Lifting Bob
About Ed and Robert Glück’s moving divides
Rainer Diana Hamilton
The central image of this essay is one man carrying another across the threshold.
If literal, the image is lifted from Robert Glück’s “Sex Story,” where Bob easily moves a lover around his apartment—“Brian loved to be carried and pleasure made me powerful, sent blood to my muscles and aligned them. I lifted him from the table and fucked him in the air”—and then to bed, from the kitchen. This is from the 1982 story collection Elements of a Coffee Service, where he “wanted to write about sex: good sex without boasting, descriptive without looking like plumbing, happy, avoiding the LaBrea Tar Pits of lyricism.” Good sex makes men portable, and being open to it makes way for language: Glück’s narrator finds it “hard to understand how a man can write well if he doesn’t like to be fucked,” if he isn’t subject to occasional spontaneous transportation.
If metaphorical, the image retains the structure and the author of the literal image, but makes some revisions for gender and abstraction. This second, figurative image is from Glück’s essay “My 2 Cents,” where he argues that feminist publications raised the stature of innovative women writers—“they brought feminism over the great divide from content to form”—retroactively generating an avant-garde lineage. First published in 1999 in the feminist journal How2’s forum on “Class & Innovative Writing,” the essay was reprinted in his 2016 collection, Communal Nude. This move “suddenly” (Glück’s ironic scare quotes) reveals as false the form/content divide that had previously prevented readers from understanding work by writers of marginalized identities as the products of artistic choice, rather than mere representation or reflection.
“Join me in briefly pretending that “style” and “content” are separable, a lie that criticism often requires in order to successfully account for their mutual constitution.”
Join me in briefly pretending that “style” and “content” are separable, a lie that criticism often requires in order to successfully account for their mutual constitution. “It would be hard to find any reputable literary critic today who would care to be caught defending as an idea the old antithesis of style versus content,” Sontag began her 1965 essay “On Style,” before conceding that “In the practice of criticism, though, the old antithesis lives on [ . . .] It is not so easy, after all, to get unstuck from a distinction that practically holds together the fabric of critical discourse.” Three years later, Samuel Delany’s “About 5,750 Words” dealt with the same critical problem for genre writing, arguing that readers of speculative fiction tend to assume the genre is defined by the inclusion of a certain kind of “content”—the nonconsenting androids and ancient groves we still associate with SF and fantasy—when worlds are built, in fact, by formal, often syntactical choices: “A sixty-thousand word novel is one picture corrected fifty-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine times.” Like Sontag, he begins by describing critics’ repression of content’s inseparability from form:
“Every generation some critic states the frighteningly obvious in the style/content conflict. Most readers are bewildered by it. Most commercial writers (not to say, editors) first become uncomfortable, then blustery; finally, they put the whole business out of their heads and go back to what they were doing all along. And it remains for someone in another generation to repeat:
Put in opposition to ‘style,’ there is no such thing as ‘content.’”
When Glück describes feminism, along with the attendant struggle for queer liberation, crossing this “great divide,” he is not recreating it, but diagnosing it as a situation that all marginalized writers confront: a cultural infrastructure that insists that, if their work is to have any importance, it will be a matter of what we call “content”—i.e., it will be held at arm’s length from the formal questions proper to art. He is announcing a secondary freedom: the ability to participate not just in representation, but also in the socio-intellectual determination of representation’s structure. In the case of How2, this means women come up with new forms of aesthetic expression. By leading and attending each other’s workshops, by reading and responding to each other’s work, Glück, Bruce Boone, and their friends did the same thing: they let what had been content (gay life) become form (New Narrative), a form that enables further such conversions.
In Summer 2023, over lunch in the Mission, I asked Glück if he agreed with a theory—perhaps more of a complaint—over which I’d be mulling for a decade or so. It seemed that I and other poets who had studied “experimental writing” had been presented only with traditions that rejected as bourgeois, reactionary, conservative, or otherwise boring the author’s tendency to write about their “self.” I believed that our professors had left New Narrative writers off their syllabi because to include them would undermine their claim that, to do formally interesting work, one must first reject individual experience as the grounds of expression. “What do you think?” I asked him, forking my crepe. “I think you should forgive them,” he said. He hadn’t, after all, organized his life around the goal of being read by NYU students. One reason my teachers might not have thought of New Narrative, he suggested, was that it had not asked to be thought of.
