Links and Descriptions for my Books
1. As The Gentle Rain From Heaven
Available in paperback and kindle versions. Read the first chapter for free here.
It is 2005 and Peter is still handling very poorly the Aids-related death twelve years earlier of his longtime partner. His overwhelming feeling is of having failed Kazuo during his long illness, not through callousness but through an astonishing capacity for denial. The extent of his isolation is made more evident when he meets Jane, a writer richly connected with the intellectual and writing communities of New York. She is working on a novel whose premise is that a young woman of today is visiting Munich and Vienna while at the same time reading the diary of her grandmother, who wrote about a trip to the same cities a century earlier. Peter and Jane realize they have interests in common, for he has been investigating the prominence of homoerotic aestheticism in the culture of turn-of-the-century Germany and Austria, and he wonders if cultural changes today make that phenomenon less likely. Jane has been in a marriage-like relationship for several years with Brian, a budding independent filmmaker. But she is also having an affair with Ray, an African-American who is a high-ranking assistant to the New York City mayor. Brian’s death in a fall from a balcony raises questions about her possible culpability. She and Peter are sometimes joined in their excursions through the city by Owen, a gay student of 22 who is in one of Peter’s classes. Peter would not morally allow himself an actual affair with a student. But he is curious to find with Owen a certain level of erotic attraction emerging after more than a decade in which feelings of that sort seemed to have vanished entirely. At the college where he teaches, he is beset by pressures for new ways of reading and teaching literature. He also looks back on a time when he spent a year in San Francisco trying to learn to be a writer. As he took long walks through the foggy streets in the late evening, he found himself slipping into certain powerful moods in which the very character of his selfhood appeared to be at stake. Such moods seem related to possibilities he never realized in his writing or in his life.
2. Wittgenstein in Late Autumn
Available in paperback and kindle versions. Read the first chapter for free here.
Ludwig Wittgenstein in this novel is in his final year, dying of cancer, and has moved from Cambridge to Oxford. As he looks back on his life, he is reflecting on a certain tension within it. He has often experienced being with others as a slipping into a world of crude moral compromise, lazy thinking, and a loss of self. He has therefore tried to find activities of intellectual and moral purity, as well as opportunities of living alone, that would prevent such dissipation. Yet he has to admit that this attempt seems to have led to an intense focus on quite small moral matters and on his own personal salvation, while on more serious matters, such as his treatment of his former lover Francis Skinner, he has behaved rather poorly. By chance he meets a young football player, Danny, and his mother, who has been assaulted by an ex-boyfriend. He finds Danny, in his early twenties, attractive in a manner that reminds him of earlier young men he has been attracted to, and he wants to find ways to help him as they develop a chaste relationship. It turns out that helping Danny and his mother may require the very kind of moral compromises that he has spent his life resisting. His encounters with the mother’s ex-boyfriend bring him back to his time as a soldier in the Great War, when he exhibited physical courage under great pressure. He reflects that his own later philosophy, which emphasizes an identification with the shared practices of ordinary people, might press him to be less concerned about his own moral purity and readier to make life better for others whom he cares about.
3. Landscape with Old House and Young Marxists
Available in paperback and kindle versions. Read the first chapter for free here.
Mark has had a badly managed and poorly paid career in New York as an adjunct professor and freelance writer. Now out of money and losing his apartment, he finds a position housesitting in northwestern Connecticut. The house itself is more than two centuries old and is surrounded by unoccupied land. He has been alone for many years since his long-term partner died of Aids and he is afraid that he may not be able to endure the solitude of his new rural home. One day, at a pond belonging to the property, he finds two young people swimming. They belong to a six-member commune that has rented a nearby house for a year in order to write and deliver a set of weekly podcasts on the intellectual history and contemporary possibilities of Marxism. Mark alternates between long walks in the countryside, in which he comes up against the profound loneliness of his existence, and visits to the Marxist house, where the appeal of a collective, socialist existence is evident but also possibly its limitations. His heroes have been Wittgenstein and Nietzsche, not Marx. On these visits to the Marxist house, a modern structure of steel and glass, he finds himself attracted both to David and to Carol, who are having problems in their relationship, and he achieves a kind of subtle intimacy with each that he comes to value. On these occasions he is also encouraged to contribute to debates about Marxism today, about what is still fresh in the thought of various Marxist intellectuals, and about how the global internet, in spite of its problems as a tool of capitalism, might lead to reinvigorated forms of Marxism.
