GLR July-August 2024

that gives you, that is another word for love,” he says. The trio of tales comprising Part Two, “Stories About God,” convey immanence rather than divinity. “The Moon,” for in stance, is drawn from Wallace’s work leading nature trips for teenage boys formerly locked up for drug and violence offenses. On one such trip to Lost Coast in northern California, Wallace wakes to moonlight. Stepping past a clutch of sleeping youth he spies a huge boulder in nearby water, wades over to it, and stretches out. “The moon above me, the sea around me, me doing something weird by myself—three of my favorite things, the complete personal trifecta,” he recalls. Having fallen asleep, he wakes up drenched when the tide turns and then has to drag a soggy sleeping bag back to camp and recount the story. Later, he mulls over the situation. “To return, to be made whole again.

That is another word for love,” he concludes. The “Stories About Return” of Part Three disclose striking personal journeys. In “The Stars,” for example, Wallace reflects on Black history from the perspective of his own ancestry. His mother was the youngest of nineteen children born to his grand mother, Luvonia Mitchell. “It is her face that I have,” he notes. “My mother had it, and my children have some version of it ... and it makes me feel we are of the same clan, the People of the Round Noses and Cheeks.” Two of the writer’s great-grandpar ents were born just before and soon after the end of slavery. “How did those round faces look gazing upward at the stars?” he wonders. “How did they make sense of their bondage?” The memoirist seeks out living relatives too. Addicted to drugs and alcohol since college, he goes “cold sober” in his late

Keith Haring in the Hands of Brad Gooch AUTHOR’S PROFILE

Claude Peck: What led you to Keith Har ing as a subject? Brad Gooch: I was in New York City at around the same time as he was. He came in 1978. I crossed paths with his work on the streets leading from the West Village to the East Village, like some graffiti that said “Clones go home.” It was from this fake or ganization called Fags Against Facial Hair. In Soho I began to see his crawling babies on newsstands, and then the subway works.

C LAUDE P ECK I Promiscuity ) to publishing authoritative biographies of three fascinating, compli cated figures of 20th-century American art. His pivot into nonfiction began in 1993 with CityPoet , about influential New York School poet Frank O’Hara, and continued with his Flannery O’Connor biography in 2009, a memoir in 2015, and a life of Rumi in 2017. His latest book, Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring , is about the gay graffiti artist turned global celebrity who died of AIDS in 1990 at age 31. Haring left his hometown in Pennsylva nia for New York City in 1978 and discov ered a heady scene that combined art, music, literature, nightclubs, sex, and drugs. Fueled by a prodigious output— Haring did more than 5,000 drawings on New York subway stations—and his distinc tive imagery and bold line, his reputation soared. His friends included Madonna, Basquiat, and Warhol. By his mid-twenties Haring was exhibiting and selling in New York, Europe, and Japan. He threw himself into politics, especially AIDS activism. Gooch, 72, lives in New York City with his partner, Paul Raushenbush. They have two sons, Glenn and Walter. Gooch came to New York from Wilkes-Barre, PA, in 1971 to attend Columbia. He worked as a fashion model and has written for The New Republic , The New Yorker , Vanity Fair and The Paris Review . A Guggenheim fellow in Biography, he has received a Na tional Endowment for the Humanities fellowship. This interview was conducted by tele phone shortly before the release of Radiant . N A RICHLY VARIED literary arc, Brad Gooch went from writing novels ( Scary Kisses, The Golden Age of

looking sort of spooked because he was within a year of his own death. I always carried with me this idea to write a novel about Keith Haring. But the facts of Keith’s life are kind of astonishing ... and the ten year comet of his career hadn’t really been told in context. So it all came together to do this as a biography. CP: With Flannery O’Connor (1925–64) and Frank O’Hara (1926–66) you wrote about writers born a generation before you. Was it easier writing about Haring, who was roughly your contemporary? BG: It actually does make it easier. I had never been in that situation. With Frank O’Hara, I came to New York five years after he died. And it was not just that I was in New York when Haring was, but that I too was from Pennsylvania. So when I went to Kutztown [Haring’s hometown] and talked to his family, I really understood that fam ily. They were very close. And yet at the same time, you had this funny matter that Keith never said the word gay to them. He never said the word AIDS to them. And so you have the paradox of someone whose work stands for liberation, yet he wasn’t entirely, comfortably open with his parents. That was a kind of generational thing. I wrote these gay novels and poems and I would give them to my parents. And I had a lover who went home with me for Christmas and Thanksgiving and then came to my parents’ house in a wheelchair when he was dying of AIDS. And all of this was accepted, right? But it wasn’t exactly talked about. CP: Knowing that Haring died so young somehow added weight to the details you recount of his childhood and early life. You have also written biographies of Frank O’Hara and Flannery O’Connor, both of

Brad Gooch. Jacket photo for Radiant .

Supposedly he came to a book party that Dennis Cooper and I gave for ourselves at Limelight. I remember him at the opening of the Apollo Theater uptown, coming in with his fantastic posse of guys and girls. He was a scene-maker at that moment. Later, when my lover Howard Brookner became ill with AIDS, Keith gave money for Howard’s care. I remember him at Howard’s funeral standing in the back

TheG & LR

36