A Gay and Melancholy Sound (Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Rediscoveries) Read online

  A Gay and Melancholy Sound

  A Gay and Melancholy Sound

  By Merle Miller

  Introduction by Nancy Pearl

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 1961 Merle Miller

  Introduction and Reading Group Guide copyright © 2012 Nancy Pearl

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  A Book Lust Rediscovery

  Published by AmazonEncore

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN: 978-1-61218-297-1

  Contents

  Introduction

  PART • ONE

  NOTES·DICTATED·ON·THE·FIRST·DAY

  NOTES·DICTATED·ON·THE·SECOND·DAY

  NOTES·DICTATED·ON·THE·THIRD·DAY

  NOTES·DICTATED·ON·THE·FOURTH·DAY

  PART • TWO

  NOTES·DICTATED·ON·THE·FIFTH·DAY

  NOTES·DICTATED·ON·THE·SIXTH·DAY

  NOTES·DICTATED·ON·THE· SEVENTH·AND·EIGHTH·DAYS

  Discussion Questions

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  About the Author

  About Nancy Pearl

  About Book Lust Rediscoveries

  Introduction

  I first read Merle Miller’s A Gay and Melancholy Sound in the late fall of 1962. I was a freshman at St. John’s College (the “Great Books” school) and finding the going very tough. The schoolwork demanded a kind of thinking that did not come naturally to me. I was not then, nor have I ever been, much of an analytical thinker, and that seemed to be the approach required for the assignments we were given. I felt inadequate intellectually, uncertain emotionally, and confused by the intricacies of the social life the college offered. I was just about to turn eighteen and felt lonely, alien, and terribly afraid I’d made a grave mistake in my choice of a college.

  So I did what I’d done my whole life when I felt uncomfortable or depressed: I went to the library. Not the college library, but the public library in Annapolis. I understand there’s a new library there now, but back then it was—at least as I remember it—small and dark (the better to match my mood, perhaps). I browsed the fiction shelves, looking for something that might take me out of my own life, and saw a title that intrigued me: A Gay and Melancholy Sound. It turned out to be the perfect book for that moment in my life. It became (and remains) one of my all-time favorite novels.

  I’d never heard of Merle Miller, the author, but decided to give the book a try. From the very first paragraph, I was hooked by the narrator’s voice:

  I was presented with this tape recorder five years ago. It was the gift of a group of people—most of them actors, if you call actors people—I had helped keep off the streets and the unemployment lists for three wildly successful years.

  I checked the book out and continued reading as I walked back to my dorm, heedless of traffic and Naval Academy cadets out and about. Once in my room, I deliberately ignored the reading assignment (probably Herodotus) for the next seminar. I was already too drawn into Joshua Bland’s story to put it down.

  Merle Miller (1919–1986) has written what I think is probably the purest example of the novel as autobiography that I’ve ever read. I found unforgettable his stark and stunning portrait of an Iowa-born former child prodigy whose inability to love stems from a lacerating self-hatred. Throughout his life, Joshua Bland has systematically destroyed whatever happiness could be his, knowing exactly what he was doing as he did it, but unable to stop himself. His behavior, which will perhaps be inexplicable to some readers, seemed all too understandable to me, then. (It still does.)

  When I think about the narrator/protagonist of Miller’s novel, it always brings to mind A. E. Housman’s poem “In My Own Shire, If I Was Sad,” in which the speaker describes many of the Londoners he meets as having “The mortal sickness of a mind/Too unhappy to be kind.” That fits Joshua Bland’s life to a T. Some of what he does is, perhaps, unforgivable, but even more, he doesn’t want to be forgiven, doesn’t want, or at least can’t accept, kindness from people. That’s the deep tragedy of his life: he feels he’s never lived up to what was expected of him, what his genius IQ presaged, and therefore doesn’t deserve to be liked, let alone loved.

  I’ve now read A Gay and Melancholy Sound at least a dozen more times. My memory is that originally I couldn’t bear to give the book back to the library, so I simply kept it, but knowing my—even then—reverence for libraries and what they stand for, perhaps that memory is apocryphal. More likely, I just kept checking it out, over and over, for those two unhappy years I spent in Annapolis. But somehow, I did end up with a copy of the novel, which I treasured until it fell apart from too many rereadings.

  A Gay and Melancholy Sound is certainly grounded in the great historical events of the mid-twentieth century—the Second World War and McCarthyism, to take two notable examples. Yet, Miller’s novel never feels dated or awkward: there’s no strong whiff of the long-dead past emanating from its pages. Indeed, there’s enough snark, emotional pain, and irony to satisfy even the most demanding twenty-first-century reader.

