GLR November-December 2025

famously at first, but he became disillu sioned (too much so, I thought) and began to find fault with her. One result is that a heavily disguised portrait of her emerged in his fantasy novel Caracole . Not disguised enough: when she read it, Sontag was furious and pronounced him anathema in New York’s elevated literary circles. Ed always cited the literary de fense of fictionality, saying the portrait was based as much on the 19th-century author Madame de Staël as on Sontag, but the latter didn’t buy it. It took two decades for Ed’s reputation to recover among the New York intelligentsia. § B YTHE LATE 1970 S , Ann and I had mutu ally decided to part company, and I was living with J.D. McClatchy in Silliman College at Yale, where he was junior fac ulty in the English Department. I’d pub lished two volumes of poetry that were

poet, critic, and opera librettist expanded. In 1981, once Yale had denied tenure to Sandy, we moved to New York. The move might have brought us closer to Ed, but he had gone to live in Paris, working as a journalist at large for Vogue magazine. It was at that moment that the AIDS cri sis erupted. One result was Ed’s founding, with Larry Kramer, the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the only organization mobilized to deal with the pandemic in the early ’80s. A second result came a few years later when Ed drafted an AIDS novel, which he described to me during one of his rare vis its to New York during that decade. I re member that we were walking up Chris topher Street as he explained that one by one the characters began to die, leaving only a couple still alive, but waiting for the end. I said, “Oh, it’s the fictional equiva lent of Haydn’s Farewell Symphony . In the last movement the musicians get up and one by one leave the orchestra, until there

Spring Rain across the lake

& cherry trees, bursting, their blooms closed doors in a dark house. April breeds secrets: leaves

concealing gray sky, the forest’s warrens

full of men, sweating, behaving like rabbits. Everywhere, the smell of pear blossoms, inescapable: wet mushrooms, wet running shorts, used condoms hanging like white fruit from every low branch. P ATRICK K INDIG

praised by James Merrill, John Ashbery, Antony Hecht, and Harold Bloom. Ed came up from New York to size up my new situation, and I introduced him to Sandy (my partner’s preferred nickname). They didn’t immediately like each other, but in time they became fast friends as Sandy’s publications and reputation as

is only a duo left still playing.” Ed said, “Oh, that’s terrific. I’m using that as my title.” And so it was. What I didn’t know at the time was that the novel included a rather ridiculous character based in part on me, with touches borrowed from Richard Howard and a few others. The reflection that he’d done the same thing with Sontag didn’t much smooth down ruffled feathers. After that book appeared the friendship went into a decline, accelerated by the decision I made to end the relationship with Sandy McClatchy, which earned the latter’s offended ire and vin dictiveness. Our mutual friends had to decide whose side to take, and once James Merrill opted for Sandy’s, Ed followed suit. He never banished me in so many words but just became much less available, which, as he was living in Paris, would have been true in any case. When I heard he had tested positive for HIV, I felt sympathy and was disposed to get past rancor and a sense of be trayal. When he began teaching at Brown University, a short visit to him in Providence went without negative incident, though I admit to being put off by the accoutrements of his new fame. By then he was well integrated into the Parisian literary set and had brought an entourage with him—his French boyfriend Hubert Sorin, a young woman who had become a follower, and a rather large dog named Fred. The telephone would ring, he’d speak a few minutes and then say: “Oh, that was Nathalie Prouvost, you know, the wife of the publisher of Paris Match.” (I didn’t know). “She wants her young son to come and live with me for a while, you know, to get some life experience.” That never happened, and years later Ed told me the boy had committed suicide after an unsuccessful, though socially prominent, marriage. Not every Paris match works out. Years went by, but we kept in touch intermittently. Late last year, we had a dreadful quarrel after I sent him a critical piece I’d published about the question of racism in James Merrill’s poetry. He wouldn’t hear of it and wiped the floor with me. Shocked, disbelieving, I nevertheless assumed that we would get past it. But several messages that I sent went unanswered, as if transmitted into the void.

MARKED BY STR OF QUEER SUICIDE A A MOVING JOURNEY g justice for the .. “Stunnin , ele ant LISA DIEDRICH suicide.”— p g in its documenting of the , “Incredibly movin Patrick Anderson examines t have died by suicide. Author emotional tribute to those w blend of historical analysis an is aunique The Lamentations emotional, and embodied re the ho nd l d b di d i adwh g queerde i h grieve in the wake of lives go light the stories of those left and case studies, and brings newspaper articles, obituarie compiling narratives from history of queer suicide, one to to es, grief and queer survivial in t death; it’s a narrative of quee more than a meditation on is The Lamentations too soon. he er s i https://bit.ly/TheLamentati wake of profound loss.

RUGGLE AND BEAUTY AND A TRIBUTE TO LIVES THROUGH THE SHADOWS persistent narrative trope of queer beautifully written, and importan r nt

i ” ho came b ore through ethica , ef l a meditation about how to do .. LÁZARO LIMA epair.”—

ons

TheG & LR

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