Arena Homme+ | by Michael Collins
© Christopher Ferguson: Farrar, Straus & Giroux
It’s heartening to meet a public figure who opts for silence, detachment and tact. ‘I distance myself when I speak about things by not going into details about the immediacy of the here and now,’ André Aciman tells me.
In his view writers should not respond rashly to major news events, unless they’re reporters: ‘You have to give these events time to develop a new skin, before you write about them.’ If only other authors and celebrities were as restrained. So many speak out in pursuit of followers on social media, appeasing those who will mobilise and target them if they fail to hold the correct views. ‘I think an entirely intelligent person is always ambivalent,’ he says. ‘You have to be ambivalent because you can always see the two sides of the same thing.’
Throughout his works he refers to ‘vigils’ to describe the return to places from the past that bring a memory to life in the present. ‘This is how I always travel,’ Aciman says. ‘Not so as to experience anything at the time of my tour, but to plot the itinerary of a possible return trip. This, it occurs to me, is also how I live.’ A Jewish émigré, he left his native Egypt in 1965, aged 14, to escape overt antisemitism. In 1996, he documented his family history and the relationship with Alexandria in the acclaimed memoir ‘Out Of Egypt’. He writes about his return years later in the opening essay of ‘False Papers’ (2000): ‘I went back to touch and breathe the past again, to walk in shoes I hadn’t worn in years.’ Nostalgia is the ache to go back; nostography the art of writing about return. Aciman trades in the latter. His formative experience remains central to his writing: ‘An entire childhood revisited in a flash. I am a terrible nostographer.’ In his novel ‘Enigma Variations’ (2018), a young man in his twenties visits the Italian town where he holidayed as a child, to find the man he was obsessed with when he was twelve years old, as well as the boy he once was. The impact of places…..the potency of the past……remembering first loves that leave a longing in adulthood…..the sensation that another life has been lived, or at least a parallel one, are themes that recur in his fiction. These are evident in his current novella ‘The Gentleman Of Peru’, which casts a mysterious older man among a group of young Americans during their vacation on the Amalfi coast.
Being displaced so dramatically so young has left the author disconnected from the here and now and reluctant to offer himself up for classification: ‘I am rootless.’ His family lived in France before settling in New York in the late-1960s, where he remains today. He is Professor of Comparative Literature at the City University of New York, but is more familiar as author of the New York Times bestsellers ‘Call Me By Your Name’ (2007) and ‘Find Me’ (2019). The former became an Oscar-winning film directed by Luca Guadagnino. It recounts an idyllic Italian summer in 1983, during which the 17-year old prodigy, Elio, falls for Oliver; a swaggering American student, seven years older, enlisted to assist the teenager’s scholarly father for the holidays. The book gives little indication of the period, while the film provides some hints: Elio’s Talking Heads t-shirt, the Robert Mapplethorpe poster on his bedroom wall. Long after that summer has passed, and the liaison along with it, the characters meet in the epilogue of ‘Find Me’.
As a professor of literature, Aciman’s specialised subject is Marcel Proust, a writer who has influenced him more than any other: ‘Proust came into my life when I was exactly 14 years old. Proust tells you who you are, and I didn’t like seeing myself, and so I put the book down and picked it up three years later. I think that many times you read someone and they are that impactful they leave a mark. Some authors say nothing. They do not open an aspect of myself and address something in me.' As a writer, Aciman shares with the reader only what he thinks they need to hear, leaving blanks for them to fill with their own stories. Working in academia, you would expect him to break with his rules on ambivalence within a campus environment corroded by cancel culture and identity politics. He keeps his counsel. He wears a tie as a means of maintaining a fine line between himself and his students. Today he is without a tie, or even the black roll neck jumper he often favours (Balenciaga for one interview). He’s affable and amenable. Our connection is such that I must refer to him as André rather than Aciman, during all that follows.
