Terry Andrews, The Story of Harold, Avon Books, 1974.
"For now -- Relax! And come with me. You have no choice: I've invited you. We will have a lot of sex. You are going to laugh a great deal -- people have no idea how blithe a suicide can be! -- and you will meet a few human beings whom you'll have to love as much as I do."
With these words Terry Andrews, bestselling author of a beloved children's classic welcomes us to his world. THE STORY OF HAROLD is a Dantesque excursion through a garden of tortured and unfulfilled relationships: one with a woman whom Terry sleeps with and cares for but cannot love completely; another with a surgeon, father of six, who is Terry's most cherished -- and most unreciprocating -- lover; and another with a sad young boy already doomed to a life of insecurity and failure, whome Terry strives to redeem -- even as he prepares his own suicide. As Terry beguiles the boy further spellbinding exploits of Harold -- the hero of his famous book -- the reader follows Terry, with terror and pity, to the end of his appointed journey.
With these words Terry Andrews, bestselling author of a beloved children's classic welcomes us to his world. THE STORY OF HAROLD is a Dantesque excursion through a garden of tortured and unfulfilled relationships: one with a woman whom Terry sleeps with and cares for but cannot love completely; another with a surgeon, father of six, who is Terry's most cherished -- and most unreciprocating -- lover; and another with a sad young boy already doomed to a life of insecurity and failure, whome Terry strives to redeem -- even as he prepares his own suicide. As Terry beguiles the boy further spellbinding exploits of Harold -- the hero of his famous book -- the reader follows Terry, with terror and pity, to the end of his appointed journey.
The Story of Harold which is the name of this novel is also the title of a best-selling kook kiddie book which the author, Terry Andrews, presumably wrote about himself -- a variable sized (twelve to thirteen inches at most) mini-magician little humanoid who lives in several closets and museums of New York. His friends -- he has a catholicity of taste -- include everyone from the Rat to the Three-Legged Nothing to discarded teddy bears to people like you and me. Terry himself is polymorphous perverse: a witty opera-attending lover for the cultured Anne Black; a storyteller divine to a disturbed seven year-old; and finally the obsessed and hopeless lover of a selfish but charming surgeon who needs an S-M switching before going home to his wife and six children. Terry is given to bubbling little verses that celebrate the author's whimsical moods; he will also tell you all and probably more than you need to know about the swingers and gay scenes of the city. It is a sometimes appealing, often funny, vaguely outrageous and quasi-erotic parable about a not-so-untypical New Yorker trying to arrange the various pieces of his life--more honest in its offhand way about the unfillable lusts of the body and the spirit than many of our serious texts. But by no means as lovable as Steven Millhauser's Edwin Mullhouse. - Kirkus
Between 35 and 40 years ago I first came upon this novel, by Terry Andrews, and found it fascinating. Many people wouldn’t care for it, since it deals with sex (a lot of it gay), and with the 3 intimate relationships the narrator has. He also has a lot of casual sexual encounters, which seems a bit odd, since he makes his living by writing children’s books. If anyone bothers to visualize what a writer of children’s books is like, that probably isn’t it.
Some research suggests that the actual author of the book was George Seldon, who did indeed write children’s books (and this book does seem autobiographical), who died some 15 years after the book was published. According to Amazon “Terry Andrews” never published anything else, and the fact that the book was very well-written suggests that he was a published writer in some other genre, so Seldon seems to be a plausible candidate.
At the beginning of the book, the narrator says he has decided to die, but never makes it entirely clear why he feels that way. He describes his relationships with his three love interests. Two are men, one a woman. One man is a doctor, married, and with a number of children. He invites the narrator to a family celebration, where he’s a hit, because he’s written a very popular children’s book, The Story of Harold, which the children all have read or heard, and like.
Harold lives in New York City, as does the narrator, and is a bit of a busy-body, trying to fix things for people (people including toys, a moth, clothes, etc, Harold being a magical personality, though his magic is limited. Of course this is the kind of thing children like, and the stories connect him to a little boy, who is deeply depressed, son of one of “Terry’s” acquaintences. The boy seems to be depressed because his mother is getting ready to remarry, and he’s almost entirely shut down. Except that he likes stories about Harold. Terry takes him for a walk, and having discovered that’s what he likes, makes up a story for him on the spot. The little boy is thrilled, and Terry begins making a regular thing of seeing him and telling him more Harold stories. At first it’s not something he wants to do very much, but he feels sorry for the boy (perhaps identifies with him?) and hopes to teach him how to get along in the world through the stories.
Of course that’s not the whole story. “Terry” is involved with another man too, this one a person who fantasizes about dying in a fire. Which he wants Terry to light. Terry says he will, figuring this will be a good reason to commit suicide, and if suicide is your goal, that certainly seems plausible.
