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Musings on Myth and Mortality in Andrew Holleran's Dancer from the Dance (Harper Collins, 1977)
cover, Dancer from the Dance, Bantam paperback edition
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Someone was the last to see Anthony Malone, but no one knows who that someone is.
It matters who was the last to see him because he was beautiful. And because, of all possible fictional characters, he is among the most real. Fiction writers are allowed the privilege of taking actual people and events and recasting them as "fiction." Holleran's Malone is therefore at a remove from the actual because he is a character in a novel but it is Holleran's privilege -- and power -- to make Malone so achingly real that the novel unfolds as documentary and not just exquisite story-telling.
Malone was from Ohio. Trained in law, he would take work with a prestigious firm in Manhattan. But he would hear the summons of older, more vibrant gods and soon trade credentialed corporate success for a pagan jubilance and abandon. There were polished corporate heavy-hitters in the law firm's conference room, but Dionysus was a subway ride away, waiting in one of several venues on the East Side, in Chelsea, the Village.
Not everybody makes such a trade. Malone did.
Did I mention that Malone was beautiful? There are people who search for others, and in what people call "the real world," there are many less beautiful than Malone. But to have been one of those men on those dance floors in Manhattan on a given night in the late 1970s -- to have been struck by Malone's beauty -- provides a spiritual rationale for the search itself.
It constitutes a sighting. Pan's pipes heard from across the glen. A girl claiming to have seen Mary at Lourdes.
In myth, gods inspire quests, extensive travel, perhaps the promise of rapture or forgiveness of one's human frailties.
I know no one on this train.
A man comes walking down the aisle.
I want to tell him that I forgive him,
that I want him to forgive me.
(Robert Bly, "Passing an Orchard by Train")
Those of us far more plain of face and limb than Anthony Malone also pursue, also undertake the journey, also seek such forgiveness in others. The difference may be that in myth, one may seek a god. A god or goddess may be in close proximity in the mortal landscape. This was Malone's role, even if he had not asked to play it.
Malone changed his life narrative. Not everybody is able to do this. But disruptions of the ordinary is the gods' best trick. They're pretty good at it. Nobody better, in fact. We would do well to honor Prometheus for stealing fire from the temple. He suffered for his courage but we are warmed by the flames in the hearth. When it comes to changing the narrative, Prometheus is the cat's pajamas. Or a child living an entirely ordinary life suddenly perceived by Buddhist elders to be the incarnation of a great teacher, and in very short order a figure whom millions of people revere.
Malone is dancing late into the night in the years just before the onset of the discovery of AIDS, which would claim many of the men dancing in the clubs with Malone. Gay literature, and Holleran's later essays in particular, have addressed the AIDS crisis, but in Dancer From the Dance we are introduced to Malone and share his narrative before the 1980s. By the early 1980s, many of the men dancing with Malone were forced to balance "the fear of contagion with the imperative of desire," in one Village Voice writer's phrase.
Holleran trusts us to understand the claustrophobia of the suburban Ohio streets where Malone grew up and the suffocation of those legal conference rooms he sat in when he was hired after college. We are on the downtown subway and understand that this is not a quotidian transport but a personal quest, imbued with myth. Holleran puts us on that train. Perhaps we are in the same car as Malone. We understand we are going from one world to another, moving between two distinct realms, and that we are liminal figures in the passage.
The last person to see Anthony Malone would have had the encounter in the late 1970s, prior to the election of Ronald Reagan. The Reverend Jim Jones was gaining a psychic foothold in the minds of his followers in Guyana which would result in several hundred of them ingesting poison. U.S. Americans were glued to their tv sets, watching "Little House on the Prairie," "Dallas," and "The Love Boat." The Ayatollah Khomeini is Time's Man of the Year one year, Deng Xiaoping the next. New York Mayor Abraham Beame is on the way out; Ed Koch's administration is on the way in. Gloria Gaynor, on a million radios and in dance clubs, asserts, "I Will Survive." Malone would have heard this song on a hundred consecutive nights dancing in Manhattan. Matthew Shephard is 2 years old. Ryan White is in first grade. Rock Hudson is 7 years away from a diagnosis of HIV. Anita Bryant launches her homophobic crusade in Miami. Louise Brown is born in Oldham, UK. Elvis Presley dies in Memphis. Harper publishes Andrew Holleran's Dancer from the Dance.
The Everard Baths in Manhattan were still open and would not yet claim nine deaths by fire in 1977, the remains of some of them unidentifiable.
The Everard Baths, 28th Street, New York City
Holleran's title is taken from the final lines of William Butler Yeats' poem, "Among School Children":
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
There are people in my family tree who would be appalled by Holleran's novel. The language is not only outrageous, but dynamically outrageous. There are accounts of naughty conduct across a wide spectrum. Sexual acts are frequently referenced and sometimes detailed. Use of Schedule I substances is more the rule than the exception. The reader is entirely in a domain of dick-centered eroticism, and if one can't take the heat, one should get out of the kitchen.
What is seen in one view as remorseless hedonism is understood from another to be pagan ritual, and therefore ancient, intrinsically mythic. The Everard Baths building had once been a church facility. And the dancing: a vast space in a New York building transformed to dance venue, to sacred space. Seekers congregate, dance. Some are chemically altered, but additives, perhaps plant extractions, are not unheard of components in ritual cultures.
Not least, Malone danced among them.
Holleran's novel has been ably addressed on this site by others, and I stand on their shoulders to better see the novel's heart and soul. As referenced above, 'heart' and 'soul' are not all there is to see here, but both are resonant in the work. My hope is that someone who has not read Dancer from the Dance so far will pick up a copy from a local independent book shop or one of the on-line services, if for no other reason than to join those of us who have looked for Anthony Malone. Beauty can be ephemeral but nevertheless sustaining, and it is manifest in many forms. Zeus is the aloof bearded patriarch of Mt. Olympus, except when he is an eagle or a swan, when those two creatures serve his own quest for beauty.
Very early on in the novel we learn that Malone, once so intensely present, is no longer there. To be absent but yet more present than ever is another of the gods' tricks. Malone's disappearance is the novel's central mystery. He would very likely have been in Manhattan when he unaccountably did not show up where he had been expected, and those who expected his arrival never saw him again. They speculated that he was among the nine dead in the fire at the Everard Baths. Or that he took the occasion to disrupt his life narrative once again and leave Manhattan for some other life, perhaps in a distant city. Rumors flew around his whereabouts. No one had reliable information, no clues were left behind. A sighting of the god, momentary but vivid. Here for some brief time, then gone, vanished, untraceable.
Which means he could be anywhere. If Mary showed up at Lourdes, she could return to Lourdes. "Worship these," Dr. Dysart says in Equus, "and more will appear."
Malone is on a given train on a given night in Manhattan, riding downtown to dance. He is on 28th street, in a denim jacket, collar pulled up against the wind coming off the river. He could be in Prague, or Paris, or Pittsburgh. He could go to your junior college. He could work in your office. He may be the man who runs the ferris wheel at a summer carnival.
Malone is there, and you can be the next one to see him.
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I owe sincere thanks to chrislove for encouragement and technical wizardry. Elsewise, this diary was a hopeless shambles and would never have made it as far as it did.
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