The Violet Hour: The Violet Quill and the Making of Gay Culture
by David Bergman
Columbia University Press
288 pages, $62.50 ($24.50 paper)
READERS of late 20th-century gay fiction are well aware of the existence of the group of writers known as the Violet Quill (VQ). Of the original seven members, only three—Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Edmund White—are still alive, while the other four—Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, and Michael Grumley (who were a couple, known collectively as the FG’s) and George Whitmore—all succumbed to AIDS in the 1980’s.
As David Bergman writes movingly in his new “biography” of the VQ, the story of the most famous circle of gay writers of the last generation must be placed within the context of AIDS. There’s no telling what the four deceased writers might have accomplished had they lived a normal lifespan. Christopher Cox, for example, an editor at Ballantine and the most politically radical of the group, died with the fewest book credits, having published only one book, A Key West Companion (1983). He had gotten as far as writing a thirty-page proposal about the history of the Chelsea Hotel, where he had once worked for Virgil Thomson, cataloguing his papers. Picano was considered one of the most enthusiastic members of the group and, along with White, has been the most prolific since the group disbanded in the early 80’s. Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance (1978) was published long before the VQ began.
In the preface to The Violet Hour, Bergman announces that he plans to “emphasize the brevity, fragility, and transitory nature of this particular cultural episode.” He intends to use these seven writers as a lens through which to view the dozen years between the 1969 Stonewall Riots and the first reports of deaths from what would soon become known as AIDS. The VQ itself held just eight meetings, from March 31, 1980, to March 3, 1981. But even before the full meetings began, the seven had been getting together informally. Bergman observes that the group’s most likely etiology was the desire of Ferro and Grumley “to re-create the atmosphere” they had found at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, where they’d met Andrew Holleran. Their underlying goal, Bergman suggests, was to get their names on the front jacket of a book.
Bergman wrote, in the context of the Ferro-Grumley trip to Italy, “The Violet Quill went to Europe first to become homosexual, and then—having improved the quality of their experience—to become writers. In some sense, acting on their homosexual desires was merely a way of developing material for their writing: they became gay in order to write.”
Bergman’s impressive range of research covers everything you ever wanted to know about the VQ: who was boyfriends with whom (Cox and White; Whitmore and White); who disparaged whose writings at meetings; who helped whom to get published; and so on. He describes White’s 1964 play, Blue Boy in Black, with such zest that, flawed though it undoubtedly was, would make for an interesting revival. He also discusses the works that these writers produced before they met—books and magazine articles (for example, Grumley was a columnist for the New York Native, Whitmore for the Advocate). There’s a fascinating description of panelists’ presentations at an early gay literary symposium.
Throughout The Violet Hour, groundbreaking works such as Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man (1964), Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers (1943), and Renaud Camus’ Tricks (1979) are discussed in relation to their importance to gay readers and writers. It is both intriguing and instructive to learn what each of the seven thought about these books, and how their own writing was influence by them.
David Bergman, who’s the poetry editor for this journal, is the author of the indispensable Violet Quill Reader: The Emergence of Gay Writing after Stonewall (1994), which includes many selections from the VQers’ works. Especially noteworthy are the excerpts from Picano’s as-yet-unpublished diaries, which are also quoted to good advantage in The Violet Hour. It would have been nice to have had a complete bibliography of all the VQ members’ work to date rather than just a “works cited” appendix. In addition, there are no photographs of any of the seven writers such as were offered in The Violet Quill Reader.
It is quite a feat to turn a scholarly work, part of Columbia University Press’s “Between Men / Between Women” series, into such a readable page-turner, but Bergman has accomplished just that. There’s virtually no “queer theory” to be found, and Bergman’s thorough knowledge of these men’s writings has resulted in a fascinating group biography of a literary movement.
