son and heir #8: the beginning and the end
My new short story, ‘Honeymoon’, is out now on the Granta site.
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‘Honeymoon’ is a kind of companion to ‘Barbarism’ insofar as it reveals the dynamic between Henry and Richard to be ‘I feel bad for you’ / ‘I don’t think about you at all’. In ‘Honeymoon’, it is the spring of 1997. Off-page, Mary gives birth to her and Henry’s fifth child, their first daughter. On the page, Richard enters into the new life given to him by combination antiretroviral therapy, while John Major’s Conservative Party staggers towards an ignoble death in the general election.
King Richard II — the one born in 1367 — made the same mistakes over and over again. He elevated his arriviste favourites at the expense of the magnates whom it was in his best interest to keep happy; he demanded parliament levy burdensome taxes in support of his own unpopular and unprofitable aims. Again and again he was struck down, politically neutered, threatened with deposition, forced to get rid (whether by sacking, exile, or execution) of his favourites. He was never really sorry. He retreated only as long as it took for him to build up enough power to take revenge against those whom he felt had done him wrong. He seemed to have no foresight at all, no sense that the future might bring a repetition of the past. He held an unassailable belief in the righteousness of his own cause, the inevitability of his triumph, so that it was an utter shock when finally one of those ill-treated magnates, Henry Bolingbroke, returned from banishment to depose Richard, imprison him, then murder him.
What HIV/AIDS seems to provoke, ultimately, is the desire to decide whether or not someone deserves it. The belief that AIDS is a plague visited upon its victims in retribution for their misdeeds never really went away, even though people like to think, now, that that’s the kind of cruelty confined to the past and/or to the contemptible Not-Us, the frothing Evangelical with the ‘God hates fags’ sign. Watching a documentary from the late 90s uploaded to YouTube, I scrolled down to see a comment reading:
I feel for ANYONE affected in the early days as there was no way to predict this horrific disease. If you choose to fuck unprotected these days, don’t come crying to public health agencies, drug companies, doctors, lesbians, or anyone else who rallied around to help the first time.
A response to that comment reads: ‘I agree 100% I’m an HIV nurse and have been since the mid 80s but the modern attitudes among gays are appalling and there’s no excuse for it’.
Sympathy, sorrow, a sense of the tragedy of it all, are more often than not inextricable from judgment. In her 2019 memoir Lady in Waiting: My Extraordinary Life in the Shadow of the Crown, Anne Glenconner recalls learning of her son Henry’s HIV diagnosis in late 1986, which followed fast on the heels of his coming-out in 1985:
I warned him so many times, saying, “If you are promiscuous, you need to wear protection and be careful.” By 1986, the British government had released major advertising campaigns on television and newspapers, warning people that one in five people would contract HIV with the tag-line, “Don’t die of ignorance.” Tragically, Henry wasn’t careful enough.
Recounting Henry’s death, she writes, ‘I don’t know what I felt — a feeling of agony I can’t put into words. […] I also felt pure anger. Anger that he had been so careless. I had warned him so many times to be careful but he just hadn’t listened.’
Though I’ve only just read Lady in Waiting, there’s an echo of the sentiment in Henry Henry, from Richard’s partner and caregiver Edward Langley:
I couldn’t help thinking — Oh, God, he’s going to know I said this, somehow. Every time I thought it, I’d pray to the Blessed Virgin to help me be kinder, though I suppose I wasn’t trying hard enough because I don’t think she ever did. I thought sometimes, Why couldn’t you not have got it? Why couldn’t you have been safe? It wasn’t ’83 — we’d all seen the tombstone advert. So I thought, You’re proving them right. You’re proving your family right, you’re proving the Church right, you’re proving the tabloids right. You could have just not done it. Why did you?
The answer ‘Honeymoon’ suggests is: because he wanted to. Everything Richard does in this story, he does because he wants to — even taking his medication, which he pretends he only does because Edward makes him. He has been given another chance at life, and what he wants to do with it is to fuck. He doesn’t want to settle for sweet, safe, monogamous love-making, either, he wants to be worshipped/degraded by a rotation of married men in positions of power. He is fascinated by the metaphorical potency of his own body: pure of heredity, entitled by blood, but corrupted and corrupting, incapable of fatherhood, capable only of reproducing death. Can he be blamed for that? Well, yes, he can, and he will.
There are moments in which he does cross over into a horror of himself. These are moments of inversion, in which his vision of himself as the lover’s object of desire becomes a vision of himself as the lover’s object of disgust. The eroticism of being at once desirable and disgusting is exactly what draws him to these affairs. He likes feeling that if he exerts his power he can tip the scales towards desire. But what if he exerts all of his power and the scales still tip the wrong way? What if he realizes that the desire is not an independent thing which in its force overcomes disgust, but rather is, itself, an operation of disgust?
The only thing Richard can do is to go back to Edward, who is frustrating to Richard because he always desires, is never disgusted. To Edward, Richard's body is just the body of the person he loves. Edward approaches all of Richard's secretions and excretions with the equanimity of one who sees it merely as matter, lovable in its association with the beloved. Richard is ungrateful until he remembers that this is an expression of the pure, loyal love he needs in order to survive. He will forget, of course, again. He will feel the horror again, not having expected to. Those who have read Henry Henry know that he will die, and Henry will bury him in a churchyard instead of the family chapel. It's still a happier death, I think, than that of King Richard II, who starved to death alone in Pontefract Castle. Richard Lancaster at least had Edward Langley there, holding his hand.
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