The Telling Makes It True: On Robert Glück’s “About Ed”
Robert Glück | About Ed | New York Review Books | October 2023 | 280 Pages
“To describe how the world is organized may be the same as organizing the world.”
—Robert Glück, “Long Note on New Narrative” (2004)
“Ed is the dreamer, and you can't look squarely enough at his face to speak of possession.”
—Robert Glück, About Ed (2023)
1.
Following their first night together, as the sun poured through the window, Ed Aulerich-Sugai recounted his dreams to Robert Glück. Still closeted to their families, both men were "paranoid," trapped between selves, and drawn to the catalyzing energy of the forbidden: "the burningness of sex of loneliness."
"Ed and I were lovers, that's the term we used in the seventies," Glück writes. Ed was his "first person," the lover who preceded the others and remains set apart by that. The "first" is the puncture that erases the known world, that relationship that requires the creation of a new world to hold it, both figuratively and literally. They discover themselves through their craving for one another. "We didn’t know that our desire for each other included our longing for all men"; Glück likens the thrill of pleasuring Ed to "exciting all creation." Ed paints Glück into jungles and cloudscapes. "It was okay to be homosexual there," in that bed they shared, in that "tenderness surrounded by hostility." The bed they shared is the one they built after moving in together. Although Ed nixed the massive canopy modeled on Bosch's Death and the Miser, the cedar wood bed is crowned by an ejaculate-sanctified headboard "so high that on either side an angel and a devil already haggle over the mourant's soul."
Like their bed and their bodies, Glück and Ed "were made for each other," crafted from "loneliness so poor it couldn't afford words." The currency of their shared world is image and text: the films of Josef von Sternberg, the art of Gustav Klimt, "aching arousal" Gérard de Nerval's Aurelia; "impasses"; "intimate distances"; Georg Trakl's poems; "mazes to be lost in"; Hölderlin's Hyperion; blow jobs; "a shared commitment to sex"; box kites; "puzzles . . . . because the language that could tell us what we were did not exist."
A ritual develops: every morning, Ed recounts his dreams aloud. At Glück's behest, he starts keeping a dream journal. Dreams are "not puzzles to solve but a commons producing images that we harvested for paintings and poems." The insolubility of dreams feels truer to life than realism. Glück quotes Michel Foucault directly: "Desire reigns in an untamed state, as if the rigor of its rule had leveled all opposition, when Death dominates every psychological function and stands above as its unique and devastating norm; then we recognize madness in its present form, madness as it is posited in the modern experience, as its truth."
2.
The poetics of abjection, as developed in Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, hit bookshelves in the early 1980s. New Narrative writers named Kristeva as an influence. As a literary movement, New Narrative started in conversations between Robert Glück and Bruce Boone. From 1975 to 1985, the two men theorized through "one long gabby phone conversation" to challenge literary conventions of narration.
In "Long Note on New Narrative," Glück set out his and Bruce Boone’s challenge to conventional literary narration with a vision of autobiography as "daydreams, nightdreams, the act of writing, the relationship to the reader, the meeting of flesh and culture, the self as collaboration, the self as disintegration, the gaps, inconsistencies and distortions, the enjambments of power, family, history and language." Taking gaps as opportunities rather than limits, New Narrative troubled the uninhabitable American "I" to include the several of queer life: the self presented to family, the self experienced among friends, and the sexual self, which varied by circumstance. The authentic, first-person speaker privileged by confessional poetry and talk shows was too self-aware, and too purist in its performance of singularity. Fastidious in its commitment to ardor, the "We" of New Narrative embraced its queer hunger, its lusts, its complicity in commodity culture. "We did not want to break the back of representation or to 'punish' it for lying," Glück said, "but to elaborate narration on as many different planes as we could, which seemed consistent with the lives we lead."
Drawing on Michel Foucault's deconstruction of knowledge and identity, they theorized a space for the hybrid self as a collage of performances and imaginings occupying an unstable terrain in which relationships played out and performed their subjects. Knowledge, as constituted by experts, was just shitty fiction. The fiction of "personality" flattened complexity—it made us recognizable to one another by emphasizing similarity.
Against "anxiety of influence," New Narrative leaned into the story's assumption of influence. Against the cultural icons of self-improvement, they interposed queer relationships, and construed selfhood as relational rather than individual. Employing shifting registers insisted on this relationality despite the perfected personhood of commodified self-empowerment.
3.
