Closet Sonnets: The Life of G. S. Crown (1950-2021)
by Yakov Azriel
Sheep Meadow Press
98 pages, $19.95
CLOSET SONNETS is structured in one of those postmodern ways that remains intriguing. The text is supposedly the life work of G. S. Crown, a thoughtful if somewhat conventional scholar, professor, husband, and father. We are told in the preface to the sonnet sequence that Crown was born in 1950, the same year as Yakov Azriel, the author. Crown is to die in 2021; only then will his family find nearly a thousand sonnets that concern his closeted desires for other men. The preface claims that his family was “unaware” of his homosexual life, but they don’t seem particularly shocked by the news. In fact, the family goes to the considerable trouble of culling the work down to about 150 poems and getting them published. (So much for Crown’s lifelong certainty that his family would reject him if they knew he was gay.) If this weren’t complex enough, it is important to note that the name “Yakov Azriel” is an invention of the author, who was born Gerald Rosenkrantz, in Brooklyn, and only adopted his present name when he moved to Israel.
Yet if this layering of self-invention is postmodern, the book in other respects is conventional. It is a sonnet series. Azriel rigidly follows the Petrarchan scheme, which is even more difficult than the Shakespearean. To his credit, he writes with amazing fluency and, within this tight little form, great variety. Closet Sonnets is as close to a page-turner as a book of poetry ever comes. Part of Azriel’s fluency derives from his treating a fairly limited series of topics that fall into the standard dualisms: truth and falsity, freedom and slavery, male and female, gay and straight. It will come as no surprise that these dualisms are unstable. None is more unstable than the central figure of the closet. To be “in” the closet is both to be held prisoner by conventional values and to have access to an expansive universe, to be an outlaw in civil society and a “slave” of Pan. As a teenager, he thinks of himself as a bat who, because he is different, is shunned not only by “all mammals,” but by all birds as well. Still, Crown begins to “sense how oceans, ebbed and flowed inside [his]closet” and when he meets a fellow “flutist” with whom he “can express/ a paradise that’s pure and undefiled,” he nevertheless finds himself “a son of adam, tast[ing]sin.” We know from the preface that Crown never was able to give up the metaphor of the closet; indeed, it organizes his life. It provides him with a space for self-pity and an excuse for his cowardice. Only briefly does he give thought to how he has cheated his wife and children of the attention and love they deserve. Mostly he regards his wife as a tormentor whose sexual needs require him to separate mind from body in a kind of psychic execution. There is little movement in these poems. From the very beginning he is paralyzed, not by misunderstanding his desires or some confusion of gender identity, but by his fear of being different, of breaking with conventionality. One of the ways these sonnets work is to separate gay from straight in increasingly dramatic ways. It is not enough to make gay people Greeks and straights Trojans; Crown imagines gay people as mermen, a totally different species, swimming to Atlantis, an undiscovered continent. But even that is too close. He next makes gay people Martians, separate from Earthlings by both space and biology. This increasing separation is needed to maintain the rather rickety metaphor of the closet and justify his need for the closet. The straight self is only allowed connection with the gay self under the tightest restrictions. The metaphor of the closet reinforces the fear of contamination. Only briefly does he accept responsibility for his abject condition. In the poems supposedly written in his thirties, he tries to wiggle out of responsibility with the how-could-I-know argument. He excuses himself because “I don’t possess Apollo’s eyes/ which can foresee the future prison key/ each choice creates.” Nor can we forgive the upside of his heterosexual charade. If he had followed his homosexual inclinations, his “daughter and my sons/ would never have been born.” Fatherhood excuses all the lies and deceptions that rule his life. Twenty years later, he’s still using his children as justification for his behavior. He cannot be open about being gay because “My children cry/ at night, for in their dreams, huge monster-jaws/ are seen emerging from the sea.” The children would be frightened by the truth. But these “children” by then are in their twenties. Even at the end of his life, he’s finding excuses for his inaction. In “The English Teacher,” he discusses Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” in personal terms. Like Frost, Crown also faced a choice: “There was a man. A good,/ courageous man. He is the path I lost.” Yet having confronted his cowardice, he finds a way of slipping away: “Yet even now I can’t erase/ my memories of the forest trails, the bed/ we shared one night, his kisses and embrace,/ his eager hands, his body and his face.” That one night, he argues, justifies a lifetime of fear, self-loathing, and deception. The emptiness of this gesture is shown by the fact that we never know whom he’s talking about or whether this man exists outside of his imagination. Closet Sonnets is divided into six parts, one for each decade of Crown’s life (starting with his teenage years). Because the poems are organized in chronological order, you’d think they would be sensitive to the historical changes that occurred over the seventy years of Crown’s life. But no. The book hides its head in the never-never land of mermen and Martians and purple mockingbirds. There is not a hint of an AIDS epidemic in the poems of the 1980s and 90s. But this ahistoricism is more telling in a poem titled “The Berlin Wall,” from the 2010-21 period, where he compares himself to the divided city except he realizes “now the wall is crashing down at last;/ the city of Berlin is really one.” The problem is that the Berlin wall came down in November 1989, at least twenty years before this poem was supposedly written. It’s not just the history of the gay movement that has passed Crown by; it is the world in general. What makes it particularly important that this book be taken to task is its use of metaphors grounded in the past to glorify social injustice. If the metaphor of the closet was ever useful, it was as a way to motivate people to declare their true nature as a personal and political act. Unfortunately, in the Closet Sonnets, it becomes a way to justify silence and repression. The closet in Crown’s poems becomes the womb of the imagination. “In order to survive, you sometimes must/ invent alternative realities,” such as his fantasies of mermen and Martians. “A Strange Device” is a riddle poem. He has a tool to transport him from “universe to universe” outside of time and space. By using this device, a man like me The closet is needed so it can be transcended by poetry. It’s a neat trick. Isn’t he lucky? Living a frustrated, dishonest life in the closet has enabled him to write poems. And how literary he’d become, since the poem borrows language from Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” where the stately pleasure dome contains “a miracle of rare device,/ A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!” How are we to feel about G. S. Crown? Perhaps I take the character too personally, since he was supposedly born a week before me and became, like me, an English professor. (I’ll be really angry if I ended up dying in 2021 as he is supposed to.) We don’t get many facts about Crown, but one can guess that, like the author, Yakov Azriel, he grew up (as did I) in a New York Jewish middle-class family. His life could have been my life, but it wasn’t. I’m not particularly brave or self-aware, but I refused to make the bargain he made. It’s not a fair bargain either for oneself or for one’s children (presuming you have them). He holds on to the closet as some people hold on to injustice, as a justification for his unhappiness rather than as a metaphor that leads to corrective action. I am impatient with G. S. Crown because, like me, he was still a teenager when Stonewall occurred; he was still in college when gay groups began to form on university campuses; he was still in his twenties when the first marches on Washington began. This sequence of sonnets reflects none of that history. The life it supposedly traces is a sad one, a cautionary tale of self-indulgence and weakness. Azriel’s genuine skills as a formalist are put in the service of a far too common bankruptcy of will. David Bergman, professor of English at Towson University near Baltimore, is the poetry editor of this magazine.
is able to explore a world beyond
his closet’s ice, a world in which he’s free
to build a submarine and cross a sea
far warmer than his closet’s frozen pond.
This strange device is writing poetry.
