Pulphead: Essays by John Jeremiah Sullivan Page B

distinctions are clumsy terms with which to address the mysteries of sexuality. But on a few occasions he’d spoken about his wife in a manner that to me was movingly erotic, nothing like any self-identifying gay man I’ve ever heard talk about women and sex. Certainly Lytle had loved her, because it was clear how he missed her, Edna, his beautiful “squirrel-eyed gal from Memphis,” whom he’d married when she was young, who was still young when she died of lung cancer.
    Much more often, however, when the subject of sex came up, he would return to the idea of there having been a homoerotic side to the Agrarian movement itself. He told me that Allen Tate propositioned him once, “but I turned him down. I didn’t like his smell. You see, smell is so important, beloved. To me he had the stale scent of a man who didn’t take any exercise.” This may or may not have been true, but it wasn’t an isolated example. Later writers, including some with an interest in not playing up the issue, have noticed, for instance, Robert Penn Warren’s more-than-platonic interest in Tate, when they were all at Vanderbilt together. One of the other Twelve Southerners, Stark Young—he’s rarely mentioned—was openly gay. Lytle professed to have carried on, as a very young man, a happy, sporadic affair with the brother of another Fugitive poet, not a well-known person. At one point the two of them fantasized about living together, on a small farm. The man later disappeared and turned up murdered in Mexico. Warren mentions him in a poem that plays with the image of the closet.
    The point is that you can’t fully understand that movement, which went on to influence American literature for decades, without understanding that certain of the writers involved in it loved one another. Most “homosocially,” of course, but a few homoerotically, and some homosexually. That’s where part of the power originated that made those friendships so intense, and caused the men to stay united almost all their lives, even after spats and changes of opinion, even after their Utopian hopes for the South had died. Together they produced from among them a number of good writers, and even a great one, in Warren, whom they can be seen to have lifted, as if on wing beats, to the heights for which he was destined.
    Lytle would have beaten me with his cane and thrown me out for saying all that. To him it was a matter for winking and nodding, frontier sexuality, fraternity brothers falling into bed with each other and not thinking much about it. Or else it was Hellenism, golden lads in the Court of the Muse, William Alexander Percy stuff. Whatever it was, I accepted it. I never showed displeasure when he wanted to sit and watch me chop wood, or when he asked me to quit showering every morning, so that he could smell me better. “I’m pert’ near blind, boy,” he said. “How will I find you in a fire?” Still, I’d taken for granted an understanding between us. I didn’t expect him to grope me like a chambermaid.
    I stayed away two nights, but then went back. When I reached the top of the steps and looked through the back porch window, I saw him on the sofa lying asleep (or dead, I wondered every time). His hands were folded across his belly. One of them rose and hung quivering, an actor’s wave; he was talking to himself. It turned out, when I cracked the door, he was talking to me.
    “Beloved, now, we must forget this,” he said. “I merely wanted to touch it a little. You see, I find it the most interesting part of the body.”
    Then he paused and said, “Yes,” seeming to make a mental note that the phrase would do.
    “I understand, you have the girl now,” he continued. “Woman offers the things a man must have, home and children. And she’s a lovely girl. I myself may not have made the proper choices, in that role.”
    I crept down to bed.
    Not long after, I moved out. He agreed it was for the best. I reenrolled at the school. They found