About Ed draws its title from a conversation, when Bob (the name Glück uses for his own character) tells Denny, "You know, I’m worried about Ed." Since Ed stopped having unprotected sex long before they did, both men think Ed is exaggerating. Ed is the dreamer letting his bad dreams get ahead of him.
Bob has been sleeping in the bed he and Ed built for forty-seven years. And Bob hopes to die there, in that bed that resembles this book Glück began writing decades ago, long after he and Ed parted. Like a moviegoer rewatching a reel to isolate details that escaped his vision, Glück leaps between the temporal spaces before, during, and after Ed's official AIDS diagnosis. The story remains unbelievable. "Nothing nothing nothing is more unlikely—not hell, or rising from the dead or bardo states, or the Isles of the Blessed—nothing is more fantastic than for someone you love to stop, just stop," Glück writes, "and be lowered into a hole and covered with concrete and actual dirt."
Although it is not a plot point, the question of how to write the book is part of the plot. And the question of authorship, or what it means to be written, is part of the book's conversation with the reader. About Ed is divided into three parts, beginning with a section titled "Everyman," an allusion to the fifteenth-century morality play, "The Somonyng of Everyman," where the allegorical figure of Everyman represents all mankind. At his death, Everyman meets the God who maintains a ledger of good and bad deeds that will be counted. Everyman wants to live past the final reckoning. Everyman wants to live forever.
Everyman occupies the background as Glück resurrects the "romance of accord" between San Francisco's Clipper Street residents in the 1980s. Mac, his tomato-sharing neighbor, is the first death in the book. Properly speaking, the book begins with this death, in the section titled "Everyman," on the street in San Francisco where the speaker stares at a window. "Half the cars had their headlights on," Glück writes. Headlights return as special effects or illuminated stigmata that punctuate silences with light.
Mac's widow, Nonie, is the next death. "Mourning is appropriate for separation, in this case divorce between Event and Feeling, the parting of the ways, the wound that leaks meaning," Glück narrates, drawing the allegory into the syntax of death and grief. The headlights return, invoking the relationship between recognition, character, and realism:
It's not much of a story, just cozy reruns with actors who do not portray people—incomplete expressions of destiny and nature–but the more recognizable character actors of yesteryear. Recognition is everything: Feeling agrees to be DESOLATE LONELINESS, glad that it has a part, however low, and at the same time it is TOWERING INDIGNATION to be so rejected. "Bob, this is Nonie 'cross the street, your front door is open." "Bob, this is Nonie, your lights are on." I run downstairs and sure enough, my actual headlights glow feebly in the dusk. Any story underwrites its experience with the value of experience itself.
"Cozy reruns" provide a visual frame; the world's a stage as well as a screen; the distance between acting and performing is slight. Form collapses the distinction between showing and telling. Confirmation of reality comes in conversation with friends rather than the proclamations of experts whose heteronormative "reality" stringently polices the self and others for signs of queerness. The reader is implicated in a continuing conversation between living and dead friends, as when Glück claims that "the story" of "his romance with Peter" will only be "complete" when he recounts it to Ed and Kathy Acker. The telling makes it true.
4.
Quotations from friends, texts, films, and authors are scattered like signposts throughout the text. The effect is fluid, metamorphic, language like lava pouring over people and places, an oneiric aura. This has always been about dreams. Their dreams. Your dreams. The facile self "dreamed up" by culture feels fake in the new narrative dreamscape. Glück's use of juxtaposition brought Walter Benjamin's dialectical image to mind, with its drive towards "illumination" rather than "exposure." Collage turns the lives that friends recounted, described, and shared with each other into found material, luminous with "the truth of the already-known" that Glück finds in pornography.
Dreams waft in through keyholes. Glück writes them down and paginates them:
The dream above; before that, I suck Kathy’s cock in the front seat of my car . . . before that, Chris and I are returning home late—I had to miss the episode on TV where Ed and I—what? Our life is a situation comedy. I want to see the rerun.
(Like a theme in a fugue, "before that" returns in the book's final section.) Lyric carnality hallows the site where the swerve of desire encounters itself in the other's flesh, headlong into the "contorted expressions" of ecstasy.
Strolling past an object of desire that refuses to grant him recognition, Bob replies to the absence in quotation: "Don’t make me feel mighty real. Let me be a porn sketch of five thick lines by Joe Brainard, or the two on-screen whose flesh is powerful light."
