Understanding John Rechy

María DeGuzmán

• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781643360065
• eBook ISBN: 9781643360072
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: LGBT Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In this first book-length monograph on the Mexican American novelist, essayist, and playwright John Rechy, best known for his debut novel City of Night, María DeGuzmán offers a conceptually clear yet aesthetically, philosophically, and socio-politically fine-grained analysis of the spectrum of his writing. Recipient of PEN Center USA's Lifetime Achievement Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, ONE Magazine's National Gay and Lesbian Cultural Hero Award, the William Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Luis Leal Award for Excellence in Chicano/Latino Literature, and the Robert Kirsch Award for Lifetime Achievement, Rechy is the author of fifteen novels, at least three plays, and several volumes of nonfiction. He has written for the Nation, the New York Review of Books, the Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice, the New York Times, and Saturday Review.

In Understanding John Rechy, María DeGuzmán offers a brief biographical overview and then traces the development of Rechy's craft through his major works by calling attention to central issues, recurring situations and characters, styles, and special techniques. She examines the complexities of his representation of identity, the subjectivity in his male homosexual odyssey and identity quest novels, and his experimentation with genre. She offers a concise yet intricate analysis of the major organizing paradigms and themes, genres, modes, styles, and handling of the gay Chicano's oeuvre. The book's guiding analysis pays particular attention to the ways in which Rechy's works function as cultural critique challenging mainstream values in a deep-structure manner.

CHAPTER 1

Understanding John Rechy

Biography

John Rechy was born March 10, 1931 Juan Francisco Rechy in El Paso, Texas to Guadalupe Flores and Roberto Sixto Rechy, both from Mexico with his father being of Scottish descent (hence, the name “Rechy”) and his mother from Chi-huahua.¹ John was the youngest of their six children. Following the move from Mexico to Texas, Rechy’s family suffered career and financial hardships—as did many families who left Mexico for the United States—and the family’s struggles continued throughout Rechy’s youth.² Charles Casillo, Rechy’s biographer, explained that Rechy’s paternal grandfather (Juan Francisco Rechy) was a Scottish man born in Spain and a “respected doctor in the early 1900s” (10) and that his wife, María, “was a strong-willed, haughty, independent … woman” who was “light-skinned and blue-eyed” (10). Juan and María moved from Spain to Mexico City and quickly rose to social prominence in Mexico, a country with a racially and socioeconomically stratified system like so many countries in Europe and the Americas, the United States included. Their son, Rechy’s father, was born in Mexico City at a time when the Rechy family was influential socially and politically. Roberto Sixto was born with an innate talent for music. According to Casillo, “At the age of 10 he gave his first concert—playing Mozart and Beethoven for President [Porfirio] Díaz” (11).

As a young man, through a combination of talent and family connections, Roberto “became the director of the Mexican Imperial Symphony” (11). Later on he married Mary, a blond, blue-eyed German woman, further advancing his family’s upward social climb in Mexico’s caste system. Under Porfirio Díaz’s regime, the Rechy family (John Rechy’s paternal grandparents) accumulated relative wealth and power. But in 1910 a violent revolution broke out, stoked by class tensions and resource inequalities resulting from Mexico’s social system under the Díaz regime. Rechy’s father, Roberto (along with his first wife Mary) and grandparents (Juan Francisco Rechy and his Spanish wife María) fled Mexico and settled in El Paso. There Rechy’s grandfather continued to be a highly respected physician, as he had been in Mexico City. Rechy’s father, however, could no longer belong to the Mexican Imperial Symphony or make a decent wage with his music. After an unsuccessful attempt to compose music for the movie industry, he founded a newspaper but “was run out of business for championing minorities and protesting poor working conditions” (14). The only money he was able to make came from working in his doctor father’s pharmacy (12), giving music lessons to children of the neighborhood, and selling pianos and sheet music at a local shop (14). After his father died, Roberto lost the family pharmacy and worked at several low-paying jobs—the first as “a caretaker of a public park” (14) and, after being fired from that job, “as a hospital custodian” (14). He went from having a brilliant career in classical music to becoming a janitor dealing with hospital waste in a society that does not value janitorial work, however essential it may be to public health and everyday functioning. Such was the reversal of his fortunes as a Mexican immigrant in southwest Texas, where, ironically, he held immigrant status in a state that was once a part of Mexico. Rechy’s father’s downhill slide in the United States—the reverse of the upward climb in a Horatio Alger story—certainly provided John Rechy with grounds for examining facile assumptions about the attainability and sustainability of the American Dream. From an early age, he was sharply aware of the often devastating collision between ideals and actualities.