  Early in 1971, ten years after A Gay and Melancholy Sound was published, and two years after the Stonewall riots marked the beginning of the modern gay pride movement, Miller very publicly came out, writing an article for the New York Times Magazine entitled “What It Means to Be a Homosexual.” In it, he described the pain of inhabiting his theretofore well-closeted life. Knowing that Miller was a gay man gave my rereadings of the 1970s and 1980s an added depth and poignancy; Joshua Bland in A Gay and Melancholy Sound sounds an awful lot like Miller in the article. I could only wonder about the extent to which Miller’s A Gay and Melancholy Sound was not only novel as autobiography, but also autobiography (at least emotional autobiography) as novel. (That magazine piece was later published in book form under the title On Being Different. Wonderfully and serendipitously, it’s going to be reissued by Penguin Classics in 2012.)

  For decades, though, A Gay and Melancholy Sound has been nearly impossible to find. It never attained the status of a “classic,” so most libraries had long since weeded it from their collections. In all my searching, I’d only ever found one copy, about six years ago: it was at Renaissance Books, a used bookstore in Milwaukee’s Mitchell International Airport. Naturally, I immediately bought it. When I was writing Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason in 2002, it had been at least a decade since I’d gone back to Miller’s novel. I knew I wanted to include it, but, worried that readers of Book Lust wouldn’t find it as compelling as I remembered it being—or perhaps fearing not being as fond of it as I once was—I hedged my bets and listed it in a section called “Better Remembered Than Reread.” Now, having reread it in order to make sure I wanted to include it in the Book Lust Rediscovery series, I see how foolish I was not to trust that earlier me, who found so much to admire and love in Miller’s witty, smart, and viscerally powerful novel.

  My favorite anecdote about my ongoing love for Merle Miller’s novels took place in 1967. My husband and I had gotten a job with the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, along with almost two dozen other young married couples, to be part of a national study of undetected juvenile delinquenc
y. Our assignment was to interview teens about crimes they may have committed that never went onto a police report. A roll of the dice determined where we were to be sent; in our case, it was to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Chicago, and a few small towns in Iowa. By this time, I had read all of Miller’s novels, but I was dying to own them as well, and even back then they were hard to come by. I noticed that one of the Iowa towns we were assigned to was not too far from Marshalltown, where Miller had grown up. I felt sure that any bookstore in that town would feature a complete complement of his books, new and older, since he was a native son who had (at least in my mind) gone on to fame and fortune. So, one sunny afternoon, we drove to Marshalltown and went into the bookstore. My conversation with the man behind the counter went like this:

  “Do you have any of Merle Miller’s books?”

  The proprietor’s brow furled for a moment, and then cleared. “Of course,” he said, “I keep them in the window.” The window! How thrilling! I went outside and looked at the window display. There, nestled near William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, William Manchester’s The Death of a President, and Chaim Potok’s The Chosen (all bestsellers in 1967) were Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn.

  Though I never met him, except through the pages of his books, I’m pretty sure that Merle Miller would have had a bitter laugh about that.

  I hope you love this novel as much as I do.

  Nancy Pearl

  For Elly, who thought it was about time, for Ruth, who helped with it, for John, who was patient, and for Bill.

  “…I always willingly acknowledge my own self as the principal cause of every good or evil which may befall me; therefore, I have always found myself capable of being my own pupil and ready to love my teacher.”

  THE MEMOIRS OF JACQUES CASANOVA

  “Good sense is of all things in the world the most equally distributed, for everybody thinks himself so abundantly provided with it that even the most difficult to please in all other matters do not commonly desire more of it than they already have.”

  RENÉ DESCARTES

  Although what follows is written in the first person singular, it is a work of fiction. None of the events related here actually happened.

  Like the protagonist in these pages, the author was born in Iowa; he has served time in certain improbable areas of Southern California and Manhattan, and now lives in a house of glass somewhat north of New York City.

  But there the resemblance ends.

  As for the people I have known along the way, none of them will find themselves portrayed here. If any of them think they do, let them try to prove it.

  M. M.

  A Gay and Melancholy Sound

  PART • ONE

  NOTES·DICTATED·ON·THE·FIRST·DAY

  (1) The beginning

  I was presented with this tape recorder five years ago. It was the gift of a group of people—most of them actors, if you call actors people—I had helped keep off the streets and the unemployment lists for three wildly successful years.

  Until now, I had thought the damn thing would be auctioned off with the rest, unwanted and unused. In fact, several times I had started to give it away, but there’s more of my mother in me than I like to think. As she used to say, “A penny earned is a penny saved, and a stitch in nine saves time.”

  So this morning I unlocked the closet, and there this recorder was, gathering dust; there were also enough boxes of tape to start a tape store.

  I’ll start off with a quote from Romain Rolland that always impressed me, from Jean Christophe, I think:

  There are in life certain ages when there takes place a silently working organic change in a man; then body and soul are more susceptible to attack from without; the mind is weakened; its power is sapped by a vague sadness, a feeling of satiety, a sort of detachment from what it is doing, an incapacity for seeing any other course of action….

  I first read those words twenty-five or more years ago, read them and remembered them.

