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Brother Dumb
Brother Dumb is the memoir of a reclusive American literary icon. Brother Dumb is a how-to manual for meaningful critical engagement with the real world. Brother Dumb is a celebration of innocence, youth, and altruism. Brother Dumb is a true story of self-imposed exile. . . . Brother Dumb is also a work of fiction. Brother Dumb begins in the mid-40s, but spans decades, delving deep into the five tortured relationships that have shaped one writer’s psycho-sexual history — but it also details his bitter literary decline and withdrawal from public life. Brother Dumb is a misanthrope. His withdrawal from the world is as famous, or infamous, as his writing — something that he takes great pains to explain is not a desperate cry for attention. Attention is the last thing Brother Dumb wants. So why publish this memoir? Why expose himself to a world of stupid, lecherous, greedy, evil, and calculating people? Because he can’t not write. And because, somewhere out there, a kindred soul might actually be reading. . . .
216 pages, Hardcover
First published March 1, 2007
8 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
April 20, 2013
I would like to write about Brother Dumb by exploring it within the context of Gilbert's other work, but I don't know his other work beyond reading some poems in an anthology in the mid-1990s. I do remember those poems, though, as being direct and honest and, therefore, powerful.
Brother Dumb is direct, honest, and powerful, too, but it is also deceptive and complex. In Quill and Quire, Alex Good called the book an "unconvincing attempt to channel Holden Caufield" that is also a "well-paced and provocative book that sets itself an enormous creative challenge." We can no longer avoid it; a plot summary is in order.
It begins, as above, with the black apartment. The narrator is a famous writer, a recluse, and he speaks directly to the reader, confessing the story of his erotic attachments. The factual elements of the narrator's life align strikingly close to the known facts about J.D. Salinger. The writer is in World War II, publishes early stories in a prestigious New York magazine, writes a novel about a juvenile delinquent, takes a strong interest in Buddhism, moves to the country, as a 50-ish-year-old invites an 18-year-old girl to live with him.
The broad sweep will suffice. One must ask: Is Gilbert channeling Caufield or the author of Franny and Zooey?
This is why I called Brother Dumb deceptive. If you really want to hear about it, it's confusing. One can read and enjoy the novel without knowing anything about Salinger, but if one does: What is one to think? One is tempted to call Brother Dumb the Salinger sequel we've been waiting four decades to receive. Except it isn't.
Like many of Salinger's protagnoists, Gilbert's narrator attempts to draw the reader into a bond of "specialness." Only we understand what is real, what is good, what is right, the narrator suggests. The novel is a confession. Many things in the narrator's life have gone wrong. He is writing to explain himself, but also to find that special audience of special people. The gifted ones, the sensitive ones. The vulnerable ones.
For there is more than a little creepy about the narrator's plea. He is attracted to women much, much younger than himself. He is attracted to their childlike qualities. Years ago, Mary McCarthy wrote about Salinger's famous Glass family. Her essay, called "J.D. Salinger's closed circuit," appeared in Harper's, October 1962. What she found, she called "terrifying."
McCarthy found the Glass family too cut off from the rest of humanity to be interesting. Pedophiles create alternate realities of "specialness" between themselves and their victims. One must be clear at this point to return to the fact that we are talking about a novel here. Salinger is fact, but Brother Dumb is fiction.
Like Nabokov's Lolita, Brother Dumb provides a complicated beauty. This is not a book that provides the simple pleasure of a well-told story.
Brother Dumb, like Lolita, is the story of one man's attempt to find "love." I put the word in quotation marks, because these are also books that complicate traditional, popular notions of love. That's about the most neutral way of stating that.
Yet, what is love if not complicated?
One of the features of Salinger's books is that his characters seek enlightenment, or transcendent reality. This is High Romanticism's legacy. Franny collapses and the reader may think she's had a spiritual epiphany. My mother, on the other hand, thought the poor girl was pregnant.
Love is sometimes framed as the gateway to the other side. This is over-simplistic nonsense.