The woman is someone he met at the opera, and she’s a very wholesome sort of person. Terry is less interested in women, and she doesn’t play a huge part in the story, but she’s at least a benign presence.
Jim, the married man with the children, is the one Terry is in love with, and since Jim doesn’t reciprocate, this is the most obvious cause for his suicidal feelings. But I suspect there’s more to it than that.
Doing a Google search, I came across a lot of reviews of the book. Most of the reviews were positive, so I was drawn, out of curiosity, to the one I found that was negative. That one was by a woman who had enjoyed Seldon’s children’s books, but found this novel hard to take. She saw Terry as oscillating between being giddy, and deeply depressed, and she found his worldview extremely weird. Fair enough. The narrator isn’t exactly the All-American boy. But that gave me a clue.
I don’t know if I’m right about this or not, and probably never will know. There are probably still people around who knew George Seldon, and whether or not he wrote this book, besides what sort of person he was, but I doubt if any of them will be talking to me, though I’d certainly like to learn more about him, if any of them would care to. My theory is bipolar disorder. Yes, the tone of the novel does oscillate, and the narrator drinks a good bit, as well as taking various drugs. All that seems to fit with such a diagnosis, as, according to my understanding, people with that disorder tend to self-medicate. I know a couple of people who are bipolar, and they’re not a lot like the narrator of the novel, or even a great deal like each other. Still, I think that may be where the feelings in this novel came from.
The story, of course, continues. The narrator experiences a deep depression one night, after trying to give the boy he’s trying to help a good momory to hold on to, and in the morning, feels as if he’s come to a different part of his life. And all this time he’s been telling the boy stories, basing them on the boy’s life, as well as his own life with his friends. The stories have evolved into a series, and Terry has put a lot into them to make them reach the boy.
Meanwhile, the boy’s mother has decided to marry the man she wants to be her next husband, and the boy is about to move out of the city with them. So Terry tells the boy one last story, just as they’re getting ready to leave, sizes up the new husband, and is encouraged by what he sees. He then tells the man who wants to die in a fire that he can’t do that, and wants the man to live. Jim, the man who won’t love him in return, also refuses to end their friendship. Nothing is certain about the ending, but things seem pretty positive.
Schematic
A man tangled up
In biology, family, orientation…
A rebellious man,
Trying to break free,
But still enclosed in something
That gives him little peace.
So he self-medicates,
Which only works awhile,
Intermittently,
And comes to the conclusion that life must end.
Just why isn’t entirely clear.
His life has strange juxtapositions.
He writes books for children,
But claims not to like them.
He is bisexual, inclining more towards men than women,
And sadistic, in a moderate way, towards men.
Knowing that about him,
What parent would buy his books?
He has interesting figures he indentifies with:
Harold, who fixes people (inheritance from a doctor father?),
The Rat, who carves a father’s attention, and is unhappy
(A reason for becoming gay?),
Rumpelstiltskin, who tears him(self) apart.
And then there’s the Three-Legged Nothing,
Which kills and eats people,
Or itself.
A portrait of his family, from which no light emerged.
Opposed to that dark triune star are his three loves:
One man, who wants to be killed by him,
Another man, whose love he wants most,
And a woman.
Is she the lover and mother too?
At least she provides some comfort,
But not enough to heal.
Something like salvation comes from outside these trinities
In the person of a boy who needs desperately.
A portrait, perhaps, of his younger self,
Someone he feels compelled to love unselfishly.
Emotions surge, and finally break into flood,
Washing him into a new country that looks the same.
He can’t possess the boy,
Nor can he let him be swept away.
“Let him grow, let him grow,
Grow beyond me, if need be…”
He cannot kill,
Which was to be the key to his suicide.
He can’t escape the man (and his family)
Whose love he probably misinterpreted,
Preparing himself to die
For a faulty definition.
So, he decides,
Living is inescapable.
Beyond his artificial trinities
Stand the forces of reality,
Which his trinities may personify.
The positive, the negative, and the force that reconciles.
What names do you wish to call them?
The traditional names are most recognizable,
Though we may not be sure just where they fit.
After all this, years later, the author dies (if it WAS him)
Hemorrhaging.
We don’t know in what context,
We don’t know in what spirit,
We don’t know what example he was meant to set,
We have only vague ideas who he was,
And how we are related to him,
Other than being human.
This is one of the strangest books I've ever read, probably because it combines elements that have never before or since appeared together. When the book first came out in 1974 it created a minor sensation and then immediately sank out of sight, never to be reprinted, as far as I know.
Certainly it is now out of print. "Terry Andrews" is apparently a pen name and though I once heard the real name of the author (someone who in fact was a celebrated children's book writer of the period), I've since forgotten it and I understand he is long since dead. The novel is recounted by a first-person narrator, named "Terry", who is a New York children's book author who penned an instant classic, The Story Of Harold, which he reads frequently to a group of kiddies.
