Anais Nin Comes to Harvard

     

 I’ve collected a number of books over the years. While my library is significant it could not be described as endless but then again that description depends on who’s looking at it. Unlike some book collectors, I don’t arrange my books alphabetically except for a few favorite authors. I have a number of autographed books, but even these books tend to be scattered among the many.  

     Lately I’ve had plenty of time to review the contents of my library. I discovered that I still have books that I bought when I was twenty years old and lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  My copy of Jill Johnston’s Marmalade Me, a collection of Johnston’s Village Voice dance columns, was purchased for two dollars at the Harvard Coop in Cambridge in the early 1970s. The Coop sales receipt is still in the book ($2.53), just as the 1970s sales receipt is still in another paperback Coop purchase, volume five (1947-1955) of Anais Nin’s diary ($3.13).

    I was a big Anais Nin fan in the 1970s. Nin’s literary fans were mostly women who also tended to keep diaries. Literary oriented males knew Nin primarily as one of Henry Miller’s lovers (and financial supporters). When Anais Nin was scheduled to speak in a church hall near Harvard I made sure that I was sitting up front and center. I had just read her book, ‘The Novel of the Future,’ and her book of stories, Under a Glass Bell. Nin was famous for her extraordinary book titles although I found her fiction too poetic and abstract. Her stories lacked verve and nerve.

      At the Harvard lecture, Nin appeared onstage in a long cape, her distinctive voice ringing out like a song bird. She spoke slowly, occasionally turning her head in a slow motion fashion that reminded me of a wind up doll. Her famous eyebrows, arched and dark penciled in to look like a sketch by Cocteau, could be seen from the far end of the room. As I listened to her speak I couldn’t help but imagine her making love to writer Henry Miller in Nin’s houseboat on the Seine in Paris, ink wells and flower pots crashing to the floor as that rake Miller put an end to the diarist’s delicacy.

     This was the beginning of the feminist era, when ardent feminists everywhere were proclaiming, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” (This was a lie because every feminist I knew then seemed to have a skinny boyfriend). Nin attracted women who were more literary than feminist but the feminists were out in force during that church hall lecture. What I did not know then was that Nin’s lecture created some controversy so that a symposium took place the following day in which Nin  was asked to explain what she meant by this or that statement. Years later, I was able to read the transcript of this interview online and came away feeling amazed at how the interviewer failed to ruffle Nin’s feathers.  Nin seemed to have the ability to take any vehement opposing view and work it to her advantage.   

Jill Johnston

   What I found most amusing then was the fact that many women in the audience brought their own diaries to the lecture. Some of the women were even dressed in capes but I don’t remember if any of them had plucked or penciled- in their eyebrows.

   

    The Boston-Cambridge area was intellectually rich when it came to writers and artists.

   In a popular gay bar, Sporters on Cambridge Street (across the street from Massachusetts General Hospital), I met a novelist named Michael Arnold

who lived in the Boston suburbs with his parents but isolated himself in a separate studio apartment in their house where he wrote all day.

    Arnold had published two hardback novels, an historical novel about Archduke Ferdinand and the start of World War I, and a historical romance novel without a single gay character. If you were gay and a published author at that time and didn’t have any gay characters in your work, you were not somebody the “community” was necessarily going to respect. Although being in the closet then was rather common, there seemed to be another standard for authors and artists. So called ‘closeted writing’ was seen as dishonest and out of keeping with the times (this was the beginning of gay liberation, after all), whereas a Harvard writer like Jonathan Strong, who published Tike and Five Stories when Arnold was publishing his heterosexual romances, (Strong still continues to write and publish) made it obvious that one could at least be half honest when it came to homosexuality. Strong’s stories had a strong gay accent without ever spelling things out whereas Arnold seemed to be the opposite end of the spectrum. 

        Sporters, located at the base of Beacon Hill, reflected the bohemian accent of the Hill. It was a bar where everybody of all ages felt at home; a bar where old gay men didn’t seem quite so isolated and “pathetic.” All ages seemed to merge together in Sporters in a way that I haven’t seen before or since. The bar had a democratizing air, especially when the jukebox played The Age of Aquarius from Hair.

