Readings: THE KINGDOM OF SAND by Andrew Holleran
The dancer is no longer dancing; so many bodies bruised to pleasure souls which evanesced .... but couldn't he at least get out of the chair?
If you’re new to HERE WE ARE GOING, and me, you should know that I talk about books from a personal perspective, my writing is autobiographical in nature because I believe reading to be a personal experience, unique in the buttons it pushes and memories and emotions and reactions it causes to surface in each individual. Today, I’m writing about Andrew Holleran’s latest novel, as well as his iconic earlier novel, a classic and touchstone of gay literature.
THE KINGDOM OF SAND, by Andrew Holleran, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022
THE KINGDOM OF SAND is Andrew Holleran’s first new book in sixteen years. His 1978 novel, DANCER FROM THE DANCE was a seminal work of post-Stonewall/pre-AIDS gay literature; its title borrowed from the eighth stanza of a poem by Yeats, AMONG SCHOOL CHILDREN:
Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
That earlier novel novel was fecund with luxuriant imagery, some union of Balzacian detail and Flaubert’s marriage of realism and romanticism, precise and documentary, with a smidgen of Jacqueline Susann scandal. It explored the milieu of a particular subset of gay men; urban and adventuresome, blazing post-Stonewall trails of proud, loud, openly hedonistic sexual exploits and escapades, a celebratory and sometimes defiant promiscuity.
I was not yet twenty when I read it. The lives lived by Holleran’s characters (and, it seems, Holleran himself) were as likely to happen for me as were the goings on of Dorothy and her trio in Oz — Frederick, Maryland was not New York, not Oz, and celebratory gay sexual exploits were frowned upon, not just by the general population — many of whom would still, then (and now, again, sadly and actually) happily denigrate and physically assault those who were openly gay — but also by the gay community itself. There was a push to emulate heteronormative coupling, to date, to be monogamous, to find the one for happily ever aftering; the foundation of fantasy on which that was built was that if we did so, we would be accepted, welcomed into society.
I said then as I say now that while monogamy and dating and marriage are fine for some people, it has always been clear to me that many who choose that path are doing so not because it is “natural” for them, but, rather, because they’ve been conditioned socially/culturally (i.e. brainwashed) to think that path is “right”.
There is a great deal of melancholy yearning for that “right”-ness in DANCER FROM THE DANCE, a mourning the characters express through their actions and thoughts and words not so much that they are homosexual, but, that they are not heterosexual.
But, when you were not yet twenty and living in a small town where there is only the tiniest gay population — well, visible gay population anyway — then the sadness of the characters in DANCER FROM THE DANCE (and also Larry Kramer’s FAGGOTS, which was published the same year and was a despicable condemnation of the same subculture about which Holleran wrote) was incomprehensible.
Why, I wondered, did they not realize how fantastic it was to have sex available in such luxuriant excess; all those cocks to suck and men to fuck or by whom to be fucked? I spent years moving around, a haphazard searching for the bohemian, free spirited community to which I just KNEW I belonged. It took me many years to understand that no such counterculture of sensualists existed, for me it was no less fantasy than Oz.
There would, in my life and the lives of other gay men of my generation, however, be a twister, a terrible storm, just as cataclysmic and transformative as the one that carried Dorothy away: AIDS.
Holleran’s dancers — the ones who survived that plague — are, in essence, the aging, aged characters in THE KINGDOM OF SAND. A never named narrator moves to Florida to care for his elderly parents just when AIDS is decimating the gay community, especially in New York. Once he gets there, he stays, a spiritual enervation resulting in a languorous impassivity, until, in this novel he is in his 60s and confronting his own mortality, alone, having lost and left a cohort, and facing the increasingly difficult task of dealing with desire — in both the physical and emotional sense.
I have much in common with Holleran’s narrator; I am in my sixties, cared for an aging mother until her death, left my home in Frederick repeatedly only to return and grasp at whatever circumstances came my way that seemed like they might last into a future acceptable to society, and find myself now threatened with stasis — or stagnation — not unready for “The End” to be typed, struggling with continuing desires and vacillating between trying to achieve satiety and wishing that the lust, thirstiness would give me a break.