He’s in New York. I’m in London. We meet via one of the miracles of the modern age, talking across the miles and in different time zones. Is there a better word for such a miracle than Zoom? We are discussing New York. For a month from Christmas 2012, I flat-sat near the High Line, minutes from the infamous Chelsea Hotel, at London Terrace. It’s a colossal 1930s apartment block, where the original doormen were dressed as the traditional British Bobby on his beat. The building was the inspiration for Hitchcock’s set in ‘Rear Window’. André is animated at the mention of it, as London Terrace features in his audiobook ‘A Room On The Sea’. I tell him how as a stranger alone in the city, I found myself in a number of fortuitous situations that brought company, and the comfort of home to my stay. These are the encounters that sometimes lead to stories in his novels. On New Year’s Eve I bumped into Debbie Harry and her two dogs, in the lift of the building. In London, decades earlier, I was working as a researcher on a live television show in which she was to be interviewed. The pair of us sat in hospitality, watching another guest, a woman who took LSD before drilling a hole through her fontanelle in 1969, to raise her consciousness. The Blondie singer was mesmerised throughout, smoking my cigarettes, and targeting me with questions afterwards. I mentioned none of this in the elevator. ‘Great dogs,’ I said. On Boxing Day, a skeletal hand reached across me for cut-price champagne glasses at the Crate & Barrel sale; it belonged to Cliff Richard. On a bus returning me down town, a women dressed in authentic Chanel, on catching my London accent, struck up a conversation. She was the ex-wife of a famous British funny man who claimed he continued to work, despite his age, to pay for the alimony. At the airport I happened upon the government’s housing minister who I’d met previously, and interviewed for BBC’s The Politics Show. He’d been to a funeral in Yonkers. He was dishevelled, without the suit and tan of earlier hook-ups, and wearing the sharpest Chelsea boots I’d ever seen. I mentioned how we seemed destined to keep meeting. When he realised we were seated next to each other for the flight home, he agreed. I said: ’I’ve never spent the night with a government minister.’
Not only was I rambling but relaying a story that contradicts the components that André adheres to so perfectly, so brilliantly, so as to make him a unique stylist and compelling story-teller. My anecdote was bogged down by details absent in his fiction, and evident in the realism that he avoids. ‘I don’t like realism,’ he says. ’It’s newspapers and magazines and it’s very easy to do. Many do it successfully, and call themselves literary, but I don’t think they are. What I do like and it’s essentially that French aspect of me, is the ability too simply capture two people sitting somewhere and speaking, with a complete lack of context of what’s going on in the world. So that only what happens to them matters.’
So, here are two people speaking. Two men with silver beards and shaved heads, each in a minimalist environment that offers few clues to each other’s interests or status, within the frame of the camera. We move on to love. He says: ‘I do believe in love, though I don’t like to use the word.’ He once said: ’I want to tell stories about how people arrive at this magical moment, where mind, body, spirit, and history all bloom and it doesn’t always last. That might be the tragedy of our lives, its evanescence, but it’s beautiful when it does happen. And the word I use is intimacy.’ Elio, a wise head on wiry shoulders, asks himself: ‘Could intimacy endure once indecency was spent and our bodies had run out of tricks? Or is intimacy the desired product no matter where you find it, how you acquire it, what you pay for it ?’ I opt for ‘intimate’ to describe the interior monologues with hypnotic, coruscating sentences in André’s first person stories, where the characters reveal their dreams, desires and fantasies while ruminating on the object of their affection. The narrative runs parallel with all that’s happening on the surface and threatens to break through. If André’s reluctant to be seen to formulate an opinion on the world at large, he advises those steeped in desire, longing, to escape that interior narrative and express themselves by saying the unsayable. Elio’s mother, perhaps alluding to her son’s unspoken love for Oliver, quotes the sixteenth century poet and noble Marguerite de Navarre: Is it better to speak or die?
