Our People     

I was born on what I remember as one of the most beautiful natural sites in the country—Capitol Hill in Salt Lake City, with the green Salt Lake Valley to the south, a part of the verdant land that extends down the middle of barren Utah. The towering Wasatch Range, walling off the country east of us, blocked me from the world I desperately wanted to know. As a child, I was usually alone, and I felt that the vast fields and well-tended grounds around the Capitol were my own secret park. I reveled in them, in Ensign Peak to the north, and in Memory Grove Canyon immediately to the East. This spacious hilltop area provided necessary and happy escapes from the hubbub of family life. Perhaps my many solitary explorations prompted me when I left home to associate nature with the loneliness I both loved and feared. As a boy, I thought that there were spirits, good or evil, in all living things. At times I would imagine myself trying to climb one of the higher peaks of the precipitous Wasatch Mountains. I sometimes feared being marooned halfway up on a vast wall of granite, unable to go up or down—perhaps a variant of my father’s experiences in hiking.

When I could understand the terms, I felt that I was far more of an animist, or pantheist, than a Mormon. Nature was all around me, as it was never to be again. I associated home with quarreling, constant tension, and perpetual chores. During my father's absences, I became at an early age the janitor and factotum for our small apartment house. To escape this meaningless labor, the park, peak, and grove provided the space and freedom in which I could find and reorient myself. Never again did I experience such exuberance in a natural setting. By the time I reached the university and found a lively group of friends, my affinity with nature gradually diminished. As an adult in the East, because I was seeking companionship, I usually chose to live in cities; and my habitual walks took place in city parks or along municipal riverbanks. I then sought more domesticated forms of nature—“nature methodized.” I rarely sought wild, more remote nature—forests, deserts or mountains; I was afraid of them.

In the Twenties, we traveled with my father a few times on his suit-selling trips, during which we stayed in many different hotels and rooming houses. I remember only a few incidents from this period. When I was about five, my older cousin Arnold drove my mother and me from Salt Lake City to Pocatello, Idaho, to meet my father. We three stayed in a hotel, and one night Arnold and mother went downstairs to dance. I woke up in the middle of the night, found myself alone, and ran up and down the halls in panic, screaming for my mother. She was promptly called from downstairs to take care of the spoiled brat she had created; and she probably blamed herself cruelly, as I thought that she should. She had already nearly strangled me with her apron strings. These journeys left me with recurring nightmares of disorientation and abandonment, but also with a perpetual longing to travel.

At home, whenever major problems arose, mother bitterly accused my absent father of leaving her to cope with troubles alone. After my sister Julia was born, mother developed serious back complications and asked for a board to be placed under her double bed. Mother said that because father hated this hard surface, he preferred to sleep on a cot in “her” room. I was too young to wonder about the significance of this arrangement. Father lacked a bed of his own until the house was remodeled. Because of his long absences, he apparently accepted these makeshift living arrangements, and I, too, accepted them as normal. I then never understood whether father was forced out of bed and home, or chose to lead a more peripatetic life. Because our family life had been unhappy, Julia and I later never regretted our childlessness. Since after my brother was born the family lacked space, I, too, slept for a while on a cot in our screened and unheated back porch. The winter nights were extremely cold, often well below freezing. I would run out, pull the covers back, leap into the cot laden with woolen blankets and covered my head. I heard the blizzards beating against the thin porch wall, but I tried not to yield to the shivers. The bed soon began to feel warm and welcoming, like a precious refuge. I have often recalled those nights of lying under the many layers of bedding that protected me from the ferocious winter just inches away. I was always to feel that life was precarious.

I was lucky that mother was a reader. Even before I learned to read, I had many illustrated storybooks that I looked at by the hour while lying on my stomach on the floor. These were generously supplied by a teacher friend of my mother. Nestled into the thick livingroom rug, I spent my most precious moments at home with my books. I began my life, as I seem to be ending it, in a prolonged horizontal position, except that I have moved from the prone to the supine. When I was six, my mother bought a series of ten large volumes called The Wonder World. The first nine volumes concerned “real life,” but the last book was wholly about the imaginative realms I have inhabited ever since. It was devoted to children’s tales, fables, and legends in both prose and rhyme. While learning to read, I scribbled on nearly every illustrated page, making up stories from the pictures alone. I found out later that many of the black and white, and the few color, reproductions were in the styles of the late 19th century, looking like the work of Gustave Doré, Burne-Jones, or the 16th century art of Albrecht Dürer. These illustrations led me to a lifelong interest in the visual arts.