4. I Was Sartre’s Self-Taught Man: A Memoir
Available in paperback and kindle versions. Read the first chapter for free here.
Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel Nausea has a character called the autodidact or the self-taught man. In that novel a character in some ways resembling Sartre keeps expressing attitudes of condescension toward this man for his naïve humanism, his awkward attempts at an intellectual life, and a scandalous scene in a library. The present novel takes off from the idea that the self-taught man was a real person in Le Havre, a soldier in the Great War and a member of the working class trying to educate himself, whom Sartre met when assigned to teach in Le Havre in the Thirties. He has traveled to Paris after World War II and has kept track in a diary, often rather critically, of Sartre’s moves in the intellectual and political life of the city. It is 1972-73 and Paris is alive with feuding intellectuals debating versions, often Maoist ones, of Marxism, including Barthes, Althusser, and Foucault. While taking apart the often wild schemes of these intellectuals, the self-taught man has also formed a life of his own. He had a ten-year relation with an Algerian man who was murdered in the streets during France’s ongoing war with Algeria. He learns early in the novel that this Algerian had a son with a Parisian woman and that this son, seventeen, is now lost in the New York drug scene. He must decide whether his loyalty to his one-time partner will make him leave his comfortable habits and travel to New York to rescue the young man and perhaps eventually to introduce him to his relatives in Algeria. He must also, at this late stage of his life, settle finally on how he stands in relation to Sartre as Sartre himself, still intensely on the political left, is failing badly in his health and is going blind. This novel gives vivid life to an unforgettable minor character of French literature.
5. Euroconnections: Literature, Philosophy, Religion, and Sexuality (1880-1940)
Available in paperback and kindle versions. Read the first chapter for free here.
At a time of skepticism about the future of the European community, it is useful to look at the cosmopolitan European culture that flourished roughly from 1880 to 1940. This book sees Europe’s intellectual world as a kind of grid or neural net in which points are lighting up in suggestive patterns due to chance associations in time and space. The author begins with coincidental intersections and uses them as occasions for a sophisticated treatment of aesthetics, philosophy, religion, and psychology, including issues of sexuality. Take the esoteric Marxist Walter Benjamin and the gay diarist-aesthete Harry Kessler. It turns out that both are at the opening night in Paris of Cocteau’s Orphée in 1926, and we can use that event to contrast the former’s conception of aesthetic experience with the latter’s Nietzscheanism. In the very same month that Kafka meets his last woman friend, Dora Diamant, at a Baltic resort, Hemingway takes his wife to the festival in Pamplona. That coincidence can lead to a contrast between the implicit account of aesthetics and religion in Kafka’s The Castle and that in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Benjamin, working on a translation of Proust’s Sodom and Gomorrah into German, arrives by boat in Pisa at the same time that Charles Scott Moncrieff, working on a translation of Sodom and Gomorrah into English, is scanning the Pisan harbor as a spy for the British. The two have quite different notions of translation. Kessler as a German officer during the war is stationed a very short distance from where Wittgenstein as an Austrian soldier is stationed, in what is now northwest Ukraine, and then his unit travels north, close to where the Austrian-Jewish writer Joseph Roth was born. Jacques Bizet is the son of the composer that Nietzsche used to criticize Wagner’s music and is also a close friend of Proust; his car service will introduce Proust to a young driver who will turn out to be one model for Albertine.
Such small coincidences and many others become the occasions for original insights into issues concerning aesthetics, religion, literature, philosophy, politics, and sexuality.
6. Nietzsche’s Guide to Reading Literature and Being an Individual
Available in paperback and kindle versions. Read the introduction for free here.
