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My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man's Odyssey, by Charles Rowan Beye
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My Husband and My Wives: A Gay's Man's Odyssey is the memoir of a man looking back over eight tumultuous decades at the complications of discovering at puberty that he is attracted to other men.
The ordeal of remaining true to what his libido tells him is right, in the midst of a disapproving and sometimes hostile society, is one side of his story. Another is the impulsive decision he made as a young adult to marry a woman who fascinated him. This led him into entirely unanticipated territory. He found himself suddenly a husband, a widower, a groom for a second time, and, finally, the father of four children and grandfather of six, though throughout it all, he never abandoned his erotic involvement with men. Perhaps most extraordinary is the story's happy conclusion: Charles Rowan Beye's wedding four years ago to the man who has been his companion for the last twenty years.
The remarkable journey from pariah to patriarch is told with an eloquence, an honesty, and a sense of humor that are uniquely Beye's own. A personal history that is also a history of evolving social mores, this wonderfully original, challenging, life- and love-affirming account could only have been written by the unconventional man who lived through it all.
- Sales Rank: #955276 in eBooks
- Published on: 2012-10-02
- Released on: 2012-10-02
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
Praise for My Husband and My Wives: “This memoir is moving, thoughtful, and witty—an enormous achievement.” —Brenda Maddox, author of Married and Gay: An Intimate Look at a Different Relationship
“Philip Larkin wrote, ‘Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three.’ Not so for the brilliant and charming Charles Rowan Beye. If only Larkin had been in Iowa City in the 1940s! Who knew there was so much action in high school and the heartland in that era? With a deep understanding of the institutions and mores that define us, and with profound self-understanding, Beye shines his light into the complicated, painful, and also beautiful world of a gay man twice married to women.” —Jane Hamilton, author of The Book of Ruth
“In this heartfelt, often humorous memoir, retired classics professor Beye tells how a onetime gay teenager ended up marrying two women, fathering four children, and eventually marrying his longtime male partner . . . It’s a deftly written personal story that will speak to a range of readers.” —Publishers Weekly
About the Author
Charles Rowan Beye is a retired professor of Ancient Greek. Competing sexual and emotional attractions have shaped the drama of his life. Openly gay in his teens, twice married to women, father of four, he is now married to his male partner of the last twenty years.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
ONE
1930–1945
I was born March 19, 1930, the fifth child, second boy, of six children carried to term. (There were six miscarriages.) An older sister often reminds me resentfully of hearing our father on the phone shouting in joy, “It’s a boy, thank God, it’s a boy, it’s a boy.” My father is more myth to me than flesh-and-blood reality. Since at the time of his death I was a small boy whose life was spent in the nursery, I had seen little of him. In fact, my memory of Daddy is little more than the sight of his body in the coffin that the servants took us to view. It reposed in the front hall of our home, since our father, being an atheist, was given a nonreligious funeral there. Although he died only a few days after his fiftieth birthday, he was already head of surgery at the State University of Iowa Hospital, and a distinguished thoracic surgeon. Whatever else I know of him comes largely from Mother, who loved nothing more than to reminisce over cocktails at the end of the day, even if, in the loneliness of her widowhood, her companion was just her teenage son.
