Dark Reflections - Softcover

Delany, Samuel R.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0486809099 ISBN 13: 9780486809090

Publisher: Dover Publications, 2016

Synopsis

"Samuel R. Delany is not only one of the most profound and courageous writers at work today, he is a writer of seemingly limitless range." — Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours

This Stonewall Book Award-winning novel traces the life and unrealized dreams of Arnold Hawley, a homosexual African-American poet. Albert's poetry ultimately meets with modest acclaim but only after decades of striving. Romance and friendship are likewise elusive, despite an impulsive marriage to a stranger. His outsider status — black, gay, and a poet — compounds his struggles to create art, to find a readership, and to lead a meaningful existence.
Beautifully written in reverse chronological order, the story opens with Albert's lonely old age and ventures back in time to his arrival in New York City of the 1950s. A meditation on isolation and sexual repression, Dark Reflections also offers an acerbic look at the literary world and the frustrations intrinsic to artistic life.

"One of the most honest books I've ever read about the martyrdom of the writer in the contemporary world. Samuel Delany, who had entertained readers for decades with his rich fantasies, now gives us the truth and nothing but the truth. At certain points I wanted to put this book down because it was so sad — but I couldn't because I was so enjoyable by its spare beauty and its searing frankness." — Edmund White, author of A Boy's Own Story

"Among the most detailed, thoughtful, and heartbreaking portrayals of a writer's life." — Los Angeles Review of Books

About this title

About the Author:

Author, professor, and literary critic Samuel R. Delany has received both Nebula and Hugo awards. In addition to his bestselling science-fiction novel Dhalgren, he has written literary fiction, criticism, and essays on sexuality and society.

From The Washington Post:

Samuel Delany's new novel is a triptych -- a biography, in reverse, of a poet we see at three stages in life. On the first panel, a decrepit writer is dining with his young editor; on the second, a middle-aged groom searches for sex in a public restroom on his wedding night; in the third, a college boy falls in love.

The figure in all three scenes is a man who, whenever he finds photographs of himself, invariably turns them over and writes on the back, "The poet Arnold Hawley." More specifically, Arnold Hawley is a black, gay poet who lives in Manhattan's East Village. Dark Reflections is a sort of love letter to that part of town, when it sheltered the homeless and the hustler in a way it no longer does.

Beneath the physical and psychological squalor, the humiliations of poetry and poverty, lies a certain nostalgie de la boue. The 10-year-old bookworm raised by an intellectual aunt who prefers Berg to Webern (Arnold's favorite) ends up "a very fragile" old man who wonders when he enters the subway whether the smell of urine is coming from him or the station. He is also unable to forget the remark a famous white poet made when a poet of color was admitted to a literary society: "Who let the coon in?"

His consciousness, however, remains essentially childlike. The same wonder is bestowed on dinner ("her veal -- which really was awfully good") as on the darkness of a restroom swarming with homosexuals ("Yes, there were men in here!").

In previous books, Delany has shown himself to be comfortable with both gay and straight, black and white milieus -- not to mention various literary forms -- but the hero of this heartfelt, often funny book is triply alienated. Looking at a beautiful oak door painted over, he thinks: "Some things were ruined, and you had to let them go, which was how, actually, Arnold had always thought about his own sexuality." His only brothers are brothers: other gay black male writers. Yet sex with men terrifies him. Meanwhile, the psychotics, policemen, hustlers and suicides he meets are mere obstructions to be endured till the next poem, mercifully, arrives.

In the end, like Doctor T.J. Eckleburg in The Great Gatsby, he's nothing but a pair of spectacles. Yet Dark Reflections, while harrowing and bleak, is mainly tender -- a loving rendition of a place that gentrification has all but obliterated, a spot-on portrait of the East Village artist as a gay black geek.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0486809099
• ISBN 13: 9780486809090
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224