Richard Amory Enjoys Wit of "Sunday"

Ordinarily, collections of short stories turn me a bit off – I have to shift gears too often, and always end up wondering what happened afterward – but John Coriolan is an exception. Bright, witty, sparkling, his book is a romp from beginning to end.

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John Coriolan Seven Ways from Sunday. The Other Traveller, New York: 1972. $1.95

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The first story, "What Are Friends for?", though not my favorite, sets the pace for what is to follow and clues the reader in on what Coriolan is doing. He moves with incredible rapidity, glancing only occasionally inside of his characters’ heads (there’s no law that say she has to), and concentrates instead, ordinarily, on surface action. Once or twice he does call time-out and gets into some heads – "Been There" is a beautifully ironic switcheroo about an uptight middle-class black kid experiencing the same old conflict with his balls, -- but mostly he stands at quite some distance from his people, and forces the reader to draw his own conclusions. The motivations are there, of course, for Coriolan is not a shallow writer.

The refreshing thing about him is that he presents homosexuality as a given, as if nobody in the world at large gave a particular damn about whether one was or wasn’t, and then goes on to the real problems of any sexual being – namely, love and fucking. I like that, since I get tired sometimes of the endless dissections of what it feels like to be gay in a straight world. (I know where it hurts, buddy, and I don’t need anyone to feed my paranoia). There is a mind-bending scene, for instance, in "The Gardener’s Helper" where Mrs. Baugh, returning to the house for a forgotten glove, looks out the window to see three men all tangled up together by the swimming pool; she observes with disgust that they are naked and having glorious sex, but doesn’t make a big thing out of it and probably goes on about her business. Unreal, but once you buy the initial premise of the author, refreshing.

The enemy, Coriolan is saying, is Victorianism, not straights per se. I can dig that.

Again, in "The Three-spoked Wheel," my favorite, Coriolan takes a group of tired, dispirited, middle-aged homosexuals, each one an Everyman, and shows what marvelous things happen to them when a handsome, loose, giving-type Canuck named Orlando walks into their midst. Orlando happily does them all, spreading thereby a considerable amount of joy. Before he gets busted and deported to Quebec, the message is clear – giving is good, and lots of fun, and profoundly revolutionary besides. There should be more revolutionaries like Orlando.

The longest piece in the collection is "A Serpent in the Garden," an epistolary thing like Fanny Hill and Pamela yet, and a wry satirical double cliché – it is pure Restoration, deliberately written in the pulsing-purple-cockhead school of John Cleland and his army of disastrous imitators, and anybody who can poke light fun at Cleland et al. gets a bouquet of heartfelt roses from me. ("Incomparable tool" – "massive anomaly" – "palpable sovereignty" – indeed!)

Wit is sadly lacking in most gay fiction, for various reasons, and Coriolan’s book is therefore doubly enjoyable. Very sly, very observant, and well worth your time.

- Richard Amory