Late in the Season (26 page)

According to the little ledger, wherein I’ve listed my works and their publication since 1971,
Late in the Season
was immediately preceded by the second of my
Window Elegies
poems and by three short stories, “Teddy the Hook,” “Spinning,” and “A Stroke,” all of which were quickly published, the first two in
Blueboy
magazine, the third in a literary quarterly no longer extant. The stories later appeared in my popular 1983 collection,
Slashed to Ribbons in Defense of Love.
For the next year, following the completion of the novel, I wrote only poems, essays, and book reviews. Obviously, the novel satisfied me for a while.

That
Late in the Season
came so easily is due to three factors. First, I knew the book’s Fire Island Pines background and so didn’t have to research it, as I’d had to for the previous two, much longer, more detailed books,
The Mesmerist
and
The Lure.
I’d lived at the Pines as a summer resident for the past five years and knew the place as well as anyone in terms of its flora, fauna, and seasonal change. Given how small it was, even if you included nearby Cherry Grove and Water Island, geographically and, in terms of population, it was nothing more really than a small town: easily comprehended and equally easy to render.

It was this ambience of an American small town with a twist that I was trying to convey in the book. As well as the idea of a “summer place,” a partly stable, partly transient community intrinsically different from other resorts around the world.

A second factor was that I felt strongly impelled by the very autobiographical story of the novel; impelled to write it out in the hope that I might somehow understand why the romance had gone so totally awry, despite all of my conscious efforts.

The end of that relationship caused me great anguish. And, coming as it had at exactly the same time as the extraordinary popular and critical (one might say “cultural”) success of my novel
The Lure,
had caused a strange psychic rift to open in me: a conflict between what I believed life was capable of bringing me and what I was experiencing. I sensed some screwy equation between artistic success and failed love that I kept praying was not or would not become a life pattern. I remember one afternoon when, within a five-minute span, I received incredibly good career news and the worst possible news about my love affair. I desperately needed to heal that inner rift before it turned into severe depression, schizophrenia, whatever. As I’d done for over a decade, I once more turned to writing as a tool for self-healing, for self-redefinition.

A few words about this romance. Like the one in the novel, it was a triangle, and, like the young woman in the novel, I was the third party intruding into a gay marriage. Yes, I was Stevie—not Jonathan. Unlike Stevie, I wasn’t aware a marriage existed until I was in very deep. But like her, once I was aware of it, I came to believe it was not a strong relationship and would not survive work on my part to end it. Like Stevie, once I’d made that clear to the young man I loved and he expressed a wish to continue the marriage anyway, I sacrificed myself and split, hating myself for taking the high road. Unlike Jonathan and Daniel’s marriage, the real one didn’t last once I was gone.

A third factor for the book being relatively fast and easy to write was that I’d grown tired of the post-Flaubert, tightly written, point-of-view novel, which, in their own way, my first four novels all had been. Now I wanted to experiment.

Late in the Season
turned out to break the mold less than I’d hoped. Instead, like the next two non-gay-themed novels,
House of Cards
and
To the Seventh Power,
it was a further exploration of how to tell a story from multiple points of view. Evidently I hadn’t worked all of that area quite yet.

On the other hand, this novel was experimental for me another way: It successfully got me past the concept of the “perfect” novel. Instead of writing a book that had to be laid out like a diagram, each hour and place and action and emotion graphed to within an inch of its life,
Late in the Season
was written almost impromptu, as though I were doing prose-poems. Feeling, mood, and atmosphere dominated action and plot. If one can (invidiously) compare writing to painting,
The Lure
was a large mural (or series of murals) while
Late in the Season
was a watercolor (or series of aquarelles). Where my other novels depended upon fully modeled characters and totally detailed settings, this was more a sketchbook, where the “white” space—what was not narrated, or said—was as crucial as what was.

I would have to construct a new form, a hybrid of fiction and the memoir, or as one publisher put it, “a memoir in the form of a novel,” to fully break away from those stylistic precursors who’d influenced me. Especially the great Henry James, who has been the cause of much of the best and worst writing of our time. Because as it turned out, how to restructure wasn’t the problem I had to solve to go on and develop as a writer, but rather how to retexture. By the time I came to write
Ambidextrous,
it was clear I had to not only stress my own voice and style, I also had to design a new way to narrate that would be no one’s but mine, one capable of the color, scenic power, emotional depth, drama, philosophizing, and character drawing of the masters.

The following volumes,
Men Who Loved Me
and
A House on the Ocean, a House on the Bay
(also about Fire Island) continued to develop this new texturing. Even my novel
Like People in History
uses it, while pretending to be first-person point of view—a slyness that has elicited the most hilariously irrelevant, boneheaded reviews a book of mine has ever received.

In that sense,
Late in the Season
is a transitional work, on the way from one fully formed style—even period—to another. Because of that, because of how easy it was to write, and because of its ability even today to revivify for me the emotional situation and period of time in which it was written, it will probably always remain a favorite.

Felice Picano is the author of twenty-three published books, including novels, novellas, short story collections, poetry, memoirs, and other nonfiction. His work has been translated into thirteen languages including Japanese, Hebrew, and Slovenian. He has been nominated for or received over a dozen literary awards in several literary forms and genres. In the U.S., Picano is considered a founder of modern gay literature; internationally, as a noted American postmodernist. Writing about him can be found in several references including
Contemporary Authors, The Cambridge History of American Literature,
and Wikipedia.com. His third play was revived in Palm Spring for a sold-out run in 2008.