In the fascinating pages of Book Ten, I was captivated by Mother Goose and other nursery rhymes, by tales of the Arabian Nights like Sinbad the Sailor, and by Alice in Wonderland. I was also introduced to knights and castles, and to the marvelous children’s versions of stories and romances of the Middle Ages, like those of dragons and King Arthur's Round Table. Today, they would be dinosaurs and space stations. I imagined myself the prince of these palaces or else a prisoner in one of their dungeons—never in dull intermediary roles. I particularly loved my bible’s preponderance of dark Germanic tales, like those of the Brothers Grimm, little knowing that Germany would become significant in my life. I learned to fear Black Forest creatures forever; and my views of nature, as menacing might have deepened at this time. In books, though never in wild nature, I could experience awe without feeling belittled. One image—that of a malevolent moon peering over a mountain—frightened me for weeks. By reading aloud to me at an early age, mother had encouraged me to enter and inhabit these imaginative worlds. Later, although mother tried ever more earnestly to bring me back to the daily life of family, chores, and school, I preferred to remain in my enchanted realms.

There were few children my age to play with in our sparsely settled neighborhood; and so the realm of stories became my true home. Few books have ever been as important for me as that single volume of rhymes and tales. To general acclaim, I memorized some of the stories and spoke them aloud to family visitors. My parents were very proud, but I was never again so confident in public. Later, my mother introduced me to Dickens, and I went through several of his novels, illustrated by Cruikshank, who set my imagination spinning. In my need to identify, I became Oliver Twist, captured and set upon an evil course by Fagin. In the novel and film of David Copperfield, I identified wholly with David. W.C. Fields’s characterization of Mr. Micawber, an inspired bit of casting, seemed a much merrier version of my father. I also identified with the outsider, the underdog. I loved these novels so much that my language very early acquired a kind of Dickensian floridity and exaggeration. Life was dull; art was always fascinating.

Later in college and graduate school, I would try to imitate the tricks of speech and witticisms of Shakespeare’s Falstaff and other articulate clowns. Often at inappropriate times, I can still launch into this run-on, literary speech. At Harvard, some friends would respond playfully in kind, others with good-humored mockery. A teacher in college once asked me, “Do you always talk this way?” And a friend one day told me, “You usually speak in metaphor,” one of the happier interpretations of my convoluted style. My speech was of course a way of showing off, but also of verbal play, of sheer delight in subverting the king’s English. For me, the shortest distance between two points was never a straight line.

In grammar school at Lafayette, my classes were often interrupted by colds, but the reward for missing school was that I could always return to my wonder worlds on the floor. What troubled me most about school life was recess, for I was not prepared for the rough and tumble of boys playing competitive games. I did so poorly in organized activities like baseball that I was always the last to be chosen by team leaders, usually with a string of oaths. My father had never taught me how to throw or catch a ball, or any other skill. To avoid an oncoming hardball, I would sometimes pretend not to see it, and then not to be able to find it in the bushes behind the outfielders’ positions, deliberately slowing the pace of the game. I would far rather play the dim-witted booby—however humiliating, shouted at by one and all—than expose the weakness of my untrained right hand and arm. Although I wanted long pants like other boys, my father kept me in knickers well into early adolescence, telling my mother, “No, I don’t want him looking like a man yet.” And long after other boys, I still wore long, curly hair, strangely insisted upon by my father. Did he want a little girl? In an era of short hair, I was hazed for my locks by other boys, and I only succeeded in having them cut when I was about nine. Indeed, father never wanted me to grow up, perhaps because he knew that he would no longer be able to control me.

Despite all of the classes I had missed because of illness in my early years, I skipped the sixth grade when I attended school in Wyoming. On our return to Salt Lake City, my parents persuaded the principal at Lafayette to let me advance to the seventh grade. I lost my circle of friends and was left with gaps in my early education—chiefly in arithmetic, which I have since noted repeatedly.

Meanwhile, more children had moved into the neighborhood. With my new friends, I would climb upon and exultantly ride the stone lions that flanked the side entrances of the Capitol. I could then vault over immense distances in two or three leaps, like an Arabian prince riding on his magic carpet. Later, I could only fly in erection-dreams. My favorite games with these newcomers, played on the Capitol courts and steps, were far more exciting than anything at home. I played to the point of joyful exhaustion, almost consumed by our games. I was partly making up for having missed the socialization of team sports. To make my friends laugh, I began to adopt some of the pranks and oddities I had seen in my father. My fear of my parents’ control, expressed in early vampire-victim dreams, was gradually replaced by a desire to amuse others by playing the clown. Instead of frightening other children, I learned how to entertain them, a portent of my later engaging students in literature. I came to use humor to amuse, as I had earlier used fear to dominate. With my closest friends, I can still resort to a playful mode, forever the wayward child.

