Can a book be a cause célèbre if you can’t talk about it? My first reaction when I read that an academic had called my first novel Aubade “Kenneth Martin’s cause célèbre” in his treatise on queer literature was “news to me ” or “paper refuses nothing. ” I still spend a lot of time picking apart my ingrained cynical reactions to get at truths that tend to be complicated. It’s that awful uneducated response I still indulge in too often, born of too much too soon (along with too little), or Northern Irish cynicism (born of deprivation), or even up-close acquaintance with the ethics of the English popular press (though that’s more of an excuse than a reason).
When I sold Aubade and moved to London, the English teacher who made my life bearable amidst the fear and torpor of the middle forms stayed in touch with me. She told me that the headmaster had announced in assembly that Upper Sullivan pupils were forbidden to read Aubade. What did he threaten them with? Expulsion? “It’s understandable,” May explained. “Think what an effect Aubade could have on a youngster.”
Think of the contortions that statement contains. She condoned me, a 16-year-old boy, writing and publishing the book (a thrill, echoing her own dreams), but not the content of the book.
The question of being prosecuted for obscenity was raised only once with me, and that was regarding my second novel Waiting for the Sky to Fall. The night I went to hear my publisher’s and agent’s verdict on the novel, they asked me to change the number of male brothels mentioned in the book to just one. I have no idea why that would have made a difference, and in the end they didn’t pursue the change.
Offhand I can’t think of anyone directly addressing the content of Aubade with me around publication time (certainly not at the queer parties to which I was introduced, where it was a given in those men’s lives). One lodger in a rooming house I briefly stayed in when I first moved to London dug out The People interview and suggested I move to the colonies.
The reporters or TV personalities who interviewed me mentioned Aubade’s content (a schoolboy falls in love with an older student). Dot dot dot. Nothing more. One reporter dared to suggest that we were over-encouraging our young people to express themselves. No elaboration. At most they called the book “powerful.” One TV interviewer said it was the kind of book she’d hide in a brown paper cover. Quickly move on to calling me an infant prodigy or an angry young man. But absolutely no discussion of homosexuality, because it was disgusting and illegal and I was jailbait.
And to prosecute an adolescent or his publisher for obscenity would raise more issues than anyone wanted to air in public. It went against the prevailing narrative about the vice of homosexuality, in which perverted adults corrupted the young, or cruised public lavatories. Rent boys didn’t count, because they were the lower orders, and public schoolboys grew out of it.
Can a book be a cause célèbre if you can’t talk about? Of course. Hard for me to admit it, since I live my life fighting the denial I learned in the land of denial. The most important things aren’t necessarily those you talk about. And a lot of people, including in the corridors of power, were certainly talking. But I didn’t know about it.

Brodsky says old men can only write a memoir or a diary. I tried a few sentences of a memoir, but making sense of the noise in my head felt too much like hard work. My days are full, I’m too busy for a diary. For years now I can only write if there’s at least a faint suggestion that someone might be interested in reading what I write. But a website blog needs content, which felt enough like an editor calling with an idea to get me going.
The posts come easily, though while I’m writing each post feels like the last I’ll have enough ideas to fill. I post Monday mornings. By Monday afternoon I’m writing another in my head. All I need is an idea and an opening sentence. But it always feels like the last idea I’ll have.
So far problems with self-disclosure haven’t stymied me: I’ve avoided thinking about it.
It helps that no matter how much tweaking I do after I write the first draft on Tuesday morning, I seem to forget what I’ve written when I close my laptop. I can’t obsess about what I’ve obliterated from memory. Which circumvents worrying about how I’ve violated that long list of things I’d forbidden myself to write about.
I’m a therapist. I’m trained not to talk about myself. Which is convenient, since I’m somewhat lacking in basic trust. Which is inconvenient, because it would seem to severely constrict my choice of things to write about. (When I used to write journalism I didn’t write about myself because I had nothing to say about myself, not because I didn’t want to write it.) I’ve told only one therapy client that I used to write fiction, and that’s because he’s a writer and I worried he might come across the republished books and think I’d been sneaky. (Decades ago, when I was doing a training internship, a client kept asking me to help him find an agent, so I suppose he knew I’d been a writer. In those days I was too green to handle the issue. I just ignored his requests.)
Who am I when I write? Therapist? Writer? I have no trouble calling myself a therapist because I have a license. I’m in considerable doubt about whether I’m a writer, not least because I don’t do it very often, not least because what I earn from writing wouldn’t feed a spoiled San Francisco mutt. Not that I earn much doing therapy. (How much I don’t earn from therapy was on my list of things not to write about.)
My truth is that the urge to write words that might get published is akin to a porn star exposing every orifice for a close-up. Once I start it’s hard to stop and I don’t obsess about the consequences. Writers (and porn stars, I think) need that sliver of ice in their hearts that Graham Greene referred to. I have that sliver, but mostly regarding myself rather than other people, at least nowadays. There’s a certain callous willingness to exhibit ourselves, and we’re only harmed by it if we think we are. Humans resemble onions with an infinite core. No matter how publicly revealed or degraded we are, however many layers are exposed, there is always more that no one will ever know. We’re only vulnerable if we think we are.
I couldn’t have written my first novel if I’d allowed myself to think about the consequences (what people would think of me) if it got published. I couldn’t have written my first novel if I’d allowed myself to think about the consequences if it didn’t get published. (Why am I indulging in this irritating mannerism that Didion uses to pad her sparse pages?) These days I’m more willing to admit to myself that there will be consequences. I’ll deal with it.

