The Taos Truth Game
by Earl Ganz
University of New Mexico Press.
320 pages, $24.95
MYRON BRINIG, whose lifetime virtually spanned the 20th century, is all but forgotten today. His name is rarely found in compendia of gay writers, yet he was, according to the Gay & Lesbian Literary Heritage (1995), the first American Jewish novelist to write in any significant way about the gay experience. Upon arriving in the desert Southwest in 1933, already a popular novelist, he found himself among the day’s intelligentsia at the salon of the legendary Mabel Dodge Luhan.
And now he finds himself as the central character in a fast-moving novel about the artists and writers who flocked to Luhan’s salon in New Mexico in the 1930’s. The Taos Truth Game is by Earl Ganz, a professor at the University of Montana, which is also the state in which Myron Brinig grew up and which provided the backdrop for many of his novels. Through some coincidences worthy of a 19th-century novel, Ganz was able to locate the elderly Brinig and speak with him directly before writing his book. He also gained access to Brinig’s papers and letters, which included accounts of his life as a gay man in New York and an unpublished memoir, and which contributed to the verisimilitude of the novel. Brinig’s first novels received extraordinary accolades in The New York Times and often made the bestseller list. The novel for which he was best known in his day is Singermann, originally published in 1929 and then again in 1975 by the Arno Press as part of its “Modern Jewish Experience” series. Singermann is based on Brinig’s own family, which settled in Butte, Montana, and became merchants. They had emigrated from Romania in search of a better life, and in Singermann’s episodic structure Brinig describes parents, siblings, and family events. Harry, one of the many sons in the family, is frequently described as girlish, secretly and “shamefully” wearing makeup when alone. The description of Harry’s bedroom, as well as that of a high school teacher that he visits (but leaves huffily with confused feelings), certainly appears to have been influenced by Huysmans’ Against the Grain. A review in The Saturday Review of Literature of Brinig’s This Man Is My Brother (1932) observes that “Harry, whose decadent tastes were evident in Singermann, is definitely a homosexual.” In the sequel he commits suicide “after an unsuccessful attempt to keep the friendship of his nephew.” Contemporary reviews of several of Brinig’s books make it apparent that coded or closeted gay characters appear throughout his oeuvre, though he wrote often of miners, organized labor, and the tribulations of settlers in the early 20th-century American West. In 1939, one New York Times reviewer called him “the most gently tolerant of our better popular novelists.” Yet in 1937, no less a critic than Martha Gellhorn (Hemingway’s third wife) wrote in The Saturday Review of Literature that “his characters don’t seem real,” and a 1939 novel was accused in a Time magazine review of having been written in “correspondence school prose.” Brinig was churning out novels for Farrar & Rinehart; his troubles with his publisher are sympathetically described in The Taos Truth Game. In 1938, his novel The Sisters was made into a movie with Bette Davis and Errol Flynn amid much hoopla. His 1958 novel, The Looking Glass Heart, was reviewed by the newly founded lesbian magazine, The Ladder, because one of its characters has a lesbian affair. By the early 1960’s, Brinig had stopped writing for publication because, in his own assessment, tastes in popular literature had changed. Ganz describes Brinig’s love affairs forthrightly, the most important of which was a tempestuous, loving relationship with a man named Cady Wells, a wealthy artist who painted New Mexico landscapes. As might be expected in a contemporary novel about writers, there are a number of imagined conversations about who’s reading what. Brinig and Wells were part of the Luhan circle, as were D. H. Lawrence, Robinson Jeffers, gay poet Witter “Hal” Bynner, among others, plus their spouses, lovers, and hangers-on. After a conversation with Jeffers about Shakespeare, Brinig says of Jeffers: “I like him. His mind is so much livelier than he lets on.” These kinds of conversations are fully integrated into Ganz’s novel so that the “review party,” at which book reviews were read aloud, comes alive. Also lively are the games of Truth that the writers frequently indulged in, which reveal Luhan’s sometimes evil and manipulative side. The well-traveled Luhan, who firmly rejected all trappings of the Victorian era into which she’d been born, had presided over another famous salon in pre-World War II Greenwich Village before relocating to New Mexico. She had been an admirer of Brinig’s work and brought him into her circle on that basis. She invited Brinig to edit her memoirs, and the two later featured each other in their romans à clef. This new venture in that genre, The Taos Truth Game, probably won’t restore Brinig to the pantheon of popular American writers, but it may help to re-assert his place in early 20th-century gay American literature.