In Translating the Unspeakable: Poetry and the Innovative Necessity, Kathleen Fraser describes how a similar comment from Glück led her to start, in 1983, the first issues of HOW(ever). In her class on Feminist Poetics, she was struggling to answer questions of canonicity, style, and sociality—“Why had most of the great women modernists been dropped cold from reading lists, anthologies and university curricula?” for example—and she felt that “something more had to be done”:
“There was a conversation with my writer-friend Bob Glück, that sticks in my mind. It began with the above symptoms of distress and finished, for me, with his gentle but clear statement: “Kathleen, you must decide who your audience is and then address it.” He was not talking about the private act of writing.
I went away again for the summer with that sentence dogging me, and my resolve became clear. I began formulating a tentative plan for a modest-size journal, which I hoped to lure my writing-group colleagues into being a part of.”
All the effort of the aesthetic encounter with the self—of connecting one’s experience to social reality, of finding forms that organize both ‘real’ and narrative living—is only worth it if you know who you want to tell about it.
*
I don’t just mean he’s challenging the false dichotomies or whatnot, though surely, he does that too; I mean that he is able to take what appears on each side of quite stubborn divides—like those between genders, buildings, waking and sleeping, or the living and dead—and set them in motion. He repositions the narrative forms that structure social life, so that conversational patterns, including those that mark talking to a dying neighbor, an awkward bathhouse hookup, or a best friend, become not subjects of potentially successful or unsuccessful realism, things the writer represents, but forms of narration that, in their controlled patterns, dignify the participants’ speech. This specialized form of dialog then permits a recurring shift between individual and collective experience.
About Ed, Glück’s long-awaited novel—in the shape of an AIDS-memoir—that New York Review of Books put out last year, opens not with the book’s subject, but with “Everyman.” The section title signals his intention to figure death as a narrative problem in which the straight couple next door equally participates. Documenting the 1985 death of his neighbor, Mac, with whom Bob shares a relationship of mutual observation, conversation, and favors, it draws a humanist parallel between Mac and Ed as they both avoid the doctor, as if putting off their sentencing. Glück describes all the things that happen, according to the local paper, in the March week between Mac’s admission to the hospital and Bob’s visiting him, putting Mac’s story on the same order as the Iran–Contra affair or a Chilean earthquake. A few chapters in, though, that everyman becomes specialized again: “Everyman” does not refer to the average Joe, but to the title character of the fifteenth-century play who “wants to bring his death to life by giving it a biography.” At this moment, for the first time, the narration switches over to Ed’s first-person perspective.
This generation of biographies, this respect for all of the accounts people like to give of themselves, has a hand in the generation of Glück’s narrative structure. I’m thinking of the very satisfying end of Jack the Modernist, his first novel (High Risk Books, 1985), also structured around a relationship with an ex-boyfriend. In his recent interview with Lucy Ives for The Paris Review’s “Art of Fiction” series, Glück says that when people ask him to write about them, he replies: “First, break my heart.” Heartbreak is one of the experiences that converts people into the “ancient mariner,” the phrase he uses to describe whomever has a story they compulsively need to tell. In this novel, Jack has been a frustrating lover, refusing to either fuck or to account for himself. His only act of conversational autobiography is a bewildering short story about a rival, “Joe-Toe,” that Bob close-reads, converting the form of scholarship into the subject matter of fiction. Bob spends much of the book trying to figure this man out, before moving on. At the novel’s close, though, he hooks up with Joe-Toe, who accidentally reveals the probable cause for Jack’s refusal to have sex: infidelity and its subsequent gonorrhea.
The present-tense narration of the relationship from within its unfolding makes room for dramatic irony, which lets the narrator enjoy his sudden self-consciousness. He knows he is a character: “Jack’s infamy delighted me from the standpoint of sheer plot. Now that he’d made a fool of me, our story was complete.” He imagines the great pleasure he’ll experience telling his friend about it:
“the attention he would give to every turn of this new and shocking development, the questions to polish each facet of revelation, to draw morals, to stretch the moment like taffy—“Now did you say Joe-Toe earns his living as a stage actor?” Bruce asks carefully. I would get excited: I was stunned, Bruce, stunned—you know what he said then? (Bruce draws back to prolong the disclosure.) That Jack had three long term lovers, Jack lied to me, and not only that … (Here Bruce assumes an expression of not quite sincere shock.)”
