GLR May-June 2023

taken by upending news: the intractable Sirius librettist has bro ken into Elaine’s office, torn sheets of music and his 75-page contract to shreds, and smashed set miniatures—only to collapse with a heart attack or stroke and die. Appropriately enough, the New Year’s Eve rampage lights a way to shut down production. Elaine, the opera board, and their lawyers negotiate a binding cancellation of the opera that will satisfy the cast and allow all parties to move on. Suddenly, there’s space for change. For one, Ally scoops an interview with the librettist’s reclusive sister, who discloses a shocking backstory. For another, Elaine secures an offer to direct an experimental opera in Brussels in the fall. A third change is ominous: Vincent’s weakening and sharp decline. At Elaine’s urging, with Ally’s support and opera patron funding, the musi

cian moves into an elegant villa not far from Perugia, with views of the Apennines, for terminally ill residents. With no chance of recovery, Vincent focuses on hearing his chamber opera songs performed. Despite brutto March weather, the performance takes place, right in the villa, and his music draws wild applause. Ally and Elaine, who now recognize both their differences and their mutual commitment, start figuring out a life together. Libretto is filled with dramatic complexity, but Wadsworth steers the story to resolution, clarifying subplots with brief re caps. Her dialogue comes across as direct and sophisticated, re flecting careful observation of how people talk, with curiosity and brisk ripostes. Like the narrator in Light , Coming Back ,Ally comes to understand “old perceptions of love and loss” and to imagine new possibilities for her vagabond writing life.

Power Games Inhabit Guibert’s Last Novel

B EFORE his death from AIDS in 1991, the French writer Hervé Guibert wrote several novels and a hospital diary, all of which chronicled his life with the disease. Of his most important work in this cate gory, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life , the novelist Nina Bouraoui noted that Guibert had effectively told “how life with

had a leading role in a film and then never again appeared on the screen. The “master,” whom the manservant always addresses as “Sir,” has turned over all his affairs, in cluding authorization to handle his fi nances, to Jim. In turn, the manservant has dismissed almost all the rest of Sir’s staff— the driver, the masseur, the nurse, the maid, the secretary, even the bellhop he would

P HILIP G AMBONE

MY MANSERVANT AND ME by Hervé Guibert

Translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman Nightboat Books. 82 pages, $15.95

the virus became an existential adventure ... when AIDS trans formed our relationship with desire and sexuality forever.” My Manservant and Me was the last novel that Guibert saw published. While not specifically referencing AIDS, it is the story of an aging homosexual whose bodily decline and de pendence on a young, delinquent caretaker depict “an unre lenting and derisory hellscape of terminal illness,” in the words of Shiv Kotecha, who provides an excellent foreword to the English-language edition. Readers, beware: this little novel refuses to depict the aging process through rose-tinted glasses. The narrator, once a young, cynical dandy, is a “man in de cline.” He wears bulky, padded underwear; his “lobster-claw” hands make it hard for him to write; he lacks the muscle strength to hold a thermometer under his armpit: “I prefer it in the butt like the good old days,” he confesses. At eighty years old, all his friends have died, but he has at his disposal his great-grandfa ther’s colossal fortune. The money allows him to undergo facelifts “every five years without fail,” and to travel widely with his manservant. In his cushioned Nike tennis shoes, tight jeans, leather jacket, and Ray-Bans that hide his crow’s feet, he imagines that the two of them—octogenarian and twenty-year old companion—appear as young as everyone else, “like two brothers.” The manservant, whose name we eventually learn is Jim, has been in the narrator’s employ since he was sixteen. A former thief who spent time in a reformatory (the references to Jean Genet seem intentional), he’s devious and lazy, a young man who once Philip Gambone is the author of five books, including the memoir As Far As I Can Tell: Finding My Father in World War II. 38

take along when he traveled. When he wipes Sir’s dangling gen itals and wrinkly butt, the master feels that the manservant has reduced him to the status of an object: “a black console table that’s always a bit dusty.” Guibert is clearly interested in the master-servant dynamic: What role does each perform? Who enslaves whom? What binds the two into a relationship? What, indeed, is the attrac tion, keen among some homosexuals, of a uniform? “I’ve al ways been fascinated, almost erotically so, by the outfits that minions of all sorts wear,” the master says. He has adopted an almost masochistic position vis-à-vis his manservant, who, in turn, indulges in ever more sadistic behavior toward his em ployer. “If you were in a nursing home, nobody would look after you like this,” Jim taunts him. At another point, the manservant confronts Sir about his in At 50 I catalogue old lovers one by one on Friday nights. They come up wanting lips and pecs, abs and thighs, and, yes, my nut. I catalogue old lovers one by one: muscled, flabby, young, old, smooth, hairy. I love their cravings and their needs. I delight in taunting. I catalogue old lovers one by one. On Friday nights, they come up wanting. B ILLY C LEM

TheG & LR