Cleanness

Review

Greenwell’s follow up to What Belongs to You feels more distinctly like a collection of short stories. I picked the book off my shelf before heading to work, unwilling to scrape my brain against Dostoevsky on my 50-minute morning metro ride. Small Rain, my first Greenwell and the follow up to this book, knocked me flat on my back, and I enjoyed What Belongs very much. So much that I’ve been saving Cleanness for just an occasion as this, a need for something I knew would capture me.

Cleanness feels much more a collection than a novel. Of the nine stories (split into three subcollections, only one of them titled, II. Loving R.), my favorites are Mentor, Cleanness, and The Little Saint. Though all of them are good, and the only one that felt slightly out of place was the endcap of part I, Decent People.

In searching for how to describe the stories, the phrase sexual politics keeps coming to mind, but it is so woefully wrong for this use. Godspodar describes a hookup with an older man, who the narrator gives himself over to temporarily saying, “I want to be nothing.” Later, in The Little Saint, the narrator muses internally while he acts as the dominant partner to a younger man, who proclaims, “I want to be nothing.” This story has an extended thought on a specific kind of objectification that sometimes happens, the want to be an object for someone else’s use. Words that strung together seem blushworthy, or maybe I just think they would make some people blush, though seem common enough in queer communities. Perhaps I think this because in other contexts, to be nothing is a valuation, to be worthless. Whereas in giving yourself to someone, to be the object that makes them shake with pleasure, is so opposite.

Where Godspodar and The Little Saint are stories about sex and the complicated feelings that happen when one has sex with strangers, Mentor has our narrator witnessing the crushing despair of unrequited love. It is the story that begins the book, and so as I read it on the metro at 6 o’clock one morning on my way to work, I wondered if I’d made a grave mistake. It had me almost in tears, as I saw words I’d written in journals over the years burn on the page. A young student describes to our narrator his overwhelming love for his friend, and how once uttered it destroys something.

I don’t know, G. said, answering his own question, I wanted it to end, I guess, I didn’t want to go back to being so miserable; or maybe it was something else, maybe I did have some hope, not that he would feel what I felt but that he would let me give it to him somehow, that he would receive it. If I could just kiss him, he said, his voice stripped now and small, if I could kiss him just once, that would be enough, I wouldn’t want anything more.

Paragraphs later, G. describes that the boy he felt so much love for doesn’t understand why G. said anything at all. “I was wrong to tell him, G. said, I shouldn’t have said anything, along with everything else now I’m so sorry for what I said.” (emphasis mine.) Words I have written over and over. Is this something everyone feels? Horrible to read, and yet so warm. Because, like G., one would not trade any of the feelings, even if in the depths of them you say you might. “I don’t want to feel it less, he said, I don’t want it to stop, I don’t want it to seem like it wasn’t real.” Just extraordinary.

I could probably meander around for a long time about the book. Outside of Mentor, no story seized me in the same way that Small Rain did, yet I enjoyed all of them. Garth writes sex between men terribly well (and a good thing since he writes and teaches on the writing of sex). You can go from tantalized to alarmed in just a few sentences, and it’s good to have these titillations spacing out the rawer stories like Mentor and The Little Saint (which is more complicated than just a story of a hookup) and An Evening Out.

I’d recommend this to anyone looking for queer and specifically gay literature.

Notes

Emphasis mine unless otherwise noted.

Mentor

• p7 - He was talking about Frank O’Hara, I understood, whose poems had shocked most of my students, as I intended them to.
• p14 - There was a deck that looked out over the mountain, and on the first night we sat there late, talking and drinking, laughing in a way I only ever laughed when I was with them. it was a perfect night, he said, with the long weekend still stretching before them, when have I ever been so happy. There came over his face at this an expression of such longing I had to look away.
• p15 - . . . But I didn’t know, I hadn’t seen anything, and as I sat there I felt something I had never felt before, it was like I was falling into something, like water though it wasn’t really like water, it was like a new element, G. said. . . . The experience he had had was my own, I felt, I recognized it exactly, and as he spoke I felt myself falling also, into his story and his feeling both, I was trapped in what he did.
  • TB: I nearly cried on the metro reading this story.
• p19 - I don’t know, G. said, answering his own question, I wanted it to end, I guess, I didn’t want to go back to being so miserable; or maybe it was something else, maybe I did have some hope, not that he would feel what I felt but that he would let me give it to him somehow, that he would receive it. If I could just kiss him, he said, his voice stripped now and small, if I could kiss him just once, that would be enough, I wouldn’t want anything more.
• p20 - Why did you tell me, he said, I’ve lost something too, you’ve taken something from me too. And I had, I realized, I had ruined so much, for him and for me. I was wrong to tell him, G. said, I shouldn’t have said anything, along with everything else now I’m so sorry for what I said. But there’s nothing I can do, I have to live with it, like I have to live with everything else I feel.
  • TB: Some of the most familiar words I have ever read. Astounding.
• p21 - I could see him recoiling from me . . . I don’t want to feel it less, he said, I don’t want it to stop, I don’t want it to seem like it wasn’t real. It would all be for nothing if that happened, he said, I don’t want it to be a dream. I want it to be real, all of it.