It is first love, and love between the young that dominates his fiction. According to André it’s first love that teaches us who we are. It becomes the template for our lives. This is central to ‘The Gentleman From Peru’. For the stately Raúl, life ended when a relationship with a woman from years before came to a close. The character has a capacity for healing people, and for knowing their secrets. He enthrals the young tourists he befriends with his psychic skills and his incantatory speeches: ‘I often know what dangers lie in store or what people are planning or plotting to do. But I’ve been tragically blind in the past - the greatest catastrophe in my life caught me by surprise’. He is referring to the love for a women from which he never recovered. Those that followed were attempts to mask the wound. ‘It is fate that hurt me, not her,’ Raúl confides. It is largely circumstance rather than death, or the death of love and desire, that mark as brief the relationships André describes in his novels. He has no time for the ‘domestic’ and so these entanglements rarely drift into bickering, boredom, settling down and putting up shelves. ‘I think the domestic has its charm.’ he assures me, ‘but it’s not what I want to convey in literature.’ That initial altered state remains, long after the players have gone their separate ways, and found other loves, other lives.
This notion of the parallel life is present in his essays and his novels. In ‘The Gentleman of Peru,’ Raúl confides: ‘We come back to correct our lives, because most of them are lived imperfectly.’ This suggestion that the routes not taken in life remain as relevant as those that were, that what might have been, what never was, could still happen, and is no less significant if it doesn’t is examined more forensically in André’s 2021 collection ‘Homo Irrealis’, via essays on a disparate line-up of figures that includes Proust, Fernando Pessoa, Eric Rohmer, Constantine Cavafy and even C.C. Baxter, the role captured so perfectly by Jack Lemmon in Billy Wilder’s ‘The Apartment’. It’s evident in ‘Call Me By Your Name’ as the summer comes to a close and Oliver is shipped off to the States, leaving Elio bereft. In a poignant stand out speech from both the book and the film his sympathetic father, Sami, takes his son into his confidence: ‘Most of us can’t help but live as though we’ve got two lives to live, one is a mock-up, the other the finished version, and then there are all those versions inbetween. But there’s only one, and before you know it, your heart is worn out, and, as for your body, there comes a point when no one looks at it, much less wants to come near it.‘
The relationship between fathers and sons is another leitmotiv in the oeuvre of André Aciman. He credits his own father with encouraging him to write, introducing him to the works of Proust, and urging him to embrace the classic and the permanent that is the legacy of the past, rather than the fleeting and fashionable of the present. ‘I started my career by writing about myself before I was born and then a twelve year old kid,’ André says. ‘Now, at my age, there is something fascinating about old people, especially those happy to be alive and still bewildered by the fact that they are happy to be alive - not dead yet - and are still at least bewildered by the fact they are attracted to other people, and they have a longing and as long as they know they have a longing they are happy, and not on their way out.’
André has said that he doesn’t like to write about sex, but a New York Times critic noted that ‘he writes arousal so beautifully you miss it when it’s gone’. Critics have commented on André writing about homosexual love and engagement, without putting it in context; without the details and facts he abhors. But this is what makes it refreshing. He writes about relationships between young men in a manner that’s mature, and free from the crass words, phrases and rainbow flags that have come to define homosexuality in order to make it acceptable. The fact that he has a wife of many years, and three sons, adds to the discomfort of his critics. In keeping with his resistance to classification, he refuses to label his sexuality. When an interviewer attempted to corner the author with the word ‘fluid’, he responded with: ‘Now, you want to use the word fluid? You want to use all of those modern tropes? Fine, they work. But that’s not where I’m coming from.’
André admits that he can’t write about ‘old love’, even though he fervently believes love has no age. I test my theory on him that nobody should have new sex after fifty. It’s one thing when couples meet young and stay together, decay together, on an ageing divan, it’s another when new love comes with an old body, on which the years have taken a toll. He disagrees. I retreat and return to Raúl.