       Sporters attracted the likes of Alan Helms, author of Young Man From the Provinces: A Gay Life Before Stonewall, and a young lawyer named Dermont Meagher, who would later become the first out judge in Boston’s Municipal Court. Meagher would go on to write Judge Sentences: Tales from the Bench, about his experiences as a judge. One reviewer wrote that Meagher’s book “suggests a form of justice that is rendered with kindness and a sense of humor, rather than with Old Testament harshness and judgment. . . .”  

 

   I knew both Helms and Meahger. Meagher, intensely Irish looking, could have been a member of the Cape Cod Kennedy clan. In Sporters, we would often share a beer and talk.

        Helms, who had just moved to Boston after a glamorous life in New York as an actor and model (his friends included Anthony Perkins, Marlene Dietrich, Noel Coward and Leonard Bernstein) and I met at an after hours orgy in a private home on Commonwealth Avenue. In those (pre-AIDS) days it was not all that unusual to hear somebody in the bar announce after “last call” the address of a party/and or orgy:

   “Orgy at 119 Commonwealth Avenue!”

   Open invitations like this meant that everyone who heard the call was invited. These events attracted hundreds of men and were usually hosted by wealthy Bostonians with immense townhouses so there was plenty of room for an ever expanding crowd. At this particular orgy—my first and last—Helms and I sat it out, observing the goings on with detached fascination. You can imagine my surprise when, many years later, Helms made a lengthy reference to me in Young Man From the Provinces, even if he labeled me an “artist” rather than a writer. 

   “In Boston,” Helms wrote, “I could see the sky; in the Public Gardens, I rediscovered the miracle of trees for the first time since childhood. The city was beautiful by American standards, also much cleaner than New York and the pace was slower. Like Paris, Boston went to sleep at night, which was some help in my doing the same…”

Dermont Meagher

      Arnold the novelist (not the famous Michael Arnold publishing currently) was the size of Mozart, a petite man-boy with a page boy haircut who spent his time in Sporters on a bar stool surrounded by adoring fans. His fans weren’t especially literary types but I could see that they were well heeled men focused on status and being seen with the right people, an unfortunate staple in the gay world. Arnold took a liking to me and asked me a dozen questions when we met.

   “The only way to be a writer is to make a pot of coffee in the morning and then write for at least five hours,” he told me, all the while taking long drags from his cigarette. Arnold was a big smoker and all of his gestures seemed to be based on how he held his cigarette. He had the air of a Hollywood starlet, affected, caustic, with lots of “Oh darling’s” thrown in for good measure.  I enjoyed watching him hold court, especially the way he’d flip his hair off his forehead while taking those long cigarette drags. 

Sporters, dingy looking but oh-so-terrific. The homeless man is misleading. Obviously this picture was taken just before the bar closed forever. There were no homeless people lounging around like this in 1971-72, etc. .  

    Arnold was always asking me if I had a good coffee pot.

    I assured him that I had a good coffee pot before asking whether his books ever dealt with homosexuality. When Arnold answered no, I asked him if he cared anything at all about the gay movement. “Does your family know you’re gay?” I inquired in my best gay lib militia voice.     

   “I don’t know what they know. I write for the market,” Arnold told me, blowing smoke in an arc over the heads of two of his fans, both handsomely suntanned guys who had just returned from Provincetown. (In Boston, everyone had suntans from Provincetown).

  “So your books don’t go into gay issues at all? There’s nothing…not even a hint of homosexuality? Not even the slightest hint?”

   “They are historical novels. My first novel was reviewed by The New York Times. I want my books to sell. If I were to write about homosexuality my books would gather mold. Tell me about your work.”

    What Arnold was saying of course was that he was in the closet. Out of the Closets into the Streets meant nothing to him. He was interested only in making money. In my judgmental 20 year old frame of mind, I pegged him as a literary sell out.  

   I’ve Googled Michael Arnold’s name many times over the years and have found nothing about him except references to his first book and even fewer references to his second novel, both of which he made sure I had a copies of. My guess is that Michael Arnold is no longer with us, while Helms continues to write and live in Boston, as does Meagher, who is also an accomplished pen and ink artist.

   

Thom Nickels

Contributing Editor