The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity

Talk10

"Queer ideology is a kind of Narcissus's tale, in which an important sameness keeps getting overlooked because of an insistence that there is only difference," writes Mendelsohn, a classics lecturer at Princeton University who is a gay Manhattanite and a New Jersey dad. In this memoir, he explains how he can be both.

Frank Browning

Had he not come of age in the 1980s, Daniel Mendelsohn, like Gore Vidal who matured 40 years earlier, would surely have looked down his long straight nose at the teeming, sweating masses of New York's gay gym bunnies and decamped for the sublime and rocky shores of the Mediterranean. He is, after all, a scholar of ancient Greek and Latin, a speaker of most of the Romance languages as well as German and Yiddish and an apparently dashing swain who, he tells us, has no trouble picking up comely bundles of muscle wherever they are. But Mendelsohn, a 39-year-old refugee from the suburbs, does like or has liked a pumped physique and has spent his young adulthood residing in the city's hottest gay ghetto he prefers the term "colony", Chelsea. He is a tormented -- deliciously tormented -- prisoner of his times. His debut book, on desire, love and identity, though at times needlessly repetitious, is also one of the smartest meditations on American homosexual life in many years.

Like most gay memoirists, Mendelsohn leads us through his sexual awakening silently salivating over an unavailable Southern swimmer who transferred to his Long Island Jewish-intellectual high school to his loss of homo-virginity to a Virginia college classmate to his eventual admittance to Chelsea boyland. Along the way he succumbs to ancient Greek, whose elusive linguistic images and structures become both intellectual and psychological guides to his own elusive sense of desire and identity. The key to understanding both the language and the author resides in a peculiar syntactic device of classical Greek: the use of the conjunctive men at the beginning of the first clause of a sentence in tandem with de at the beginning of the second clause.

This syntax, which Mendelsohn renders as "on the one hand this" but "on the other hand that," epitomizes, he says, the Greek tendency to bipolar thinking. Yet the linguistic polarity of men and de is also key to Mendelsohn's story: the Jewish boy always chasing after fair-haired Southerners, the meditative intellectual in search of relentless play, the playboy dogged by the mysterious tombstone image of a beautiful immigrant ancestor 70 years dead, the hunk lover seduced by the infant child he is helping to raise. "If you spend a long enough time reading Greek literature, that rhythm begins to structure your thinking about other things, too," he writes. "The world men you were born into; the world de you choose to inhabit. Your Jewish men heritage, stern yet fertile, sexless for you because heterosexual, yet for the same reason procreative, proliferating, productive; your passion, de, for classical Greece, rich with fables that must always end the same way, the culture of perfected beauty and marmoreally self-sufficient bodies doomed always to repeat the same pleasures." It is a handsome device for intertwining the complexities of his own diverse passions and demolishing the simple-minded propaganda of the proliferating gay chambers of commerce bent on reducing homosexual desire to a marketing niche. It would be more effective still had he not lingered so long on the professorial platform, hectoring the reader with repetitious and often self-indulgent elaboration.

Mendelsohn's elusive embrace is nowhere stronger than in his brutal reflections on the difference between his love-lust for perfect young men and his simple love for his friend's child. He had never loved, truly loved, the boys he sought, he admits, because he stayed with them only "as long as they left me alone and whole and untouched." The love of those boys was like the narcissistic love of the dapper, oft-married grandfather who was his idol. "To be a lover -- to be a desirer, a collector -- is to be self-obsessed, for your desire is ultimately about yourself," he writes of both his grandfather and himself. "But to be a parent is, ultimately, to efface yourself -- your self…In our different ways, my grandfather and I are great desirers."

Unlike the authors of the recent stream of soupy-minded diatribes against the exuberant sexuality of the gay demimonde, Mendelsohn does not repent his testosteronic chase. Yes, he has become a part-time suburbanite parent like his schlumpy schoolteacher father, but he still spends half his week in Manhattan, a few subway stops from the Chelsea corner he calls the Intersection of Desire. Daniel Mendelsohn remains, in this age of Monica moralizers, a "yes, but" seeker after the meaning of his own identity, a trickster of Gotham who understands well that simple nostrums are never adequate to complex passions.
— Salon

Goldhill

Daniel Mendelsohn's autobiographical reflections on the nature of his social, familial and professional identity as a gay classicist and writer are surprisingly brilliant, subtly revelatory and wonderfully well-written. He interweaves fragments of his own biographical narrative through childhood, university, and life in New York with ironically precise and intelligent appraisals of his developing intellectual concerns with Sappho, Greek tragedy, Narcissus.
—The Times Literary Supplement

Jonathan Lear

If you want to know the inner workings of [Mendelson's] mind, take a look at the streets along which it wanders....Mendelsohn recognizes that sometimes there is no...meaning [beyond the obvious]: ''This is how your life happens: somebody has the right color hair.'' But, for him, the complete recovery of meaning lies at the heart of what it is to be gay....[T]his charming aperçu-filled memoir is...a personal myth about undoing family myths.
— The New York Times Book Review

Glen Bowersock

These chapters could scarcely be said to constitute a conventional autobiography. They are more like the movementsof a lyric suite, in which motifs come and go until the reader feels at the end wholly attuned to their spiritual and emotional conjunctions—conjunctions that begin in dissonance and conclude in exhilarating harmony. The book defies categorization. Although sex is a central theme, this is not simply another gay memoir.
—The New York Observer

Kirkus Reviews

Mendelsohn's first book is a clever attempt to look at gay identity and family mythology through literary narratives of antiquity. A classics scholar who for years has been grappling with issues such as gay culture and the homosexual psyche, Mendelsohn finds a natural connection between the "pagan culture" and "pagan acts." He discovers in the Greek mentality and Greek language a tendency to bipolar thinking, whereby any articulated idea invites its opposite. Such, claims Mendelsohn, is the gay identity, which hovers between the extremes of the straight world into which every gay man is born and the gay world that he eventually chooses to inhabit. In Ovid, the myth of the nymph Echo illustrates how difference can be mistaken for sameness; it is supplemented by the myth of Narcissus, who, on the contrary, mistook his own face (sameness) for a stranger's (difference). This ancient paradigm is reflected in the gay male perception of men and women. While for gays the female world signifies difference, other men signal sameness. Tracing the etymology of the word "identity" to the Latin adverb identidem ("repeatedly"), Mendelsohn defines the gay identity as an infinitely repeated desire for other men. Analyzing Sappho's love poem about the frustration of seeing the erotic object pursued by someone else, the author reflects on similar painful episodes in his own love life. Euripides' fatherhood tragedy Ion provides for Mendelsohn a framework for his own experiences as the godfather of a friend's child. Here two extremes coalesce again, as he is driven both by his inherent fear of commitment to family life and by his enjoyment of this pseudofatherhood and the accompanying routine. Finally,Sophocles'Antigone presents the author with an archetypal myth of beauty and loss, which he sees reflected in his family's myth of a great-aunt's death. Despite Mendelsohn's disturbingly excessive descriptions of his numerous one-night stands, his insights into the mechanisms of gay culture are interesting.