I wonder if the new novel is his response to realism. It merges past lives with present ones; he plays with time. Someone suggested he’s interest is in exploring how realism can accommodate fantasy and visions of the world other than it is. One phrase that certainly doesn’t cover the content of Raúl’s story, and his search for lost love through various lives, and possibly centuries too, is ‘magic realism’. André says: ‘People frequently compare my work to Gabriel García Márquez. But I am not fond of magical realism. So I decided to write a novel in that genre just to prove the point that even I can do it. But my own stylistic attractions are in the novel. My own insecurities come through even in a character like Raúl who knows everything but is still insecure.’ At first, the character is reminiscent of those solitary male outsiders that European writers do so well. You find them in the works of Mann, Hesse, Bassani, Sartre and Camus. They appear as witnesses to the lives of others, often finding an outlet in art and philosophy rather than love and relationships, and are cursed with a sense of loss, grieving for the life they never lived and the love they never found, or lost. Raúl believes this is because no one wants to accept who they are: ‘Everyone requests the self they believe is the very best, hoping to be loved for who they’re not and could never be.’ Speaking personally, André put it another way: ‘I think we don’t like who we are. That’s why we want other people because they make us understand that we are worth whatever it is they see in us. It’s the desire to, literally and metaphorically, find our other half in order to become whole.’
It is in his essays that André speaks personally, introducing some details, perhaps the occasional biographical touch. He does this to attach himself to a subject and, in this instance, express an opinion. You become his confidante: ‘I try to find where the reader and me are going to connect. This is also how I enter into dialogue with a movie or a book. I look for that something about me that has been manifested in an author’s work. Then I answer them in my work.’ I have attempted a similar method throughout this essay and interview, previously introducing myself by way of a cameo. Here I write myself a bigger part to disagree with André on perhaps a greater subject than new love and old sex. I don’t believe that everyone is destined to be with someone, and needs to be paired with a partner, and pursue love and sex, to feel complete. I guess this puts me in the company of those odd outsiders in those European novels, to some extent. We live at a time when so many variants on the traditional form of gender roles and relationship options have been joined by numerous alternatives in the cultural mainstream, and yet those of us satisfied, or at least accepting of being single, celibate, and resistant to classification because it’s our natural, default setting, are the anomalies.
Here again, too much detail in the relaying of an experience, I know. I mention this outlook to indicate that the ‘vigils’ André writes about, the emphasis on intimacy, and the revisiting of key memories are just as relevant in lives where they are not inextricably linked with the love and touch of others. Our reasons for embarking upon these excursions to the past remain the same. If it’s nostalgia, then it’s a home-sickness, which is said to be the original interpretation of the word. If it’s nostography, the impetus might be to acquaint ourselves with the happiness that André believes we only experience in hindsight: ‘There is a secondhand quality to all experience, including the experience of remembering. We are usually kept from the ecstasy we anticipate by a layer of consciousness that separates us from it.’ The two of us discuss the word ‘melancholy’, a very English state of mind, which he understands, having been steeped in English history and culture in British schools during his education in Egypt. ‘I think melancholy is the norm,’ he says. ‘Happiness comes as a wind, a draught. You’re not sorry to be alive, by and large most of us are a happy bunch, but I don’t know of anybody who likes themselves. What we project and what we really are - these are different things.’
For the young, the past hovers even though the lengthy future is ahead. When older, the future diminishes, along with the past, as the emphasis falls on existing in the present, and expanding that experience to keep the end at bay. Just as André has said he doesn’t do details, facts, ethics, old love, or domesticity when it comes to his writing, he doesn’t do death. Even though his characters have their own thoughts, as in ‘Enigma Variations’, with the suggestion that the dead come back and catch us off guard: ‘Sometimes, just wanting to tell them something that would have mattered to them, or to ask about people only they would have known about, remind us that they’ll never hear us, won’t answer, don’t care. But perhaps it’s much worse for them: they are the ones calling out to us and it is we who listen and don’t seem to care.’ André has another take: ‘I don’t believe in death. I don’t accept it, and we all have to fall away. That’s the beauty of love. It goes to the end. Once we’re gone, we’re going to forget that we have loved people.’ As Raúl says in ‘The Gentlemen of Peru’, in words his creator has handed him: ‘It’s life that’s provisional. Not love.’