Something Unforgettable, Forgotten
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Today Dowell’s novels have a cult readership at best. The first two are more-or-less forgotten. The Grass Dies launched his writing career in London in 1968, though the U.S. version was retitled One of the Children is Crying. His second, Mrs. October Was Here, followed six years later. But it was with 1976’s extraordinary Island People—available today in a Dalkey Archive reprint—that Dowell first revealed the distinctiveness of his literary gifts. As Tennessee Williams wrote at the time, this is “a work in a genre of his own creation … hardly distinguishable from a long, marvelously sustained narrative poem.” The gothic quality of all of Dowell’s writings was perfectly harnessed in Island People to the psychological degeneration of his gay narrator (or, more accurately, overseer of the various stories collected in it).

Not that Dowell was pleased to find how closely the writing of this fiction reflected the trauma of his own erotic interests and couplings. As he wrote to publisher James Laughlin, “One thing I am most emphatically not pleased with … is what seems to be an overweighted ‘queer’ tone. I dislike specialized writing, whether it’s black, Jewish, or whatever—limiting, if that word has any meaning at all.” In fact, what Dowell found uncomfortable for personal reasons was liberating when applied to his fiction writing. The hauntedness he experienced as a middle-aged white lover of mostly straight-identifying young black men gave rise to a mesmerizing hauntedness in Island People. Politically, Dowell began life and remained out of sync with his times. Even a laudatory review by White of his last novel in Christopher Street in 1983 brought scorn, because of where it appeared: “I am one of the conservative queers who regrets just about everything that militant gay people glory in,” he announced.

Whether he liked it or not, however, thematically Island People was far ahead of its time. White’s own “coming out” trilogy was written in a very different idiom. But it is fascinating how similar certain incidents in Island People are to those White himself experienced—and worked into the auto-fictional A Boy’s Own Story. Take this passage from Island People:
My diary was found by a sister who spread it about among a family that I was in love with a male teacher, and thus the designation “abnormal” entered my life before puberty did. It was a curious entrance, not a conventional pain at all as when nails and sharded glass and jealousy entered me. There was no sharpness, but rather a crowding, like fur in the throat. The diary was, of course, found, but the word “abnormal” was truly a found word, for I had been searching for it, had dreamed toward sleep of finding it, knowing that when I did I would know I had.
Dowell’s narrator repeatedly and capriciously jumps between words and the “things” they are supposed to represent. Here, twenty years before “queer” politics, he embraced his own abnormality, relishing being able to name it, own it, proclaim it. A page later, he recalls first hearing the word fellatio—possibly, though not certainly, at the same time that he experienced the act: “‘Fellatio’ is like a banjo tune, lively as a jig; I encountered it years too late, in a sprightly mood, and laughed all the way over the top.”

This particular winning, jocular recollection makes readers feel privileged to be among Dowell’s narrator’s intimates—or does it? Do we choose to forget that he had just previously deadpanned: “On Saturday last I murdered a boy, nineteen years old, radiant as a black Apollo, and unless I confess no one will ever know.” Characteristically, what is proposed is soon partly renounced: “the memory of the murder could be a nonmemory.” Dowell’s strategy has rightly been described as an example of postmodernist narration, but unlike most practitioners of experimentation by that name, Dowell confined all the consequent ambiguities of his text within this central, unifying character. The result is something inchoate, remarkable, and unforgettable.

Too Much Flesh and Jabez (1977) is that rarity: a novel about a guy who is hung like a donkey. The Dalkey archive reprint emphasizes the point rather crudely, its cover reproducing a famous period photograph by Montague Glover of a farm worker with a semi-hard on. In fact, although this fiction is about a man with “too much flesh” in the crudest sense, it isn’t, as it were, concerned with him much at all; his own interior world—almost as a punishment—is the least realized of all the main characters’.

The book’s true subject is the fantastical mental state to which sexual repression or abstinence gives rise, and its most original character is Miss Ethel, the schoolmistress and spinster who invents a “perverse tale” concerning “hung” Jim, one of her former pupils with whom she is infatuated. In her account, he is simply too large to penetrate his wife. The book is also about—for want of a better term—sexual overspill: the conceit (fantasy?) that highly sexed straight men who are denied congress with women will turn to the nearest, most suitable male candidate. In this case, the candidate is a youth called Jabez, who falls helplessly in love with Jim. Gary Indiana called Jim’s blessed predatoriness an example of an “omnisexual, self-consuming modern consciousness.” Of course, the consciousness itself is typically refracted—explained, perhaps—by the need to fantasize along these lines on Miss Ethel’s part. This indirection is similar to how Walt Whitman’s vision of “twenty-eight young men and all so friendly,” bathing by the shore, was mediated through a woman’s gaze.

Too Much Flesh and Jabez is condensed and extremely lyrical, and not unlike the novels of Carson McCullers. It has, as Indiana pointed out, a filmic simplicity and logic. Dowell’s last published novel, White on Black on White (1983), does not. An extremely challenging work loosely influenced by Othello, it is unique in its deliberations upon both men’s and women’s capacity for self-enslavement through passion—and invariably through the longing for a racial other. Peter Brooks has spoken of Balzac’s characters as “desiring machines,” propelling forward his sometimes creaky plots. Dowell’s characters are not machine-like but protean, changeable, human. Yet desire, it is true, motivates all they do. James Baldwin tried such a broad racial, social, and sexual canvas in Another Country, but the determined naturalism of that novel always left this reader finding his characters’ machinations programmatic or unconvincing—informed, that is, by their author’s overt intentions. So baroque, complicated, and contradictory is White on Black on White that it resists précis, and Dowell’s “presence” as author is beguilingly and vexingly obscure.