Life is so sad…

At Horace Mann Junior High, our middle school, competitive team sports seemed once again devised to display my weaknesses, and again I willingly played the fool. The greatest pleasure of junior high was that I had a superb French teacher who formed a small club of her favorite students. Whenever we were together, we spoke enthusiastic and broken French. We had several parties at Enid Rosengreen’s house, and we all loved her. We learned many French songs, which we sang lustily. I once gave a friend in junior high a short story I had written about an evil hunchback named Mr. Crainte, who haunted basements, and had harmful designs upon everyone. Late, I realized that this, of course, was Mr. Fear—a version of myself. Although written in my clumsy, penciled handwriting, the story seems to have circulated widely and was returned after months with the comment, “We all think it’s very spooky.” I was overjoyed to have an audience. This was my first self-revealing creative effort. My English teacher, Miss Chugg, called on me more than any other student, requiring me to read my stories aloud before the class. My mistakes were her pedagogical exhibits. My writing was attention-getting, wildly unpredictable, and graced with all major grammatical errors, which she pointed out almost with exasperation. But the students laughed at my stories, and I scarcely heard her criticism.

In junior high, my closest friend, Morris Johnson, and I met downtown in the early evenings and roamed through streets and back alleys, trying to act out our extravagant fantasies, versions of my earlier nightmares. He had a dark and perverse imagination like mine, and we especially loved to haunt the upper floors and roof garden of the white marble Hotel Utah, our classiest hotel—now taken over by the Mormon Church. We explored the tower on top, and once we feared we put out the electric lights on the roof. Like two ghouls after dark, Morris and I also explored many downtown public buildings and basements, hunting for the trouble we never found. Were these nocturnal rambles unconscious preparations for my later night-cruising? Through our fathers, each of us suffered from a murderous Mormon conscience, although we desperately tried in our escapades to defy our inheritance. But the naughtiest thing our squeaky-clean Mormon minds could think of was walking up and down past the ominous front of the only whorehouse we knew, the Blackstone Hotel, which looked like a haunted house. These were our daring urban equivalents for what “healthy” boys did—mountain hiking and other forms of wilderness risk-taking. Dodging janitors or guards was risky enough for us.

The high points of my youth were the film experiences I shared with my mother. I would often emerge from the theater dazed and speechless, with tears in my eyes, overcome by the magical power of the screen’s huge images. My mother was also moved and happily silent. Neither of us would speak for some time, and I treasured her sensitivity. I have always needed time to recover from any immersion in the arts, and I’ve hated impetuous blabbermouths who break the spell too soon. Good films have been my drug of choice throughout life: I can be haunted by them for days. If my mother and I couldn’t understand a sequence or two in a movie, we stayed with it until we could. My carefully working through puzzling dialogues and scenes helped me later when I tried to understand passages in literature and other arts. Mother always insisted upon inspirational movies, and our favorite actors—George Arliss and Charles Laughton—brought to life many of the great men of history. We were always deeply involved in their portrayals of historical figures like Alexander Hamilton, Voltaire, Disraeli, and Rembrandt, and of fictional characters like Javert and Captain Bligh. The last two, like other roles of Laughton’s, also appealed to my fascination with and fear of implacable power figures.

Seen early in my life, these films prompted me to identify for too many years with heroes and the heroic. I never entirely lost this tendency, and later, in an age of anti-heroes, it has often misled me or left me feeling unsatisfied. But I could not for long remain exclusively content with mother's world of exalted heroes, because my nightmare life pulled me in downward directions. Thus, I began going with Morris or on my own to gangster, mystery, suspense, and horror films of which mother wouldn’t have approved. My friend and I could recite entire scenes together, becoming the characters whose lines we spoke. Although I had to keep mum about these films, villains or evil heroes often felt more believable to me than virtuous characters, partly because they gave me insights into my own hidden feelings. These characters were a necessary counterbalance to the oppressive Mormon emphasis upon righteousness. Years later, I ran into Morris at a theater in San Francisco. I greeted him, but he looked horrified and turned away, guiding his large Mormon brood to the closest exit. Evidently, the news of my disgrace at Smith had reached Zion and other western cities. Apparently I was now for him the embodiment of the evil we had sought back in Salt Lake City.

Although I endured years of longing for male intimacy, I still did not understand or accept my own sexual nature. My failure to explore or even enjoy my own body, aside from eating, was characteristic of my family’s denial of the physical. But there were small exceptions. When I was 13, the class bully would occasionally corner me during library hours at school, sit down next to me, reach under my jacket and hold my penis. Although I was afraid that someone might see, I never resisted. I couldn’t understand why he, of all people, was making this oddly intimate gesture. Another boy had earlier done the same thing to me in a movie house, but I simply didn’t know how to react and was totally passive. Since they were not pleasurable, I forgot these incidents almost at once.

My seduction by my piano teacher at 16, however, felt like an answer to prayers. As I write, newspapers are filled with horror stories about pedophilia, and I cannot defend it. But I was not a victim, and I know that frustrated gay boys like me are often ready and eager collaborators. Many boys are seduced by men; but few fall with such relief and exhilaration as I did. Although, naturally, I would have preferred someone my own age, gratitude and joy overwhelmed me. Until this relationship, I had feared that for all Mormon boys, nothing went beyond awkward groping.