Porn's syntax, the banality of scored repetition, allows the oversaturation of data and gesture to overtake the linear narrative, resulting in something like kenosis, an ecstatic self-voiding that permits the speaker to flee the performative pageantry of representation. The aesthetics of cruising turns the gaze into an elocution, a speech act preserved in invisible ink, where recognition depends on reading other bodies for signs, and waiting for responses. Memory fondles the sensual excess of first love and seeks to articulate the world that exists between two people whose language stays secret, even as they speak it. The writer fashions an icon of that first lover, immortalizing him with talismans and symbolic offerings, seeking his eternal approval, pouring a monument onto the page that preserves his magic for others.
5.
AIDS changed everything.
AIDS drew sex and death into an inscrutable tango, "a calm that had direction like the eye of a sex hurricane" meets the desiring self in another man's eye, in the fanatical need to "show the world what he had become: a glimpse of a sped-up shadow fucking hard." Bataille showed Glück how "a bath house and church" played similar roles in their communities. The profane is holy, too.
Contra realism's tight division between the dead and the living, Glück posits a co-existence. "Realistic portraits began with death masks and praying tomb figures in the thirteenth century," he writes. The eroticism of metaphysics retains an impossibly carnal edge: he physicalizes the memorial gesture as a literal communion, taking the dead into his own body and creating a space of numinous time in which they are remembered, imagined, and written.
Mac, the book's first death, provides a template for memorializing. When visiting with Nonie, Glück takes a frozen, premade fish almondine from Mac's freezer. "From April to September, Mac's death remained in my freezer: skeleton, death's-head, hourglass." Although a generic frozen dinner is difficult to recognize as a memorial, the act of thinking about Mac re-cognizes identification in relation to "Mac's monument." The memorial gesture involves consumption and being consumed, dedicating spans of time to remembering a person in the ordinary; "the cover showed the meal as it was and would be, like the face on a pharaoh's coffin that preserves life by means of an image." Despite the food's blandness, Mac is present in this "dinner." "Every night I turned the monument into ritual by taking it inside me," Glück writes, "I consumed distinctions where before I had seen none." Consuming the dead is how friendship continues.
On October 14, 1987, Bob accompanies Ed to get his HIV results and refuses to believe Ed's diagnosis. It is like one of those crazy dreams Ed had—an act of imagination rather than reality. As Bob replays old conversations, we slip into the apprehensive fatalism of Ed's interior monologue, into the "slow pinwheels, looming walls" of that medical office where "I judge myself and Bob judges me." This conversation between interior monologues becomes part of the staging of the Everyman play. "Ed's not giving me his story, he's taking it from me," Bob thinks. He shudders at losing "consistency." If logic fails, faith in Ed's visions provides an alternate rubric for knowing. Bob concedes, "I give Ed the theater of my mind and faith in his images":
Ed restages his troubles so he can benefit from the promise made by life-as-it-is. In the fifteenth-century play, Everyman pleads with Discretion, "Look into my grave once piteously." Everyman wants to bring his death to life by giving it a biography, but Discretion rejects him. Everyman tries to place the image of his fate in Discretion's mind to create a moment of promise.
The morality play continues in Bob's hunger for answers; he wants a reason, however tiny, for which Ed must die. And Ed sees this—Ed reads Bob's face ("Bob’s terrified of my fear, he’s wearing his face")—Bob writes the way Ed reads his face unsparingly, by entering his mind, by putting thoughts inside his head. Love scorches the reader's eyes; the intimacy is reckless, tender, excruciating. Glück is merciless in his depiction of a love looking at death.
Like a spurned lover, a furious Bob stops "believing in his story," not just the illness and staged self but also Ed's desire to live. It is a betrayal. "I have to retell myself the facts of the epidemic, I can’t believe this…"
6.
By 1995, one out of nine gay men in the US had been diagnosed with AIDS. The vast majority die slowly, invisibly, surrounded by victim-blaming headlines and culture warriors proclaiming the virus is a punishment for being gay.
With his head resting against the cedar headboard of his Ed-bed, Bob watches porn videos. "Devils and angels debate on either side of the mattress" as Bob admires "the reassuring failure" of the actors: "their aura of the already-known." Memory is "constructed of film loops and pages from granny porn magazines," Glück says, before riding an associative leap to childhood, recalling how "the uncanny took the form of Abraham Lincoln." Writing returns him to "Lincoln's part" on the stage of his young life, where a magazine article reported that Lincoln's corpse continued growing nails post-mortem. The uncanny segues into metaphysics. How was it possible for Lincoln to continue being Lincoln in the grave?
