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GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE August 6, 2004

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Stranger than fiction

Reality is often more interesting than the literature it spawns

by Anthony Glassman

Truth really is stranger than fiction. Life is far more intriguing than any convoluted tale concocted by an author's imagination.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the field of biography, where the lives of the shadowy figures behind the great novels are

thrust into the glaring illumination of scholarly judgment.

Take, for instance, In Love with a Handsome Sailor: The Emergence of Gay Identity and the Novels of Pierre Loti by Richard M. Berrong (University of Toronto Press, $60 hardcover). Berrong is an openly gay professor in the Department of Modern and Classical Language Studies at Kent State University.

Ja Love with Handscose Sailor

In Handsome Sailor, the author is faced with the daunting task of constructing a biography of Loti, a less-remembered luminary of fin de siècle French literature, a contemporary of Oscar Wilde, André Gide and Marcel Proust.

In addition to being a far more obscure figure than his peers at the end of the nineteenth century, Loti, whose real name was Julien Viaud, has a more cryptic sexuality.

Biographers have spent far more time heterosexualizing Loti's life than the others, perhaps due to his less-enduring fame. However, according to Berrong, Loti's writings crafted as strong a gay identity as any other writer at the time and for decades afterwards.

Gilbert Adair takes another route in The Real Tadzio: Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and the Boy Who Inspired It (Carrol & Graf, $10 paperback). Instead of examining the life of an author through biographical and fictional accounts of his life, Adair takes a fictional character and uncovers the truth behind the myth, in this case the beautiful blonde youth with whom the much-older Aschenbach falls in love.

Mann had writer's block. He and his family went on vacation, where they met the Moes family and their son Adzio. The Moeses returned to their native Poland, and Adzio was unaware for many years of the part he

played in contemporary world fiction.

Adair traces the course of Adzio Moes' life, from birth to death, all illustrated with photos comparing the real person to his fictional counterpart.

Finally, autobiography can be both the most and least truthful form of biography. Talking about oneself, one can embellish greatly or completely bare the soul. In the case of Moab is My Washpot by gay actor-writer-wit Stephen Fry (Soho, $13, paperback), he errs on the side of honesty, telling of all his youthful foibles and peccadilloes with a bashful, “boys will be boys" sort of shrug.

Fry, famous for playing Oscar Wilde in the movie Wilde, is probably one of the most intelligent celebrities alive today. Having produced a handful of novels,

STEPHEN FRY

written columns for newspapers and magazines, scripted a musical-inside-amovie and acted in dozens of movies and television shows, he's done pretty much everything.

Including a crosscountry spree of petty larceny, apparently. The book includes a reproduction of the court documents after his arrest.

For those who have read Fry's novels, especially the brilliant The Liar, it's interesting to see what in the book was fiction and what was taken from his life. "Write what you know best," said Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Fry apparently takes that to heart.

The most amazing part is how he can take his early life, which was apparently a not-uncommon English upbringing, and make of it some mythical quest, completely without self-aggrandize-

ment.

All of this brings to mind the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of physics, which says the act of observing something alters it. “The closer we determine the position of a particle, the less likely we are to be able to determine the momentum of the particle."

The principle may apply to a life observed, either from within or without. Either way, Loti, Moes and Fry lived interesting lives, and thankfully, Fry should be able to release a second volume of his memoirs in the future.

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