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 aul
Monette has recorded that he didn't want to write non-fiction, but
his experiences with Roger Horwitz's dying of AIDS impelled him to
do so. At the same time that he was creating a new poetic style for
himself, he also crafted a compelling and rushing prose style. It
captured the venom against the establishment that was displayed in
the poetry, as well as the immediacy of his love for Horwitz. He began
this prose style with the introduction to Love Alone and
almost immediately began Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (1988),
a love story, a story of Los Angeles, and a polemic against the forces
preventing full recognition of the AIDS epidemic.
Monette made holograph notes for Borrowed Time, but they
are in a larger and more bold hand than he had used up until then.
He also typed an outline and proposal for the memoir and seemed to
proceed quickly and determinedly in this book whose famous first sentence
is: "I may not live to finish this."
From the beginning of his preface to Love Alone he aligned
himself with the usually thought to be gay British World
War I infantry lieutenant Wilfred Owen. His poems of "the pity of
war" revolutionized the sensibility of war poetry. Monette wished
to change the presentation of gay men combating AIDS. The central
image given in the introduction to Love Alone was two men
as warriors together, the lines set to music by Roger Bourland, and
Monette develops this further in this story of Horwitz's dying.
Monette continued in the memoir the warrior image which had disturbed
composer Ned Rorem. This trope derives from Achilles and Patroclus
fighting and loving together at Troy. Their love story is seldom preserved
in adaptations of the story, but it is alluded to in the visual presentation
of Borrowed Time. The dust jacket is a photograph of a statue
of Menelaus removing the dead body of Patroclus from the field of
battle. This cover image is larger on the advance proof copy shown
here than on the dust jacket of the published work. Even readers who
wouldn't know the full import of these warriors' story would sense
the support of one male for another in death.
Monette was well aware of Susan Sontag's landmark 1977 work, Illness
as Metaphor, and her critique of the use of battle imagery when
discussing disease, for example, "fighting cancer," or speaking of
a disease which "invades" the body. His use of battle imagery was
not just to suggest an attitude toward the disease itself, pace Sontag,
but directed at the establishment arraigned against gay men and others
with AIDS. Society branded gay men as weak, as "twilight men" unable
even to care for themselves. Religion denied gay men dignity when
John Cardinal Ratzinger authored the idea that homosexual sex was
"an intrinsic evil." U.S President Ronald Reagan didn't mention the
disease, thus denying through politics a full confrontation of the
disease's horrors and ravages.
Borrowed Time is also as much a paean to Los Angeles as were
his comedic novels. Interspersed with the harrowing details of disease
and death are descriptions of Los Angeles as a beautiful and consoling
place:
Evenings at the brink of summer are yellow gold across
the city's western
face, as the sun narrows toward the ocean, eye to eye with the white
buildings of the coastal basin. The setting sun is especially prized
in late
May and June. Summer is something else again, sunny all day long,
till the
light expires of heat and boredom after Labor Day.
Borrowed Time also praises UCLA and its doctors and
particularly its hospital nurses who cared for Horwitz.
Monette's message was received with relief from readers of all kinds,
since the book is primarily a book about love and caring and grieving.
It doesn't offer the superficial messages of those like Louise Hay,
whom Monette and Kolovakos disliked, but renders a brutal and almost
day by day account of Horwitz's and Monette's suffering through Horwitz's
illness and death and mourning for him.
Even more than Love Alone, the memoir Borrowed Time
received unprecedented fan mail. A representative stack of such letters
is here on exhibit. The letters come from those suffering from the
disease, from gay men themselves mourning the loss of lovers, from
family members or friends mourning such a loss, and from men and women
mourning a loss from other devastating illnesses. The book touched
a nerve and continues to touch such nerves with each rereading. Although
it didn't win the awards that Monette's next work earned, it will
remain a classic of American literature. It was probably because of
Borrowed Time and its insistent and needed public message
at the time that alerted readers and critics and reviewers and prize
givers to Monette's next non-fiction work, Becoming a Man: Half
a Life Story.
Monette was also preparing himself more and more as a public speaker
and as an interviewee on the topics of AIDS and discrimination and
homophobia. He has stated that he didn't want to become the AIDS poster
boy, but he was well suited to this task and even spoke on such shows
as "Geraldo." In the Los Angeles area he appeared for a benefit at
Highways (Santa Monica), known as a performance space. He read from
his poetry from Love Alone and from Borrowed Time
he read what was advertised as his "new political writings."
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Paul
Monette's notes for Borrowed Time
First
page of manuscript of Borrowed Time
Manuscript
leaf from Borrowed Time
Cover
of advance copy of Borrowed Time
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