More Adventures of a Gay Roué
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, each in two parts: Volume II was reviewed in an earlier issue (November-December 2009), and Volume III, Part 1, covering the first half of 1943, is reviewed here. Marc Harrington hopes to publish the remaining sixty-odd volumes as well, time and money permitting.

Volume III opens on New Year’s Eve. Claude is nineteen, staying on his own at the St. Moritz in New York City. He goes to the theater. At intermission he is at first repelled by “homosexuals … swarming around.” But then he notices a lonely soldier: “[Norman] had his hair cut very short and it was dry and shiny and healthy-looking. … [H]e had a smooth brown face, carefully shaved and a little shining, a delightful face, he looked about thirty … my inevitable age, he talked embarrassedly and intelligently—and I was lonely.” Every nuance is savored as they gradually proceed to Claude’s hotel room, and into his bed. “We were both very shy and didn’t speak very much and said vulgar or awkward things when we did—but don’t think it was sordid or cheap even though it sounds so as I write this. … We didn’t do much, it wasn’t particularly fun, and yet I was happy. He is terribly nice.”

In general, the happier Claude is, the less he writes; he is too busy living. Fortunately for the reader, he is rarely happy for long. The hook-up with Norman, for example, is barely mentioned in the entry for January 1st, but we get the full story in the entry for January 11th. The same thing happens on an even larger scale to Claude’s intense relationship, the previous fall, with his Harvard classmate, Bill Quinn. The fall entries are relatively short and cryptic. Only in this volume, after Claude and Bill have broken up, do we get the full story.

Claude and Bill initially bonded as intellectual and emotional soul mates; for several delirious months they were almost inseparable. Bill was deeply conflicted about sex, yet it was he who pushed them into their first sexual experience, which Claude describes with hilarious pathos:

 

[We] hugged each other affectionately a minute, and then he motioned that I was to lie a certain way (oh it was the strangest intercourse I ever endured or ever expect to) and then he nervously said, “Shall we masturbate each other?” I nodded, and he immediately set to work and had me do so; he was annoyed when I touched him unnecessarily, and there was, I think, only the idea to go to work and get it over with immediately. I myself rather dreaded it all and found no pleasure in it after leaving his arms and lying on the other couch; most of my sexual joy comes in the preliminaries and in sleep afterwards, and masturbation is always a final little cap that must be put on only as a mechanical act after all the excitement is over for merely hygienic reasons.

 

Six weeks later Bill announces—to Claude’s horror—that his feelings are “no longer homosexual,” and a harrowing breakup

ensues. Claude finally realizes, however: “It was a relief to be hunting again, and I think in reality I relish my loneliness and am annoyed at being burdened and tied by reciprocated love and am as fickle as hell and in reality love only the romance of imagining love and the excitement of the hunt.” This is as apt in the age of Grindr as it was seventy-plus years ago, although Claude’s needs are in reality far more complex.

That he’d been asked to leave Harvard came as no surprise, since his extracurricular activities—boy-chasing, concert-going, journal-writing—left little time for academics. He imagines that this will give him more time for independent study—he has “faith that I am a great artist like Shakespeare or Dante and am not a mere Saroyan or Eliot”—but of course leaving school just allows him to focus more exclusively on his real interests.

Young Claude celebrates his own sexuality, but often shies away from overt homosexuals. This attitude, which we would now call internalized homophobia, is a major reason for his relentless pursuit of straight boys. As well as being irksome to the reader, it largely prevents him from documenting Harvard’s lively gay community. Fortunately, he does record one long, gossipy conversation with a gay classmate. This breathless account gives us a glimpse of both the glories and perils of gay life in Boston between the wars:

Then there is Horace Washington. Mac Clark, [poet John]Berryman’s blondhaired [sic]friend … pointed him out to me one night with alarming gasps that embarrassed me. … I saw him on the street in Boston where his eyes, riveting themselves on one boy after another, terrified me. … Horace had a friend, Gil Phillips, who was as notorious as his protégé. Fifteen years ago he maintained an elaborate apartment with silk dressing gowns and nightly allnight [sic]orgies. He got into trouble and went to the South Seas, came back, lost his money, got in trouble next time with a boy in Lowell House, Jack Alexander, who knew nothing about such things, told his parents in horror, who initiated a lawsuit. Phillips wrote frantically to Horace asking him to help him. Horace took Alexander to dinner, persuading him to drop the suit, but only succeeded in having detectives start investigating Horace, and so Horace withdrew from Phillips’ friendship and left him in the lurch.

 

The Harvard boys that Claude himself pursues, however, are almost all ostensibly straight. In this volume, he is at first infatuated with a French boy named Brie, then turns his attention even more intensely to a freshman playwright named John. These young men admire Claude’s intellect and erudition but don’t reciprocate his sexual attraction. While he does manage to get each of them into bed, these experiences, however charming, don’t fully satisfy either Claude or the reader.

Fortunately, Claude is about to meet a more responsive partner. On leaving school, he has to find somewhere to live. After a brief stay with May Sarton’s parents, he settles into a rooming house run by the Dickensian Mrs. Bemis. At first he finds it lonely; but then, who should move in across the hall but a handsome, shy young man named Allan? Not only is Allan straight-acting, but (we learn later) he hasn’t previously even noticed another boy. One evening Claude is playing the Shubert Quintet and Allan knocks on his door. “He is blond, dammit, and terribly handsome, simple, graceful, clean, modest, that kind of washed appearance country boys have.” They talk, listen to music, take a three-hour walk, and a beautiful friendship blossoms. Will this be just another straight-boy crush? Or will they end up having torrid sex night after night? Will this be the happiest four months of Claude’s young life? or will the relationship conceal a fatal flaw? or both? Some of the mystery must be left to the reader, but it is perhaps fair to say that the relationship between Claude and Allan will not soon be forgotten.