"Dying is not the same as hiding," Glück ventures. A tomb appears, but it is not Ed's tomb. "The lovers on my tomb are a bodily promise to keep the argument of my life open," Glück tells us. As for childhood, his parents "are a guarantee of possession, an incomplete document to read forward and backward and endlessly," recapping again how this story is being told.
Intertextual use of television and film blurs background from foreground, making it difficult to distinguish the figures from their figuration. The distance between the screened and the experienced, the witnessed and the embodied, goes blurry. To Denny, Bob recalls the day when he tossed the ashes of an elder poet-friend into the ocean, only to find the wind throwing the ashes back in Bob's face. Is the reference to a scene in the 1998 film, The Big Lebowski, uncanny? Or is it stolen? Is Glück remembering his own experience or reviewing what he experienced when watching a film?
"I probably have some of her lodged inside my lungs," Bob tells Denny, who responds by calling Bob "a walking urn." The world is a fucking stage, Glück confirms, taking a deep breath and addressing Ed as his interlocutor: "On this stage I have constructed for my soliloquy, I can't speak about my death or bid you look in my grave. As for ordering my tomb, over the two dates put an image of men fucking—to show what made me happy."
Kathy Acker makes a spectral appearance. A ghost is "unfinished business." The dead one has adored never truly rest.
"Everyman'' ends with a soliloquy to an absent divinity, staged in an afterlife where Mac and Ed are both present at the occasion of their absence. Glück's anaphoric, psalm-like language resembles the ancient Homeric hymns that praised a deity's power in order to secure his future favor. "Let death be noted in the guidebook. The reader's expectation may be the faith to restore, the anticipation you enter and become," he soliloquizes, but "to answer your question answers every question."
"A formal feeling comes" when he quotes Emily Dickinson without attribution. ("After great pain, a formal feeling comes," Dickinson wrote.) "Each leaf an image flung from the Tree Ed safe, as image replaces image." The anaphoric use "Let" replicates the form of litany or blessing: "Let Ed sail past the coordinates. Let him be Sinbad, fast clouds over slow clouds." When Glück says of Ed, "His longing will be open (we dimly sense a god)," longing is the hole which opens into the metaphysical possibility, or the impossibility.
"Everyman" fails as a model for recognition. Glück rides the Homeric invocation for favor: "Let Ed live forever, Cup on the Sill, Wind in the Flue. Let him live as the world unfolds into pages." Who is the presiding deity of Ed's absence?
Curtain.
7.
November 15, 1988. Ed dreams that he runs into Bob on the way to a health club and then sees a man who is dying and recognizes the face as his own. Ed calls 911 and begs for help: "Then calm takes hold. Is dying the same as hiding?"
The middle section, "About Ed," takes entries from Ed's dream journals as epigraphs for each subsection. "I want Ed's experience," Bob admits. "A portion belongs to me already," he says of Ed's life. Is it possible to steal memories from a world you co-created? Addressing the author, Bob asks if he can "edit a dream" or "change a name for the sake" of the book. "Ed would say yes," but that doesn't really "answer the question."
Unsettled, Bob feels Ed within him; "the dreams shape an Ed-feeling that was already there." The selves tangle in autopoiesis. The reader holds her breath as Bob asks: "Can you take him inside you—will you be his tomb?"
Boone and Glück backed away from New Narrative when it got programmatic, or developed guidelines thick enough to gate-keep on the basis of purity. They declined "to recognize" themselves "in the tyrants and functionaries that make a literary school," Glück wrote. But About Ed retains its formal principles. In "writing against the world," Glück uses light to liken the sinner's ecstasy to the saint's passion. He consecrates an iconography of orifices, objects, and pleasures to serve in the material lexicon of symbols and relics: the bed, the gym, the bathhouse, the subjects of Ed's painting—orchids, tulips, nude men, erotic degradation, ethereal appetites, irresolution. And he quotes Georges Bataille's Eroticism directly: "The power to look death in the face and perceive in death the pathway into unknowable and incomprehensible continuity—that path is the secret of eroticism, and eroticism alone can reveal it." Bataille's influence hovers above the text like a patron saint of "expenditure," excess, rapture, rapture, the economy of art, sex, public sports, war, religious sacrifice, feasts, and dead lambs.