Harold is a minuscule man who wears a checked vest and a bowler hat, possesses minor magic powers that can change some things but not all, and writes spontaneous poems that sometimes work as spells. Terry is a hard-drinking, sadistic, death-infatuated bisexual who is a star of the wife-swapping orgy circuit, who has a respectable girlfriend, Anne, and who has two main boyfriends.
One is Jim Whittaker, a handsome, cold-hearted egotist, a pushy masochist who drops in on Terry whenever he feels like a roughing up. He's eager to be manhandled and thrashed - but no marks, please, since he must go home to his wife and six children. His children, of course, are all enormous Harold fans, and Terry gets invited to the Whittakers' for Thanksgiving so that he will fill the kids in on still-unpublished episodes in Harold's adventurous life. Harold's biggest admirer is Jim's handsome, blind son, Ben.
Although Terry is profoundly in love with Jim, Jim is abundantly clear about his own basic indifference to Terry - a friend, hot sex, nothing more. Terry's other "slave" is Dan Reilly, a "fire freak" who wants Terry to handcuff him to a stake and burn him alive; in fact, Dan has bought an isolated little house in the suburbs just so this erotic death can be accomplished in privacy. And Dan has carefully constructed his funeral pyre in anticipation of Terry's visit (he's even thoughtfully provided the matches).
Strangest of all are the scenes with Bernard, an impossible, unloveable lump of a little boy whose mother has begged Terry to spend some time with him every so often. Bernard loves only one thing in the world, The Story Of Harold, and Terry is able to encode life lessons for Bernard in further tales of the tiny figure. Even more bizarrely, Terry talks about the perverted corners of his own nocturnal life in the twee terms of a children's story. There are faults in this book - it's about fifty pages too long, it has a sentimental ending, the tone seldom strays from an exalted, almost giddy despair.
But it is a fearless performance. The narrator's tone (derived, one suspects, from Nabokov's Humbert Humbert) smoothly negotiates its way through all the motley elements. And though "Terry" is a bisexual and a shockingly far-out sadist, nevertheless this novel is the earliest document that renders the feel of Downtown Village gay life in the 1970s - the mix of high culture and perverse sex, the sudden transformation, say, from a night at the opera to an early morning at the baths, the bohemian indifference to bourgeois comfort or even cleanliness, the Sade-like conviction that sexual urges are to be elaborated rather than psychoanalysed, a complete silence regarding national politics (one would never know this novel was written in the last throes of the Vietnam war), and an enthralled focus on personal destiny. The gym is already a part of the single man's life, as is the apartment that is little more than a trick pad. And a life of sex does not in any way preclude a nearly Wagnerian passion (for Jim Whittaker):
"He genuinely loves his wife. At least he must, the amount of sex they make together. He's told me about that, and doesn't lie. (God, I wish that one time he had!) In fact - all you my witnesses - he's described their married life in intimate detail. Among other pleasures on the mental rack, I've been made a confidant... And he simply adores his kids. I'd like him for that. If there were any seashore left in the storm of emotions I felt for him.
"I'd say I'd like him - but the truth within the truth is I love him just for that! The fact that he is an excellent father, a pretty good husband - despite how much he fucks around - those things are what allure me most - they've magnetised me like iron toward his life: the things that make it impossible for me to be anything at all except some casual sex for him...
Terry Andrews - the living dildo, the living whip - that's me!" All the stylistic tricks are here - the voice that interrupts and corrects itself, the demotic-hieratic vocabulary ("fucks around" in the same sentence with "magnetised"), the exclamations as asides in parentheses buried in an otherwise matter-of-fact sentence. This is the voice of the first gay liberation generation: romantic and sexual, unguilty and explicit, non-judgmental and appreciative, grittily urban and, at the same time, operatic and verging on hysterical self-dramatising. To me, The Story Of Harold is a remarkable period piece that reminds us that the 1970s was a period far more sophisticated and humane than our own. - Edmund White
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/feb/17/classics.features
Some research suggests that the actual author of the book was George Seldon, who did indeed write children’s books (and this book does seem autobiographical), who died some 15 years after the book was published. According to Amazon “Terry Andrews” never published anything else, and the fact that the book was very well-written suggests that he was a published writer in some other genre, so Seldon seems to be a plausible candidate.
At the beginning of the book, the narrator says he has decided to die, but never makes it entirely clear why he feels that way. He describes his relationships with his three love interests. Two are men, one a woman. One man is a doctor, married, and with a number of children. He invites the narrator to a family celebration, where he’s a hit, because he’s written a very popular children’s book, The Story of Harold, which the children all have read or heard, and like.