As in the previous volume, World War II is a persistent but remarkably muted presence. Amid concerts and trysts Claude muses occasionally on whether he will have to claim conscientious objector status, or maybe even be sent to prison for refusing to serve. The climax is his minutely described induction physical. One might think that a room full of naked men would be heaven for Claude, but the experience is more nuanced: “I saw a handsome Negro boy and a wildhaired [sic]and wonderful Italian one. But for the most part I grew terribly sick of the ugly bodies I saw about me, pimply skin, fat buttocks, hanging stomachs, and I almost lost any homosexual desire I ever had. … Nonetheless, I found it intellectually interesting to look at the hundreds of naked bodies and … learned much about the shape of penises and the way hips are thrown.” Claude’s physique is worrisomely perfect, but a letter from his psychologist ultimately excuses him from service. While it might have been interesting to see how he and the military would have gotten along, I don’t think exempting him impaired America’s war effort.

The death of his beloved dog Kewpie is the occasion for a harrowing meditation on mortality. A teenager’s lament at the passing of a lapdog sounds like the stuff of comedy, but the raw pain of Claude’s account commands respect: “She is rotting and all that joy is still and there is nothing left. I feel no emotion now … I am quite flat as always. I have no idea what it means. It makes me believe in the terrific deadness of dead things. She is so irrevocably gone and dead and I too am going there. “So what?” is all I can say. The sooner the better, of course. … And I loved her so passionately and terrifically, like nothing else in the world.”

I never met Claude in person—he was always planning a trip to Boston that never materialized—but over the last few years of his life we struck up an epistolary friendship. He typed his letters on his beloved manual Olivetti with hand-written corrections, just as he produced the journal itself. I was taken aback at first by the return address: “Claude Fredericks : Pawlet (Vermont) U.S.A.” No street or zip code. Of course, there was only one Claude Fredericks in Pawlet, and I gradually came to realize that there was only one Claude Fredericks anywhere. He was aptly described at his memorial service as “an American original.”

Claude was the model for the eccentric classics professor Julian Morrow in Donna Tartt’s 1992 bestseller, The Secret History, published while she was a sophomore at Bennington. Julian’s brilliance and kindness are portrayed with great affection. His passionate embrace of Greek ideals is shown as both inspiring and potentially dangerous, though there is just the tiniest suggestion that Julian—not necessarily Claude—might be driven by ego as well as by magnanimity. Tartt’s current bestseller and Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Goldfinch is dedicated to her mother, and to Claude.

What makes The Journal so good? Claude was indeed an original, and many of his friends were (then or later) quite famous. There is a titillating aspect to reading such detailed portrayals of the poet May Sarton, of New York magazine theater critic John Simon (Claude’s freshman crush), of visiting Harvard lecturer Béla Bartók, or of the Boston musical salon of Fanny Mason. But these are mostly red herrings. The key to The Journal is not how different Claude’s life was from our own—but how similar. What makes The Journal unique is Claude’s extraordinary ability to observe and recall his perceptions and feelings, his obsessive commitment to recording them, and the clarity and power of his writing. But his skill and dedication would be worthless without an additional factor: whatever does or doesn’t happen to him, Claude lives passionately. His desire and joy and despair—adolescent though they inevitably are in this volume—are the stuff of life, and he invites his readers to experience these emotions along with him.

Most of our experiences are swiftly forgotten, and even the few that we remember are destined to die with us. This is Milan Kundera’s “unbearable lightness of being.” But what if there were a Book of Life, in which everything was indelibly recorded? Each moment would have permanence, weight, and meaning, like the figures on Keats’ Grecian urn. Forget Google Glass: The Journal is the closest to a recorded life that we may ever get.

In reading, as in life, one is never sure what will happen next. A journal in this respect is the same as any other genre, except for a crucial difference. In every other kind of writing the author knows how his story will end, so he or she can smooth the way for the reader. But the writer of a journal is just as ignorant as the reader. Each day’s entry can be structured—Claude’s best are like short stories—but at the end of every entry both writer and reader come face-to-face with the same unknowable future.

There are advantages to the way in which a journal mirrors life—immediacy, authenticity, true surprise—but there are disadvantages as well. Not infrequently Claude spins his wheels, obsessed with some boy who doesn’t fully return his interest. When this happens, the repetitiveness can be mind-numbing. But I had an epiphany toward the end of this volume. The repetitiveness of a journal is not like that of a novel: a novelist would never let her hero run herself ragged like a hamster on a wheel. What it resembles is improvisational music: a theme is established upon which endless variations can be devised.

Which brings us to the question of how to read the Journal. Each entry is packed with experiences, feelings, and ideas. While you’re curious to know what will happen next, you also want to stop at the end of each entry and mull over what just occurred. This is particularly true for the second half of this volume, which for long stretches recounts a steamy sexual experience almost every day. So I read slowly, typically one entry a night before bed. In future volumes I look forward to Claude’s romantic but ill-fated European trip with the poet James Merrill, his printing apprenticeship with Anaïs Nin, the start of his teaching career at Bennington, and (if I live so long) his life-changing trip to Japan. But at the pace I read that’s as far as I can reasonably hope. The Claude that his husband Marc Harrington loved is dead, but the Claude Fredericks who wrote The Journal will, as per the classic literary conceit, outlive us all.

 

Robert W. Mack, a director emeritus of the Harvard Gay & Lesbian Caucus, resides in Cambridge, Mass.