Review
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Title: Immortal for Quite Some Time
Author: Scott Abbott
Publisher: University of Utah Press
Genre: Non-Memoir, Creative Nonfiction winner Utah Arts Council’s Original Writing Competition
Year Published: 2016
Number of Pages: 257
Price: $24.95
Reviewed by Harlow Clark for the Association for Mormon Letters
Are We Still Brothers and Sisters My Friends?
“It asks every question that is forbidden in polite society. It asks us if we are content with our marriages, with our family lives, with our professional lives, with our friends . . . It asks us if we are content with ourselves, if we are saved or damned.”
–Lionel Trilling, “On the Teaching of Modern Literature,” in Beyond Culture
“Kim and Marlene,” I said walking into the room where my wife was and turning on the radio, a brother and sister she had babysat growing up in deep rural Idaho. Kim had “gone off to San Francisco to be gay,” she had told me, and come back to Pocatello to die, cared for by his older sister. His partner, Danny, had already died–only recently.
The radio story was about the response to AIDS in Idaho, but NPR doesn’t have it indexed by either Kim or Marlene’s name, so it might have been a local story from KUER, but I don’t find it in their archives either.
I didn’t get to hear Kim’s funeral a few weeks later because our energetic toddler wouldn’t stay put in the church, so we went outside together. Not an LDS chapel, their ward was not supportive at all–and no one came by or called when Kim died.
Experiences like this helped piqued my interest when I heard Scott Abbott was working on a book about his brother’s death from AIDS, but Kim wasn’t the first gay man I knew in crisis. A few years earlier, when I took a year off from graduate school as my young family was dissolving, the bishop had asked me to home teach a young man named Fritz. “He thinks he’s gay, but he uses sex as a way of debasing himself.”
I found that Fritz indeed had deep ambivalence about his sexuality, as would any boy who had been stopped repeatedly as he walked around town by the good businessmen of Bellingham who threw money at him to do unspeakable things, then spread the word to other good businessmen, so he couldn’t go anywhere in Bellingham without an expensive car pulling up and beckoning him to enter the unspeakable. Yet here he was speaking it to me, with fierce anger, fierce desire to shock and repel and disgust me, the anger and rage that kept him from being able to hold down a job because he couldn’t stand to work for a businessman. “When I tell my therapist these things she blushes,” he said, shocked at my lack of shock.
“I’m your home teacher. If you need to tell me, tell me,” unwilling to give him the satisfaction of a blush.
It was one of our late night conversations. Perhaps I had been cleaning the headquarters of one of the noted Seattle sportswear companies, furiously pattern vacuuming the third floor to be out the door by one AM so I could sprint across the Seattle Center and catch the last bus of the night.
Or perhaps I’d been across Lake Union that night, hurrying out of an office overlooking Gasworks Park (setting for some Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire stories I’d read about in a Times or Post-Intelligencer Halloween feature “Seattle’s Ghost Writers”–20 years later I learned from A Motley Vision. Pugmire had returned to the Church, still a Queen, “a totally queer Mormon, but celibate”–or was Gasworks Park another ghost writer’s setting? another piece I haven’t been able to find online even with a date, Sunday, Oct 27, 1985–since the following Sunday would have been after Halloween), sprinting up Stone Way, watching off to my left for the 6 bus to start crossing the Aurora Bridge, hoping I could get to 42nd Street before it did.
Aurora Ave N is about a mile west of 15th Ave NE, and there were three ways of getting home after I got off the bus. Some nights I would take the long way around, getting off ten or fifteen blocks early at 175th N and Aurora, walking down 175th, under the freeway, past the Shoreline Library and up the hill to 15tn Ave NE. Walking north past the senior citizen apartment complex where Fritz had found (or social services had found him) refuge I would watch for his insomnia light, and sometimes we would visit.
–Excuse me, aren’t you supposed to be writing a review here, not a memoir, not imitating the author’s format or approach, not trying to match the long elegant sentence on p. 239? Wasn’t that what Charles Johnson got after you for, writing in Sartre’s voice instead of about Sartre?
–What better way to understand his thinking than to put words together in his voice? Another professor told me he wanted me to write about hermeneutics instead of doing hermeneutics, that he thought I really didn’t understand hermeneutic theory. What am I, a savant who can do but not therorize?
–I suppose you’re about to launch into a long-winded comment about style and theory and all that stuff.
–No, just a question. Would you rather I said something like, “This quietly devastating book raises important questions about the meaning of fellowship and brotherhood and the point where we may stop saying, ‘I receive you to fellowship in a determination that is fixed, immovable, and unchangeable, to be your friend and brother through the grace of God in the bonds of love,’ or cut some phrases, like ‘in the name of . . .’ or ‘through the grace of . . .’–and the costs of doing each of these”?
Is that what you want, power words and blurbspeak? Abbott says, “This is not a memoir.” It’s also not an essay meant to raise and answer the big questions of life. It’s a narrative about professing German literature and trying to achieve the rank of full professor and trying to reconstruct your dead brother’s life and your brotherhood.
And the most important question is one Abbott doesn’t bring up at all, but clearly he’s avoiding or rejecting Kant’s categorical imperative. He doesn’t want to say, “My intellectual and ethical and social commitments led me out of my marriage, out of my job, out of my church, and I ask that my account will lead you along the same path.”
When he starts making these kinds of demands a female voice in boldface comes into the narrative mocking, ridiculing, and questioning his pretensions.
–OK, you’ve made your point. Get back to your story. My you’re long-winded.
–Yes, but first, for other female voices commenting on losing a husband to AIDS, sexuality and homosexuality, losing and recovering faith I would recommend Carol Lynn Pearson’s Goodbye, I Love You, Phyllis Barber’s Raw Edges and Linda Sillitoe’s Secrets Keep.
Sometimes I couldn’t catch the bus, couldn’t vacuum fast enough, couldn’t run fast enough. Once or twice I walked the twelve miles home. More than once I walked from the sportswear company over to the nearby Safeway at the base of Queen Anne Hill and slept in the newspaper recycling bin.
–Idiot.
Fritz said something like that. It vaguely occurred to me that someone could come and empty the bin in the middle of the night. I suppose I figured the backup beeps of the garbage trucks would would wake me.
–Idiot. What about someone attacking you?
–Ah, what could happen to me with Royal Anne, the Mother of Mary, watching over me, and the location being the Safe Way?
–Idiot. Where’s your common sense?
–An idiot like Prince Myshkin, or a savant? I did make some notes and scenes for a novel set in downtown Seattle at night among the homeless. About a year ago my niece asked me to write a novel with her about a homeless man she met in Portland. A year or two after all this happened I worked in a call center with a guy who had decided once that he needed to experience homelessness, live among the homeless, and the best way to get a lot of calories without a fridge was to drink a lot of cheap fortified wine, like Thunderbird or Maddog (read it backwards). I was leaving work one day to head over to Kirkland for a weekly appointment, and he was outside the building deeply troubled. “Paul needs a blessing.” But where? Go into the break room? Have him sit in my car? Stand there on the sidewalk with cars whizzing by half a block away on Aurora? A day or so later he told me that when I saw him there he had just gotten news that some friends from a gang he had been in had been bombed in their car. As they were scrambling out of the car another gang shot them each in the head. I wish I had offered him the blessing. He had a Mormon background and would have understood the offer. Spots on your feast of charity, Jude called such lack.
–And you didn’t think you were in danger wandering all over downtown cleaning buildings at night?
Fritz had some of the same concerns. Especially when I told him how much I liked cleaning the sportswear building because Beba’s, A Deli was just around the corner, and there was often good food left in the break room.
“You eat from the garbage can?” shocked. He told the bishop via the Elder’s Quorum president I needed a food order. I said I didn’t. Partly because they had declined to give Fritz one. He wasn’t trying to find a job, or do anything. Coming from the president of a large insurance company downtown the words did not sit well with Fritz, and he demanded the bishop take his name off the records of the Church.
Nothing against me, though, he said. “Harlow Clark: A home teacher who made a difference.” But the words that were sweet to his mouth were bitter to my belly. I hadn’t been able to hold off the confrontation, hadn’t been able to mediate between him and the bishop, to avert or rebuke the hurtful words the bishop probably thought were tough love.
–Aren’t you being mighty ungracious towards Fritz? Why should the genuineness of his gratitude depend on his making some kind of reconciliation with the bishop?
There’s a lot more, but I’ll get to the point of the story. Like Chekhov’s gun that has to be fired before the seagull darts out into the audience as the final curtain falls, the story has to get Fritz to Bellingham.
I mentioned to him one night that I would be driving up there on Saturday to see my boys, and he asked to come with me. He had some business in town and had to do something at the family home. “Who is Fritz?” their mother asked me later, with that note of concern a question mark barely conveys. “The bishop asked me to home teach him. He’s from Bellingham originally and had some stuff to take care of.”
It only occurred to me recently, thinking through this essay, that she probably thought I way lying and Fritz was my boyfriend.
–In thirty years that never occurred to you?
–Maybe. I’m not the brightest french fry in the Happy Meal, just the most savant. Fritz told me once that human sexuality is on a spectrum and he was at the far homosexual end and I was at the far heterosexual end. I suppose I took that to mean he wasn’t attracted to me.
–So you’ve fired the gun at the seagull. The trip to Bellingham seems anti-climactic. What are you really driving at?
Not long after he asked to have his name removed Fritz told me he had met a younger man, a homeless older teen I think he said. “We’ve had sex three times over the weekend.” (seven?) The boy needed some clothes. Did I have any extras to spare, and no cast-offs, something nice. Of course the boy disappeared shortly after.
“I’ve scheduled an AIDS test.”
“Let me know how it turns out. Especially if it’s positive.”
“Yes. I guess you’ll want to avoid me if it is.”
“No. You shouldn’t be alone with that kind of news.”
Thursday Jan 12, 2017
I am on the FrontRunner on the way to a friend’s funeral, counselor to the branch president I clark for. Some kind of leukemia, elevating his white blood count suddenly some time in October. I am preparing to read the last few pages of Immortal for Quite Some Time, but someone has left sections from the Tribune on the train, including Peggy Fletcher Stack’s feature about Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s new book on polygamous feminists, A House Full of Women. Talked to Doug Fabrizio about it yesterday on Radio West.
She gave the first Eugene England Memorial Lecture at Utah Valley University years ago. A neighbor told me how much he enjoyed my story about it in The Daily Herald. “I always used to go hear Eugene England speak at Sunstone. Back when I attended Sunstone,” he said.
Before the lecture there was a memorial tree planting, if I remember correctly. One of Gene’s colleagues told a story. “I can help you with that” (that problem with the Church). “Give it up Gene.” Then with tears in his eyes he told Gene’s response: “I’ll never give up on you Scott.”
“Memory is a fallible thing,” Scott Abbott says at one point, and if my memory has attached this anecdote to the wrong colleague I apologize, but that phrase haunts this book, giving up and not giving up and the costs of giving and not giving and “it’s all giving and no taking,” as Dolly Parton sang, are we still brothers, the cover asks. (Art thou a brother or sister? I salute you in the name of . . . )
I told Ulrich how much her essay “The Importance of Trivia” meant to me, how important trivia is in my own writing. And to this book about the small and trivial things we leave behind and how the brothers and sisters we leave behind reconstruct our lives from that trivia–even those we might raise a fist against, as some ot the violent scenes and dreams suggest.
–That’s it? You’re wrapping the review up? You haven’t fired the gun yet. You didn’t even quite put it on the wall. You chose the Trilling quote because Immortal for Quite Some Time exemplifies all the things Trilling said give modern literature its power and danger,
–As does The Book of Mormon. Are you saved or damned?
–You’ll not distract me. You left out the important part, that when the teacher has said all else, “he must confront the necessity of bearing personal testimony.”
–Yes, “must use whatever authority he may possess to say whether or not a work is true, and if not, why not, and if so, why so.” The quote has always intrigued me because the wording is so Mormon that, if you didn’t know it came from a 1950s New York intellectual, you might think it came from someone like Eugene England or Marden Clark (who first introduced me to it). But beyond Mormon culture the verb you would use is testify. Perhaps Trilling used bear testimony as a homophone for bare testimony.
–And you can’t forbear and stall anymore.
–True, but as Trilling says, that kind of baring can only be done at the risk of considerable loss of privacy, the writer’s and the readers’. So let me collect my bearings for a moment.
In Mormon culture we bear testimony in the name of the Lord, a frightening thing to do–especially since, as Flannery O’Connor reminded us, we writers have not had our lips purified by burning coals. (See Linda Sillitoe’s setting of Isaiah 6 in a burn unit, “Windows on the Sea.”)
So I won’t presume to speak in the name of the Lord, but I will say that when I read accounts like Abbott’s about wrenching away from the culture, I wonder why I haven’t, and I feel like Marlow at the end of Heart of Darkness lamenting that “I had been permitted to draw back my hesitating foot,” while Kurtz had “stepped over the edge.”
Then I remember the paper I wrote for Steve Walker’s Mod BritLit class arguing that Marlow’s lament is sentimental. Kurtz is not noble for stepping over the edge. In terms of the hero journey Marlow is the hero of the story because he’s the one who brings back the boon. Kurtz can’t deliver a boon. That’s why Marlow lies to Kurtz’s fiancé about his last words. But Marlow does deliver a boon. His story gives the other sailors power to sail safely “into the heart of an immense darkness,” and safely return. Twenty years later Steve wrote me a note saying he had just that day read the paper to his class. “It stands the test of time my friend.”
–Isn’t that rather condescending? People who leave the Church don’t think of themselves as stepping into “the horror! the horror!”
–Sure it’s condescending–descending with–that’s one of the functions of the eternal feminine voice that keeps disrupting the dated entries making up most of the book. (Now I understand why for most of the book her voice sounds to me like the voice of a wife: eternal feminine equals ewig weiblich and weib is only a great sound shift away from wife.)
The female voice challenges Abbott’s rhetoric, and in one memorable passage chastises him for feeling morally and intellectually superior to his mother for leaving the culture that rejected her son and his brother. The voice reminds Abbott or the intellectual sacrifices she made for her children and asks what he has sacrificed.
So I’ll descend (that word is the last line of a lovely poem I can’t recall), and I’ll come back out of the maelstrom. Thank God for the Single Adult dances and conferences at chapels around Puget Sound. They saved my life, or my emotional health. At one I met a newly returned missionary several years older than myself.
Several months later my roommate neglected to give me a message from the University of Washington’s housing office, and I lost the slot I had applied for in married student housing. So we ended up on the back side of Capitol Hill, across the street and through the park from Yimi Hendrix’s high school (as the Finnish seventh graders called him in 1970, during my father’s Fulbright (“love the implications of that name,” he said) professorship at the University of Oulu, where the English department had just moved from space above the sausage making factory to space over the cable-making factory. A few years later Oulun Yliopisto had a campus, and by that time I might have known who Hendrix was. In October 1970, I was only vaguely aware he had just died–something involving a drug overdose, wasn’t it?)
Capitol Hill is also the gay district, and the place where a lot of LDS go to hide out–swelling our ward to 800 members. Bill, my home teaching companion for a few years, was a gay man the bishop used as a liaison with the gay community. (He took seriously the idea that he was bishop to everyone in his ward boundaries, and reached out to The Bright and Morning Star Baptist Church. He gave a short sermon at their Easter revival–The scriptures don’t say what the Savior did on Wednesday of Holy Week. I think he needed some rest and revival–and the director of The Total Experience Gospel Choir spoke in our sacrament meeting, taking a moment to relish, she said, what her pastor would never allow a woman to do in church.
Bill was called into the bishopric around the time we left Seattle for my parents’ basement in Provo. A few years later Sharon, who we home taught (“don’t encourage Sharon’s feelings for me”) called to tell us Bill was dying. Did we want to call the hospital and say goodbye, though he couldn’t respond and might not even hear. I wish I had. It sounded like AIDS, but Sharon said it wasn’t.
More recently she said it was, something he contracted before he returned to the Church.
All these experiences have given me tools to endure the paradoxes and pains and perplexities of my culture, as has my thirteen years of clarking for the branch president in a little care center, working with people whose bodies and minds and spirits are breaking down, who sometimes don’t have the hand-eye coordination to put a piece of bread in their mouths, or a thimble cup to their lips–so the branch president helps them.
And one final word. The entries in this book span 20 years, a generation. In that time we have continued to attend Kim and Marlene’s family reunions–usually in Arco on Labor Day weekend (the world’s first atomic city, powered by the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory about 20 miles away). In that time Kim and Marlene’s younger sister has grown from a late teenager to a grandmother whose mother is declining. In a few months my wife will start gathering silk flowers to take to cemeteries along the Poatello-Blackfoot-Arco-Mackay-Challis-Hagerman loop, exiting the freeway at the Pocatello cemetery (start or end of the loop), finding Kim and Danny’s graves, wiping any dirt away, arranging the flowers and taking a picture. And return home.