Holleran’s characters visit boatdocks and video booths to hook-up. Anonymous couplings between people who have come to a place solely to find sexual gratification. In such places, there is no artifice, none of the legerdemain of auditioning for a partner; there is just the cruise, the meeting of eyes and unspoken agreement to do whatever it is each wants to have done. It is at one of these spots that the narrator first met Earl, another single gay man, twenty years older than the narrator, and though there was no sex between them, a friendship developed.
But, it too — as it seems to me to be the case with all of the relationships in Holleran’s novels — is portrayed as a relationship the currency of which is a shared disappointment in themselves, in the lives they have. There is a foundational self-loathing in all the characters here in THE KINGDOM OF SAND, as there was in (mostly) all the characters in DANCER FROM THE DANCE; having never been able to fully embrace themselves, they are unable to do so with others. There is always a patina of regret, the plangent sigh of “if only”.
I’m not going to say I’ve gotten to my 60s without some remorse and self-reproach about what I did and didn’t do. But living in lamentation is not living at all. Holleran’s narrator, like me, grew up in an era and a place where being gay was dangerous and isolating and condemned. We reached adulthood and made ourselves new homes in new places where we might be safer and less alone and might even be celebrated. And then we were stopped dead in our tracks by AIDS. And the response of the government and much of society re-inforced whatever doubts we had about whether or not we were accepted. We had fought and marched and loved as freely and as openly as we could, and then we watched and grieved as so many of us died, and for so long, so little was done about it. And those of us who survived those wars — and make no mistake, they were life and death battles — find that within our own community there is vicious ageism, rampant racism, body shaming, republicans for fuck sake, transphobia, misogyny, gender role bigotry, and a heartbreaking level of homophobia. And then, COVID hit and it triggered everyone who lived through the AIDS plague (not that it’s yet cured), and if that wasn’t enough to sap one’s soul of any remaining light, the freaking gopzis stacked the courts and gerrymandered the country to death and managed — as a minority of haters and bigots — to undo many of the freedoms we literally died for. And they promise to do more to undo us.
So, I get it — there are certainly days when I want to keen and wail and rage at the universe. There are times when I have been told to “fuck off grandpa” and periods when the closest I got to getting off was the few minutes between first messaging with someone and when they blocked me.
But, while all of the above is a part of me, it does not define me. The trouble with the novel and its characters — for me — is that they go nowhere. Nothing really happens as the result of the narrator taking action. Because he doesn’t really. He is all reverie; and in the same way I find exhausting someone whose main conversational practice is to recount their sorrows, I found THE KINGDOM OF SAND to be a slog.
In fairness, perhaps it is due, in part anyway, to recognizing in the character my own tendency toward lugubrious hopelessness. I do not, now, in my sixties, want to be like the narrator, always recounting the past, disappointed in the plotlines of his life, sitting, waiting — in essence — for THE END.
We cant. Holleran used a quote from stanza eight, the final stanza of William Butler Yeats AMONG SCHOOL CHILDREN. I am inspired by the first stanza:
I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;
A kind old nun in a white hood replies;
The children learn to cipher and to sing,
To study reading-books and history,
To cut and sew, be neat in everything
In the best modern way—the children's eyes
In momentary wonder stare upon
A sixty-year-old smiling public man.
I think of myself as having played all those roles; I was student, I was teacher, and now, I am a sixty year old smiling man. I have much to smile about. And still much to learn.
I get, too, that there are rotten, lonely times. I have those days. But this is why I write. This is why I spend time with my amazing family and friends and Twitter-community. This is why I read. This is why I remind myself that the stuff of the universe is Love and Light. This is why I continue to act on my desires. This why, Here I am, Going.
If you would like to read a real review of Andrew Holleran’s work, and this novel in particular, follow this link to Garth Greenwell’s brilliant, insightful exegesis on them in The New Yorker. Garth is a particularly eloquent genius, whose own novels — WHAT BELONGS TO YOU, and CLEANNESS — are already classics.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/06/13/andrew-holleran-chronicles-life-after-catastrophe