| Peter Weltner: A Bio-Bibliographic Essay |
Originally published in Contemporary Gay American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport, Conn.:Greenwood Press, 1993.Biography Born on May 12, 1942, Peter Weltner grew up in a religious Lutheran family in Winston-Salem and Greensboro, North Carolina. He showed an early interest in painting, and when he was a boy his parents sent him to Salem Academy and to St. Leo's Convent in Winston-Salem to study art more seriously. Around the age of 15, Weltner says, religion "fell apart" for him and he had a sense that reading and the whole study of art was an attempt to find another source of religious meaning. When he was 17, he attended an exhibition of artist Gerald Coble's work in Greensboro and was so excited by what he saw that he got in touch with Coble, who then took him on as a student. For over a year, Weltner went to Coble's cabin every Saturday morning to work on painting and to see more clearly "what making modern art was all about." During the same period, Weltner returned to New York City, which he had visited often with his family while he was growing up, to see the work of the Abstract Expressionists. These artists had a profound influence upon Weltner, as did the writers he discovered in magazines like Arts and Art News which he would buy at a newsstand down Market Street from his family's church after Sunday services. In 1960, Weltner entered Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. He felt that going to college was in many ways "a digression" from what he had been learning in his friendship and work with Coble. Nevertheless, Weltner received his A.B. from Hamilton and immediately afterward attended graduate school at Indiana University, where he completed his Ph.D. in English Literature in 1969. In August of that year, he moved to San Francisco to teach at San Francisco State University, where he is still employed as a professor. 1969 to 1972 were "three years of the usual coming-out madness," and in the fall of 1973, Weltner met Bob Mohr. They fell in love and lived together for the next eight years. Starting in 1973, Weltner and poets Linda Gregg, Robert Hass, John Logan, and several other writers began to meet regularly at Weltner's apartment on Telegraph Hill to discuss poetry and writing, though at the time Weltner was writing only critical essays and reviews. Before he could begin writing fiction, he sensed he had to free himself from the academic strictures which for the preceding ten years had limited the kind of writing he really wanted to do. More importantly, he had to find "a sense of a world." Until he had that sense of a world and a "sense of comfort in it," he says, "I don't think I could really have started writing." Once he began in 1976, however, he wrote a long story or short novel a year, though he refrained from seeking publication for over ten years. Weltner met his current lover, medical social worker Atticus Carr, in 1986. In 1989, his collection of stories Beachside Entries/Specific Ghosts was published, followed the next year by his novel, Identity & Difference. In 1991, more of Weltner's fiction began to appear in print. Five Fingers Press published his collection of three short novels entitled In a Time of Combat for the Angel and his story "At Dawn the Guard Advances in the West" appeared in the special issue of Five Fingers Review entitled Vanishing Point: Spirituality and the Avant-Garde. In 1992, his long story "The Greek Head" appeared in both the June issue of American Short Fiction and George Stambolian's fiction anthology Men on Men 4. Since this bio-bibliographic essay was published, Weltner has published two critically acclaimed books: a collection of short fiction, The Risk of His Music (Graywolf Press, 1997) and a novel How the Body Prays (Graywolf Press, 1999). Major Works and Themes"The responsibility, the challenge of gay writing," Peter Weltner has said, "is to write in an uncoded way without [the writing becoming] sociology or journalism. Coding allowed for an extraordinary development of metaphor, which we can now abandon. We need other kinds of metaphors" (personal interview with Jim Tushinski). It is this search for other kinds of metaphors to tell the stories of gay men that unites Weltner's published work. In each book, he has found a different narrative and stylish approach to join with the thematic concerns--redemption, memory and loss, intellect and emotion, the interconnection of geography and sexuality--and create works that both celebrate and examine life without violating the mystery and simplicity of emotions. Weltner's first book, Beachside Entries/Specific Ghosts, is divided into two independent sections separated by a group of Gerald Coble's haunting drawings. The first section, "Beachside Entries," consists of 30 short pieces, each less than a page--prose poems on themes of love and loss. Weltner chooses to ignore linear components of short fiction such as characterization and plot, achieving unity, tension, and climax through his use of recurring imagery. A swirl of Scotts, Dons, Phils, and Joes move through "Beachside Entries," their lives and relationships irrevocably altered by AIDS, while images from fairy tales and mythology and vignettes of natural disaster, war, religious persecution, and pestilence weave in and out. The vague collection of proper names takes on personalities, not from the scattering of information Weltner provides, but from one's own memories of dead friends. By the end of "Beachside Entries," the effect of Weltner's skillful image weaving is profoundly moving. He takes on the emotional enormity of AIDS by creating a patchwork of memory and myth that, when seen as a whole, is formally beautiful and ultimately healing. Memory also plays a central role in the second part of the book, "Specific Ghosts." Here Weltner uses the classic form of the literary ghost story, borrowing specifically from Mary Wilkins Freeman, to study the effects of the death of a lover or friend on the survivor. "Specific Ghosts" consists of ten brief, but traditionally narrated, short stories, each dealing with the restless dead and the unhappy living. Weltner refrains from ambiguity about the supernatural and makes it quite clear that the spirits depicted are no more or less real than a memory and that memory itself can be quite physical. The strengths of "Specific Ghosts" reside not only in the subtle craft of the ghost stories, but also in Weltner's