August 4, 2006 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE
eveningsout
Two summer volumes give a warm view of days gone by
by Anthony Glassman
At the risk of sounding like some trite, elementary-school-teacher cliché, books are time machines.
Whether examining the minutiae of everyday, contemporary life, delving into the details of history or flying into the unknown
Eustace Chisholm
JAMES PURDY
future, a book, like a
magic carpet, can take its readers to lands of which they
never dreamt. O
f
course, the present is really too depressing to dwell upon at the moment, what with
wars on multiple fronts, the Middle East about to become "the crater formerly known as the Middle East," and the entire United States political system swirling around the drain like some sort of doomed, damned ball of hair.
The future is too uncertain, and much of the gay-themed science fiction out there is so dreadful that one almost prays those days in the distance never come to pass.
That leaves the warmth, the comfort of the past, whether fact or fiction. The distinction is almost irrelevant much of the time, since even the most outlandish of myths have their basis at some level in reality. Take, for
instance, Eustace Chisholm and the Works by James Purdy (Carroll & Graf, $13.95, paper). Written in 1967, when it was considered
too controversial for its use of profanity and bisexuality,
it deals with bizarre
a
Fren
Love
EFLİCE PICANO.
cast of characters who all fall into the orbit of Eustace "Ace" Chisholm, an aspiring poet, drug addict and layabout.
Among his circle are the rough-andtumble Daniel Haws and the beautiful and roguish Amos Ratcliffe. The love affair between the two never really connects as it should, perhaps because in the Great Depression, when the book is set, people were struggling enough to survive, much less thrive.
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Somewhere between Catcher in the Rye and The Boys in the Band, Eustace Chisholm and the Works is an excellent example of Purdy's skill.
Felice Picano's Fred in Love (Terrace, 14.95, hardcover) is a more intimate tale, the story of the author's own experiences with cats, both as a child and then emerging into the gay bohemia of New York City in the 1970s and '80s.
While it is certainly autobiographical, it is as much a love story between Picano and, primarily, his cat Fred, with whom he had an almost telepathic attachment.
As a cat owner, Picano's habit of letting his cat out of the apartment in New York
City really rankles, because any one of eight million lunatics could have hurt him, but one supposes that Fred really enjoyed running around.
In fact, for much of the book, Fred takes the place of any human mate Picano could have had, and probably was a far more satisfying inamorato than any of those pesky humans would have been.
While viewing the past through rosecolored glasses is a fairly commonplace ailment, nostalgia cannot always gloss over the pain of those bygone days. Thankfully, there are no memoirs of horrific abuse on my bookshelf, so Eustace and Fred will be the windows to decades gone by.
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