tlavideo.com

Review

The autobiographical essays in Edge offer insight into the passions of acclaimed author Jeff Mann. These memories, insightful as they are endearing, range from his boyhood obsession with the gothic allure of Dark Shadows, to the doubt and pain of being a Southerner, and so at the edge of the gay community, and the appeal of leather bars and bear culture. Mann also visits many gay meccas in these essays--the resorts of Key West, Provincetown, and Rehoboth Beach, along with several European destinations such as Germany, Ireland, Belgium, and Scotland, have important cameos. But he is never an idle traveler--he is challenged by his experiences, and his observations reveal the thoughts of many gay men. Along the way Mann ruminates on a variety of subjects, from lost lovers to kilts, theophany, Sylvia Plath, adult videos, and bathhouses.

“Edges are always thrilling, highlighting our free will, the power we have over life and death.”

So Mann distills one of his central themes in his series of essays about travel both figurative and literal, from small-town Appalachia to gay resorts to European must-sees, and from coming out to coming apart to coming together.

Mann’s travelogue-cum-memoir isn’t the usual catalogue of romps and conquests; rather, he begins at the beginning, intertwining his adoration of such tragic antiheroes as Dark Shadows protagonist Barnabas Collins and Wuthering Heights’ Heathcliff with his own story of coming out amidst supportive lesbians and an antagonistic southern mountain culture. These juxtapositions characterize every episode of these marvelous essays, and Mann’s ruminations are shot through with increasing subtlety and ambiguity as he revisits this theme over and over again. His masculinity puts him on the margins of his first gay community, his gayness places him beyond the pale of his southern culture, his bookishness and introversion set him at the margins of bear culture. Early on, Mann dubs himself “the Hinton Heathcliff” in homage to his hometown and his newfound appetites. Appetite is a second theme of these marvelous essays. Mann recounts his Dark Shadows fandom (and the metaphor that emerged for him ~ that of living outside mainstream society, harboring a dark secret and darker desires) with nary a sneer for the follies of youth nor sarcasm about lessons learned. Rather, Mann casts himself as an epicure, seeking to encounter and devour beauty in all its incarnations but fearful that the true self is too monstrous to be worthy. This untenable balance Mann delivers with a healthy dose of humor at no one’s expense (not even his own), but rather with the kind of weary chuckle that bespeaks a long-sought and fiercely cherished joy in the possible ~ no mean feat for such a great dreamer. Mann is particularly adept at reconciling the glories of the ideal with the disappointments of the actual, as in this recollection of visit to the Yorkshire home of the Brontës: “…how I loved playing Heathcliff, marching over the moors…until a chorus of biting flies drove me off slapping and cursing. Inescapable for longer than a few seconds, that fracture between beloved fiction and tedious fact.” Sexual appetites are reported in , though readers seeking Mann’s trademark leather-scented heat may still prefer his fiction (e.g., A History of Barbed Wire). Appetites for knowledge take center stage here, though the essay Kilts is a delightful exploration of more earthy appetites. The essay Ludwig about Mann’s pilgrimage to the Alpine fastness of the ill-fated Bavarian monarch, might be my favorite on this theme, for it distills Mann’s struggle over the paradox of romancing the past. “What seems to be one of the crucial elements of Ludwig’s identity was an almost fanatical passion for those rare moments when fantasy and reality seem to converge…,” he says. Mann’s empathy for Ludwig is tempered by his knowledge that the great passion he fantasizes about was necessarily an artifact of the past. The new, unlovely century Mann bemoans carries with it new, lovely ideas that render the grand and deadly liaisons of our forbears moot even as they make them possible. In this essay Mann describes his lusts as “always static, hypothetical,” and here I must take exception: this is a very lusty book indeed, especially when it comes to that most literal of appetites: food.

Where Mann’s sexual appetite is often only fleetingly, and sometimes painfully, satisfied ~ he refers to one important breakup as “the Apocalyptic Divergence” ~ he is more successful with food, stalking great meals around the US and Europe with singular focus, and devouring them with singular abandon. I have been curious but skeptical about haggis for years, for example, but I have the feeling that if I shared a table in a Scottish pub with Mann, I’d not only try it, but relish it. There’s no sense of food becoming a pathological substitute for good sex or satisfying love; instead, in the way of an accomplished food writer, Mann reports upon the development and refinement of his appetite for good food; the delicious payoff, in this book, is that he craftily lays that development alongside his development as an intellectual and as a gay man, and then weaves those three threads into his larger narrative about a fully-integrated life at the edges of the expected, the mainstream, the mundane. How fitting, then, that the book ends in “Key West” with the third of three essays that feature “gay meccas.” In it, the span of Mann’s gay youth and maturity play alongside his quirky, intellectual, southern, kinky, mendicant, introverted, hungry selves, selves that find, most pleasingly, an uneasy peace over a good meal with a devoted beloved in the center of a marginal subculture. Given Mann’s impressive publishing record in poetry, fiction, and criticism, I was not surprised by the quality of these essays. Each stands alone, and while certain bare facts are repeated, they serve a new insight in a new context, avoiding the self-referential tautologies of many a memoir. Still, read the whole thing: Mann’s ascending spiral of self-knowledge is too deftly rendered to miss. These are damned good essays, shot through with a self-effacing generosity of spirit and an expansive affection for places, persons, and ideas. All this would be enough, but what makes Mann’s book a keeper is his clear-eyed (never cloying or vicious) yet tender (never sentimental) treatment of himself, the edges he’s traveled, and the ones he embodies. Never once, in this collection of essays, does Mann take the edge off. Most enthusiastically recommended.

 -- Amos Lassen