McCarthy's essay on Salinger highlights the over-simplistic nonsense of Salinger's novels. Brother Dumb takes us through similar territory. The idealization of love is tempting. It's even sometimes rewarding. It can also be tragic, terrifying and abusive.
Brother Dumb is an unsettling book. It is a remarkable achievement. Alex Good suggested in his review that Salinger would have led the readers on "a merrier chase." I'm not so sure.
I find that thought, actually, a little creepy.
Postscript:
There's something else. Language. The writing process. The ability of language to approach truth. How language may or may not define the outer limits of reality. How language may or may not refer to anything but itself.
I don't mean to refer to Derrida here. I'm thinking of a letter to The Globe and Mail by Sky Gilbert about, as the Globe framed it, "the portrayal of gay men in Mark A. Wainberg's July 26 Three for Thought about HIV/AIDS, saying that it's a typical story from the white, heterosexual AIDS research establishment. Wainberg replies that the facts speak for themselves."
Wainberg wrote that promiscuity among gay males was the primary factor in the spread of HIV/AIDS. Gilbert called this "moral panic." Wainberg replied with, "Several studies have shown ...."
My interest here is not in the conflict over the spread of HIV/AIDS. What interested me was that Gilbert chose to respond to the conflict by referencing and quoting Oscar Wilde: "A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal." Gilbert argued that researchers are blinded by the framework of their language associations, which is leading them down the wrong path, just as the prosecutors of Oscar Wilde destroyed beauty by being blinded by their stark, barren aestheticism.
Gilbert's own words:
"But the homosexual/AIDS meganarrative - like all meganarratives - while terrifically seductive, only resembles the truth. Not all people who get AIDS are libertines, and not all learn redemption. North American (mainly white and heterosexual) AIDS scientists - somewhat overzealously, I think - analyze "lifestyles" and collect data about the sex lives of gay men and Africans, meanwhile convincing everyone that their lurid invasions into the privacy of their subjects is about saving lives. But is it merely a coincidence that a transhistorical fear of same-sex desire between males and the Western obsession with colonizing Africa have merged to become a single discourse called The War on AIDS? Even if scientists were to find out conclusively that white heterosexual North Americans are models of monogamy, attempts by crusading colonizers to teach the rest of the world abstinence are historically doomed to failure. Human beings are sexual (which sometimes means promiscuous) and even an evangelical devotion to transforming the aberrant sexualities of mankind will not change that - or the course of this disease. Non-judgmental, factual information based on conclusive scientific evidence can, has and will."
Wainberg said in response, the statistics speak for themselves. Words need not apply.
Words. Numbers. Reality. Truth. Beauty. Lies. Danger. This conflict raises suggestions about how to read Brother Dumb. In short, we need not look to the life of J.D. Salinger or suppose the Gilbert is writing about him. This is not a biography. It is a work of imagination that intersects with reality, a kind of counter-life.
It's true subject may be, in the end, language itself. The novel's narrator often discusses the writing process and how writing is his substitute for interacting with other people.
Does language lead toward insight and higher reality, or just an alternate, risky dimension?
http://thenewcanlit.blogspot.ca/2008/...
Brother Dumb is direct, honest, and powerful, too, but it is also deceptive and complex. In Quill and Quire, Alex Good called the book an "unconvincing attempt to channel Holden Caufield" that is also a "well-paced and provocative book that sets itself an enormous creative challenge." We can no longer avoid it; a plot summary is in order.
It begins, as above, with the black apartment. The narrator is a famous writer, a recluse, and he speaks directly to the reader, confessing the story of his erotic attachments. The factual elements of the narrator's life align strikingly close to the known facts about J.D. Salinger. The writer is in World War II, publishes early stories in a prestigious New York magazine, writes a novel about a juvenile delinquent, takes a strong interest in Buddhism, moves to the country, as a 50-ish-year-old invites an 18-year-old girl to live with him.
The broad sweep will suffice. One must ask: Is Gilbert channeling Caufield or the author of Franny and Zooey?
