The Fire Next Time

By Dan Graham

In chapter one of his new book Stand By Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation, the Historian Jim Downs writes of the largest massacre of gay people in U.S. history. It was on June 24, 1973 at the Up Stairs Lounge in New Orleans. It was a fire, intentionally set on the ground floor of the bar as a gay church group met upstairs. Thirty two people died.  It took a long time to identify the bodies because they were burned so badly, and to this day, two bodies remain unidentified.  The fire and deaths were met by a largely indifferent public.  I was just one year old in 1973.

That could have been it, a piece of history forgotten by even the most demonstrative queens among us, but the events of last Sunday morning at another nightclub, the Pulse in Orlando, Florida, changed all that.  Forty nine people dead in three hours and a hail of bullets at the hands of a monster. It was a sobering thing to wake up to, especially as Angelenos began to gather in West Hollywood, just down the street from the Soup, to march in or observe the annual gay pride parade.

There has been a long and rambling conversation this week in person and online about the purpose of this attack - was it terrorism, homophobia, the result of lax gun laws and the proliferation of mass casualty assault rifles, inept or uncaring politicians, religion?

Can't it be all of those things?

I, like many of you, soaked in it for days. I was stunned, tearful, and finally angry. And then it came to me - James Baldwin.

"God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water, the fire next time!"

I went digging around my house for my old dog-eared copy of The Fire Next Time, Baldwin's searing indictment of his country, a country that couldn't or wouldn't accept him. It's the one book that probably best captures my state of mind after this catastrophe. 

I watched talking heads on television ask me to pray and I seethed with rage. Many of them had previously gone on record as being against the very freedoms that gay people had only recently been granted. I know they'll do nothing.  Prayer is all they have; they lack the courage or will to do anything else.

You might be sick of people working this out in writing. I'm not. I can't read enough essays and opinion pieces, news reporting, and Facebook posts.  Thirty two people died in a gay bar just 40 years ago, and no one cared.  So I'll take the help from well meaning people who donate blood, or money for funerals, or simply a social media post in solidarity.

I'll think about Baldwin as I reread this book, and how disappointed he'd be by the present day - the problems of racism and homophobia, and how we thought we had turned a corner but it's still here, still burning.

A Terrible Interview or a Wonderful Wit? Evelyn Waugh and the BBC

By Christina K. Holmes
 

We Book Soupers love us some YouTube clips, especially anything nostalgic or from a different era (hey, we are in the book business after all).  When Eveleyn Waugh's The Loved One was voted as our June (Book) Soup of the Month, I didn't waste a minute using my  Googling powers to see what I could dig up on the cantankerous Brit that fellow author James Lee Milne once described as "the nastiest tempered man in England."

What I found was this BBC interview conducted in 1953, considered to be the "most ill natured interview ever broadcast" according to the caption, though credit for that may fall to the interviewer rather than the author himself.  And as for comparing it to interviews in our current times, I'm sure we could all come up with worse (Kanye West v. every interviwer ever comes to mind).

Presenting our June Pick for (Book) Soup of the Month - Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One!

When he wrote The Loved One, a short satirical novel set in 1948 Los Angeles, Evelyn Waugh was, indeed, in Hollywood. The popular British author, known for Scoop and a Handful of Dust, had come west to talk about a possible film deal for his master work, Brideshead Revisited. The deal fell through, and Waugh clashed with what he perceived to be LA’s overall lack of propriety. He had a lot of complaints, and he was very inspired.

The Loved One follows Waugh’s surrogate, Dennis Barlow, a young-ish British poet hot off his first realpublishing success. Dennis heads to Hollywood, where he takes- and immediately leaves- a screenwriting gigat a studio, soon after finding employment at a pet crematory, “The Happier Hunting Ground.” Here, Dennis makes house calls to the rich and famous, disposing of their furry dead at outsize expense. But he isn’t the only expat in town, and the older, wealthier British set view his morbid occupation as reflecting poorly on their proud Hollywood community of actors and writers. They urge him to refocus his energy. The thing is, Dennis likes his new job. A lot. Dennis’ fascination with death causes him to wander Whispering Glades, a pristine all-service burial ground and mortuary.

Waugh’s portrait of Glades was clearly taken from Forest Lawn Memorial Park, which he was fascinated with, and which indeed played the part in the book’s totally restructured and poorly-reviewed 1965 film adaptation. It’s here at Whispering Glades that Dennis meets the beautiful and cosmetically gifted Aimee Thanatogenos (literally “beloved, born of death”) with whom he becomes infatuated. Aimee has an infatuation of her own: her boss Mr. Joyboy, a simpering mortician known for imprinting his bodies (called “Loved Ones”) with a blissful smile. Dennis attempts to woo Aimee by sending her famous poems he didn’t write. Mr. Joyboy attempts to woo Aimee by sending her the most radiant corpses to decorate.

 The Loved One provides a searing, viciously observant send-up of 1940’s Los Angeles. While peripherally involving the film scene, Waugh focuses instead on a larger coagulating set of morality and values, a culture of “packaging” people, and indulgent obsessions with beauty, death, and, above all, beauty in death. It’s not only Hollywood that finds itself under fire, but the funeral and mortuary industry, a business portrayed as invasive, exploitative, artificial, and spiritually desolate. Yet, for all its garishness, Whispering Glades exudes gaudy, mystical charm, and like Dennis, the reader cannot resist taking a closer look.

I first read The Loved One in a high school satire lit class alongside Gulliver’s Travels and Candide. As a native Virginian who had never seen anything but the east coast, I was distinctly aware that many of the references to LA culture and geography were far beyond me. I longed to be in on the joke. Five years later, as I journeyed west on a weeklong road trip, I cracked my copy open and found myself again brimming with ghoulish curiosity. It was my first literary picture of Hollywood (and, yes, I still wanted to move here after reading it).

The Loved One is a truly unique book about Los Angeles, written by an outsider who was briefly an insider, a house guest who may have sent a “Thank You” note to his hosts but secretly kept a list of grievances. The book’s success in America baffled Waugh, who perhaps thought we didn’t have the ability to laugh at ourselves, that we didn’t fully understand what he was saying, or a little of both.  While sometimes referred to in criticisms as Waugh’s “hate letter” to America, The Loved One is also unbelievably fun and silly. It’s a crisp, dishy work from a writer at the top of his game.

-Donald, Book Soup Bookseller 

Purchase your copy HERE