Stephen Sondheim said he’d have trouble if you asked him to write a love song, but no trouble at all if you asked him to write a love song about (here I’m inventing the details) a woman in a green hat sitting alone on a bar stool in a dive on 54rd Street at 5:45 p.m. on a Thursday and repeatedly glancing at her cellphone.
I’m horrified when my writer clients tell me the hoops they have to go through to pitch an idea to the New York markets, the tiers of editors who have to approve it, the way writers are forced to shape a pitch to match editors’ attempt to depict a reality they’re inventing. “A second-rate boxer,” a London Sunday Times editor would tell me on the phone. I’d call a boxing magazine to get a suggestion, call the man to ask him if he’d cooperate and the date of his next fight, then call the editor back to assign a photographer. (Actually that was one of the rare stories that had to be rewritten. “It’s reported,” the editor told me on the phone. “It needs to be written.” That’s all.) Usually the story went into the magazine or paper with not a comma changed, not a fact checked as far as I knew. Oh, a subeditor once called me for an extra line to fit the space.
So once upon a time I was spoiled as a journalist just as I’d once been spoiled as a fiction writer. Since I wasn’t used to generating ideas I stopped writing when I moved to the U.S. and the requests for my writing dried up. (I did other things: eleven years in under- and grad schools, years of writing psych research papers in that awful clunky pseudoscientific jargon psychologists use—nearly as bad as the impenetrable stuff English Lit majors at Berkeley turn out these days. Enough to stop anyone writing decently.)
I’d written nothing for years apart from a few radio perspectives and an unsold piece about trying to learn Russian, until Jay Jenkins called and told me he wanted to republish Waiting for the Sky to Fall, which of course required a new intro from its not-yet-extinct author. (He added republishing Aubade seemingly as an afterthought.) He suggested a website, a website needed a blog, which needed content in case anyone ever wanted to read it. I’d thought of blogging before, maybe calling it The Psycho Therapist, but blocked on the issue of confidentiality. What my clients tell me stays told only to me. I don’t like the idea of using even disguised clients to illustrate therapy issues. I don’t even like the idea of discussing therapy issues. I’m too involved in the day-to-day details, working in the trenches. (Which is one of the reasons I have GRUNT tattooed on my left calf.)
And I was trained not to talk about myself. MORE TO COME

Which means I might as well have called this post The Years of Not Writing. Isn’t most (all?) good writing a response to what our betters have written? “The paradox is that the more indebted the artist,” Joseph Brodsky wrote, “the richer he is.”
I remember doggedly working my way through Dostoevsky in Penguin Classics when I was 20, living my own version of Raskolnikov’s life on the streets of London, not Peterburg. (His name is tattooed in Cyrillic on my neck.) I’ve heard writers talk about their immediate connection to Dostoevsky, but at that age I read to make sense of the sentences, nothing more. I’d have needed help to appreciate his wild comedy of tragic humans in extremis.
At least I had an idea that I was missing something important, a residue of that bookworm child back in Ulster. What followed in my twenties was a classic defense: When I realized that I couldn’t match my early success, I stopped respecting what I knew I couldn’t do. Or mostly convinced myself that it wasn’t worthy of respect. As a journalist in London I read only for information. I read about books.
As a student in my thirties in New York I took literature courses for a requirement or an easy A. I knew what to say about the books but I read without pleasure. Though I remember one day sitting on a bench in the sun on the Columbia campus, grinning ear to ear as I turned the pages of One Hundred Years of Solitude. I’d rediscovered that good books can be fun, which means that reading had become a chore. But Solitude is the most accessible and instantly rewarding of great books, daring a reader not to be delighted.
After I moved to San Francisco in 1981 I tried to make up for the years in school by “living,” a lot of it repetitive and wasteful. I’ve calmed down a bit, but I can rarely focus on a book for more than 90 minutes. Part of the trouble always was that I thought something great was happening someplace else and I’d better go and find it, though I rarely knew where to look.
What got me back to reading was my rediscovery of Europe after the years in school. For a while I wanted to be an old man in Prague, where I’d first been in 1968 to cover the Russian invasion, 30 or 40 years later maybe wandering on the islands in the Vltava with a big dog. So I gravitated to the language and its literature. Russian language and literature were just a hop away, and I’ve stayed there, feeling like that 20-year-old struggling in a London night class with the Russian alphabet on the flimsy pages of a textbook imported from Moscow.
Fiction leaves you behind if you don’t keep up, though not as far behind as poetry leaves you. These days I tend towards nonfiction, towards what I can or could do. I’d still rather read Brodsky on Mandelstam’s poetry than try to truly read the poetry, but Nadezhda is totally my cup of tea.