I had studied with Mr. Carlsberg for five years before he made his first move in the middle of a cornfield one night in his car. My first orgasm startled me so much that it was anything but pleasurable. Nevertheless, this longed-for seduction, at the hands of a 52 year-old man, someone I respected rather than loved, was one of the great breakthroughs of my life. I was as excited as Carlsberg was, and astonished at this new sensation. My body had to be brought to life inch by inch, as though it had been frozen in ice. Curiously, I thought of my penis as primarily his plaything. In the goody-goody atmosphere of Mormondom, it took me over a year to realize that I could bring myself to climax. Carlsberg had just begun to unlock a great power in me, but out of fear I soon locked it up again.

Over two years later, I told Carlsberg that orgasms made me feel weak and that I wanted to stop. This explanation was surely a sign of my increasing guilt. Wasn’t it wicked to experience pleasure? Another young Mormon had told me that every orgasm shortens your life by a day, and that one orgasm requires a quarter of a pint of blood, as though the energy of the body were finite. This shame-inducing folklore was probably familiar in Zion and other provincial areas. When I was 19 and out of town, Carlsberg died suddenly in the prime of life of a heart attack. Because I could not cope with this loss, I repressed it. Like the rest of the family, I had already learned to shut down painful feelings. Later, I wanted many times to be seduced, but the right boy or man never again made the move, and I was incapable of initiating action, even of touching others. Rendered passive by mother’s usurping my sexual feelings, I didn't have satisfying mutual orgasms until my last four years at Harvard.

But I still ached to love. In senior high, for the first time, I fell in love with a boy and was loved by him in turn, although I believe neither of us was aware of the intensity of our attraction. George Hubert and I spoke wretched French for hours after school. He accompanied me faithfully on my newspaper route every day, walking his bike. His companionship helped me to forget the increasing discomfort caused by lugging my sack of papers. In those days, paperboys had no wheeled carts, and this job marked the beginning of my lasting spinal troubles. I was growing very rapidly, and the heavy loads greatly augmented three congenital curvatures. I took George’s friendship for granted, although today I would be amazed and deeply grateful for such affection and loyalty. We simply considered ourselves buddies. It’s now clear to me, however, that we were deeply in love. But in a world that uniformly condemned erotic feeling between boys, we made no physical contact.

I remember one day in English class, sitting across the aisle from each other, we gazed deeply into one another’s eyes. George’s dark brown eyes seemed bottomless and left me spellbound. When I started feeling weak, I was the first to blink. The teacher called us to attention, and the spell was broken. For the first time, I realized that something extraordinary was happening to me, but we never advanced from eyes to hands. My dreams of George, among the loveliest that I have ever had, were telling me what I really wanted. But despite Carlsberg’s having tried to persuade me, I still feared that mutual male love was too wonderful to be unattainable. On one occasion, I had a chance to break through my excessive fears of the body with George, but we both flubbed it. Four of us boys took an overnight camping trip, and we slept in two beds in the same room in a tiny cabin. George and I shared a large bed. Overcome by conflicting feelings, I started shaking so violently that George must have thought I had a fever. I ached to touch him, and I devoutly hoped that he would touch me. I think we both were timidly trying to reach halfway. The atmosphere was unromantic, for the other two raucous bedmates talked loudly and shared dirty jokes for most of the night. If we had acted, I knew that they would mock us ruthlessly. Our trip ended without incident. Gradually, my repeated failures to act demoralized me. Even stroking a head of hair, the side of a face, or a long-held handshake was forbidden for boys. Later, I realized the truth of the comment: “We suffer most from the temptations we have resisted.” Of the many brilliant aphorisms on this subject attributed to Oscar Wilde, I now prefer, “Only the courageous yield to temptation.” But I was a coward and afraid to yield.

Because of the pre-med courses I soon started taking to please my mother, classes at West High School were either too difficult or boring. I went into the ROTC to escape gym, particularly since West did not have a swimming pool where I could satisfy my interest in seeing naked boys. I was soon made a lieutenant to do office work, partly because, as I now see, the middle-aged officer in charge wanted to surround himself with good-looking boys. In my journalism class, Miss Selby, seeing that I possessed untapped talents and no confidence, persuaded me to read Emerson, a priceless guide for someone as self-doubting as I. I must have read Self-Reliance and other key essays ten times. If I could have learned from Emerson’s radiant doctrine of self-respect (today I might say self-aggrandizement), I might at least have had more confidence. Miss Selby also submitted some columns of mine from our school paper to a national contest, and I won a second prize. The most marked characteristic of my writing then was a free-flowing style and prolixity, characteristics I could later never recapture except in speech. I don’t know when, or why, my increasing self-consciousness broke this easy rhythm. During my miserable performance throughout years of math and science classes in high school and at the university, I lost both the ability to write easily and my confidence in myself as a student.