Meanwhile, Roberto’s marriage to Mary disintegrated under the pressures of family losses (including the untimely death of his first son), his declining social status, and his own infidelities. One day in El Paso he met Guadalupe Flores, who was from a working-class family from Chihuahua, Mexico. The Flores family had also settled in El Paso after “fleeing the revolution in Mexico” (13). Guadalupe had “long dark hair and green eyes” and was—by John Rechy’s accounts and Casillo’s descriptions based on those accounts—a beautiful, kind, and devoted woman who made the best of what turned out to be a hard marriage with Roberto.

The last of Guadalupe and Roberto’s children, Rechy was born in 1931 in the early years of the Great Depression. Casillo wrote, “Juan Francisco Rechy—who would one day become famous as a writer, John Rechy—was born into a house of decay and death” and financial woes (17). By the time of Rechy’s birth, his mother was saddened by the difficulties of her marriage and the loss of her first child, a daughter named Valeska. His father had turned into a bitter, angry man subject to smoldering rages and explosive temper tantrums who was emotionally and sometimes physically abusive toward his family and toward John in particular, driven, it would seem, by his demons of artistic failure and his homophobia (21). According to Casillo, “John Rechy’s early childhood was characterized by an intense and terrible feeling of isolation he felt powerless to escape” (20). Nevertheless, Rechy survived by observing, reading, drawing, and writing, mostly secretly (20). He survived through his “dream world” in which “he could draw pictures and write stories in which he controlled the characters’ destinies” (33). And, starting in 1936, when the head priest of a neighborhood parish enlisted Rechy’s father as the director of cultural activities for the parish, John acted in a number of theatrical productions that his father staged with the theater company that he began. According to Casillo, “Because [Rechy’s] father was such a completely changed man when involved in his productions, even John would sometimes agree to perform” and become the star of his father’s children’s productions (27).

Rechy’s modes of early survival—observing, reading, drawing, writing, acting, and escaping to movie theaters—shaped the themes and substance of his writing. Much of his writing is a form of creative synesthesia, combining aspects of drawing, acting, photography, cinematography, and music. The roots of his writing’s synesthetic and intermedia qualities lie in these childhood and teenage survival tactics. Rechy uses writing as intermedia not only to survive hostility, isolation, and loneliness but also to provide a deep structure and vivid critique of many of the values of U.S. dominant culture.

In 1952 Rechy received a B.A. in English from Texas Western University (now the University of Texas at El Paso), and afterward served in the U.S. army, primarily to get away from home and especially from the shadow of his father. While in the army, he was sent to Dachau, Germany to teach for a time in an army school. He walked through Dachau’s concentration camp, an experience that he claimed politicized him “against all prejudice.”³ While on a leave during his time in the army, he travelled to Paris and headily took in the city, its architecture, museums, art galleries, plays, films, literature, gardens, and parks. Rechy made the most of his brief time in Paris, which filled him with “exhilaration” at a new, never-before-felt freedom, including (as compared to his experience in the United States) an erotic freedom that he sensed all around him but did not yet have the courage to act upon.⁴ Decades later, in his 2008 memoir, he summarized his Paris experience: “I had stepped into another world that I must have known long ago existed. Whatever necessary subterfuges I might have to concoct to live within it, I would not be able to abandon it” (195).

