ON MAY 25, 1959, Joseph Caldwell was walking across the Brooklyn Bridge at dawn on his way to his tenement apartment in lower Manhattan. So begins his memoir In the Shadow of the Bridge. From this scene, Caldwell moves back and forth in time to tell the story of his Irish Catholic childhood in Milwaukee, his move to New York at age 21 in 1950, his friendships in the “secret society” of gay New Yorkers who shared a love of opera, ballet, and above all books. At the center of these reflections is the man he met that dawn on the bridge, his first—and possibly only—lover.
Caldwell’s friends included James Baldwin, who had just published Go Tell It on the Mountain and was not yet famous.
The narrative maneuvers that adeptly give shape to Caldwell’s memoir in the first section are, unfortunately, absent in the middle section, which becomes a desultory recounting of experiences that do not add up to a satisfying portrait of a man’s life in a particular time and place. We learn about his writing career, which began in the theater. His plays won him fellowships at Yale, and he had an Off-Broadway production in 1961. By 1973, after a stint of writing for soap operas to pay the rent, he was working on the first of his five novels. Caldwell tells a good story about how he and another gay writer interjected a gay element into the vampire storyline of the TV soap opera Dark Shadows. For the most part, however, his memoir focuses on the external circumstances of a writer’s life, such as fellowships and prizes, rather than exploring the creative impulses propelling his long lifetime of writing.
A topic that brings more force to Caldwell’s writing is his Catholicism and how he reconciles his faith with his homosexuality. Not all readers will warm to this topic, but in Caldwell’s hands, it is affecting. Simply put, Caldwell sees his faith as being not about sin and guilt but about caring for those in need and creating inclusive communities. These impulses determined how he reacted when AIDS appeared in New York in the early 1980’s: he volunteered in a “buddy” program at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village. Caldwell laments that this historic hospital, run by Catholic nuns, which played a major a role in the AIDS crisis and the aftermath of September 11, is now gone. A luxury condominium tower stands on what he calls its “holy ground.”
As an AIDS volunteer, Caldwell was trained to have “no demands, no expectations” in his relationships with his patients. The brief final section of the memoir describes the one time that adhering to this mantra proved difficult. Bill—the man Caldwell met on the Brooklyn Bridge in 1959, his first love, and, after their relationship ended, the man he never stopped longing for—becomes one of his patients. For eight months in 1988-89, he cares for Bill, now afflicted by Kaposi’s sarcoma. Caldwell’s fundamental decency and concern for others is evident throughout this book. Here, however, his self-sacrifice starts to verge on masochism. He moves into Bill’s house and sleeps on the floor next to his bed, hoping for a renewal of their emotional intimacy. It never comes. The way Caldwell shapes the material barely disguises his resentment for Bill’s selfishness. He asks readers to accept that his “everlasting yearning” for this man has actually been a blessing that gave him a life of reaching for an ideal he could never achieve. This is unconvincing. Still, one clear blessing of this book is the portrait it offers of a young gay man standing on the Brooklyn Bridge long ago, looking toward Manhattan, seeing nothing but possibility in the life ahead.
Daniel Burr is assistant dean at the U. of Cincinnati College of Medicine.
