OVERVIEW “HALF-LIFE”
These two autobiographies by gay men appear belatedly here. Becoming a Man received the 1992 National Book Award for non-fiction in the US and Before Night Falls, completed shortly before Arenas’ suicide in 1990, was published in Spain two years later. Superficially, much else connects them.
Both detail a search for freedom; in Monette’s case, from the “half-life” of self-hating closetry in the “Puritan sinkhole” of America; in Arenas’, from persecution in Castro’s Cuba, the motherland that doubly condemned him as a homosexual and as a “counter-revolutionary” writer.
Monette’s escape occurs on meeting Roger Horwitz, the man with whom he could realise his dream, “the thing I had never seen: two men in love and laughing”. Becoming a Man ends as their life together begins, a period captured in his previous memoir, Borrowed Time.
Areans escapes Cuba in the confusion of the Kariel exodues of 1980. Both writers’ freedom turns out to be short-lived, truncated by Aids. The epidemic imposes a tone of urgency to their writings, as they write while battling against poor health.
STORY ABOUT THE BOY
It is this urgency that distinguishes Becoming a Man from the recent spate of coming-out narratives. Monette’s book is less polished than Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story; less subject to chronology than Felice Picano’s Ambidextrous.
It reads discursively, almost as if dictated, and Monette is given to angry outbursts against those who have contributed to the oppressive environment; he describes burying an old lover “murdered by barbaric priests and petty bureaucrats”. His tale provides evidence enough for us to draw similar conclusions.
Still, it is impossible not to be moved by Monette’s sense of his own past shadowing the present, the “terrified boy in the closet” never finally laid to rest. The memoir itself becomes a last, best attempt at exorcism: not only of Monette’s past, ghostly selves, but of the comparable ones in each gay life.
In one breath Monette insists that he can’t “saddle the women and men of our tribe with the lead weight of my self-hatred”; then asserts that it may be the past alone that actually bonds this tribe: “our lives align at the core, if not in the sorry details.” Throughout, he instills his prose with the vivid and unflinching self-analysis that makes for a bracing read.
IN THE CASTRO’S PRISONS
If Arenas’ sufferings, including long stays in the worst of Castro’s prisons and the “last circle of hell” on the sugar-estate work-camps, seem the more tangible, it would be a dull mind that interpreted these books according to degrees of bravery.
One of the most touching moments in Before Night Falls comes in Arenas’ own struggle with his conscience after he is tortured into recanting his past and dedicating himself to the revolutionary cause. Such enforced conversions had marked the failure, in his eyes, of writers who adapted themselves, even under duress, to Castro’s regime.
The richness of the work might seem guaranteed by the material itself But it is Arenas’ sharp, even arch analysis of his experiences that makes Before Night Falls so unforgettable, from his poverty-stricken beginnings onwards. “To eat dirt is not a metaphor.” he writes, “or a sensational act. All the country kids did it. It has nothing to do with magic realism. One had to eat something. Dirt was the only thing we had plenty of.”
He impatiently describes his later dealings with the “Communist Deluxe”, the left-leaning western intelligentsia that indulged Cuban Stalinism in spite of testimonies such as his own. Arenas is always his own man, as in his dismissal of Gabriel Garcia Marquez as “the pasticheur of Faulkner, personal friend of Castro’s, and born opportunist”.