successful transposition of the modern gay male experience onto a classical literary form. Identity & Difference, Weltner's first novel, alternately tells two unrelated stories. One is about Preston, a self-absorbed gay man in San Francisco who does not need to work and who spends too much time analyzing and agonizing over his relationship with Jim. The other story deals with Darryl, a working class teenager in San Mateo, California, who is trying to come to terms with the suicide of his older brother, Glenn. Their stories never intersect and are even stylistically different. Preston's is told in a somewhat distant, analytical third person, while Darryl relates his own story in a searching and immediate voice. The novel's two-story structure resembles William Faulkner's The Wild Palms, and like that book, Identity & Difference succeeds by juxtaposing its stories in ways that are seldom obvious, but that seem to rhyme with one another. On the surface, Preston and Darryl are about as different as two young men can be, yet both are deeply involved with trying to understand and accept aspects of their sexuality. Preston, older than Darryl and more experienced sexually, is nevertheless the immature one, groping toward commitment and monogamy in his relationship with Jim. Darryl only begins to accept his homosexuality by the end of the book, but seems better prepared to face the difficulties of coming out and loving men. Weltner's exploration of the difference between the two men and of analytical and emotional responses to love, instead of pulling the book apart into two distinct narrative and stylistic clumps, weaves together their disparate experiences into a celebration of a shared "gay male experience." The three "short novels," as Weltner calls them, that make up In a Time of Combat for the Angel all take place in the South and center on characters struggling with his sexuality. Yet it would be a grave misreading of these works to call them "coming out" stories or "Southern" stories. They are, however, all intensely concerned with place and the yearning for a home--both real and imagined. In "Dying," the home is real enough, a familiar place where the narrator, a school teacher, and his younger brother Gerald have come to care for their dying mother. He watches with anger and helplessness as Gerald tries to break away from the sexual and emotional bond the two brothers shared for years. Their home becomes a place of death and waiting, their relationship an uneasy dance of denial and pain. Even so, breaking away from his brother is ultimately as inconceivable for Gerald as leaving the family home is for the narrator. After their mother's death, the brothers draw closer to each other, closing off the outside world for a relationship that seems both comforting and suffocating. A similar inability to escape from the past haunts Eric, the main character in the second story, "Summers." Now a resident of California, Eric idealizes the summers he spent as a teenager in the South and his love for high school football star Charlie Kittinger. Weltner uses these nostalgic yearnings as an entryway into Eric's past, painting a broader canvas of characters, opening the narrative out and becoming omnipotent, but always returning to Eric in the present. By making these summers so complete and populated, Weltner allows us to participate in and understand Eric's feelings of loss, to examine nostalgia without succumbing to it. "Backswimmers," the final story, again deals with a young boy's yearnings, but this time sexuality is barely understood and home is an emotional vacuum. On their way to a favorite secluded lake, Mark Morehead and his friend Dewey discover Cal, a returning World War II veteran who is squatting on what used to be his family farm. Mark attempts to help Cal rebuild his house and his life, looking for the affection Mark's father, a wealthy businessman who dabbles in poetry and sketching, cannot give him. Mark's relationship with Cal is eventually cut short by the forces of the law and "Backswimmers" ends with Mark watching business and progress pave over the land he and Cal hoped to restore. Critical ReceptionThe paucity of critical attention Weltner's fiction has received points out the difficulty writers have attracting attention when they publish with small presses. The difficulty is inevitably compounded when the writer deals with the gay experience. To date, reviews of Weltner's works have appeared mostly in local gay newspapers, affording little chance of recognition on a wider scale, even within the gay community. Weltner's first book, Beachside Entries/Specific Ghosts received only one review. Identity & Difference fared much better as far as the number of reviews went (a total of 5), but only one of them appeared in a non-gay-oriented periodical, Publisher's Weekly. This review was brief and lukewarm. It praised the book's "perceptive and graceful" writing, but found the plot "conventional and lacking in humor." The four reviews in gay periodicals were mostly excellent and evenly split between national publications and local ones. George Stambolian, in The Advocate, cited Weltner's novel as one example of the different gay male sensibilities to be found in recent works of fiction. Calling Weltner an "exceptional talent," Stambolian quotes a passage in which Preston vents his frustration about the ubiquity of heterosexual "stories" and concludes that "one purpose of gay fiction is to end these frustrations and to give us, at last, the stories of our yearnings." Steve Abbott, writing in The San Francisco Bay Times, gives a thorough and sensitive analysis of the work, emphasizing what he sees as the "mythic scripts" in Preston and Darryl's stories and offering an interesting reader/text correspondence. Abbott says the book is "on one level...simply a damn good read" and that "by seeing how others act out their mythic scripts, we get clues on how to act out our own." Since this bio-bibliographic essay was published, Weltner's recent collection of short fiction, The Risk of His Music, and novel, How the Body Prays, (both published by respected literary publisher Graywolf Press) have received numerous reviews in national and regional magazines. BibliographyWorks by Peter Weltner Beachside Entries/Specific Ghosts. San Francisco: Five FingersPress, 1989. Studies of Peter Weltner Abbott, Steve. Rev. of Identity & Difference, by Peter Weltner. The San Francisco Bay Times, December 1990, p. 46. |