  I have forgotten almost everything else I ever read or learned or knew but never those words, and yesterday afternoon I realized that I had come to such a time in my own life.

  Her telegram arrived at a little after three.

  I held it in my hand for a moment, still hoping it would not say what it had to say.

  Then I tore it open. It said, “Decree granted at ten this morning. Charley.” Nothing else, no regards, no regrets, no good-byes, not even the full ten words.

  I crumpled it and threw it in the wastebasket, and then I went for a walk. I cannot remember exactly where I went. My memory started disintegrating a little more than three months ago, shortly after the headaches began.

  However, around five-thirty I found myself seated among the tired and peculiar people who make use of Bryant Park, directly behind the New York Public Library.

  As I sat there, I thought of the afternoon almost three years ago when Charley and I were in the park for the first time, listening to the library luncheon concert. One of the pieces was a special favorite of Charley’s, “The Cuckoo and the Nightingale.” Charley and I held hands while it was played—a small woman of thirty-five who at first glance might have seemed plain and a nearly middle-aged man wearing a beard and a look of hope and apprehension.

  I don’t know how Charley felt, but I felt foolish and incredulous. I felt amazed and grateful, and I was filled with such a sense of awe. Who me, I kept thinking, me loved and loving? Oh, there must be some mistake here. The mistake will be rectified; such mistakes always are, but for the moment, for however many moments, I am grateful. I give thanks.

  I remember Charley giggling rather girlishly and saying, “Let’s go to Paris on our honeymoon; I’ve never been, and I can’t think of anybody I’d rather go with.” I said, “Is that the reason you’re marrying me?” “One of the reasons,” she said.

  I remember that on that sultry summer afternoon three years ago I also prayed, to God and to the gods, that I would not fail Charley.

  Yesterday, I finally admitted what has been apparent for some time. Except to me. Except to the leading non-facer of facts in this non-fact-facing time.

  I failed Charley all right. I failed her as completely as I have failed every human being whose path has through some unlucky accident crossed mine. Including me. Oh, especially including me.

  Yesterday, I thought, “I cannot love; therefore, I am not.”

  And I had that feeling of total abasement I have read about but never before experienced. I felt a complete collapse of self-esteem, and I knew what I have to do. I left unanswered the question of whether I will have the courage.

  Yesterday, smelling of decay and defeat and humiliation, my thoughts were interrupted, allegro vivace, by the angry voice of a woman.

  I looked up. The woman, who had the face of a befuddled cockatoo, was standing a little away from me, her sparse gray hair in wild disorder. She was shaking her fist at me, and on her thin, speckled arm was a great grease-stained purse out of which poked a graying, somewhat mangled half of a ham on rye.

  “I know who you are,” the woman shouted at me. “I recognize your kind. Every time.”

  A few people turned and looked at me, not many. Almost everyone in Bryant Park at that time of day has some disreputable activity of his own to attend to.

  Nevertheless, I rose quickly and started out of the park, the woman’s voice pursuing me.

  “You can’t fool me with a false beard,” she screamed. “It isn’t even a good false beard.”

  I walked away from the sound of late-summer madness, to the corner of Fortieth Street and Fifth Avenue, then stopped, looked behind me, and saw that the woman had not followed.

  After that I laughed for a moment, and then I cried.

  By the time I got back to my office, I decided that I was quite capable of taking my own life. Two questions remained, how and when.

  I was surprised then and as I speak these words I am still surprised at how easily I
made up my mind. Decisions come hard for me. In the morning I often find it difficult to decide which pair of socks to wear. I’ve often spent as much as half an hour just looking into my sock drawer, and I’ve sometimes compromised by wearing one each of two pairs.

  After the sock decision, there is the egg decision. I never know whether to ask Louella to boil, bake, scramble or fry them.

  Which will it be—vanilla or strawberry? Catsup or mustard? Rare or medium? Large or small? Decisions. Decisions. Decisions.

  Why? Oh, I know why. I’ve spent thousands of hours and more thousands of dollars for expert guidance into the dark reasons for my indecisiveness, but what none of them—Adlerian, Jungian, or Freudian—has been able to tell me is how to stop.

  Or how to love.

  Anyhow, as I said, yesterday I made the most fundamental decision of my life in the few minutes it took me to walk from Fifth Avenue and Fortieth to my office, between Park and Lexington on Thirty-fourth.

  Since it is no longer necessary to worry about lung cancer, I found a pack of cigarettes in my desk, lighted one, and inhaled. My first cigarette in months. Only an eye as familiar and expert as mine would have noticed the slight trembling of my hands.

  I sat at my desk for a while. I had turned off the air-conditioner, and through the open window came the gentle sounds of an early August evening in the Murray Hill district.

  Someplace a girl laughed. A boy with a prep-school voice said that he would be home after the second feature, and a woman’s voice, old, cracked, yet mellowed, too, said, “I wish to Christ I could believe in some damn god or other.”