After two years in the U.S. army, Rechy was granted early discharge to allow him to enroll as a graduate student at Columbia University, with tuition covered under the GI bill. However, he did not enter Columbia, instead choosing to attend the writing classes of Hiram Haydn (a senior editor at Random House) at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Moving to New York in the early 1950s, Rechy simultaneously embarked on a writing career and a career as a “rough-trade” male hustler catering to a male clientele interested in picking up a good-looking, masculine man of the working classes, or one appearing to be such. In New York and later in other cities (including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, Houston, and New Orleans), Rechy used hustling to experience, and yet also to distance himself from, his own homosexuality. Any hint of homosexuality had been the target of his father’s homophobia, partly internalized by Rechy himself, as well as a target of the rampant national homophobia of the 1950s and 1960s.

Homophobia is not merely an attitude but is written into, and sanctioned by, unjust laws. In 1970, seven years after the publication of Rechy’s first novel City of Night and seven years before the publication of his The Sexual Outlaw: A Documentary (1977), forty-nine states (Illinois being the exception) “had laws that criminalized intimate relationships” between persons of the same sex.⁵ Prostitution, also illegal according to states’ laws (although legal in some rural counties in Nevada), provided a contradictory cover for being intimate with other men. Thus, Rechy could tell himself it was for money, and not out of desire, that he had sex with other men. Male prostitution, or “hustling,” and its role-playing also afforded a way for Rechy to work through his father’s abusive behavior toward him, as well as to understand the intricacies of Rechy’s position as a light-skinned Mexican American man from a subaltern family who had suffered a severe reversal of socioeconomic fortunes in U.S. territory. Like a Hispanic Hollywood star made over into an image more palatable to the dominant Anglo-American culture (such as Margarita Cansino who became Rita Hayworth and Jo Raquel Tejada who became Raquel Welch), he “passed” with his clients.

In fact, Rechy “conformed” to their fantasies while remaining in control of the encounter and reaped the rewards of feeling highly desirable. In the process of working out these attachment and status issues, Rechy slowly came to recognize that he was also seeking a deep emotional attachment to, and committed relationship with, another man, a relationship that he did indeed find at age forty-eight with longtime mate Michael Earl Snyder (also known as Michael Ewing), whom he met in 1979.

Development of Rechy’s Oeuvre

Rechy’s oeuvre is varied and multifaceted and spans many decades, but some descriptors apply to almost all of his works: groundbreaking (particularly in relation to homosexuality and sex work); transgressive; existentialist; confessional in an imaginative, not factual way; simultaneously Naturalistic and Romantic; French Symbolist in its deployment of color, music, and mood; experimental in terms of form and expression; carefully crafted in terms of style and point of view; highly structured and plotted;⁶ and highly allusive of other works of literature, film, painting, and music, both overtly and covertly. All of Rechy’s works are concerned with journeys of self-discovery or identity quests; desire; power; the breaking of rules (the sexual outlaw, for example); a critique of tyranny, exploitation, and oppression; exile; outsider status, both socially and artistically; the struggle to create a self; loneliness; aging; death; defensive narcissism (including the relentless pursuit of youth and beauty); and the search for meaningful connection and aliveness, however ephemeral, and even for a kind of salvation with art and the reality of artifice playing a central role in an everyday kind of redemption.

In the late 1940s Rechy had already begun his novel-writing, producing rough drafts of a semi-autobiographical novel (The Bitter Roots) and an historical novel (Time on Wings), both of which he abandoned.⁷ Between 1948 and 1949 he composed a novel titled Pablo!, and, at the New School for Social Research, Rechy started—but did not finish—another novel, titled The Witch of El Paso, about his great-aunt, Tía Ana, whom, he claims, “had ‘deer eyes’ and magical powers.”⁸ Pablo!, which opens in a Mayan village and ends in the city, features a boy who, like the protagonists of City of Night and Numbers, wants to be desired.”⁹ Excerpts of it appeared in the literary magazine Bachy (1980).