Over the years I was to learn that my father was an admirer of Theodore Roosevelt, that he too spent his summer holidays hunting and fishing. I well remember my mother showing me the box in which he kept the trout flies he had made; it was like viewing the crown jewels. He was an acolyte at the altar of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant hegemony in the United States, fearful and disgusted, if my mother is to be believed, at the invasion of these shores by the Irish and Italian Catholic immigrants, and determined to match their prodigious birth rate with his own efforts, however my mother might have felt about it. (That she did not like children all that much she managed to convey to us in her magisterial indirection.) Needless to say, he was equally affronted by Jews, not because they were superstitious and feckless, as he imagined the Catholics to be, but because he considered them so extremely sharp and grasping. When a parent dies young, there are so many questions a son has not had answered. What, I often wonder, had my father, who was a doctor in the U.S. Army in the First World War, thought about shooting at German soldiers, who must have included his blood relatives, or at least the descendants of fellow townsmen of his father, Wilhelm? How could it be, as Mother often told me, that he was planning a year’s sabbatical in Germany for the academic year 1937–38, so as to get to know the Germans better, when as a reader of newspapers he must have noticed the dire turn of events since Hitler’s accession to power in 1933? How was it that he admired so very much the Viennese Jew who headed the Orthopedic Surgery Department while always pleased that he and my mother found accommodations in hotels that stated “Gentiles Only”? Again, if I can go by Mother’s testimony, this orthopedic surgeon was to be valued because he was a repository of European tradition and learning, but, more than that, because he was a Jew, one of a people who, in my father’s opinion, had a more profound sense of high culture, were more refined, than the rest of mankind.
I have always thought that I would not have liked my father very much, but then I remember a favorite family anecdote about Daddy. It happened that when his first four children were very young, he entertained the Roman Catholic priest who had been the chaplain in his unit at the front. This very jolly young man and my father enjoyed sitting about, drinking wine and reminiscing. During his stay, the family dog, Jiggs, died, and, of course, the children were inconsolable. My father hired a carpenter to make the dog a wooden coffin; then my father and his friend contrived that the latter would don his robes of priestly office to lead a procession down to the back of the garden where a grave had been dug. In the presence of the children and the household staff something appropriate was said, and Daddy took the shovel to fling in the first load of earth, and signaled to the grieving little tykes waiting with their toy shovels to take their turn. Mother loved to tell this story, laughing all the while at the kitchen staff, all of them first-generation Irish or German Catholics, who marveled that someone so atheistic and impious as Dr. Beye could yet manage to hold a kind of Catholic burial, including even a priest, for his dog.
My small hometown was distinctive in being both the commercial center for the surrounding farms and the site of the State University of Iowa, which even in the thirties was renowned for its departments of art, theater, creative writing, and music. On Saturday nights there were pickup trucks parked in rows outside J. C. Penney on College Street, where farmers in clean overalls with their wives, dressed in homemade cotton dresses, were shopping. Over at the university another, different crowd was gathering for a performance of the symphony orchestra or on their way to the university theater to see a play. The streets, which were paved in brick, were shaded over in summertime by giant American elms that gave the effect of so many naves of Gothic cathedrals. Where the town ended began open fields as far as the eye could see. This was not the Iowa City of today; large-scale construction after the war turned a village into a city, brought housing developments to the surrounding farmlands, and the tragic invasion of Dutch Elm disease took out the shade. But I don’t really see those changes. Maybe I have just looked at too many Grant Wood paintings. He was, after all, a resident of the town.
We lived in a large house, large enough to be renovated into apartments in later years. The property stretched from the street back as much as the length of an average city block, with a steep terraced hill in the front, climbing beyond the house to a level where there was a formal lawn surrounded by flower beds. Then the property sloped gently down to the back boundary, beyond which were open hilly fields and one could see miles into the distance. As a small child my existence was confined to the nursery on the top floor, where I was given meals, and my bedroom on the second floor, and the back, or “servants’,” staircase down to the side door, which we children were meant to use. Apart from a swing that stood on the crest of the land, a sandbox underneath a shady tree on the gentle slope rising to it, and the flat lawn for croquet by the kitchen door, we children were sent to play way out in back of the house beyond the formal lawn, and beyond the formal garden, where there was a miniature house built for us. Beyond that, past a cherry orchard, there was a two-story small barn, the upstairs loft of which had been converted into a “clubhouse,” and to the side of it was a chicken coop. We were seriously discouraged from entering the kitchen or pantry except by invitation. There were four or five women who worked for my parents doing all the household chores and we were not to get in their way. The living room, front hall, and vestibule that led to the front door were also out of bounds. There was one man who did the gardening, the heavy lifting, and drove my father to work (since, if Mother is to be believed, my father did not think a surgeon should strain his hands before morning surgery by handling the wheel of a car). The gardener would sometimes help us with our little garden, but we were reminded that he was also busy, and not to be bothered. Only the upstairs maids, who had also functioned as our nursemaids when we were smaller, were part of our world.