Harold lives in New York City, as does the narrator, and is a bit of a busy-body, trying to fix things for people (people including toys, a moth, clothes, etc, Harold being a magical personality, though his magic is limited. Of course this is the kind of thing children like, and the stories connect him to a little boy, who is deeply depressed, son of one of “Terry’s” acquaintences. The boy seems to be depressed because his mother is getting ready to remarry, and he’s almost entirely shut down. Except that he likes stories about Harold. Terry takes him for a walk, and having discovered that’s what he likes, makes up a story for him on the spot. The little boy is thrilled, and Terry begins making a regular thing of seeing him and telling him more Harold stories. At first it’s not something he wants to do very much, but he feels sorry for the boy (perhaps identifies with him?) and hopes to teach him how to get along in the world through the stories.
Of course that’s not the whole story. “Terry” is involved with another man too, this one a person who fantasizes about dying in a fire. Which he wants Terry to light. Terry says he will, figuring this will be a good reason to commit suicide, and if suicide is your goal, that certainly seems plausible.
The woman is someone he met at the opera, and she’s a very wholesome sort of person. Terry is less interested in women, and she doesn’t play a huge part in the story, but she’s at least a benign presence.
Jim, the married man with the children, is the one Terry is in love with, and since Jim doesn’t reciprocate, this is the most obvious cause for his suicidal feelings. But I suspect there’s more to it than that.
Doing a Google search, I came across a lot of reviews of the book. Most of the reviews were positive, so I was drawn, out of curiosity, to the one I found that was negative. That one was by a woman who had enjoyed Seldon’s children’s books, but found this novel hard to take. She saw Terry as oscillating between being giddy, and deeply depressed, and she found his worldview extremely weird. Fair enough. The narrator isn’t exactly the All-American boy. But that gave me a clue.
I don’t know if I’m right about this or not, and probably never will know. There are probably still people around who knew George Seldon, and whether or not he wrote this book, besides what sort of person he was, but I doubt if any of them will be talking to me, though I’d certainly like to learn more about him, if any of them would care to. My theory is bipolar disorder. Yes, the tone of the novel does oscillate, and the narrator drinks a good bit, as well as taking various drugs. All that seems to fit with such a diagnosis, as, according to my understanding, people with that disorder tend to self-medicate. I know a couple of people who are bipolar, and they’re not a lot like the narrator of the novel, or even a great deal like each other. Still, I think that may be where the feelings in this novel came from.
The story, of course, continues. The narrator experiences a deep depression one night, after trying to give the boy he’s trying to help a good momory to hold on to, and in the morning, feels as if he’s come to a different part of his life. And all this time he’s been telling the boy stories, basing them on the boy’s life, as well as his own life with his friends. The stories have evolved into a series, and Terry has put a lot into them to make them reach the boy.
Meanwhile, the boy’s mother has decided to marry the man she wants to be her next husband, and the boy is about to move out of the city with them. So Terry tells the boy one last story, just as they’re getting ready to leave, sizes up the new husband, and is encouraged by what he sees. He then tells the man who wants to die in a fire that he can’t do that, and wants the man to live. Jim, the man who won’t love him in return, also refuses to end their friendship. Nothing is certain about the ending, but things seem pretty positive.
Schematic
A man tangled up
In biology, family, orientation…
A rebellious man,
Trying to break free,
But still enclosed in something
That gives him little peace.
So he self-medicates,
Which only works awhile,
Intermittently,
And comes to the conclusion that life must end.
Just why isn’t entirely clear.
His life has strange juxtapositions.
He writes books for children,
But claims not to like them.
He is bisexual, inclining more towards men than women,
And sadistic, in a moderate way, towards men.
Knowing that about him,
What parent would buy his books?
He has interesting figures he indentifies with:
Harold, who fixes people (inheritance from a doctor father?),
The Rat, who carves a father’s attention, and is unhappy
(A reason for becoming gay?),
Rumpelstiltskin, who tears him(self) apart.
And then there’s the Three-Legged Nothing,
Which kills and eats people,
Or itself.
A portrait of his family, from which no light emerged.
Opposed to that dark triune star are his three loves:
One man, who wants to be killed by him,
Another man, whose love he wants most,
And a woman.
Is she the lover and mother too?
At least she provides some comfort,
But not enough to heal.
Something like salvation comes from outside these trinities
In the person of a boy who needs desperately.
A portrait, perhaps, of his younger self,
Someone he feels compelled to love unselfishly.
Emotions surge, and finally break into flood,
Washing him into a new country that looks the same.
He can’t possess the boy,
Nor can he let him be swept away.
“Let him grow, let him grow,
Grow beyond me, if need be…”
He cannot kill,
Which was to be the key to his suicide.
He can’t escape the man (and his family)
Whose love he probably misinterpreted,
Preparing himself to die
For a faulty definition.