In 2016 the Los Angeles Review of Books printed an excerpt of Pablo!¹⁰ Arte Público Press accepted Chicano Studies & Latin American Literature Professor Francisco Lomelí’s proposal to rescue Rechy’s late 1940s novel from the obscurity of archival retirement and published a full, revised manuscript of Pablo! Spring 2018. Rechy’s return to Pablo! indicates his investment in being recognized as a Latina/o author, a writer drawing not only from his own Mexican and Mexican American past, but also from the indigenous history and mythologies of the Americas. Included as part of the Arte Público publication is an afterword by Francisco Lomelí briefly exploring the novel in relation to Rechy’s oeuvre and situating it, not in relation to American literature, but rather to Mesoamerican myth and folklore and certain novels by Latin American writers such as the Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias (Hombres de maíz) and the Peruvian José María Arguedas (Los ríos profundos).¹¹

During the late 1940s and the 1950s Rechy wrote poems, short stories, and nonfiction pieces. He continued to write nonfiction along with fiction throughout much of his writing career and experimented with blurring what he considered arbitrary distinctions between the two forms, at times presenting the work as fiction and at times as nonfiction. An early nonfiction piece was an exposé of male hustling that detailed how to find hustlers, what they charged, and the locations they frequented. This piece, moralistic in tone—a feature that symptomatized Rechy’s ambivalence about hustling (as both a desirable and undesirable activity)—was published under a pseudonym. Rechy’s poetry was never published, though one could argue that much of his published work reads like prose poetry—is, in fact, prose poetry. In 1958 a piece titled “Mardi Gras” (that eventually became a chapter in his first published novel City of Night) garnered the interest of Evergreen Review and also that of Donald Allen, then editor at Grove Press in New York, which published the novel in 1963.

According to Rechy, when City of Night first emerged, the book was attacked by reviewers—both for its subject matter and because its author was a hustler—in the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, and the New Yorker. However, it had already made Time’s national bestseller list, and it remained on bestseller lists for almost seven months. A little later on, “some excellent reviews began appearing, and eventually the book would be translated into about a dozen languages.”¹² As Hernandez-Jason and Martín-Rodríguez observed, “When City of Night finally appeared in 1963 with Grove Press, it quickly became an international bestseller” and “early critics compared him [Rechy] to the French author Jean Genet, and the U.S. authors John Dos Passos, Tennessee Williams and Thomas Wolfe.”¹³ It was one of the first books of its kind—dealing openly with homosexuality and gender nonconformity, hustling, johns, and many kinds of often marginalized people (homeless and/or poor youth, drifters, vagrants, young women with a preference for hustlers, hoods, hobos, petty drug pushers, working-class women, senior citizens, gypsies, African Americans, Mexicans, and Native Americans, among others). It was also one of the first books of its kind by a Chicano writer.

Rechy’s second novel, Numbers, which appeared in 1967 and was also published by Grove Press, is an example more along the lines of Poe’s gothic tales of “ratiocination” with their mad, searing intensity. Here such intensity involves a young man attempting to defy age, death, and what he considers to be a sniper God. His defiance is similar to that of the narrator of City of Night. It takes the form of scoring with or having sex with as many men (numbers) as possible. “Numbers” is a word that connotes—among other things such as counting, taking aim (as in “murder by numbers”) and getting into tr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Understanding John Rechy
• Chapter 2: Male Homosexual Odysseys as Cultural Critique: City of Night, Numbers, This Day’s Death, and The Coming of the Night
• Chapter 3: True Fictions: The Sexual Outlaw and After the Blue Hour
• Chapter 4: Intermedia—The Novels as Theater, Film, and Other Experiments: The Vampires, The Fourth Angel, Rushes, and Bodies and Souls
• Chapter 5: The Women-Centered and Chicana Feminist Novels and the Memoir: Marilyn’s Daughter, The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez, Our Lady of Babylon, and About My Life and the Kept Woman
• Chapter 6: The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens and Musicophilia
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index