One of my favorite classes in high school was biology, because it was the only branch of science that seemed to have human relevance. Only through learning about stamens and pistils, birds and bees, did I belatedly realize what the penis and vagina were for. Incredibly, no one had ever told me about sex and childbirth. Although she had repeatedly promised to do so, mother was too inhibited and embarrassed to tell me anything about sex—what she considered the regressive function that we unhappily shared with animals. In my English class, I was swept away by romantic poetry and I memorized several poems, which I would repeat to myself in periods of dejection or elation. Since I had long been obsessed by phrases, rhymes, rhythms, and the feelings that they evoked, the world of poetry, beginning with nursery rhymes, afforded me most of the material for my ceaseless inner monologues. Among the Saints, however, I knew that the delights of my world—literature, movies, and music—could never be taken seriously; they were only play.

At home, radio kept me in touch with what I felt was our cultural center, New York, and I found listening essential to my daily life. I romanticized every aspect of the great metropolis, and I would listen religiously to everything from “Invitation to Learning” and the New York Philharmonic to Phil Spitalny’s All-Girl Orchestra. In addition to my favorite mystery serials, I enjoyed a great deal of popular culture—from Jack Benny and Fred Allen, to sentimental love songs. Stormy Weather characteristically was my favorite. But it was only later at Harvard that I came to love the great blues singers, especially Bessie Smith and Billie Holliday. This music seemed to give voice not only to the loneliness of black women, but to the yearning of gay boys searching for love. In Salt Lake City, I rarely ever heard the word “gay,” however, and its synonyms were ugly.

In senior high, Mother’s passion for “bettering the world” through medicine and social service increasingly distracted me from the subjects I loved. She was troubled about my dismal performance in science classes, but she paid little heed to my constant complaints. She repeatedly told me that the will always finds a way, but the will was wholly hers. I now see that she wanted to continue to mold me, as she had the premature baby. And her arbitrary goals for me severely delayed my sense of autonomy. Unfortunately, I would have turned myself inside out to make mother proud of me. Despite our differences, I treasured our friendship. Mother and I had shared many rich experiences in our responses to films and books, and I appreciated her absenting herself from Church, although she rarely criticized it.

In my speech class in high school I performed well, and I was chosen as the school valedictorian at commencement. At the ceremony itself, I concluded my flagrantly optimistic remarks—the last onward-and-upward exhortation I ever uttered in public—with a recitation of Tennyson’s Ulysses, ending with the ringing flourish, “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” This high-flown oratory, of course, reflected my mother’s idealism far more than it did my own quizzical nature. She was in the audience, quietly spreading her feathers like a peacock. Feeling more confident after this speech, I finally confronted her about my future. I told her that I wanted to stop taking pre-med classes. I had just received a D in Calculus and had done poorly in Physics. I explained that I wanted to become a pianist or study literature. Looking back, I see that music would have been a stretch. But although I wasn’t very good at the piano, I loved music more than anything else.

She was surprised by my unexpected boldness, and replied at once.

“Oh no, you’ve got to go into a helping profession! It has given my life great satisfaction. I've always wanted you to become a doctor.”

“But I hate my science classes.”

“But you just won a science award.”

“The only reason I won anything was because my biology teacher liked me, and he had a lot of pull on the committee.”

But she was immovable and as usual personalized the issue, “MDs have saved my life, Joel.”

As I had before, when I saw her resolve, I backed down and kept my desires to myself. Thus for the next two years, even at the university, I continued to take science classes, hoping that each would be my last. I still wasn’t confident enough to stand up to this strong woman. And I didn’t want to hurt or disappoint someone who, as she said, had “devoted so many years of her life” to me. Mother must have regretted having hooked me very early on her first loves— books, plays, and movies. I came to think of mother's will, as I did other major obstacles in life, as a kind of destiny to which I must struggle to resign myself. Needless to say, this didn't make for peace of mind.

Because Utah graduates students with 11 grades instead of 12, I missed further basics in all aspects of my education and entered the University of Utah at 17. Just when I thought I might finally be independent, mother came a year later to the university to teach. When was I ever to find autonomy? I was soon driving my mother and two of her neighboring colleagues on Capitol Hill, to and from school in our old La Salle. With growing resentment, I came to feel that this morning and evening chore—chauffeuring three ill-tempered academic ladies—now brought into the open my family servitude. After a year, I summoned the courage to tell mother that the automobile was becoming too unreliable to ferry such august company. My father was now staying away from home for half-year periods. Our few visitors were women, and nearly all of my teachers until my junior year in high school were also women. I thus suffered from a growing feeling of female suffocation. With my sister, I was living in a totally feminine world. The one exception was my brother, Kermit, who was more than seven years younger than I. Like a saving buoy, he strengthened my ability to resist being swallowed by this vortex of women. I tutored Kermit on the piano and in reading, and my intense love for him grew year by year. He always listened attentively and never seemed shocked by my skepticism. Because I had already broken the ice and rebelled, Kermit later didn’t have to make a dramatic break with father or the Church. Somehow, he slipped through the blockade of piety that father had built for me. Inevitably, it was the masculine world that was mysterious and attractive to me. Much later, my sister told me in her last illness that she had also deeply missed a strong male presence in her life. Tragically, Julia—the total outsider of our odd family—remained a sacrificial victim to the power of our mother and the Church until she, too, rebelled against both in her last decade.