So, he decides,
Living is inescapable.
Beyond his artificial trinities
Stand the forces of reality,
Which his trinities may personify.
The positive, the negative, and the force that reconciles.
What names do you wish to call them?
The traditional names are most recognizable,
Though we may not be sure just where they fit.
After all this, years later, the author dies (if it WAS him)
Hemorrhaging.
We don’t know in what context,
We don’t know in what spirit,
We don’t know what example he was meant to set,
We have only vague ideas who he was,
And how we are related to him,
Other than being human.
This is one of the strangest books I've ever read, probably because it combines elements that have never before or since appeared together. When the book first came out in 1974 it created a minor sensation and then immediately sank out of sight, never to be reprinted, as far as I know.
Certainly it is now out of print. "Terry Andrews" is apparently a pen name and though I once heard the real name of the author (someone who in fact was a celebrated children's book writer of the period), I've since forgotten it and I understand he is long since dead. The novel is recounted by a first-person narrator, named "Terry", who is a New York children's book author who penned an instant classic, The Story Of Harold, which he reads frequently to a group of kiddies.
Harold is a minuscule man who wears a checked vest and a bowler hat, possesses minor magic powers that can change some things but not all, and writes spontaneous poems that sometimes work as spells. Terry is a hard-drinking, sadistic, death-infatuated bisexual who is a star of the wife-swapping orgy circuit, who has a respectable girlfriend, Anne, and who has two main boyfriends.
One is Jim Whittaker, a handsome, cold-hearted egotist, a pushy masochist who drops in on Terry whenever he feels like a roughing up. He's eager to be manhandled and thrashed - but no marks, please, since he must go home to his wife and six children. His children, of course, are all enormous Harold fans, and Terry gets invited to the Whittakers' for Thanksgiving so that he will fill the kids in on still-unpublished episodes in Harold's adventurous life. Harold's biggest admirer is Jim's handsome, blind son, Ben.
Although Terry is profoundly in love with Jim, Jim is abundantly clear about his own basic indifference to Terry - a friend, hot sex, nothing more. Terry's other "slave" is Dan Reilly, a "fire freak" who wants Terry to handcuff him to a stake and burn him alive; in fact, Dan has bought an isolated little house in the suburbs just so this erotic death can be accomplished in privacy. And Dan has carefully constructed his funeral pyre in anticipation of Terry's visit (he's even thoughtfully provided the matches).
Strangest of all are the scenes with Bernard, an impossible, unloveable lump of a little boy whose mother has begged Terry to spend some time with him every so often. Bernard loves only one thing in the world, The Story Of Harold, and Terry is able to encode life lessons for Bernard in further tales of the tiny figure. Even more bizarrely, Terry talks about the perverted corners of his own nocturnal life in the twee terms of a children's story. There are faults in this book - it's about fifty pages too long, it has a sentimental ending, the tone seldom strays from an exalted, almost giddy despair.
But it is a fearless performance. The narrator's tone (derived, one suspects, from Nabokov's Humbert Humbert) smoothly negotiates its way through all the motley elements. And though "Terry" is a bisexual and a shockingly far-out sadist, nevertheless this novel is the earliest document that renders the feel of Downtown Village gay life in the 1970s - the mix of high culture and perverse sex, the sudden transformation, say, from a night at the opera to an early morning at the baths, the bohemian indifference to bourgeois comfort or even cleanliness, the Sade-like conviction that sexual urges are to be elaborated rather than psychoanalysed, a complete silence regarding national politics (one would never know this novel was written in the last throes of the Vietnam war), and an enthralled focus on personal destiny. The gym is already a part of the single man's life, as is the apartment that is little more than a trick pad. And a life of sex does not in any way preclude a nearly Wagnerian passion (for Jim Whittaker):
"He genuinely loves his wife. At least he must, the amount of sex they make together. He's told me about that, and doesn't lie. (God, I wish that one time he had!) In fact - all you my witnesses - he's described their married life in intimate detail. Among other pleasures on the mental rack, I've been made a confidant... And he simply adores his kids. I'd like him for that. If there were any seashore left in the storm of emotions I felt for him.
"I'd say I'd like him - but the truth within the truth is I love him just for that! The fact that he is an excellent father, a pretty good husband - despite how much he fucks around - those things are what allure me most - they've magnetised me like iron toward his life: the things that make it impossible for me to be anything at all except some casual sex for him...