This is why I called Brother Dumb deceptive. If you really want to hear about it, it's confusing. One can read and enjoy the novel without knowing anything about Salinger, but if one does: What is one to think? One is tempted to call Brother Dumb the Salinger sequel we've been waiting four decades to receive. Except it isn't.
Like many of Salinger's protagnoists, Gilbert's narrator attempts to draw the reader into a bond of "specialness." Only we understand what is real, what is good, what is right, the narrator suggests. The novel is a confession. Many things in the narrator's life have gone wrong. He is writing to explain himself, but also to find that special audience of special people. The gifted ones, the sensitive ones. The vulnerable ones.
For there is more than a little creepy about the narrator's plea. He is attracted to women much, much younger than himself. He is attracted to their childlike qualities. Years ago, Mary McCarthy wrote about Salinger's famous Glass family. Her essay, called "J.D. Salinger's closed circuit," appeared in Harper's, October 1962. What she found, she called "terrifying."
McCarthy found the Glass family too cut off from the rest of humanity to be interesting. Pedophiles create alternate realities of "specialness" between themselves and their victims. One must be clear at this point to return to the fact that we are talking about a novel here. Salinger is fact, but Brother Dumb is fiction.
Like Nabokov's Lolita, Brother Dumb provides a complicated beauty. This is not a book that provides the simple pleasure of a well-told story.
Brother Dumb, like Lolita, is the story of one man's attempt to find "love." I put the word in quotation marks, because these are also books that complicate traditional, popular notions of love. That's about the most neutral way of stating that.
Yet, what is love if not complicated?
One of the features of Salinger's books is that his characters seek enlightenment, or transcendent reality. This is High Romanticism's legacy. Franny collapses and the reader may think she's had a spiritual epiphany. My mother, on the other hand, thought the poor girl was pregnant.
Love is sometimes framed as the gateway to the other side. This is over-simplistic nonsense.
McCarthy's essay on Salinger highlights the over-simplistic nonsense of Salinger's novels. Brother Dumb takes us through similar territory. The idealization of love is tempting. It's even sometimes rewarding. It can also be tragic, terrifying and abusive.
Brother Dumb is an unsettling book. It is a remarkable achievement. Alex Good suggested in his review that Salinger would have led the readers on "a merrier chase." I'm not so sure.
I find that thought, actually, a little creepy.
Postscript:
There's something else. Language. The writing process. The ability of language to approach truth. How language may or may not define the outer limits of reality. How language may or may not refer to anything but itself.
I don't mean to refer to Derrida here. I'm thinking of a letter to The Globe and Mail by Sky Gilbert about, as the Globe framed it, "the portrayal of gay men in Mark A. Wainberg's July 26 Three for Thought about HIV/AIDS, saying that it's a typical story from the white, heterosexual AIDS research establishment. Wainberg replies that the facts speak for themselves."
Wainberg wrote that promiscuity among gay males was the primary factor in the spread of HIV/AIDS. Gilbert called this "moral panic." Wainberg replied with, "Several studies have shown ...."
My interest here is not in the conflict over the spread of HIV/AIDS. What interested me was that Gilbert chose to respond to the conflict by referencing and quoting Oscar Wilde: "A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal." Gilbert argued that researchers are blinded by the framework of their language associations, which is leading them down the wrong path, just as the prosecutors of Oscar Wilde destroyed beauty by being blinded by their stark, barren aestheticism.
Gilbert's own words:
"But the homosexual/AIDS meganarrative - like all meganarratives - while terrifically seductive, only resembles the truth. Not all people who get AIDS are libertines, and not all learn redemption. North American (mainly white and heterosexual) AIDS scientists - somewhat overzealously, I think - analyze "lifestyles" and collect data about the sex lives of gay men and Africans, meanwhile convincing everyone that their lurid invasions into the privacy of their subjects is about saving lives. But is it merely a coincidence that a transhistorical fear of same-sex desire between males and the Western obsession with colonizing Africa have merged to become a single discourse called The War on AIDS? Even if scientists were to find out conclusively that white heterosexual North Americans are models of monogamy, attempts by crusading colonizers to teach the rest of the world abstinence are historically doomed to failure. Human beings are sexual (which sometimes means promiscuous) and even an evangelical devotion to transforming the aberrant sexualities of mankind will not change that - or the course of this disease. Non-judgmental, factual information based on conclusive scientific evidence can, has and will."