My first year at college was a turning-point, marked especially by my total break with the Mormon world. I finally found several friends and teachers who shared my feelings of alienation from Zion. Wallace Stegner, my freshman English teacher, had an air of having read widely, and of having experienced almost everything, and I admired the satiric eye with which he seemed to view the world. I thought I could never become as sophisticated or well-informed as Stegner, whose imperturbable face later reminded me of that of Robert Mitchum. An older girl in our class, who dressed like a boy, fascinated me. She was very bright, a loner, and wanted to become an archeologist. But I admired her most for her quiet defiance, even for her relentless smoking in public. What incredible freedom and daring in Mormondom! Without thinking of my mother, I realized for the first time that I was drawn toward masculine women. I soon met other interesting Jack Mormons, and we formed poetry and musical groups that were affectionate and liberating, and that enabled me to develop more confidence in myself, a slow and never-ending process. Through our listening reverently to records together, my new musical circles became my chief sources of pleasure. I joined the Unitarian Church near the university, where I ostentatiously smoked and drank coffee, and the Reverend Trapp encouraged us to think dangerous thoughts.

As I turned more sharply against the Church, I wanted mother to share my deepening agnosticism. She was always interested in my reading and never seemed upset. During summer vacations, I read to her many skeptical passages from H. G. Wells’s Outline of History and Will Durant’s Story of Philosophy. I also shared with her my long love affair with the work of Thomas Mann. At my urging, she found time over several summers to read large sections of Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, and Stories of Three Decades; but we never discussed the sexually problematic episodes that most intrigued me. Her openness to fiction reassured me that she still loved the arts and could tolerate non-religious interpretations of life. Because of my father’s inflexibility, mother’s apparent philosophical openness was very important to me. Although few then knew about Mann’s complicated personal life, he afforded me insights into the complexities of the family, of eccentric individuals and bisexuality, and thus of lives very different from those of the Americans I knew. I was fascinated by Mann’s associating artistic talent with illness, and I hoped that the two were related in me, since I took for granted that I was “poorly,” as some old folks used to say.

Before World War II, I clearly preferred European and English works (especially if decadent and doomed) to American realism, pragmatism and positivism. My favorite book for a while was Santayana’s The Sense of Beauty. This led me to Samuel Butler, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and the art for art’s sake movement, although I would probably now speak of art for life’s sake. I had an almost comic fin de siécle sensibility, and I wished to burn at all hours with a hard, gem-like flame. I had always made intensity of feeling an ideal. I only learned later about the homosexuality of several of these writers, and I discovered to my surprise that some of them had been inspired by America’s Whitman—for gays a historically precocious hero.

I read little American literature until I taught it in Germany 25 years later. Although a Westerner, I possessed none of the frontier hope and gusto that are associated with what is still called the “American Dream”—a dream I then associated with the parades, rodeos, flags, and noisy patriotism that my father loved. Because I feared that the Saints were in ways representative Americans, I was doubly prejudiced against the culture of my own land and time. I even considered much English fiction I knew—except for Dickens—too middle-of-the-road, even too “healthy” (perhaps meaning heterosexual), for my skewed temperament. Later, I came to love Jane Austen. Although I had read parts of Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis, I far preferred what I considered the more sophisticated work of writers like Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh. Although I had heard Stegner briefly refer to other American writers, I had not yet read Hemingway, Fitzgerald, or their contemporaries. Even at Harvard, I preferred reading about heightened characterizations of unusual lives and extreme situations, as in Madame Bovary and Crime and Punishment. As I moved from my adolescent love of the heroic to the anti-heroic, to outsiders and the underground, I had other reasons to avoid the literature and art of middle-class America. Years before I thought of myself as homosexual, I had in private the sensibility of a member of a scorned minority.

I was thus an offbeat young man, looking for byways in human life that I hadn’t yet explored in myself and did not understand. Later in graduate school, when I finally came to know them, I felt that some of the characters created by Poe, Melville, Henry James, and Faulkner were as marginal as I was. And later, Flannery O’Connor was a great discovery. I did not then know that the surface optimism of popular American culture is often antithetical to the dark visions of our greatest American writers and artists. The critic Harry Levin, later one of my two favorite teachers at Harvard, has characterized the spirit of some of these authors as The Power of Blackness.

