THE JOURNALS OF SPALDING GRAY
Edited by Nell Casey. Knopf, New York.
368 pp., $28.95 cloth
Spalding Gray spit it all out in his monologues, right? At his wooden desk with his glass of water and steady gaze, he stripped and came clean, confided and flashed, didn’t he? Yes and no. The truth, whatever that is, was the raw material of his theatre. The truth was something to fling around the way Jackson Pollock used paint. In The Journals of Spalding Gray, there is plenty of truth—paint but without the artful flinging. Still, anyone interested in Gray’s work will want to read this book.
Kathie Russo, the woman Gray spent the last decade or so of his life with, offered his journals to editor Nell Casey, a founder of The Moth storytelling series, so in some sense the volume is an authorized account. In compliance with Russo’s wishes, Casey omitted passages Russo thought too hurtful to herself and her three children (including Forrest and Theo, her two sons with Gray)—little matter, I should think, given the sting that remains, aimed especially at the three central women in his life: Elizabeth LeCompte, Renée Shafransky and Russo herself.
Earlier this year, in a critical appreciation of Gray that appeared in these pages, I discussed his relationships with women and men. He was a great seducer, and he was needy, and that is catnip to lots of women. I wrote, too, about a yearning for the male body and for approval by men that rises off Gray’s stories like an aura or a fog. Gray wanted to own up to his desires, and in his work you feel him making that effort. But the struggle is far more explicit in the journals—so much so that Casey makes revelations about Gray’s fluid sexuality a selling point of the book.
Fair enough. According to the journals, Gray had sex all the time, recording it the way other people keep diaries of meals or golf games. He isn’t detailed. The notations are more like notches on a belt or proof he’s alive: I fuck, therefore I am. Often we don’t know where sex takes place or what led up to it or how he felt during or after it. There are few sensual descriptions of his partners. When he recalls them fondly, it’s not in a sexual context; it is a visit to his grandmother that prompts perhaps the tenderest entry about a woman: “I put her sweater on her and felt her old flesh and bone arms which felt good they were soft and still very strong. They had a kind of beauty to them like an old tree.”
Gray adds a footnote or two about the mysteriousness and capaciousness of human sexuality. But apart from a description of an experience in an Amsterdam bathhouse, from his thinly fictionalized autobiographical novel Impossible Vacations, he doesn’t write about sex with men. He wishes to be desired by them, and he is excited and discomfited by the pull. It’s an urge he indulges but more often resists, maybe less for the meaning it has to him personally than for his reservations about the social category of homosexual.
Reading this book, you feel the one-sided nature of memoir—of all writing, really. You feel you are hearing one side of a conversation, and you wish you could eavesdrop on the women in Gray’s life. They loved him. They were loyal, and you can see how they would be—he’s coming on to them all the time, so it must mean desire, right, or love? Every so often, a female voice filters in. In 1993, Gray has confessed to Shafransky not only his affair with Russo but that Russo has given birth to his son. Shafransky and Gray are separated, but she is still directing him in Gray’s Anatomy. He writes, “…she asked me and this is a big and important question—why was it that she spent so much time making a scum bag cad look so good on stage?”
It’s a good question because it has no answer and it has many answers, some concerning Shafransky’s psychology, which we glimpse through Gray’s versions of her. Never mind. People do what they do. You feel the women in his life were compelled by his creativity more than anything else, and it’s understandable, given the charismatic nature of his stage presence and his commitment to hard work. All three collaborated with him: LeCompte during their years at the Performing Garage and the Wooster Group, Shafransky during the heyday of his solo monologues, and Russo by bringing out two posthumous texts. Gray didn’t sound like anyone else: He sounded like a wave advancing and curling into itself before knocking you down. Not all his monologues are consistent. Maybe only in Swimming to Cambodia did he concoct a balanced cocktail of big and little history, big and little murder. He reported on what he knew, producing a comedy of perspective, or of self-interest, depending on how you think about it, a comedy summarized by Mel Brooks in his definition of theatre genres: “Tragedy is when I have a hangnail. Comedy is when you fall off a cliff and die.”
Chief among the pleasures of the journals are snatches of the wry, incisive commentary that marks Gray’s finished works. In 1986, while performing Swimming to Cambodia in Australia, he’s disappointed the audience isn’t laughing. A friend tells him he has “an ironic sense of Jewish humor” that Australians don’t get, and Gray starts to think about how he didn’t have a sense of humor before coming to New York. New York saved him. New York made him Jewish, in the sense that he is interested in meaninglessness and the pain of language. He is addicted to language at the same time he seeks to escape its confining definitions.
He sometimes sounds naïve. In 2000, he wrote, “It is not enjoyable or easy for me to have a non-narrated private experience and I’ve always known that.” Okay, but the fact is that everyone narrates. It is the nature of consciousness—the inner voice that sounds like it’s coming from an outside source. Everyone exists in the monologue form, but not everyone is a compelling narrator, and that is where Gray comes in, layering memory and rumination in a way that little by little draws us into a story so detailed and candid it feels like it’s about us.
Gray is crazier and more tedious in the journals than in his finished work. What the journals illuminate most pointedly, perhaps, is the difference between art-making and things as they really are. Gray doesn’t discuss his performance pieces much—he kept separate notebooks (not published here) for each monologue as it evolved. He did not create for the page. (Most playwrights don’t, foremost among them, Shakespeare.) Gray created for the body and from the body. His pieces grew like collages as he experimented with audiences, mixed up time sequences and integrated improvs. But when he considers his process in the journals, the remarks are startling, and you see the perfect fit of mind to form. In 1990, he writes, “When I was writing about our summers in Jerusalem [Rhode Island] the order of the memory seemed random as I’m sure it is. The memories would appear to me as if on a wheel and to set them in print would be to stop the wheel but to speak them in different order each night would be to be free to spin the wheel until the right combination came up and what is the right combination? Finding the right combination is finally some intuitive combination of psychological insight and aesthetic form.”
He is saying that memory set out in a line, the way it is recorded in a journal, is the enemy of story—and few have been in a better position to know.
Laurie Stone is the author of the memoir My Life as an Animal, and is at work on a collection of essays.