Wainberg said in response, the statistics speak for themselves. Words need not apply.
Words. Numbers. Reality. Truth. Beauty. Lies. Danger. This conflict raises suggestions about how to read Brother Dumb. In short, we need not look to the life of J.D. Salinger or suppose the Gilbert is writing about him. This is not a biography. It is a work of imagination that intersects with reality, a kind of counter-life.
It's true subject may be, in the end, language itself. The novel's narrator often discusses the writing process and how writing is his substitute for interacting with other people.
Does language lead toward insight and higher reality, or just an alternate, risky dimension?
http://thenewcanlit.blogspot.ca/2008/...
July 24, 2019
It's not bad, but it was disappointing following "Sad Old Faggot," which is one of my favourite auto fictions.
April 15, 2012
[This review originally appeared on "Chroma Journal's" book blog on January 27, 2008.]
Can you trust the voice of an author who never actually wrote anything as he ruminates on the peaks and valleys of his own literary career? And what can be made of a man looking back on a life (not lived, mind you) in an autobiography? Brother Dumb asks these questions, and many more, in the course of its 207 pages as it intentionally challenges and actively engages the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, author and character, memoir and extended monologue.
“Just a quick style note. (You might not think that I’m paying attention to style, but I am.) I know it seems weird – and it will become even weirder – that I don’t refer to anyone by their actual names, including myself. (I go on about “my daughter” or “critics” anonymously, but when it comes to the women in my life, I’ve changed their names – to protect the innocent.) Also, I’m not going to quote from my books. In a way this doesn’t make sense, I know. It’s not as if you can’t figure out who I am. But all this is related to the way my brain works. I need the illusion of privacy. Which brings me to why I would even write this. It’s the kind of book I should never have written, that I promised never to write. But certain incidents – horrible, nightmarish incidents – have force my hand. And also, if I were to use real names, it wouldn’t seem like fiction. Sure, it’s all true, but it’s important for me not to think it’s true. The best type of writing is when the author is trying to fool himself that what his writing is a lie.” (p. 29)
Gilbert holds the University Research Chair in Creative Writing and Theatre Studies at The University of Guelph and has been a driving force on the Toronto queer theatre scene as an actor, playwright, and director for decades. This dramatic background is quite evident in the pages of Brother Dumb as Gilbert’s unnamed narrator makes so few forays into actual dialogue in the course of a reminiscence about a life lived most vibrantly in the years on either side of World War II that the narrative quickly coalesces into an almost singular rant against the whole of humanity itself (with the occasional direct address thrown into the mix to vary the POV, ever so slightly). Highlights on this misanthropic hit list include (but are by no means limited to): other writers (“the arts attracts the worst class of people. By that I mean the lazy liars, the unabashed hypocrites, the gossiping guttersnipes” (p. 25)), jazz (“I really do think that the whole thing is bogus” (p. 4)), and parties (“God, I hate parties”(p. 34)). This Salingeresque character, however, reserves his most potent bile and invective for the “crapulent dolt[s]” (p. 18) who engage in the literary criticism that forced him into the exile that is laid out, at length, in the pages of this book. “Since I couldn’t detach myself from reviewers – the stupid, fatuous crap they spew to feed their own egos – there was nothing to do but abandon the act of putting my work before them.” (p. 118)
The vehemence of this last sentence begs the obvious question: “Why would you (meaning me) even consider reviewing Brother Dumb? Because this type of difficult-to-categorize literary pranksterism thrills me in a way that straight fiction and conventional autobiography often do not and because this hybrid genre, alternately discussed as fictoir, memtion, autolieography, and (this is my favorite) Freyction, reminds us that creative writing is still an art form that is meant to be appreciated for all of its thought provoking, controversial, antagonistic, unreliable, and deliciously vague potential.