At the University of Utah, the sudden freedom from the Church’s and my father’s religious and moral constraints was thrilling. My mother’s increasing needs, however, distracted me from participating fully in both study and friendships. Although she was in her 50s, she had to obtain an advanced degree to continue teaching at the university. For her MS degree, she chose to write a thesis on “The Effects of the Deprivation of Vitamin E on Rats.” I spent hours assisting her in the lab with the care of these pathetic creatures, so hungry that they ate their young. I also helped her compose and type her thesis. This work consumed the entire summer and fall of my sophomore year. Whenever I was in the Humanities Building, I could never forget the towering presence of my mother in the Home Economics Building on the other side of the campus. It felt as though I myself had a divided center of gravity. I could not admit the level of resentment I was increasingly feeling, nor that she—the woman who had long inspired me—had delayed for almost three years my finding myself and my life’s work.

Roosevelt’s work-study programs then enabled me, and hundreds of thousands of other students, to get through universities. I did everything from mowing campus lawns to working as a research assistant to professors. In FDR and Mrs. Roosevelt, my mother and I had live heroes to inspire us through difficult days. Mother had finally found a worthy female model in Eleanor to match her earlier male model, Woodrow Wilson. For some years, mother had been our only breadwinner, working doubly hard so that she could get us all through school and the university. Although she was becoming steadily stronger, I strangely continued to empathize with her every physical symptom as though she were still an invalid. We continued for years to fret unnecessarily over each other’s health. When I almost failed another science class in my junior year, I told mother that I couldn’t go on. After deflecting my complaints for years, she suddenly gave in. I was amazed. I think by then that she was simply too self-involved to refuse me.

I immediately changed my major to English. At first I did not do well, because in science classes I had not been reading literature or writing essays. Thus my writing was still marred by grammatical errors and a total lack of style; furthermore, I had come to expect poor grades. And I had repressed my feelings for so long, that I could not reveal them in my writing, which remained lifelessly factual. I had oddly forgotten my years of enjoyable summer reading, and I had begun to think of all study as a soulless ordeal. Of course, no one in the family ever thought that school should be easy, pleasurable or emotionally fulfilling.

Meanwhile, my erotic desires at the university became more insistent, although they remained sadly platonic. Of course, we then had no gay bars or other meeting places. I gazed longingly at several Tadzios on campus and followed each for a while, but I eventually lost sight of them. I never spoke to them and was unrecognized by them, although one student later told me that he had also been following me. Another dear friend and I took a long hike one day, intent on seducing each other. But we returned defeated. There were several closeted gay friends in my social groups—but of course we never discussed, much less acted upon, our preferences. My steady date, Elvira Eldridge, was my closest companion, a role that did not satisfy either of us. She was ten years older than I, and had studied modern dance with a pupil of Mary Wigman, a famous German dancer. Elvira inevitably ended up teaching grammar school. This unblushing romantic danced for me with abandon in the moonlight at two of the city’s cemeteries, the only secret stretches of lawn we could find. I have never since felt like dancing on graves. She also recited her poetry, which she dedicated to me. Using all her flamboyant arts to court me, she once pounced upon me while we were lying down and kissed me ardently. Chagrined and unable to respond, I told her that I had no feeling in my lips. Hers were simply the wrong lips.

Because mother had come from a family primarily of boys, she knew their ways and let me come and go freely. I appreciated her permissiveness. But my father had tantrums when I stayed out late. In our apostate circles, we Jack-Mormons were perversely happy to pay our dues as sinners, as we rebels still felt that we were. We frequently toasted our new-found freedoms, even though we were never as free as we pretended. After I left Utah, I never found sin as much fun as it had been in Zion. One friend said that when he confessed to his father that he smoked, his father told him, “Satan has you by the balls,” and another friend told me that for the first few weeks, smoking gave him an erection. All sinning was somewhat sexualized, and thus our sexual lives were further disturbed.

At parties, my outcast friends and I would often join in singing our versions of Mormon hymns, such as “Put Your Shoulder to the Wheel,” “Never Be Late to the Sunday School Class,” or the hymn about the Word of Wisdom—something like, “Tea and coffee and tobacco we despise…and we eat / But a very little meat….” We partied late, and even when I was finally studying literature, I rarely had enough sleep and was often only half-awake in the mornings at school, even hung over. My socializing played havoc with my studies. But I had come a long way from my isolated life as the family janitor, knowing only about the lives in books.

Obviously, I was far too neurotic and too easily distracted to be a good student. For the first time, I lost all sense of hours, dates, and deadlines. I usually delayed studying and writing until the last moment, and then, after staying up all night, handed essays or term reports in late, sometimes delivering them furtively to the professor’s house door just before grades were due. I seemed to have thrown away not only clocks, but calendars, and each academic deadline seemed to spring up before me as a shocking surprise. Then I would almost panic in an attempt to complete my work. Of course I could never do my best under such pressure. I have ever since dreaded deadlines, days on which I am forced to face judgments. I increasingly lacked academic confidence, and my guilt worsened. Although I was finally studying in my chosen field, it took me over a year before I could enjoy it.

