historical moment, when gay rights were not yet written into the legal code and the first hints of a mysterious "gay plague" were beginning to crop up, it seemed to many gay men that there was no good reason to think much about the future. There was no ability to start a family or live an authentic "out" existence, so it made sense to live for the moment. This was actually a reason many people put forth in the decades since for why gay marriage should be legal. It would give gay people a reason to care about the long-term health of society, because they stood a shot of enjoying some of the domestic benefits (and, let's be honest, hell) that the rest of us enjoy.

While this might not take the sting off for a gay reader who sees his community accused of being more likely to be predatory or at least shallow, I think the real targets of scorn in the story are those who think they've got sexual identity all figured out. They think that some of the signs we attach to being gay, like "sensitivity" or certain items of clothing, are an infallible guide to knowing the sexual identity of others. As if sexual identity were any easier to figure out or box up than any other part of our identity, as if all the choices on the sexual spectrum were easy "either/or" logic gates to pass through.

I've tried to write a story that played off this notion before. I had a character whom others seemed to read as gay, or whom, I thought, readers might want to read as gay, when I think in reality, the totality of the story made his sexual identity more of a mystery and part of a larger identity issue he was trying to solve. Eugenides, being Eugenides, obviously succeeded at it a lot more than I did.

I think often, while trying to achieve the socially laudable goal of increasing awareness of and tolerance for a variety of identities, we end up simplifying the whole notion of identity until our attempt at understanding potentially does more harm than good. It makes people read their own images into the signifiers others present. It also encourages us to put too much stress on what is a question of secondary concern (at least, we can make it a question of secondary concern once we have accomplished the goal of physical security for sexual minorities). This isn't primarily a story about sexual identity, although I imagine that's what a lot of people will focus on. (Even I have mostly focused on it, if only to say I don't think that's mostly what its about.) The main issue in this story is what lasts versus what doesn't, and why we ought to care about what lasts. Stories that focus on more than just one facet of identity are probably likely to last longer and resonate more deeply than those that only look at that one thing.


Additional reading: Karen Carlson saw this as more of a period piece, like And the Band Played On.