This approach honors the reader by letting them briefly share Bruce Boone’s position. The novel is structured by this anticipation of getting to tell a friend about your love life, waiting for the “sheer plot” of jealous despair to become narratable. This resembles the formal freedom that comes from Bob’s experience of Mac’s funeral: “I felt tremendous latitude, that anything short of dying would be appropriate.” Similarly, he says that Ed “reorganized [his] imagination by dying during the first two weeks of February 1994”—real emotional events have narrative and imaginary effects. His “Long Note on New Narrative” opens, “To talk about the beginnings of New Narrative, I have to talk about my friendship with Bruce Boone.” Glück’s work acknowledges friendship as one of writing’s conditions, not just in a sweet through-love-we-enrich-each-other logic, but also because the set of people with whom we are in relation determines the stories we are in a position to tell.
In Commemoration of the Visit carries the ‘content’ of a photograph into the ‘form’ of the epistolary prose poem by way of friendship, too. This book of poetry, published in 2016 by Further Other Books Works, began when Fraser and Glück both learned they were, by chance, writing poem sequences in response to the same source—twelve images from a picture book, as the title suggests, commemorating a 1947 visit of “Foreign Commercial Representatives to Japan,” printed here as the centerpiece between the two poets’ texts—purchased at an antique store that Glück had recommended to his friend. Fraser’s half is titled after the images’ captions, whereas Glück’s are more simply numbered. The photographs become, retroactively, postcards, their shape motivating an epistolary style even before Glück and Fraser know they are writing to each other.
Glück’s oeuvre is an incredible body of sublimation’s work. I mean that word in its strongest sense—more than the simple fact of making art instead of love—something like transubstantiation, the manifestation of “real presence,” or, if that’s too Catholic, other non-metaphorical conversions of states of matter, like solid into gas.
*
In About Ed, death is the most important threshold for men to see each other through. As he looks back on the years leading up to Ed’s death, Bob circles the question of his own:
“On this stage I have constructed for my soliloquy, I can’t speak about my death or bid you look in my grave. As for ordering my tomb, over the two dates put an image of men fucking—to show what made me happy. Do the following stories belong here? They don’t “come to mind” but intrude.”
He goes on to list three of the intrusive images:
His mother, handing him blue eggs, after driving 350 miles to show him their color;
Kathleen saying that her husband, Art, is lucky because his parents are still alive; and
A judge being beaten by a man he’d paid for the pleasure, in a story Bob’s dad tells about a traffic ticket.
Glück interprets each of these images for us, so we don’t have to speculate. The filial throughline is explicit: in the first, he asks his mother for advice, and she tells him he’s alone, which is “chilling because she eliminated her own presence” prematurely; in the second, Art gets to remain a child so long as the lucky fact is true; the third ends with the judge “throwing a tantrum, a frantic child.” Though this suggests that childishness is our aim, it leads to a memory of Bob’s early fixation on Abraham Lincoln’s corpse which was, like a saint’s, incorrupt. Confusing Lincoln with Frankenstein’s monster, and then his own imagined presidential product of synthetic vivisection with the Muscle Man, his fear that the dead will return realizes itself. The intruding images transport their subjects between death and youth, charting a course that, in a later chapter titled “Notes for a Novel” (which opens with a dream of Nazis murdering his parents), Glück names “autobiography,” what “happens when childhood replaces the good death.”
Glück often depicts a psychological fixation on childhood as a narrative cage, in opposition to the more liberatory forms afforded by death. When Ives asks him to explain his skepticism of “mainstream psychology,” he argues that “we’re bigger and more interesting than it supposes,” especially when it comes to the narrative paths that bad therapists chart:
As to the Freudian narrative—that my childhood determines who I am going to be—it’s probably the most fatalistic vision of the self ever proposed. The medieval idea that your life’s meaning is refracted backward from your death is much better. At least the defining moment is in front of you.
The years Glück spent with About Ed permit him to revise from the perspective of the present, and the question most subject to this perspectival reconsideration is death. “It’s April 2023,” he writes—just before the manuscript would be finalized—“and the greatest difference between us—he’s dead and I’m alive—has an expiration date. Reader, allow me to erect a monument inside you. Life can’t last forever but memory can.” Serial narration permits each of us to become reliquaries, replacing reliquaries:
If Ed goes inside me, what then? Will his spirit manifest? Will we cohabitate? Can he go inside you? Can you go inside them, Reader? Lost in his dreams? Hidden in his dreams?
*
The image has three terms: the lifter, the lifted, and the doorway.
