The Mad Man, and a promise kept

[coyotegoth]

After half-a-dozen serious attempts over the years, I've finally finished reading- gotten through- Samuel R. Delany's The Mad Man. In case you've not read it, it's a novel filled with *extremely* vividly depicted, largely unhygenic sex scenes: this is a book where a protracted description of the protagonist's adventures at the Mineshaft is one of the *less* extreme sequences. (And at that, it's scarcely Delany's most extreme work: Hogg makes The Mad Man look like The Mill on the Floss by comparison.) The book lingers- and lingers- on the protagonist's sexual encounters with (often) homeless people, with every hygienic detail and scatological exploit rendered in some of the most vivid prose in the English language: I don't squick easily, and I've had to close the book and take a shudder break many, many times along the way.

Well, all right: since I obviously don't share the sexual predilictions of the protagonist (and, based on his interviews and nonfiction writings, Delany himself: I recognize some of the prose as quotations from his 1984: Selected Letters), this begs the question: since this *isn't* a turn-on for me, and since so very much of the book is devoted to these scenes, why read it? Why not just return it to the shelf as I did Hogg (a book whose depiction of profound amorality bothered me almost as much as its more extreme situations), and call it a day? I've thought about this quite a lot over the years; there are many reasons:

1) Delany: one of the most honored voices in science fiction (and justifiably so); a brilliant novelist and essayist. Even before I began to engage seriously with the book (that is, to force myself to read enough of the book that I *could* engage seriously with it), the sheer fact that Delany is the author forces me to take this work more seriously than I might otherwise. (Needless to say, this is not an absolute: I mentioned rejecting Hogg after a few pages; I have yet to get all the way through Dhalgren, an extremely highly regarded science fiction novel of Delany's, although for different reasons in that case.)

2) Personal history: I first encountered The Mad Man in 1995, while working at the LGBT Center in New York City; it was pressed upon me by Nick, a friend of mine who was a Radical Faerie. (To my surprise, he had no idea Delany was an SF author.) I told him I'd give it a lookover; Nick passed away not long after; this was the only book he ever recommended to me; I've never quite been able to let go of a promise to a dying friend.

3) General history: Much as Delany's The Motion of Light In Water provides a vivid depiction of early- to mid-60s New York City, The Mad Man provides a look at a different age: at New York City at the dawn of the age of AIDS, when the Mineshaft was still host to *extremely* unsafe sexual practices, and the virus itself was first a shadow on the horizon, then a night fear, then a plague. Simply as a (somewhat fictionalized) cultural history, there is a great deal of information here. (...damnit: now some vagrant corner of my mind is saying, "So, Professor Delany, what exactly was 'Wet Night' at the 'shaft like?" "All right, Jim, we'll discuss that next. Class, turn your books to page 182; Rebecca, begin reading from where it says, 'I stripped down to my shoes...'")

In all seriousness, though, this book does shed a great deal of anecdotal information on a now-vanished time. The novel itself, aside from its vivid evocation of a vanished New York, is:

-a satire on academia and its procedures (Delany has been a professor at several universities);

-a detective story (scarcely the most interesting aspect of the book for me; useful chiefly as a frame for Delany's meditations on New York, and gay sexuality, and AIDS);

-a meditation on AIDS, blending an almost documentary realism and more magic-realist tendencies (the book begins with a depiction of a demon, a complicated symbol in the novel).

At heart, the book is about how John Marr, the protagonist, comes to terms with his fear of AIDS: he comes to feel that he's done what he rationally can, given the far from complete information on the subject (this is set in the early/mid 80s), to mitigate his risks of infection (as one example, he refrains from unprotected anal intercourse). He is living in a mad time, and he has either protected himself sufficiently or he has not (there are times when I feel that the demon at the novel's beginning is a symbol of the fear of AIDS which became endemic in those times). At the novel's end, he is past fear, and simply living: a sane response (which society would no doubt deem insane: how can you carry on in such a situation?) to an insane time, he is the mad man.

(Random: per Wikipedia, Delany wrote The Mad Man as an angry response to a piece in which Harold Brodkey discussed his own life as a PWA, which began: "I have AIDS. I am surprised that I do..." and went on to discuss how the author's homosexual encounters were a passing phase, a long time ago, which surely should not be affecting him now. Delany (who in an interview in the supplemental materials for the documentary The Polymath estimated that he has had 50,000 sexual encounters in his life, nearly all with men) must have found this disingenuous in the extreme; his novel begins: "I do not have AIDS. I'm surprised that I don't...")