Gospodar

• p32-33 - As there was for me, the intense pleasure I’ve never been able to account for, that can’t be accounted for mechanically; the pleasure of service. I’ve sometimes thought, or more darkly the pleasure of being used, the exhilaration of being made an object that had been lacking in sex with R., though that had had its own pleasures, pleasures I longed for but that had in no way compensated for the lack of this. I want to be nothing, I had said to him, and it was a way of being nothing, or next to nothing, a convenience, a tool.
  • TB: See penultimate story The Little Saint for the inverse of this.

Cleanness

• p88 - I always forgave R. when he didn’t appear, I accepted any excuse he offered, whatever my annoyance I never complained. I wanted to think of this as patience, but really I knew it was fear; I would push him away if I demanded too much.
• p91 - . . .he liked stories in which I was a little ridiculous, in which students got the best of me. It had the effect I wanted, which was his laugh, or less his laugh than the transformation his face underwent when he smiled.
  • TB: Such warmth in writing this recognition.
• p103 - I thought: we can never be sure of what we want, I mean the authenticity of it, of its purity in relation to ourselves.
• p108 - . . .but also things that seem whole, the sands of Africa or Greece; it was moving the very lands, I thought, however slowly, nothing was solid, nothing would stay put, and I held on more tightly to R. and drove into him more fiercely, drawing from him those noises of pain and of need, noises maybe of pleasure too. I wanted to root into him, even as the wind said all rootedness was a sham, there were only passing arrangements, makeshift shelters and poor harbors, I love you, I thought suddenly in that rush that makes so much seem possible, I love you, anything I am you have use for is yours.

The Frog King

• p132 - I took my time, I put the raisins in my mouth one by one, thinking a wish for each, though all my wishes were the same wish.

Harbor

• p159 - It might be possible, I thought about the other writer, he looked at me sometimes in a way that made me think maybe I could have him, or he could have me, we could have a little romance, though that wasn’t what I wanted; I wanted something brutal, which was what frightened me, I wanted to go back to what R. had lifted me out of.

The Little Saint

• p174 - . . .I had looked at his profile often; he was always online, for months I had been fascinated by him. It was a kind of profile common enough in the States or Western Europe but I had never seen one like it here; it claimed that anyone who wanted to could fuck him, that he wanted it rough, that his only demand was to be fucked bare, he wanted as many loads as he could get. No limits whore, it said, in good pornographic English, with a Bulgarian translation beneath.
• p176 - People always lie, he would say to me later, why bother to ask, why should I believe them, why should I care.
• p187 - When you’re being used like that you become an object, which is the pleasure of it, your only role is to be the best object you can be, to keep your lips wrapped around your teeth, to curl your tongue to make the right aperture, now tighter and now more ample; you have to become a hole, which was what he had said he wanted. I went easy at first, since most men say they want it but they don’t really, they gag or choke and they’ve had enough; it’s another fantasy of themselves, what they think they want they don’t actually want.
• p196 - Finally he laid his head on my chest. Don’t be like that, he said again as I put my arms around him. Do you see? You don’t have to be like that, he said. You can be like this.
• TB: Really interesting stuff here re: sexual politics and roles / identity that happen in sex with strangers, probably all sex. Good to compare with Gospodar where the narrator is the submissive partner.

An Evening Out

• p215 - . . .I felt myself swept by a wave of happiness, my face stretched stupidly in a grin. I must look foolish, I thought, but there was so much pleasure in being a fool, why had I spent so much of my life guarding against it?
• p216 - Maybe he thinks it was an accident, I thought, maybe it was an accident, maybe there’s no need for shame, even though I knew that wasn’t the case, or maybe he was so drunk he would forget it and then the only shame would be a private shame, the shame I was accustomed to, the shame that felt like home.
  • TB: emphasis in original.
• TB: Garth loving the word “abnegation” in this story, I believe I’ve seen it three separate times. A word I’ve never heard before, I interpreted it to be a cousin to abdication, which it sort of is. Apparently it means self-denial or renunciation of your own interests.