Its first man could be Glück himself, but it could just as easily be the Christlike corporealization of an idea, say, “Poetry.” With his broad shoulders, Poetry carries, now, not Brian, or L., Jack, or Ed (the lovers who recur in Glück’s fiction), but another word-made-flesh—say, “Narrative”—between the two rooms. 20th-century poetry inherited the formal affordances of the 19th-century novel, the ability of individual experience to register the movement of history, “manners” as a stylistic element of storytelling, and polyvocality as maintenance of difference, while the novel left these behind for a less social, psychological interiority. By passing through poetry (by fashioning itself as a corrective, even, to the “dead-end” of the poetry scene of the mid-seventies), New Narrative brought these characteristics back to prose and evaded both poetry’s desire to be canonized and fiction’s compulsion to be marketable.
“In Glück’s dozen or so books—poetry, fiction, and essays, with some generic infidelity—he is often carrying something, with sudden strength, across a liberatory threshold.”
You get the idea: in Glück’s dozen or so books—poetry, fiction, and essays, with some generic infidelity—he is often carrying something, with sudden strength, across a liberatory threshold.
This bisection of form and content mirrors others, like “the tension between masculine-feminine and inside-outside” that Glück says “pervades all levels of [his] community” in Margery Kempe, the novel where he wrote through an obsessive love affair in collaboration with the 15th-century mystic’s own erotic autobiography of her time with Jesus. That partial list of oppositions is itself drawn from a parable in the Gospel of Thomas that Glück described at a reading at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in March of 2023, recounting a conversation between Christ and his disciples as they look on at a mother nursing her children. When Jesus says that those who enter the kingdom of heaven must be like children at the breast, the disciples assume he means we ought to be broadly childlike—like those intruding images of Bob’s in About Ed. What is heavenly is not youth, though, but the temporary breakdown of the border between two selves. Christ instructs his followers to “make the two one,” to make the inside the outside, to remove all distinctions between male and female, to put the eye in place of the eye, foot for foot, image for image.
That spring, Glück was introducing I, Boombox, his most recent book of poetry, comprising twenty years of misheard phrases, explaining the lack of the need for connective tissue between the puns, innuendos, and aural errata that slip from line to line. But this is also the narrative, romantic, and emotional resolution to About Ed. Converting Bob’s private and social experience of Ed Auerlich-Sugai’s death into fiction, the book avoids the fixing or finalizing gestures of narrative by opening up, at the end, onto a dream sequence that Bob painstakingly edited down from hundreds of pages of Ed’s journals. “They are a kind of heaven,” the narrator promises, “not a heaven that culminates in an image that explains a life, but a heaven of endless narration where image replaces image.” Glück refers to this ideal serial afterlife in accounts of many of his books. In a 2009 interview with Tony Leuzzi, he describes collaboration with Fraser, In Commemoration of the Visit, as “a riff on the idea of replacing one image with another,” claiming that “if the storyteller did this forever, you’d be in heaven.”
Speaking of the divine, Glück also wrote the text for a 2017 artist book, Parables, by José Angel Toirac and Meira Marrero, that paired clips from newspapers run by Cuba’s Communist Party with 33 poems (the titular parables). The book frames the revolution as having produced a new scripture. Two examples allude to this lactation parable where Christ defines the criteria for entry to heaven. Both titled “Miracle” (and numbered XIV and XVI), the first poem faces a scan of a newsprint photograph of Castro petting a cow:
"With outstretched arm I conjure the miracle of the new cow, divinity lactation.
The breed, the herd, the farm, the farmer — bless this cow that needs so many blessings: milk to drink, hay to eat, manger at night, accidents of weather, butcher’s razor.
The cow replies, Uphold the present so I may flow white.”
The second faces a photograph of Castro smiling down at four children, all wearing headphones that seem to be plugged into a common source:
“Miracle. Sound is an image too.
Welcome to paradise, little girls, where one image replaces the next.
They know it and they don’t, they know it and they don’t, they know it and they don’t, the piston of prayer that runs on its own through all things.”
The caption, in Spanish, identifies it as the inauguration of a school for children with hearing disorders; we learn that the serial image need not be visual.
In a footnote to Delany’s essay on the form/content divide, he tries to maintain the equally difficult boundary between poetry and prose. Acknowledging that he will ignore the musical and vocal elements of style, Delany explains that this is because “this discussion is going to veer close enough to poetry. To consider the musical, as well as the ritual, value of language in SF would make poetry and prose indistinguishable. That is absolutely not my intention.” That is, however, my intention, if a perverse one, given that two books Glück spent the last twenty years writing—About Ed and I, Boombox—neatly maintain this distinction. Though verse and narrative are two distinct modes of ‘content’ becoming form, they share the same formal heaven: Glück shows us that, in death, poetry and prose look alike.