Terry Andrews - the living dildo, the living whip - that's me!" All the stylistic tricks are here - the voice that interrupts and corrects itself, the demotic-hieratic vocabulary ("fucks around" in the same sentence with "magnetised"), the exclamations as asides in parentheses buried in an otherwise matter-of-fact sentence. This is the voice of the first gay liberation generation: romantic and sexual, unguilty and explicit, non-judgmental and appreciative, grittily urban and, at the same time, operatic and verging on hysterical self-dramatising. To me, The Story Of Harold is a remarkable period piece that reminds us that the 1970s was a period far more sophisticated and humane than our own. - Edmund White
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/feb/17/classics.features
The entry for George Selden Thompson in
the multi-volume Dictionary of Literary Biography runs 12 pages long,
detailing Thompson’s contributions to literature in the form of 17
novels for children, a couple of books on archeology and the
classical world, and some credits for theatrical and film scripts.
Thompson’s best-known work, states the Dictionary, written under
the truncated name George Selden, is the award-winning, perennially
popular children’s classic, A Cricket in Times Square - a story I
loved as a child.
But the Dictionary makes no mention of
what is arguably Thompson’s most singular contribution to
literature, a now out-of-print 1974 novel entitled The Story of
Harold, written under the pseudonym Terry Andrews. I knew nothing of
the Thompson/Selden/Andrews connection when I picked up The Story of
Harold last year after reading an article in the Guardian UK in which
Edmund White recommended it as “one of the strangest” books he’d
ever read. But some 30 or so pages into my reading of the book,
captivated by its novelty, I sought to know more about the author.
I don’t know that I’ve ever had
quite this experience: discovering, as an adult, an adult novel (and
it is an adult novel) that engaged and impressed me to the equal
degree that a children’s book, written by that same author, had
when I was a child. I found The Story of Harold exceptional,
absorbing, and unexpected, among the most tender, brave and deeply
honest of post-war American novels.
Told in diary form, Terry Andrews’
The Story of Harold concerns a children’s book author, also named
Terry Andrews, who has written an immensely popular children’s
book, also entitled The Story of Harold - a contemporary fairy tale
featuring a small person who wakes each morning with a sense that
“Something is wrong!” and goes off to remedy the problem by
supplementing his own efforts with a limited bit of magic at his
disposal. Within these concatenated stories and shifting boundaries
between truth and fiction are more stories within stories. And Terry
Andrews - writer of popular children’s tales - is also a
polymorphously polyamorous bi-sexual adventurer who lives for “the
bliss that derives from oblivion” he finds in orgies, with pick-ups
from bars and street corners, with swinging couples, in
sado-masochistic homosexual encounters and in more anodyne, cerebral
sex with a woman friend – a panorama of consensual sexual behavior
ranging from the extreme to the transcendently subtle (he sternly
warns his readers that “those of you who don’t recognize [sex]
when it happens outside the flesh can leave the room right now”).
If this sounds like a novel written for
shock value, eager to push buttons, one can rest assured that it is
anything but. The cultured, inquisitive Terry - lover of opera, art
and all things New York - is simply not the kind of author, narrator
and protagonist to indulge in anything quite so puerile. In addition,
despite its careful deployment of the tools of fiction, The Story of
Harold conveys a palpable impression of searingly honest
autobiography (alas, the Dictionary of Literary Biography is of no
help in throwing light on this conviction). The seriousness
underlying Terry’s story is underscored by this honesty as well as
by a question at the book’s core: is life worth living?
For The Story of Harold is also a novel
about suicide. From the first line, in which Terry states “Again
last night, for a little while, I was able not to be alive,”
readers are invited into a lengthy suicide note. Despite Terry’s
wild sex life, he finds himself coming up repeatedly against
relationships that fail to supply what he needs to feel happy or even
alive; the frustrations of love offered to those who either can’t
reciprocate or whom he fears won’t be able to embrace his
complexity; an inadequacy in human contact (he even seeks warmth in
subway seats just vacated by others). Fulfillment takes on the
appearance of “the Impossible.” His frustration has reached a
turning point just prior to the diary’s first entry, when a
self-loathing and masochistic partner, Dan Reilly (“the brute with
the damaged child inside”) manages to secure Terry’s promise to
help Reilly fulfill a S & M fantasy of being burned alive,
presenting Terry ample excuse for his own eventual suicide. He makes
his purpose explicit to readers: an invitation to serve as witnesses
to the case he makes for his suicide and as judges of its legitimacy.
By all rights, The Story of Harold could join what’s almost become
an industry of confessional American narratives of dysfunction and be
a depressing, sordid slog towards its narrator’s self-extinction.
But far from dragging his readers into unrelenting misery, Terry
promises, in his invitation to the voyage, to make the journey
entertaining: “Come with me…We will have a lot of sex. You are
going to laugh a great deal – people have no idea how blithe a
suicide can be!”
