James McCourt, _Queer Street: The Rise and Fall of an American Culture, 1947-1985: Excursions in the Mind of the Life_, interim report

I HAVE NOT finished this (I am past midpoint, though, having just finished the four-act blank verse monologue McCourt wrote in the persona of an English drag queen), but I have been wondering, do Edmund White and James McCourt ever think of themselves as vying for the honor of being the Proust of Gay New York from the 1960s to the 1980s?

McCourt has some advantages, having actually been born and raised in New York while White was in Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, and so on. But I think McCourt will have to settle for being the Joyce of Gay New York from the 1960s to the 1980s.

There is the Irishness, for one thing. There is the Catholicism, for another. That's just for starters, though, as there is also his compulsive allusiveness. McCourt sometimes, like Henry James or Stephen Dedalus, leaves the impression that he would even prefer alluding to a phenomenon, if at all possible, to identifying it. Moments like this are fairly frequent:

The American version, redolent of Jansenism and of the even earlier Montanists and Cathars, is best summed up by a wacky title from the '50s (I don't remember what it was attached to): Embezzled Heaven. The preeminent American models were Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day (the most glamorous Magdalen, or good girl thief, of her era). The characteristic witness of adherents in my youth was feeding, clothing, and consorting with the unwashed under the banner of the cardinal virtue Charity, hoisted by the strong scrubbed arm of the gleaming Miss Day, appearing to grovel just a little, dreaming not of being Americans in Paris but barefoot pilgrims to Chartres and espousing the existential angels of Gabriel Marcel.

You have an afternoon with Wikipedia cut out for you right there. Embezzled Heaven, by the way, is the a 1939 novel by Franz Werfel; his next one was the better-known Song of Bernadette.

Then there is the conversation. The rendering of conversation is not what Joyce is most famous for, but in the final chapter of Portrait and in some episodes of Ulysses--"Telemachus," "Aeolus," "Sirens," "Cyclops," I would say--we get some excellent ones. And quite a bit of Queer Street is conversation, often only in fragments, the speakers unidentified, but fascinating, like this bit from the Everard Baths:

   "They could cut them ["our tongues"] out of our heads, and they'd still flap, in nervous miseries, like little spastic creatures of the filthy floor, born of spilled spunk, the get of unholy lust. We are not hearsed, but make our ghost home here among the soul-shrunk lost."
   "I think that is the most depressing instance of self-hatred I've heard in enormous years. Base contamination, indeed--wash it off!"
   "That's the spirit, woman--go on!"
   "I shall. I cannot be patient of such waste of shame. In the first place, it is natural for man to reach the intelligibilia through the sensibilia. That's Thomas Aquinas, darling."

This runs for pages, sometimes, and it's usually brilliant.

Finally, neither Proust nor White is much interested in parody, mixed genres, or heterogeneity of form, but Joyce is--see Ulysses, passim--and...well, I mentioned that four-act blank verse monologue in the person of an English drag queen.