When under pressure, I repeated some of the nervous habits I had developed in science classes, setting up a rhythm by rocking to and fro—as my father had—to force myself through pages I found difficult. My nervous tics multiplied. Each time I had to cram for difficult finals, I would shake or tremble, afraid that I wouldn’t be prepared. Since my hands were often as flighty as those of Zazu Pitts, I bit my nails and the skin on either side until I drew blood, and I played with pencils, rubber bands, anything handy, except the one forbidden object. I took my nervousness for granted; I had been an anxious youth. Although I had once easily and rapidly read much fiction, my reading speed now slowed down markedly. Slowly, I came to prefer poetry and drama to fiction, partly because they were condensed, shorter forms. My back curvatures had already rendered my sitting for long periods difficult, especially on hard library chairs, and so I studied with greater relaxation at home, slumping in recliners, lying in positions that seemed more comfortable. They doubtless worsened my back.

As an extension of my rebellion against my family, Church and pre-med studies, I now found myself rebelling against the very subject that I had long wanted to pursue. I lacked the patience to think through and respond emotionally to the more difficult language of Chaucer and Shakespeare. Unluckily, the Utah professor who introduced me to Shakespeare, of all writers, was pompous and boring, and employed Shakespeare’s characters solely to satisfy and display his own vanity. He thought of himself as a noted textual (rather than literary) scholar. Oddly, he saw all characters from Falstaff’s point of view. This was a disastrous approach to tragedy. This insensitive man blocked me for years from finding and loving what would become my lifelong preoccupation.

Suddenly, I had a stroke of good luck, when the University English Department decided to hire a few juniors as part-time teachers. Two English professors spotted me as promising material, and I was asked to teach the remedial sections of Freshman English in my last two years. This was an astonishing and critical breakthrough for me. I was finally motivated to concentrate and focus more sharply. Since I had long tutored my own brother, I now found it natural to play the older brother to students not much younger than I. But to discipline the unruly, I also needed to become something of a father or authority figure, and this proved to be difficult for me, since I had long rebelled against all such figures. To monitor me, the chairman sat in on my class one day and later told me that I must immediately learn how to discipline my students. I managed to accomplish this feat very rapidly by reading aloud compelling stories. Astonishingly, the students quieted down and began listening to every word.

As soon as I started teaching, I began to rediscover my childhood and adolescent enthusiasm, even passion, for reading, and I quickly found that I could write with more ease and pleasure. The required workbook on grammar also greatly helped me. Thus at 19, this wholly unexpected opportunity to teach greatly improved my own studies and gave me far more self-assurance, the key quality that I had lacked at the university. I could now read for hours at a time without neurotic fidgeting. Reading closely enough to explain texts to others gave me purpose and a heightened sense of satisfaction. I learned to persist until I could more fully comprehend the well-selected essays I taught, and I began to generate ideas about them. I took enormous delight in sharing my discoveries with students, and I very soon saw that I could indeed be happy as a teacher. By the time I took my comprehensive examination for the major, I performed very well. Since my fulfilling requirements in English had been delayed by my enforced science curricula, I had to stay at the university a fifth year to complete my English courses.

In my last year, in a curiously manic mood, an expression of my increased confidence, I began writing a thesis in which I attempted to discuss ways in which the arts had recently tried to imitate one another. I had for some time been as enchanted by music and painting, as I had by literature, and so my thesis seemed like a natural step. Stevens’ Peter Quince at the Clavier was one of my examples, poetry echoing music. I can now scarcely recount my presumptuousness without wincing, for I was still a novice in all of the arts. The idea behind my thesis was triggered by my reading of R. P. Blackmur and other critics who were just beyond my reach—but who themselves were widely experienced in poetry, painting and music. For organizing my project, I unwisely relied upon outrageous published syntheses like Art and the Art of Criticism, which Blackmur would have loathed. I ignored the fact that I lacked both experience and judgment. After having endured years of incomprehensible science classes, I for a few months entered a phase of grandiosity in my own field. The major arts became my oyster. My mood swings at this time could be as wild as those of my father, and my work was as inappropriate and embarrassing as his. Although I did at times attempt similarly manic projects later, I slowly tried to discipline myself so that I could operate on a more even keel and finish what I had begun. Encouraged by my mentor, I soon abandoned my thesis. He wisely recommended that I wait until the end of my career to resume such heroic endeavors.

In my last two years at the university, I had finally discovered what would become my life’s work—teaching. More importantly, I had begun to cultivate an identity that was in harmony with that work. I had finally found a profession that would engage and sustain me. For the first time in my life, I felt that I might have an interesting future.