And because “I distrust the whole idea of authenticity, actually – I think it’s very inauthentic.” (p. 134)
Can you trust the voice of an author who never actually wrote anything as he ruminates on the peaks and valleys of his own literary career? And what can be made of a man looking back on a life (not lived, mind you) in an autobiography? Brother Dumb asks these questions, and many more, in the course of its 207 pages as it intentionally challenges and actively engages the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, author and character, memoir and extended monologue.
“Just a quick style note. (You might not think that I’m paying attention to style, but I am.) I know it seems weird – and it will become even weirder – that I don’t refer to anyone by their actual names, including myself. (I go on about “my daughter” or “critics” anonymously, but when it comes to the women in my life, I’ve changed their names – to protect the innocent.) Also, I’m not going to quote from my books. In a way this doesn’t make sense, I know. It’s not as if you can’t figure out who I am. But all this is related to the way my brain works. I need the illusion of privacy. Which brings me to why I would even write this. It’s the kind of book I should never have written, that I promised never to write. But certain incidents – horrible, nightmarish incidents – have force my hand. And also, if I were to use real names, it wouldn’t seem like fiction. Sure, it’s all true, but it’s important for me not to think it’s true. The best type of writing is when the author is trying to fool himself that what his writing is a lie.” (p. 29)
Gilbert holds the University Research Chair in Creative Writing and Theatre Studies at The University of Guelph and has been a driving force on the Toronto queer theatre scene as an actor, playwright, and director for decades. This dramatic background is quite evident in the pages of Brother Dumb as Gilbert’s unnamed narrator makes so few forays into actual dialogue in the course of a reminiscence about a life lived most vibrantly in the years on either side of World War II that the narrative quickly coalesces into an almost singular rant against the whole of humanity itself (with the occasional direct address thrown into the mix to vary the POV, ever so slightly). Highlights on this misanthropic hit list include (but are by no means limited to): other writers (“the arts attracts the worst class of people. By that I mean the lazy liars, the unabashed hypocrites, the gossiping guttersnipes” (p. 25)), jazz (“I really do think that the whole thing is bogus” (p. 4)), and parties (“God, I hate parties”(p. 34)). This Salingeresque character, however, reserves his most potent bile and invective for the “crapulent dolt[s]” (p. 18) who engage in the literary criticism that forced him into the exile that is laid out, at length, in the pages of this book. “Since I couldn’t detach myself from reviewers – the stupid, fatuous crap they spew to feed their own egos – there was nothing to do but abandon the act of putting my work before them.” (p. 118)
The vehemence of this last sentence begs the obvious question: “Why would you (meaning me) even consider reviewing Brother Dumb? Because this type of difficult-to-categorize literary pranksterism thrills me in a way that straight fiction and conventional autobiography often do not and because this hybrid genre, alternately discussed as fictoir, memtion, autolieography, and (this is my favorite) Freyction, reminds us that creative writing is still an art form that is meant to be appreciated for all of its thought provoking, controversial, antagonistic, unreliable, and deliciously vague potential.
And because “I distrust the whole idea of authenticity, actually – I think it’s very inauthentic.” (p. 134)
May 28, 2021
A fictitious memoir of a narcissistic and antisocial writer who is a control freak and, as a result, is pitifully lonely. (There is my psychiatric diagnosis, to add to a common theme in Brother Dumb) ; ) Although sometimes funny, if not caustically so, this recluse becomes loathsome through his self-righteousness and consistent contradictions. This 'unknown celebrity' (Salinger??) who is a “hopeless romantic … who hates people,” appears to us as a human oxymoron. I am intrigued by Sky Gilbert and will look up more of his work.
September 20, 2009
I'm surprised this book didn't get more attention. It's smart, provocative, complex. At the same time, very accessible and readable. Some great surprises and insights in this fictitious memoir of an author very much like JD Salinger.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews