Well into "Seeing Through: a Chronicle of Sex, Drugs, and Opera" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a long-winded but often touching first-person memoir of the prodigious American composer, Ricky Ian Gordon, I thought I might have to begin my review with disclaimers. Gordon declares that his favorite opera is Berg's "Lulu" (he says "probably," as I do more often than not) and that Benjamin Britten's best opera is his last, "Death in Venice." I enthusiastically share these two otherwise heterodox opinions.
On a more personal level —and Gordon is at his best in person— like me, he has an almost pathological distaste for all things fart, expelled gasses to be sure but even references to farts or their noises. For Gordon, as with me, the fart joke is an oxymoron.
Then, there's Gordon's self-identification as a "working composer," full irony included, or so I think. I had thought only writers of my ilk called themselves "working journalists." What's with people in the arts?
It gets downright eerie when he notes that his mother won a singing contest by performing "Indian Love Call" in Central Park. Minus the park, the song was the one my own mother, also prized for her singing, took to the piano whenever she needed to get things out.
Who could not like this guy?
Throwing down names
Then, midway through his immensely readable book, Gordon says he went to a performance of "Rags" because Teresa Stratas was in the cast but, more to his point at this time, "my friend Mark Fotopoulos is in it." I don't know if I stopped reading or stopped breathing first.
Mark was my housemate in San Francisco the last year and a half of his life beyond the competing clutches of what we call, antiseptically, the "birth family." At that point Mark was more than six years into what can only be described as AIDS celebrity. He was adored, often idolized by his new West Coast friends (and the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus, which rightly doted on him), and while he never abandoned his AIDS activism, neither was it all rage. Mark was funny, and fun.
Gordon writes that when he met him in New York, Mark was "a beautiful dancer and singer in 'Sophisticated Ladies.' He was a Greek god, with jet-black hair, chiseled features, the stature that dancing brings, and a robust and beautiful leading man baritone voice."
Gordon was there to see the first KS lesions on Mark's nose, unsuccessfully covered with makeup.
His summary reflection was that "Mark fought long and hard, ... but he finally had a nervous breakdown because of the continued stress of trying to be the poster boy for longevity with AIDS, trying to hold back the catastrophe of losing his looks ... and then he died, looking the way so many beautiful young men ended up looking then —gaunt, hollow-eyed, spotted, with mouths white with thrust, and frightened."
That's a fair description of Mark's "looks" at the end, but it doesn't even touch the vitality, the irrepressible hopefulness —the stunning attractiveness at all levels— of his being "at the end," which New York was not. I no more begrudge Gordon's take on a man he was clearly taken with than if he had written otherwise. But Gordon's few paragraphs about Mark did little more than expose the prejudice of New Yorkers, then and now, that life west of the Hudson was somehow a waste.
You would respect Gordon's name-dropping in a memoir that asks nothing less. To paraphrase a friend of his in Manhattan gay AA, gossip is the fruit of love —sustenance, anyway— and Gordon is typically tender in his recognition of named others. But his occasional adventures into name throwing-down discolor his perceptions.
Personal, even confessional
The gold in "Seeing through" is Gordon's take on himself —on "Rrricky," as his aunt would have it. There's healing candor in his reflections on growing up "in a climate of intense sexuality —an atmosphere of forced complicity," his obsession with his father's penis, and his "prodigious underage sex life."
Better yet, and deeper —more relatable by most people— his chronic body dysphoria.
"I have always been afraid of my body, its desires and its functions," he writes. "Seeing through" is a text about how difficult it is to dislodge fears that deep, how hard it is to move beyond looksism. Mostly Gordon offers the comfort of the fellow sufferer.
The drugs and the compulsive trawling for sex are New York normal, except that the drugs were merely disabling and not life-threatening. As told by him, his recovery is convincing and frequently more (clean and sober after Halloween 1989), at times verging on the philosophical. More down to earth, his cognitive dissonance at remaining HIV-negative —against the odds— while tending to others less fortunate is not just admitted but fully explored.
Humor intended and not
At the core of Gordon's likeability, which is considerable, is his sense of humor, particularly about himself. I couldn't quite tell how much he intended the self-parody in his naming of clearly influential developments —masturbation, pornography, "The Victor Book of Opera," desert-island recordings (the Janet Baker Mahler song cycles with Barbirolli, another match with me)— as life-changing. It's tricky business keeping the drama queen in check while indulging in unsparing self-revelations, but Gordon manages it to a commendable degree.
He talks about growing up in a house full of women, and a bad father ultimately a no-show. For intended humor at its most successful, he recalls trying to avoid going to school to escape the bullying. Returning home holding his stomach, he told his mother and sister, "I am getting my period!"
He's generous even in his accounts of the foibles of the others in his life. His chronicle of the friends, boyfriends, and, as we used to say, lovers, exhibits an appreciable lack of take-downs or other gestures of revenge.
Reflecting on his colleagues in the musical and theater worlds, he sometimes settles scores up. He speaks of his admiration for any number of other composers while adding a comment that, among them, Hugo Weisgall took the most unfair rap for inaccessibility. (Again, we concur.)
His view of his own compositions is exhaustive without somehow becoming exhausting, in the book's later sections making a bid for completism. Other than expressing his appreciation of the readers of his manuscript, he has little to say about his own writing, which is terrific and, as with the most readable of memoirs, satisfying.
If occasionally it gets "too-too," it's only in the interjections of what could be called his writing process. At one point, apropos of nothing in particular, he confides, "I am listening to the great and glorious 'St. Matthew Passion' as I write. Christ has risen."
It would be unfair not to indulge Gordon's occasional what's-it-all-about reflections.
"All my life I have been in love with beauty: the beauty of music, of art, of poetry, of foreign films. I thought I needed to mirror such beauty. Bad smells and fat had no place in my exacting aesthetic. That's why I had to make an opera out of Frank Bidart's 'Ellen West.'
"Perhaps by writing about shitting, farting, bad breath, body odor and baldness, I can get to a deeper place in myself. Though probably not."
Ricky Ian Gordon's "Seeing Through: a Chronicle of Sex, Drugs, and Opera," Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 466 pages, $32. www.fsgbpooks.com
www.rickyiangordon.com
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