November 1997
Why Allan Gurganus
plays well with others
Learning through laughter
Interview by Ellen Kanner
Watch out for Allan Gurganus.
He seems such a genial, charming southerner -- and he is -- but while you're smiling at what he writes, he's got a hidden agenda. He wants you to learn something, too. "All my work has this quietly subversive secret life," admits the author best known for his 1989 novel "Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All." Gurganus uses humor both as a weapon and a tool, something he's learned in the wake of AIDS. Humor, he discovered, is the best way he can honor the dead. "People want to laugh at funerals," says Gurganus with a trace of North Carolina drawl. "The most effective eulogies were the funniest, people's gratitude was so immense. In turning a sob into a chuckle, I felt I was invoking the dead in the most complete, honoring way." The author also honors them in his exuberant, comic new novel, "Plays Well With Others."
Set in New York in the 1980s, it tells the story of narrator Hartley Mimms Jr., who arrives fresh from North Carolina, "doggedly healthy, loaded with energy, nearly as talented as driven, a rube, if a well-brought-up one, terrified, oversexed and reasonably fearless." In other words, Hartley is much like Gurganus himself, who lived in New York in the 1980s while teaching at Sarah Lawrence.
Hartley meets Robert, gorgeous in his own right but also a gifted composer, and Angie "Alabama" Byrnes, an ambitious artist. The three form an intense friendship, the type possible only when you're young. They have nothing but time, nothing but potential, until a fourth character casts its shadow across the novel: AIDS. "We -- being this talented and so young -- found but one roadblock to our careers. It was called getting sick."
If this is not purely the stuff of comedy, it is where the novelist can test comedy's power. "The goal is ambitious," Gurganus admits, "to put funny and compassionate people in dangerous, historical moments. To test their virtue, to test their affection for each other. Creating shapely and comic and significant fiction out of what was an essentially chaotic and singularly unfunny mortal situation is one of the miracles of being an artist. It's also the miracle of being a good citizen in one's community."
Gurganus is fascinated by ethics, by the choices people make. What happens, he posits, when your glittering, wonderful friends stop being wonderful? What happens to your friendship as they sicken and die? He chose, as Hartley does, to assume the role of caregiver to his dying friends. And though Hartley and his creator are different, they share the odd, unwelcome sense of having survived those they loved and lost. "Caretaking and storytelling wind up being the same thing," says the author. "Hartley is telling his loved ones who they are through stories about themselves when they're alive and even after they're dead."
As a survivor of that time, Gurganus felt an imperative to tell the story, and to do it soon. "I didn't want to write about it when I was 90. I wanted to write while I was still having bad dreams, while my address book is still full of the names of the dead and while they are still a stark presence in my life." To write about it, though, he had to leave. "I love New York, I think it's an addiction, but I left because most of my community was dead and I needed replenishment. I needed a garden." He returned to his home, North Carolina, "a place whose manners and pace I understand."
Humor in Gurganus' hands is never cruel. Often, though, it's instructive. In "Plays Well With Others," it teaches you laughter is life-affirming, a deliberate stepping away from sadness. And that is why he manages to end it "as a strangely affirmative tale, because of everything we gained from the experience," he says. "I think who would I be if I hadn't had this amazing crash course in growing up? I prefer the person I am now."
Ellen Kanner has interviewed many authors for BookPage. She lives in Miami, Florida.
| 
