David Wojnarowicz was recognized in the 1990s as a writer, performance artist, photographer, and, in one critic’s view, a “provocateur” who put his stamp on the decade. Born in New Jersey in 1954, Wojnarowicz dropped out of school at 16 and left home for New York City, where he became a hustler (although in another autobiographical work, Memories That Smell Like Gasoline, Wojnarowicz claims have been a prostitute before he was fifteen.) He died in 1992, of complications from AIDS. Close to the Knives, published in 1991, is, as much as anything, the testament of a complete outsider.
The book is subtitled “A Memoir of Disintegration.” So powerful and so lucid is the author’s voice that we become convinced that it is not Wojnarowicz who is disintegrating, but our own safe, respectable world. Sometimes straddling the boundary between poetry and prose, Wojnarowicz leads us through an assault on everything we know. The book begins, in “Self-Portrait in Twenty-three Rounds,” with “So my heritage is a calculated fuck on some faraway sun-filled bed while the curtains are being sucked in and out of an open window . . .” through five-and-a-half pages of searing, scary images from the life of a child prostitute, told dispassionately and without rancor. Succeeding chapters are reminscences and evocations of cruising the waterfront in New York, a solo car trip through the American Southwest, filled with images of men and lust. These are snapshots of a life lived on the outside, told by a thoughtful, perhaps a brilliant man, shadowed by his own impending death. There is a raw, acid-etched, haunting beauty in this book, harsh, frightening images rendered through a sensibility that has nothing to do with what Americans think the American dream is.
The images provide a starting point for larger questions. “In the Shadow of the American Dream: Soon All This Will be Picturesque Ruins,” which captures images from a road trip through the Southwest, contains a rumination on death sparked by a tour of an “air force base museum of the atomic bomb” which states simply “Americans can’t deal with death unless they own it. If they own it, they will celebrate it.”
This is, in large part, a book about death. At its most obvious, it is about a politicized form of death, a form of death in which people who have an infection are made scapegoats. In “Postcards from America: X Rays from Hell,” Wojnarowicz says that “WHEN I WAS TOLD THAT I’D CONTRACTED THIS VIRUS IT DIDN’T TAKE ME LONG TO REALIZE THAT I’D CONTRACTED A DISEASED SOCIETY AS WELL.” That, in very succinct terms, was the point of view not only of many of those who contracted HIV, but of those who were trying to save them. Wojnarowicz follows this section with “The Seven Deadly Sins Fact Sheet,” a roll-call of bigotry and ineptitude, which includes in its roster New York’s Cardinal O’Connor and Jesse Helms, two of the most vicious bigots in American history. And yet, even in polemic, Wojnarowicz maintains a rational, distanced stance which to this day one can only hope for in our country’s leadership. The fact that this chapter follows immediately on “Living Close to the Knives,” a painful and sensitive reminiscence of the last days of photographer Peter Hujar, only throws the question of culpability into high relief.
There are problems in this book, which have a direct bearing on how I rated it. It would have benefited greatly from stronger editing: it becomes repetitive and, although most of these pieces had appeared earlier in various journals, several of them could have been consolidated. There are sections of charged intensity, but not everything is up to the strength of “In the Shadow of the American Dream” or “Living Close to the Knives.” Balanced precariously in all of this is the fact that these essays are slanted, opinionated and angry: one recognizes that Wojnarowicz often overstates his case, but he does so with such authority that the issue is not that his words can be safely dismissed, but rather, how overstated are they and how strong is his justification for going off the deep end?
This is not an easy book to read, and not an easy book to understand on a gut level, although that’s the only level that is going to help. I do recommend it, perhaps even more for the comfortably squeamish than for others. It contains things that needed to be said, things that should have been understood more widely than they were.
(Vintage, 1991)