The ensuing pages deliver on that
promise, taking the reader through an often sharply funny and humane
cavalcade of sexual and emotional feats of daring, a high-wire walk
involving “the vertigo of those beyond repair” (this phrase
Jean-Paul Sartre used in reference to Jean Genet came to mind
repeatedly as I read the book), propelled along by Terry’s
surpassing wit, acute intelligence, and gentle charm. Another buoyant
force is the sheer exuberance of his writing, which at times bubbles
beyond the confines of prose into song and poetry – mostly humorous
little couplets, but occasionally intimate odes to those he loves, as
gracious and moving as any communication any of us might ever hope to
receive from a loved one. Equally piquant are Terry’s myriad
delightful and piercing observations, as when he spies Jacqueline
Onassis one night at the opera and describes her as, “A deity of
sweet sadness – blithe, smiling, blinding mere mortals with legends
of pain – still gowned in the aura of gorgeous disaster: an effigy
of lovely grief…" - then adds, in typical Terry fashion,
"Well, I hope I never meet her. She too must be a human being.
And as in the case of all swans, beneath that graceful gliding there
must be a pair of madly paddling flat feet.” Similarly lancing
observations capture certain New York experiences, making The Story
of Harold a memorable New York novel as well. Terry’s voyage
towards his terminal goal makes frequent stops along the way to opine
on New York’s landmarks (I’ll never be able to look at Lincoln
Center the same way again) as well as its more pedestrian glories.
But some unanticipated complications
occur along that voyage: a growing, unreciprocated love for a
favorite S & M partner, Jim Whittaker, a handsome, happily
married doctor with six children – one of them blind, all of whom
are wild about Terry’s books; an on-going sexual relationship with
Terry’s closest female friend, a recently widowed single mother,
Anne Black; and, above all, the unwitting intrusion into Terry’s
life of a seven year old “lump of a little boy” named Barney
Willington. Barney’s well-meaning but obtuse mother, emerging from
divorce, enlists Terry’s aid - a demand to which he acquiesces with
grudging dread - in trying to help Barney adjust to the divorce and
to a new father he’ll have once an impending new marriage is
finalized (unsurprisingly, sending the child to a psychiatrist has
been of no help). The story follows these compartmentalized, discrete
threads of Terry’s life as the tension surrounding his planned
suicide is enhanced by his unavoidably deepening relations to the
people around him, particularly Barney. Out of Terry’s
irrepressible generosity as well as his identification with the child
(Terry too being the child of a neglectful parent), he takes on the
task of getting through to this “glum little troll,” this “gob
of underdone dough.” And Terry’s chief means for accomplishing
this is through the telling of stories – more specifically, new,
extended elaborations on Barney’s favorite book: The Story of
Harold.
As Terry takes Barney out for walks in
the park, to museums, and to the gym, these new tales increasingly
serve to draw Barney out of his bovine docility; at the same time,
they allow Terry a means of articulating his own inner angst by
encoding, in the stories he weaves, the events unfolding in his own
life. This is done so thinly at times that I immediately rushed to
reread The Cricket in Times Square to see if it contained an
encrypted adult reading; it does not, at least not obviously (some of
you frowning parents may be relieved to hear), other than a
blissfully tipsy little animals’ party…
I’m not sure there exists a better or
(perhaps paradoxically) more innocent American novel about
storytelling. The Story of Harold fundamentally illuminates the
urgency of stories, their life-affirming and even life-saving
“magic.” It recognizes, spectacularly, their psychological
underpinnings, how myths and children’s tales float upon a
foundation of psychosocial and psychosexual conflicts, work on
resolution of those conflicts, and provide a means for negotiating
life (the novel appeared, I might note, a few years before works by
figures like Bruno Bettelheim and Jack Zipes on the secret lives and
coded psychology of fairy tales, what Bettleheim termed “the uses
of enchantment”). One of the key challenges for Terry is
maintaining enough storytelling magic to keep Barney engaged and to
draw him out into life. His elaborations on the adventures of Harold
offer enchantment and structure to help Barney psychologically
navigate his own capacity to cope with life. I need hardly add that
these improvisations are delightfully entertaining, witty and
inventive in themselves, and often cut around psychological wounds
with surgical precision; it’s not for nothing that George Selden
Thompson is recognized as one of the finest American authors of
children’s books.
What’s perhaps most striking about
The Story of Harold is its refusal to indulge in simple ironies and
expectations. For one thing, it defies American Puritanism not
through typical reactionism, but by postulating a world antipathetic
to it and disentangling sexuality from the muddled morass of American
morality - one of the only examples I can think of in American
literature that does this successfully. In place of a reactionary
response is an empirical experiment with truth: what if, in lieu of
the mask of normalcy worn by American culture as regards sexuality,
one simply tells the truth – that behind the façade of placid
American sexual conservatism there’s a largely unspoken wide wild
world of experience? The Story of Harold pulls off in macro the micro
experiment that Terry, invited by Jim to dine with the whole
Whittaker family one night, imagines would happen if one “simply
stood up and tapped the glass, and spoke…a fact of total truth”
to “encounter…the lies we all live.” By this candid catalysis
- “like matter meeting antimatter” - Terry manages to make
manifest what is normally latent in American life. I know of no novel
that succeeds so well in daring this transgression (though a
criticism one might level is that the book’s tangible urgency to
express Terry’s truth at times makes its diary aspects strain its
novelistic ones). This is a work that could have been written nowhere
but in the United States; it brings into the light both our national
self-image of innocence and the latent content - not only sexual -
that lies beneath it. In so doing, The Story of Harold offers readers
the visceral impression that some essential dynamic in American life
is being uncovered.