Dowell’s stories were collected and published posthumously in 1987 as The Houses of Children (also Dalkey Archive, 2000). White described them as “the excruciating last words of someone crucified by his own exquisite and all-comprehending sensibility.” They are unbearably intense, yet more often than not achieve what they set out to—to examine further and in extremis man’s perpetual sense of the confinement and antagonism of his own body. They offer something akin to what D. H. Lawrence was aiming at, perhaps, but fell short of.

In Dowell’s papers was the manuscript of a memoir, A Star-Bright Lie, which was published in 1993. This sometimes folksy account of Dowell’s arrival from Kentucky into the bright lights of 1950’s New York is hilarious—mostly, but not always, intentionally—for the haphazard, screwball ways in which he’s thwarted in his attempts to get a foothold in showbiz: the absurd notion of staging a musical version of an O’Neill play (who else could have thought this up, except John Waters?); his own beyond-obscure musical compositions, such as the doomed version of Carl Van Vechten’s long-forgotten twenties novel, The Tattooed Countess (even Dowell described the vehicle as a “wreckage,” and it had a four-performance run); his songs for TV vaudeville, including the one that Bea Arthur “burped”—Dowell’s word—to launch her career. At times, A Star-Bright Lie is inches from Patrick Dennis’ superb, surreal satire of the showbiz memoir Little Me. However, one senses that the writer behind it has stowed-away depths.

Each rich achievement in Dowell’s fictional œuvre serves as a counterstatement to his earlier, doomed attempt at a theatrical career. Like many gay artists, Dowell was obsessed with age and convinced that “achievers” hit their stride young. He shaved years off his own age to give him an edge in showbiz—like Wilde, Williams, and many others. But his ideas were simply, and from the start, too off-the-wall to bring mainstream acclaim. His songs were curiosities, but even they were stunningly untheatrical. Consider the title of a tune he tried to get the young Barbra Streisand interested in: “Love Just Happens.” You don’t say?

Still, the size of the challenge probably appealed to him, since White points out in his introduction to A Star-Bright Lie that Dowell thrived on antagonisms, on working, as well as existing, against the grain: “Since his lover Bertram Slaff was Jewish, Coleman chose to be anti-Semitic. Since his lover was calm and reasonable, Coleman was extravagant and irrational. Since his lover lived for Coleman alone, Coleman took up with one demon lover after another, although the entire act was played out before the admiring eyes of an audience of one—or two, counting Tammy [his beloved dachshund].”

Dowell must have fetishized the art of infuriation. Slaff, as is probable in relationships of this kind, cut him as much slack as was humanly possible. Still, it must have hurt when, midway through an extensive Grand Tour of Europe in 1957, Dowell called a halt to the interminable sightseeing. Slaff had introduced him to architectural and cultural wonders in Milan, Florence, Rome, Naples, and Venice. But he was especially devoted to Siena Cathedral, which he thought the finest in the world. On their arrival, he revealed his excitement at sharing the experience of visiting the building with Dowell, only to receive this abrupt response: “I’ve seen enough cathedrals.” Dowell and Tennessee Williams, also a poor traveler, seem to have understood one another.

Slaff put up with everything, even Dowell’s public airing of private delusions; he would remove the boundary between his fantastical inventions and real life. So, in 1971, he “discreetly” told a number of friends that he was feeling suicidal since he had been diagnosed with terminal leukemia. It was untrue. On another occasion, frustrated at the constant importuning of his many past and present lovers, who would turn up at his apartment overlooking Central Park at all hours of the day and night, Dowell wrote each a letter explaining that he was abroad. He posted the correspondence to a friend in Switzerland, who obliged by mailing them back to the men in New York.

His lover would have to put up with one thing more. On Saturday, August 3, 1985, Dowell tired of it all. Disaffection at the neglect of his published works had grown incrementally, and while serious attention was increasingly being paid to the complexities and ambiguities of Too Much Flesh and Jabez and White on Black on White, this couldn’t answer Dowell’s need for bigger acclaim—and more money. He had started the memoir A Star-Bright Lie in the hope that its levity might hook a wider public. Perhaps, however, he had reached a melancholy recognition that its story—one of intrinsic failure—could not readily be “gee-d up.” (Its working title was the distinctly market-unfriendly A Dark Book). He also left behind an unfinished, and to date unpublished, fictional manuscript Eve of the Green Grass, based on a play he had written so badly, he felt, that it was the cause of his move from drama to fiction.

Dowell wrote Slaff a perfunctory suicide note—“I just can’t bear the pressure anymore. I am so very sorry”—and also a will, with everything left to the man he still referred to as “my very dear friend.” He then jumped from the fifteenth floor to his death. His novels have not given rise to a trajectory of influence; nor is one ever likely to emerge. As Bradford Morrow acknowledged, however, “the level of craft and breadth of emotions available to Dowell as a writer is dizzying. … The syntax, spun from Brontë as much as Faulkner, forges in the power of its obsession something beyond the recognized parameters of Southern fiction.” Like these other two determined one-offs, Dowell will never inspire imitation—at least, not impressive imitation. But for readers alive to the vicissitudes, thrills, and agonies of the human mind as it struggles to make sense of the body’s impulses, vexations, and pleasures, there remain few more thrilling discoveries than Island People.

Eugene Hayworth’s Fever Vision, meanwhile, is comprehensive, assiduous, and illuminating, and should bring a deserved new readership to this underrated author. It is hardly Hayworth’s fault if the sometimes workmanlike responsibilities of any biographer make Fever Vision a slightly less enticing prospect for the uninitiated than Dowell’s three late, great novels.