Because he was so accomplished at questioning, and at analyzing the hidden origins of, the beliefs of his time, Nietzsche from 1970 on or so has been recruited into various progressive and postmodern critiques of the contemporary order. An unfortunate result of this move is that it leaves behind, often by misreading Nietzsche egregiously, the extremely rich resources he offers for thinking about aesthetic experience and its role in shaping a worthwhile individual life. On his account, Christianity radically redesigned the human psyche in the ancient world, but with the rapid decline of this religion, that design is now failing and nihilism, ennui, depression, and modern anxiety result. It is his task to model a new design of the psyche. In our conscious interactions with others, he believes, we are indoctrinated into a cult of shared beliefs. But through our experience of music, literature, architectural and city styles, and even of climate, and through our experience of certain profound emotive responses to events, we can contribute to reordering the unconscious mental elements within us, the inner warlords competing for territory, into a more distinctive, convincing, and elevated form, one that is truly individuating and that can help us resist the forces of depression and nihilism. We learn to take a more active stance toward the world by giving form and style to whatever happens to be pressing in upon us. Nietzsche turns out to be the great enemy of academic life in America today. He is a fierce opponent of safe spaces, of protecting individuals from experiencing challenging states of mind. He hates indoctrination by means of a moralizing ideology and advises us to find a healthy solitude, away from the leveling powers of modern social practices. Instead of reading literature to bring out the moral errors of the past, he would have us read it to bring out its implicit music, the rhythms and gestures that underlie it like a form of dancing, so that it may help us to shape a more satisfying emotional life and a more inviting manner of experiencing the world and others. He would worry that today’s education is actually encouraging depression as well as a fragile, weakened individuation that is dangerous to our culture.
7. Recent Gay Novels and the Return to Literary Modernism
Available in paperback and kindle versions. Read the introduction for free here.
Rather a large number of recent gay-themed novels seem to return quite self-consciously to the scene of literary modernism. These writers (Alan Hollinghurst, Caleb Crain, Andrew O’Hagan, Michael Cunningham, Colm Toibin, Jamie O’Neill, Garth Greenwell, James Cahill, and André Aciman) may have their characters declare a strong interest in Henry James or in Proust and those novelists turn out to be a clear influence on their work. Or Joyce’s Ulysses, James’s The Princess Casamassima, Mann’s Death in Venice, or Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway are clearly placed in the background as framing devices and as sources of allusions. Or Nietzsche’s Apollo-Dionysus contrast, so important to literary modernism, is implicitly referred to. It is just as significant that while all of the novels I consider, with two exceptions, are set in the mid-1980’s up to the present, the aesthetic and intellectual preferences of the characters, including the writers and composers they prefer, seem to go back before 1920, as if the last century of intellectual life never occurred. The authors seem to wish to ignore everything associated with postmodernism, deconstruction, Marxism, and queer theory. Why should these writers (all but two of them are gay) make such a move? Much of the intellectual life of France and Germany for the past century, and of American universities from 1970 on, involved radical attacks on the so-called humanist, bourgeois individual self. But many gay writers will continue to insist on the value of giving shape and meaning to an individual life; of using aesthetic resources to assist in facing aloneness and emotional difficulty; of working out a satisfying architecture of self and other that is expressed in a style of prose; and of facing the often painful burden of individuality through negotiating the tension between the appeal of Apollinian form and the appeal of Dionysian de-individuation. They recall when such a work of self-formation was not allowed them by the general culture and so they value it more. While literary critics for decades have scorned the notions of beauty and form, gay writers may be grateful to the literary modernists for showing how beauty and form can bring profound psychological needs and sophisticated aesthetic resources together.
8. Traveling Alone in Africa and Asia
Available in paperback and kindle versions. Read the first chapter for free here.
The author here recalls a year-long journey in which he traveled alone through Africa and Asia in 1974. He ended up hitching rides from one oasis town to another in the deep Sahara, hiking a full day to reach the secluded Bumbaret Valley on the northern Pakistan-Afghanistan border, and hiring a boat in the early morning fog to go up and down the Ganges while also watching two blazing funerals along the river later that evening. He had close confrontations with a hyena and with hippos while sleeping on the ground in Kenyan game parks, had a dangerous encounter with border officials in the Congo, and hiked alone into the Ituri Forest to find a pygmy encampment. But the book is more than a travel memoir. The author, later a philosophy professor, reflects on why we travel and on why we may feel a need, given our psychological makeup, for certain kinds of landscapes. He is twenty-five and is leaving behind him in America the very powerful religious upbringing of his youth as well as a long, intense, unsuccessful, and unconsummated gay relationship. Traveling alone is a deliberate attempt to force himself into situations in which he will face the pressures of solitude and separateness, as he works to overcome the depression and sadness that his unsuccessful gay affair has left him with. The author also uses references to Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and others to ask why certain physical settings may be useful in our psychological formation as individuals. With little money, he travels in a third-class train car for seventy-eight hours in the late June heat of India and then third-class on a boat from Bombay to Mombasa. He speaks with Iranian students about their attitudes toward the Shah, climbs the now detonated Buddhas in the Bamiyan Valley of Afghanistan, and in Goma sees mountain gorillas and discusses with an elderly Belgian missionary the recent travails of the eastern Congo region. Many years later, he remains clear about how crucial that year of traveling alone was for him.