Once when friends asked my second wife and me why we did not let our children come down the front stairs or enter the living room in our baronial house in Brookline, we discovered to our amusement that we both had instinctively and tacitly (one of those ça va sans dire things) thought that this was the way of the world between parents and children; even in our modern glass box of a house in California, where many of the dividing walls did not go to the ceiling, where there was what they used to call “flow,” we just did not encourage the little tots to go into the living room. I notice that to this day my instinct upon entering our living room is to make sure that the pillows are all plumped up and in their proper place, that the books and magazines are properly arranged, as well as the photographs in their framed stands on any coffee table or end table. In my childhood home, while the adults were eating in the dining room, someone was in the living room rearranging the pillows and emptying the ashtrays so that the room was more or less pristine when anyone entered it. Because I was crippled I was allowed to sit reading in the living room during the day; my reading chair was next to a large mahogany library table, upon the highly polished surface of which all the current magazines were neatly arranged. Always neatly arranged; I don’t remember seeing them scattered.
When my father died, Mother decided to eat meals with the children, and thus I left the easy comfort of the nursery and descended into the formal dining room. Breakfast especially was meant to be a family occasion. We had always to be punctual. (“Be considerate of the servants, Charles.”) About six-thirty in the morning a maid went through the corridors awakening us with chimes, so there was no excuse for tardiness. At breakfast time we stood behind our chairs until Mother entered, then my brother held her chair for her, and when she was seated the rest of us sat down, she unfolded her napkin, and she rang a small silver bell to indicate to the kitchen help that they could bring out the meal. We were required to make conversation, and if we brought up unsuitable subjects—the tedious retelling of something we had read or a joke we had heard, the whiny account of an argument with a sibling—Mother remonstrated with us and insisted upon stimulating or genuinely amusing talk. Wit and rapid delivery were key...
Most helpful customer reviews
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
Gay Man's Odyssey
By Anita Faye Neff
Five stars for a superbly well written book direct from the heart of a well educated, forthright and honest Mid-westerner. The author wrote from the essence of his being with no pretense and, although the book contained sexual details, it is not what the book is about. The author's undramatic sense of self makes the book a must-read for a younger audience as well as for those of us who have already established our identities. I devoured this incredible story in three days flat.
I also highly, highly recommend this book to book-clubs as the possibility of insightful discussion is endless.
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
Something for everyone
By Mary DeForest
Those who know Charles Beye's works on ancient literature will love this book. He directs on himself the piercing wit and insight that breathed life into ancient characters. Beye's studies of Jason, Achilles, and Odysseus changed how ancient heroes are perceived. In his autobiography, we learn that his insights derived from people he met in Iowa. Or rather, he saw literary characters and actual people with the same sympathy. His life gave him insights into literature, which, in turn, have enriched the meaning of his life.
What surprised me most was that although I am not a man or gay or a parent, I identified with the central character.
First-time readers will be glad to learn that his works on classical literature are just as engaging.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Got a bit fed up with him after a while
By SJVM
I've always liked C. R. Beye's work on epic, and was interested to read his biography. He writes very well, of course, but I really would have liked a bit more on his professional life, which, as a fellow classicist, I found fascinating, and a bit less of the endless lists of blow-jobs he has given/had. In spite of his statement early on that the abundance of sex was deliberate, integral to his hard-won gay identity, an argument with which I do have a lot of sympathy, the sex got very dull, very quickly. I also got a bit fed up with his endless generalisations about women, and over all, even allowing for the fact that this is an autobiography, he comes over as quite in love with himself. That said, it's impossible not to like him as well and admire him for coming through so strong and cheerful - better a C. R Beye than an A.E.Housman!
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