Michael Horovitz
Memoirs of a Bastard Angel by Harold Norse (Bloomsbury, £25, £9.99) was pan- ned by most reviewers, mainly on the
ground that if his reminiscences are to be believed Norse would be active on every page of a gay 'Who's Had Who since the Twenties'. Even before Chapter 1 he's boasted of how he ran with, had sex with, and catalysed the literary beginnings of Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, Anais Nin, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Corso and Burroughs, plus both Auden and Dylan Thomas in New York. However, though Norse's apparently incurable egomania, starstruck snobbery and fascinated obses- sion with gossip and sexuality are far from contagious, I found his candour about them and their generally catastrophic effects admirable, often exhilarating. In 1939 he lost his first and dearest love, Chester Kallman, when they were still students together at Brooklyn College, to Auden — relationships whose reconstruc- tion forms the most substantial high-point of a never less than eventful and poignantly entertaining read. Indeed, of the various gay/sad confessions that have come my way, these strike me as the most revealing, notably of the 'psychic wounds' Williams warned Norse every homosexual carries 'badly bandaged, a monster among angels or angel among monsters.' The free- floating promiscuity of the pre-AIDS Bo- Homintern has a lot to answer for. It also posed profoundly provocative questions without which our century's intelligence, culture and mores would be much the poorer. This intrepid, unrepentant auto- biography of an American-Jewish liberta- rian outsider who has made sense of his wild and woozy experience will give a lot of pleasure and enlightenment to anyone not proud to be incurious, straight and narrow.
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