9. Loners: Writers, Thinkers, and Solitude
Available in paperback and kindle versions. Read the introduction for free here.
Today there is often a preference for collaborative and collective activities, perhaps with a goal of training individuals to become a new kind of socialist self. Many are encouraged to become almost constant performers for others on social media, to be thoroughly shaped by the available reinforcement. At such a time it might be instructive to examine several thinkers who strongly valued solitude and a fervent resistance to being a performer for others, seeing these as necessary conditions for shaping an individual life that might be found worthwhile. This book examines in this regard Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, Fernando Pessoa, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henry James, T. S. Eliot, and Klaus Mann. While their personal lives are probably not enviable to most observers, they face up with a special intensity and honesty to the human experience of aloneness, loss, separateness, depression, and metaphysical emptiness, as well as the peculiar pressures of individuation, self-consciousness, and agency. At a time when students are encouraged to read literature in order to draw correct moral and ideological conclusions, it might be beneficial to encounter thinkers and writers who can help them face up to their own experiences of loneliness and of the pressures of being an individual self, once humans with their hunter-gatherer brains have moved into sophisticated modern societies.
10. Three Deaths in Munich
Available in paperback and kindle versions. Read the first chapter for free here.
It is 1911 and Katia runs a tiny detective agency in the Schwabing neighborhood of Munich. Newspapers are obsessed with the very recent death of a young pregnant woman who fell or jumped or was pushed from a ridge overlooking the Isar river south of the city. Katia is visited by a close friend who happens to be the mistress of the painter Kandinsky. She wants to hire Katia to clear Kandinsky of all suspicion in this affair. The young woman was also acting in the play Spring Awakening by Frank Wedekind and he is under suspicion as well. That death is soon followed by another, that of a young man drowning in the Starnbergersee in a manner that closely mirrors the death decades earlier of Ludwig II. The young man’s parents suspect that murder was involved and hire Katia to prove this. Her investigations of this death take her into the back-to-nature youth movement in Germany, with its clear homoerotic overtones, and into the circle of young men around the esteemed poet Stefan George, with his grandiose conception of the role of poetry and eros in the future of Germany. Katia is also asked to investigate a right-wing fanatic who is harassing the radical Munich Marxists Kurt Eisner and Erich Mühsam. When that man is shot and killed after a Fasching celebration, she must try to prove that the two Marxists had nothing to do with the shooting. Her interviews and investigations reveal the political and artistic life of 1911-1912 Munich in vivid detail. She also happens to meet in the Hofgarten an American poet, Tom Eliot, and she suggests some of the Munich sights and history that he might wish to introduce into a poem. Another Munich resident at this time, Thomas Mann, gives a reading, attended by Katia, from a novella he is about to publish based on a recent visit to Venice. In the final scene, in late 1912, Katia meets a young artist from Vienna who sells watercolors of city architecture and is seeking to move shortly to Schwabing.
11. Two Murders in Paris
Available in paperback and kindle versions. Read the first chapter for free here.
In spring 1935 a young refugee from Berlin who is part of the surrealist movement is found strangled in a cheap hotel. Thérèse is asked to assist her close friend Jules, a detective with the Paris Prefecture, as she often does when his cases involve the arts and avant-garde community, for she was part of that community during the 1920s. In 1935 Paris is brimming not only with its own intellectuals, who have their peculiar artistic and political controversies, but also with many intellectuals fleeing Hitler’s growing power. The following year these are joined by representatives of several different factions in the Spanish Civil War who are trying to gain French support. In this political context of fall 1936 a representative of a radical Spanish workers’ group is also found dead in his hotel, perhaps a murder, perhaps a drug overdose. There are similarities suggesting that the two deaths may be related. It turns out as well that several important intellectuals have had recent contacts with one or the other of the two victims. These include Jean Cocteau, Klaus Mann, Joseph Roth, and Walter Benjamin. They must be interviewed as well as government officials, Catholic conservatives such as members of the Camelots du roi, advocates of Spanish Civil War factions, and a Renault factory manager. Thérèse alternates between investigating the 1936 murder and recalling her efforts along with Jules to solve the 1935 one. While uncovering clues regarding the two deaths, they come to appreciate the disputes both within the surrealist community and between the surrealists and Stalin-leaning socialist realists as well as the underlying political and ideological conflicts in France and Spain.