After Aubade was published I rejected it; when it was first republished a quarter century later I acknowledged its worth. After I wrote Waiting I defended it; now I’m wary about telling my new publisher how I really feel about it.
I can’t think of myself as an adult when Aubade was first published. Just turned 18, my editor Jack McDougal treated me as an adult, listening with apparent respect to my spoutings about Art and Literature and all the great books I was going to write. I can only think he hid any doubts because he truly believed in my talent, and he’d made it clear he wanted a second book as soon as possible. In truth I was whistling in the dark, hiding my fears and misgivings, though I knew how difficult writing had become for me. I reacted against Aubade’s raw emotionality. It told too much about me. I was a teenager, I wanted to be cool.
As I wrote Waiting I had to believe it was going to be a success, which entailed it being a “good” book. After the literary success of Aubade I wasn’t trying to attempt a commercial potboiler. (Just as well, since for years I remained remarkably naïve about the basic concerns of the popular reading public: when a Sunday Times editor told me he was assigning me a story about a miser who’d died with a lot of money in the bank because people always liked to read stories about money, it was news to me.) When I wrote Waiting, I was in the position I’d been in writing Aubade, except I lived in a room in Goldhurst Terrace, London, rather than Dufferin Avenue, Bangor, Northern Ireland: penniless, rejecting what little help anyone offered, with no options I was aware of except to become a successful writer. In Dufferin Avenue, I believed absolutely in what I was writing (or did I? some nagging memory just surfaced); in Goldhurst Terrace I used sleight of mind to ignore my doubts about the quality of what I was writing.
The respectful or enthusiastic reviews of Waiting outnumbered the bad, but secretly I took the bad to heart, because Aubade‘s ecstatic reviews were missing this time. But I stubbornly hid my doubts; if I downplayed Aubade’s qualities, Waiting might seem less disappointing. So when someone introduced me to the playwright Terence Rattigan at a party as “Kenneth Aubade Martin,” I corrected him with “Kenneth Waiting for the Sky to Fall Martin.” Either way, Rattigan barely acknowledged me.
Over the years I started to assume that Waiting’s bad reviews were valid. I circled the book for a long time before I picked it up again after 50 years. I’ll finally admit that reading it was an excruciating experience. I can’t forgive those characters for their bored indifference to the mind’s riches. Today I have young therapy clients who feel the same ennui, and I can understand and empathize with them. But I find it hard to forgive myself for writing that book that reflected the way I once felt. I’m not sure why.

These days my hero is Andrey Platonov. A few others of transcendent talent who suffered under the Soviet boot taught me humility about writing and the rest of life, and helped me gain perspective on my talent and efforts. (I just read A.O. Scott’s review of The Place Beyond the Pines, in which he mentions Bradley Cooper’s restless and resourceful talent. To be called restless and resourceful is the highest praise I’d ever aspire to.)
I’ve always been embarrassed by Aubade and Waiting for the Sky to Fall, but for different reasons and at different times.
Twenty-five years ago an agent who had the idea he could sell the movie rights to one of my novels (he couldn’t) told me I seemed to be embarrassed when he mentioned Aubade. I was. I was squirming, but now I can’t figure out why, at that particular time. I’d been embarrassed many years before, to the point where I even denied writing it, because in my twenties I was trying on a heterosexual identity and had internalized a lot of homophobia. It wasn’t until I moved to the U.S. when I was 30 that I got caught up in the spirit of the times and fully came out. Except when for some reason it wasn’t convenient. As a journalist I trod an uneasy path between denial and making a point of choosing gay men to write about, their sexuality a given only worth mentioning in passing.
Yup, it’s complicated. A 16-year-old boy who wrote a book that gave comfort to many might have been a gay icon. If I’d been rich, or protected by a powerful family, or didn’t have to earn a “respectable” living. I was reckless, but not that reckless. I’d known that writing a gay novel was a huge risk in that climate where queers were still regarded as perverted things, but I also sensed the queerness was what would make the book get noticed and maybe published. At 16 I was desperate. I’d left school, I’d missed going back for an A-level year to get into university and there was no money to support me at university even if I got a full scholarship. There were no options. Everything depended on the book getting published. (I benefited from the law that may help a cowardly writer seem brave, the law of delayed consequences. You weren’t immediately held accountable for what you committed to paper. In the days of www. that law may no longer apply.)
And when I got the advance there was no question that I’d get on the boat to England. Let me tell you what I was escaping. A sister made a weak attempt to keep me at home. “If you stay you’d have everything you want,” she said. “Enough money for your own razor and your own radio.” MORE TO COME