of his life. Dark Reflections traces Hawley's life in three sections —
in reverse order. Part one: Hawley, at 50 years old, wins the an award
for his sixth book of poems. Part two explores Hawley's unhappy
marriage, while the final section recalls his college days. Dark
Reflections, moving back and forth in time, creates an extraordinary
meditation on social attitudes, loneliness, and life's triumphs.
http://www.perseusbooks.com/perseus/book_detail.jsp?isbn=0786719478
Poetic Licentiousness
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DARK REFLECTIONS
By Samuel R. Delany.
295 pp. Carroll & Graf Publishers. Paper, $15.95.
By BAZ DREISINGER
Published: September 9, 2007
Poets are "the unacknowledged legislators of the world," Shelley
proclaimed; they're capable, Wordsworth mused, of turning mere mortals
into "heirs of truth and pure delight."
Except for Arnold Hawley. This poet protagonist of Samuel R. Delany's
evocative novel is hardly so exalted, more prone to glancing at his
toilet and his own "weak flow" than to glancing "from heaven to earth,
from earth to heaven" (as Shakespeare said poets are wont to do).
Consider him an African-American version of J. Alfred Prufrock: a
tubby gay man who's had sex with only three men, two of whom he paid;
someone who measures out his life with coffee spoons — who, poised on
the margins of experience, is busy seeing but never quite being.
Delany is the Hugo Award-winning author of the popular novel
"Dhalgren," and he has written everything from epic science fiction
and postmodern theory to autobiography and pornography. His devotees —
and there are legions of them — will enjoy teasing out the
autobiographical strands in "Dark Reflections." Both Delany and Hawley
are literary witnesses to the gay subculture of the pre-Stonewall
Lower East Side. Delany has been a gay single man and a married man
(to the poet Marilyn Hacker); Hawley, too, tries on a '70s-era quickie
marriage that's over before it begins: his mentally unsound wife
commits suicide while he's in the next room, feebly trying to lose his
virginity with a Tompkins Square Park hustler named Horse.
Although Delany's autobiography, "The Motion of Light in Water," is a
painstaking portrait of a rich bohemian life — Delany wrote there of
shunning the "coyness" that obstructs "a clear, accurate and extensive
picture of extant public sexual institutions" — Hawley's real-life
episodes, in which he always plays a supporting role, are dramatized
in books whose titles connote closets, not clarity: his momentary
marriage, for instance, is chronicled in "Pretences," a title his
editor changes to "Dark Reflections." Hawley's art doesn't imitate
life — it, alone, is his life. He writes, therefore he is.
This doesn't make for a very gratifying existence; nor does it always
make for riveting reading. Delany deftly makes us feel Hawley's
aloneness, but the effect of spending a lot of time in his shoes —
which happen to be wet and cold, owing to a "crack in his right sole"
— is at once moving and frustrating, as if we were ever on the verge
of an experience or an epiphany that never comes.
The first section of this three-part novel, written in reverse
chronological order, is stunningly slow. It's meant to be: in his
agonizingly mundane senior years, Hawley, grasping for emotional
material to write about, navigates what might be called the poetic-
industrial complex, brilliantly satirized here — disingenuous dinners
with hipsters and tiny-press editors who preside over rinky-dink
poetry awards. For his sixth book, 51-year-old Hawley wins one — the
Alfred Proctor Prize, which carries a whopping $3,600 stipend. Money
is everywhere here, because Hawley has none. Even his stint in a
psychiatric ward is unromantic: "A pudgy black man, well over 60,
losing his grip for a couple of months, even if he had published seven
books of poems, was pathetic."
Parts 2 and 3 focus on incidents that shaped Hawley's unrealized
sexual self: his whirlwind marriage to a stranger and, before that,
his college-age crush on a black delivery boy who lives in Boston with
his photographer boyfriend. While Part 1 feels spare and
impressionistic, the latter two sections occasionally drown in
floating signifiers. The hustler Horse's frequently mentioned
birthmark, for instance, or the section titled "Vashti in the Dark,"
referring to a Stephen Crane short story, which Crane is said to have
destroyed, about a rape committed by a black man — I was never quite
sure what these overdetermined symbols were meant to suggest. But
when, at the end of the novel, Hawley ogles a book of homoerotic
photographs taken by his college crush's boyfriend in the '60s, the
implication is clear, and heart-rending: these two men embraced their
sexuality — they had, as Prufrock put it, "the strength to force the
moment to its crisis" — in a way that Arnold Hawley, hemming and
hawing and lyricizing his way to old age, never could.
Baz Dreisinger, an assistant professor of English at John Jay College
of Criminal Justice, is the author of the forthcoming "Near Black:
White-to-Black Passing in American Culture."
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