Last week's New Yorker has a lovely essay by the gay classicist, translator, and essayist Daniel Mendelsohn on his unlikely correspondence with the popular writer Mary Renault, herself a gay novelist who often wrote about ancient Greece, books which had very openly for the times gay characters and themes.  In 1976, when he was fifteen, Mendelsohn wrote her a fan letter, which she answered.  He wrote again, and again she answered, though telling him that this was her last response.  But later that year, she sent him a Christmas card, and the correspondence commenced again and lasted till her death in 1983.  Among Renault's circle of friends in South Africa, Mendelsohn became known as "her American boy."

Story City, the town with a population of 1500 where I grew up, had a public library (as well as a movie theater, two parks, a restored carousel, a swimming pool, tennis courts, and later a nine-hole golf course).  The library was housed in the same building with the city hall, the fire department, and the jail.  If you needed a restroom while you were at the library, you had to get a key and use the one in the city jail, which was always unoccupied.  The library was divided into two sections--half of it was for kids and had the reference books; half of it was the "adult" section.  For Bertha Bartlett, who ran the library, "adult" meant thirteen--and no one under thirteen, no matter how much he or she argued, could cross the invisible line.  Another of Bertha's rules was that you couldn't check out more than two books at a time.  For years, I thought that was some sort of cosmic law, and I remember the first time I visited the library at college and how amazed I was to see people checking out armloads of books.  When the magic day came and I turned thirteen, I entered the adult section and checked out two books: a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories, which was a great disappointment, and From Here to Eternity, which was not.  It was long, engrossing, and violent--and it was the first book I ever read that had a gay character.  I remember seeing the many novels by Mary Renault on the shelves, but I didn't know who she was, and she went unread.  I still wonder, however, what the Norwegian community thought about her books.  Someone must have checked them out because Bertha ordered each new novel as it was published.

I didn't write fan letters often and not till later.  I wrote two to my hero, Pauline Kael.  She answered both in handwritten notes, her scrawl hurried and difficult to read.  On both, she had put the stamp on upside-down and chastised herself for her haste in being so careless.  I was happy to have the letters, but they had nothing personal in them, and after two exchanges I decided not to push my luck.  I wrote to Anne Tyler, who wrote back three times, each letter short but warm.  Later, I had a couple of exchanges with my favorite literary critic, Stanley Fish.   By the time we wrote, he was Dean of the Law School at Duke (a controversial appointment--a Milton scholar as head of a law school) and I was living with someone who was in the law school at KU.  Following Fish, I was interested in legal fictions (not in the negative sense), and I would send him cases I discovered in which the fictive nature of legal assumptions seemed particularly clear or interesting.  He always responded with cases of his own.

I had only two really satisfying exchanges.  The first was with Carol Burnett, who was scheduled to film a movie, partly shot here, co-starring Glenda Jackson and to be called Two Girls from Topeka.  I wrote inviting her to dinner (I need to check the date because I could cook absolutely nothing before 1982) and suggesting a sketch for her variety show.  She replied with a long, funny letter, telling me that the movie had been cancelled, but that if she was ever in Topeka, she'd take me up on the dinner offer (a safe acceptance) and saying that union rules prevented her from accepting ideas from non-union "writers," but that maybe she could come up with my idea on her own.  That was the extent of the exchange, but I loved her reply.

My longest and most meaningful exchange was with Joseph Heller.  OU had a series of visits by guest writers, and even though I was just a graduate student, I ingratiated myself with the professor ostensibly in charge and often got to shepherd the writers around during their visits.  Anthony Burgess and his cigar-smoking wife had dinner at my apartment.  I didn't cook, so it was pizza, but Burgess was extremely generous and good-humored throughout.  I got John Hawkes, then a cult author, into a fight at the Friendly Tavern in Noble, Oklahoma, both names that were too obviously ironic ever to be used in fiction.  The chair of the department told John Barth that the only reason I hadn't converted to Judaism was my fear of even symbolic circumcision--exactly the topic you want to be the subject of discussion with a famous author.  But the best experience, and the one that led to my only sustained correspondence with a writer, was with Joseph Heller.  Three of us were charged with taking him to the airport.  His plane didn't leave till late afternoon, so we got to spend the whole day with him.

We decided that it would be a good idea to get stoned with him, though how we were going to introduce the idea wasn't at all clear.  We finally chose to be "casually" smoking when we picked him up--in a VW van, of course.  The van was filled with smoke by the time we arrived at the Holiday Inn.  Heller took one sniff and began singing Cab Calloway's "Reefer Man."  We passed him the joint, and we all spent the rest of the day very happily.  Heller was interested in trying acid, and I was the only one of the three who had done LSD, so we had a long discussion (though not necessarily a coherent one) about its effects.  Once back in New York, Heller wrote the first of many letters, saying that if he decided to try acid, he'd like to come back and do it with us.  He typed his letter and wrote that not even among his closest friends in NY would he feel as relaxed and be able to drop his "very deep inhibitions."  On second thought, he crossed out that phrase and penciled in "the deepest of [his] inhibitions."  Like Mendelsohn, I was awe-struck by the meeting, by Heller's generosity (he offered to help any of us find a position in New York), and by his letters.  The correspondence eventually ended, but I've dined out on the story for the last 40+ years.

Two unrelated notes (well, perhaps the first one is related to the last story):  the insurance company still will not pay for the tincture of opium, though the intermediate step of Lomotil hasn't worked well at all, so I decided to spring for a partial fill of the prescription--$125 for 25 mL--just to see whether this will be more effective.  I took my first .6 mL this morning.  Here's hoping.

Among the news of the performers for Obama's second inaugural (Beyoncé, Kelly Clarkson, James Taylor), there was also news of the poet chosen:  Richard Blanco, who is, in addition to being a poet, a gay Cuban-American.  It's only Democratic Presidents who have chosen to have a poet read at the inauguration.  First of course was JFK's choice of Robert Frost.  I still remember that January day in 1961.  I was a sophomore in high school, and we were all gathered in the auditorium to watch the event.  Frost was old, the wind was blowing his hair in his face, and the bright sun made reading the poem he'd written impossible, so he recited instead "The Gift Outright."  Clinton had Maya Angelou and then the Arkansas poet Miller Williams, better known for me as the father of Lucinda Williams, one of my all-time favorite singers and a fine wordsmith herself.  Occasional poems are usually not very good ("The Gift Outright" was certainly much better than what Frost had written for the occasion), but here's hoping again that Blanco avoids the snares and breaks new ground for his poetry as well as for his ethnicity and orientation.