I also don’t know that I’ve read an
American novel of the period that seemed so deeply honest and so
decent in a moral sense. Terry’s protectiveness of others, his
conscientiousness in putting their care (and their stories) foremost,
keep them insulated from his own frequent bouts of inner rage and
despair. The most memorable elements in The Story of Harold are not
its granular descriptions of sexual behavior or inventive treatment
of storytelling, or even the question of whether Terry will carry
through on his plan, but its emphasis on the fragility and strength
of relationships. The most affecting scenes display an extraordinary
respectfulness and tenderness in Terry’s relations with those he
loves, his ability to pick up on fleeting nuances of emotion and
vulnerability in others, his remarkable ability to make simple human
communication meaningful: a literature of aspects of love. A deep
appreciation for friendship (noted in the Dictionary of Literary
Biography as one of George Selden Thompson’s chief themes in his
children’s books) also pervades The Story of Harold, a work in
which, to paraphrase a line from Stephen Benatar, friends serve
mercifully as God’s recompense for having families.
Edmund White characterized The Story of
Harold as a “period piece,” but I think this characterization –
though understandable from the point of view of looking back to the
period of pre-AIDS sexual exploration in the gay world – misses the
mark. Taken as a whole, The Story of Harold seems no more a period
piece than does The Portrait of a Lady, and has as much to say about
human interactions now as it did then. A few details place the action
historically, but the book is surprisingly unfettered by these,
notable given that scope of Terry’s diary – October 1, 1968 to
March 21, 1969 – falls in the midst of the Vietnam War (“that
arbitrary abyss of useless misery”) and includes the election and
inauguration of Richard Nixon (“the most unlikely and depressingly
inevitable of Presidents”). There’s little overt reference to
these events, though there is a telling comment, early in the novel,
regarding writers whose works are too fixed in the present, as well
as some assurance that Terry is not completely oblivious to what’s
unfolding outside his own “interior Vietnam.” Nonetheless,
Terry’s aloofness from the movements of his time reveals a
surprisingly apolitical, even conservative streak, with an impatient
reference to the “Militant Hobbits” of the time, a tone that
softens slightly when, in a scene near the novel’s end, he has a
tryst with a young soldier facing deployment and expresses
astonishment that such young people are actually being shunted off to
war.
For all the daring and entertaining
terrain The Story of Harold travels, what it may leave to many
contemporary readers is a dispiriting sense of the relatively
cautious and contracted quality of the times in which we now live.
The heady, liberated view of sexuality taken by Terry seems wistfully
grand in a world in which categories of sexuality are diced into
ever-extended acronyms and those marginalized in this culture by
their sexuality seek inclusion (albeit rightfully) in an institution
as medieval as marriage. But viewed through this lens of contemporary
concerns, The Story of Harold implies as strong an argument as any to
underscore that the sexual orientation and private, consensual
behavior of adults has nothing to do with their fitness to be
responsible caregivers to children, and to put to rest the absurd lie
that those whose sexuality doesn’t fit into heteronormative
constraints can’t be wonderful guardians and parents.
And this, quite apart from these
contemporary issues, is perhaps the central concern of The Story of
Harold: the ways in which society treats its children, the importance
of the care and feeding of young minds and hearts. It speaks in
myriad and mature ways to the manner by which children – those
embodiments of possibility - can have the life squeezed out of them
by inattentive, unimaginative, even well-intentioned adults (who are
today as likely to send them to the pharmacy as to therapy). It’s
a testimonial to how stories can help mitigate this outcome and
provide all kinds of people – from misfit children to adults
struggling with despair – with tools to navigate a life. And in
this, The Story of Harold is a kind of American classic, a
startlingly honest, moving, funny, inventive, playful and serious
novel of psychological chiaroscuro that deserves a coyly revered spot
in post-war American literature.
The Story of Harold was published by
Holt Rinehart Winston in 1974. A paperback edition (with cover
illustration by Edward Gorey) followed in 1975, and the book was
again reissued by Avon in the 1980's. Although not easy to find in
good condition, these books do resurface frequently on second-hand
book sites – albeit usually at prices few can afford.
Claude J. Summers: Terry Andrews (pdf)
in Surprising Myself by Christopher Bram
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