GLR May-June 2024

PEH: After Widescreen Dreams , I started work on another memoir exploring my inter est in Matthiessen and my relationship with a young man who resembled Matthiessen in crucial ways. I wanted to understand myself and my attraction to a kind of self-destruc tive gay man. I wasn’t satisfied with the book. It lacked a center of gravity, and I was especially dissatisfied with the opaque pic ture of myself that emerged. I was in my early thirties looking back on my early twenties, so perhaps I was still too close to those events. At that time, I was fascinated by portraits of men. Whenever I went to a museum, that’s all I wanted to look at. I realized there was a project in that, so I initially thought of writing a series of essays on portraiture. But I wanted to be as intimate as possible with the portraits. I didn’t know what that meant, only that I didn’t want to write from an aca demic distance. Then I had a fantasy about a young man in a gallery looking at a painting and another man looking at this young man. Then I added a museum guard looking at both. A story seemed contained within that network of gazes. That’s how I decided to approach the topic, and this became my first novel, Portraits at an Exhibition . Charles Green is a writer based in Anapolis, MD.

urgent than living in the past. These are a few examples of how my work dramatizes the relationship between individuals and art in a way that, I hope, brings excitement to the life of the mind and heart. CG: Pennsylvania Station takes place in the early 1960s, while parts of American Scholar are set in the late ’80s, with many references to the early and mid-20th century. Are there connections between these eras and our own time? PEH: History is intrinsically interesting. It helps us measure ourselves and our present moment and helps us see ourselves clearly. I enjoy studying history and trying to repre sent the past. In Pennsylvania Station , what attracted me to the early 1960s was that it’s the moment before sexual liberation, before Stonewall and everything that flowed from that explosive event—and yet everything leading to Stonewall is contained therein. The two main characters, Frederick and Curt, represent two different stances toward the gay liberation movement. Frederick is a mostly closeted middle-aged man who lives his life under the radar. Curt is an out young man and activist who becomes increasingly committed to gay rights causes. But they love, need, and admire each other, so the lines dividing them are not fixed. In some ways this period is both more conservative

and more radical than our own when it comes to the struggle for LGBTQ rights. In American Scholar , the narrative switches between the late 1980s, during the worst years of AIDS, and 2016 on the eve of the presidential election. In one passage, James considers the difference between life in the late 20th century and in the early 21st, about the revolution in technology and the political changes we’ve lived through in that short period. Life in the ’80s and ’90s throws life in this century into relief. In Por traits at an Exhibition , Robin looks at paint ings from the Renaissance and imaginatively enters their world. The past contains potentially life-saving information for him if he could only access it, but he’s blind and deaf to it. In my memoir Widescreen Dreams , I analyze movies I loved as a child in the 1960s and ’70s to un derstand how those films and the culture they came from helped shape me. Again, it’s exploring the past that sheds light on the present. There’s always a connection be tween the past and the present, but we need to inhabit the past in a way that it speaks to us. Fiction seems uniquely poised to let us do that. CG: Your first book, Widescreen Dreams , was a memoir. What prompted you to write fiction?

May–June 2024

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