8.
But Ed is still dead. Ed is still dying. Ed is so sick that he barely moves from the couch. Bob is surprised by sexual desire for him, as he remembers "the tenderness of snuggling in bed, soft cotton T-shirts and naked below-the cotton erotic, the hot and cold of train stations."
Ed responds with an interrogative look which asks what Bob sees.
"The face that detained me for so many years," Glück admits, "Galaxies."
On February 13, 1994, a phone call from Daniel announced Ed's death.
"As a last rite," Daniel and Bob assume the intimate role of partners in washing and preparing Ed's body. While touching Ed's thinned skin, Bob recalls a story his mother told him had come from her own mother, who lived in Oradea, a "Hungarian town" (now part of Romania) where women customarily gathered around a wood table to wash the corpse of a loved one. ("This is the same table where they eat," my mother explained as we paid our respects to the dead Transylvanian neighbor who was similarly laid out on the large wooden kitchen table, his wooden leg detached from his body and set to his left.") "Rigor mortis had set in so they cursed the stiffening corpse to shame it into flexibility," Glück recollects. (That's not true, his mother said, denying his memory of her story while affirming that the Hungarian women swore as if heaven and hell collapsed into a goulash of curse words in the area around a corpse).
Which "story" about "the story" is true? Which "mother" remembers the story given to the child? Which "child" carries the story into a book, if only to undermine the reliability of the adult narrator by questioning its accuracy? Who is the "speaker"? And how can one speak of an ending given the shifting circumstances?
Who owns the dreams as text?
Legally, Ed's longtime partner, Daniel, inherits his estate, including the dream notebook. Daniel lends Bob the dream journal. There, in Ed's dreams, Bob recognizes images from his own poems, images re-encountered in Ed’s handwriting, images floating between the living and the dead without clear ownership.
Did you see me that way, or did we see it together? Am I your creation on the page? What does it mean to be influenced by someone? Who is the muse and who is the maker? These questions trouble the memorial form precisely because that insolent word—muse—cannot be avoided. The dead lover is the eternal muse, his voice revoked by death, his consent unattainable. The lover's memory curates the museum to house him. The book is the tomb of dreams filled with Ed.
Although Glück believes "Ed's death belongs to Daniel," the question of who owns Ed's life is complicated. In the way that Ed's life belonged to no one person, his absence—the condition created by his death— belongs to everyone who loved him.
9.
"Inside," the book's final section, is written from Ed's perspective. Unspooling entirely from the anaphora "Before that," Ed recounts his life backwards, from the end to the beginning. Supposedly drawn from Ed's dream journals, the first person speaker moves backward through time, back through the wasting, the hospitals, the diagnosis, the lovers, the art, the childhood. In this motion of going inside, we return to the book's beginning, when Glück takes Mac's memorial inside of him by eating the fish almondine. The anti-finale occurs in Bob's consuming Ed: the author takes him inside his own body and reimagines him from his own dreams. This, too, is a life after death. And Everyman's wish.
As form, elegy fetishizes the memorial. Since notions of fidelity hinge on the keeping of secrets, the memorial is the love-crime the writer can't resist. And we hear this in Glück's longings for Ed as a threshold into "lyric time" and in his refusal of the definitive. Fear; arousal; "the loud fragrance of jasmine"; lonely hook-up sex; his erection as "nature's applause meter"; tree silhouettes—and "desire, the creator of ghosts." We hear it in the Bataille held so close to the lips.
Is the book a proxy-relic, a miraculous fragment of sanctified bone, a fetish? To own the jawbone of the saint implies obsessiveness; being possessed by the fragment in one's possession. Fetish makes too much of things; fetish becomes the kink of thing-ness. Devotion sustains the aura of the sacred. "Let sex be the loneliness and flesh itself, loneliness that does not even struggle towards communion." This hallowed loneliness stays lit between them—it refuses redemption, transcendence, and meaning. Art For art's sake. Sex for sex's sake. Ecstasy for ecstasy and no salvation in the middle voice. In reinventing the speaker continuously, Glück prolongs the reverb of the utterance. He rests in that irresolution, and scores various pedal points throughout the lyric of remembering. Hesitation, doubt, and self-contradiction strengthen his narrative authority, not as the author of a dispositive biography but as the lover of a human that no man or brand can own entirely. Ed is there, illuminated by light yet still inexplicable. The problem of love is eternity.