Life Drawing

by Michael Grumley

From the dustjacket:

From the plains of the Midwest to the close humidity of New Orleans to the crazy heat of Los Angeles, Michael Grumley's Life Drawing travels the course of love and its destruction, of the fragile balance of commitment and exploration.

Born in Iowa to the sounds of Bob and Bing Crosby and the Dorsey brothers, Mickey grows up to the comforting images of his living room TV and the reassuring ruts of his parents' life. During the restless summer of his senior year in high school, drifting away from the girlfriend he could never quite love, Mickey spends a night with another boy, and his world will never be the same. On a barge floating down the Mississippi, he falls in love with James, a black card player from New Orleans, and in time the two of them settle, bristling with sexual intensity, in the French Quarter - until a brief affair destroys James's trust and sends Mickey to the drugs and images of Los Angeles.

Lush with visual detail, told with an inflinching and lyrical honesty, Lie Drawing captures the bright agonies of learning to be the person one is born to be.

Includes a foreword by Edmund White and an Afterword by George Stambolian.

Genres: LGBT, Gay, Fiction

156 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1991

About the author

Michael Grumley attended the University of Denver, the City College of New York and the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, where he met novelist Robert Ferro. They lived together for many years and founded the writers' group The Violet Quill. Michael Grumley died of AIDS in 1988.

Reviews

[K.D. Absolutely · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was reading and enjoying Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child when I bumped into this book at my favorite bookstore selling second-hand books. The introduction of Edmund White, whose "A Boy's Story" (1982) I read and liked, was just too beautiful to pass up on. He wrote: "Now the Ferro-Grumleys are buried together in a grave overlooking the Hudson." The Ferro-Grumleys was a gay couple, the author Michael Grumley and his lover Robert Ferro. This struck me as odd. Why? I've never met a gay couple ending up together for the rest of their lives. At least for me here in the Philippines, I am still to meet a gay couple who has been together for so many years and they have plan to stick to each other until one is dead. All the gay couples I've met have already separated and all the old gays I've met are heading to dying alone.

But the Ferro-Grumleys? They are even buried side by side with each other that reminded me of Catherine and Heathcliff. I am even crazy to imagine that maybe one side of their caskets is open so their dusts mingle like in those ill-fated lovers in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. Well, who knows? Both Grumley and Ferro were both artists and too bohemian not to think about the idea. But let's live them at peace. They are dead. At least this introduction proved to me that gay men can also love 'till eternity.

However, ignore the hunky bare-chested man on the cover. There is no explicit sex scene in this book. It is subtle and simple. Simple in a way, that Grumley's purpose in writing the book was only to relate his tale. His, because he used first-person narration so I thought that this could be a semi-autobiography. It's just that the lover of the main protagonist Mickey, a white young man who is also a nude or underwear model, is a black man James who he meets afloat a ship down on the Mississippi. This reminded me of Huck Finn so maybe it is high time to finally read those two books, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.

The simplicity of the narration should not be discounted though. At some point, of course, I missed the hysterics of Augusten Burroughs but when I closed the book, I felt refreshed. It was nice knowing that there are books about gays that are just honest and do not resort to traumatic childhood, maltreated by parents, drugs, sex, discrimination, etc, etc. Also, there are no explicit sex scenes. This book is not written to titillate readers, especially gays. This was written to tell a tale of honest love between two men. This is a book that narrates a gay man's life just like any other straight person. It oozes with realism and sincerity. At last, a book about a gay person that is portrayed to be like anybody else and does not have any hangups on being gay.

Kudos to Michael Grumley. May you rest in peace but I hope that gay writers will take the cue from you.

[Mark Ward · Rating 2 out of 5]

In the words of Bernard Black, "Enjoy. It's dreadful, but quite short."

Life Drawing is a novella - that should have been a short story - padded out to novel length with an introduction and an afterward. The writing is... fine but the story and plot is just, uniformly, terrible. The first 40 pages could be cut entirely, and when it gets going - characters are introduced and then dropped. Perhaps he was going for an eighteen-year old's naivete, but it comes across as a sloppy novel. I literally only gave it two stars instead of one, because I liked the last three pages. I only persisted with this because it was short.

[W. Stephen Breedlove · Rating 5 out of 5]

“SOME KIND BLUE LIGHT”

I am of the same generation as Michael Grumley, the author, and Mickey, the narrator, of Life Drawing. Mickey’s account of growing up in a small town in Iowa in post-World War II America is fascinating. His references to people such as Kate Smith, Ed Sullivan, and Dagmar brought back memories of evenings watching our black-and-white TV with my parents and my younger brother in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Significantly, Mickey doesn’t forget another TV personality: “On the television screen those early high school years, we saw Senator Joe McCarthy.”

When Mickey’s Dad gives “the talk” to Mickey and his brother Franklin, Mickey understands him to say, “Aggression was the key, that in sexual matters we were to take what we wanted without asking for a by-your-leave from our partners . . . Sexual arrogance was the habit we boys were to put on.” This is so much of the period of the 1950s.

I love the scene in which Mickey meets James. Although Horace, James’s father, says, “This nasty-looking creature is my son James—don’t you call him Jimmy,” James is glamorous to Mickey. James tells Mickey, “My papa doesn’t know I’m in the life, so don’t say nothing.” Mickey, the inexperienced white boy, and James, the grownup black boy, are meant for each other. Mickey says, “Anywhere we went, something seemed to follow us, some kind blue light that made us shine.”

Mickey draws and thinks he would like to be an artist, but he doesn’t have a clue to what being an artist is really about. When he has difficulty capturing James’s likeness, James, who becomes Mickey’s guide and mentor, as well as his lover, asks him, “Why don’t you use your imagination?” Later, as Mickey matures, he comes to realize, “Drawing was the way of making sense of the world.”

Life Drawing is full of poetic writing. I love these two lines: “I felt self-awareness whip through me like an icy wind, snapping off the blossoms of my ego” and “Suddenly over the whole golf course jeweled flowers of light, flowers like universes, burst into being, showering us with radiance, rapturing my heart.”

Life Drawing has been called a Huck and Jim story because Mickey, a white boy, goes down the Mississippi with James, a black man. Kirkus Reviews calls the novel “a modern homosexual retelling of Huck Finn.” Publishers Weekly weighs in with “This latter-day Huck Finn sets off down the Mississippi to find the world, but discovers instead an 18-year-old black man.” In Unlimited Embrace: A Canon of Gay Fiction, 1945-1995 (University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), Reed Woodhouse describes Life Drawing as “Less a coming-out story than a coming-of-age story, it is about a gay Huck Finn who finally consummates his love with Jim.” Ernest Hemingway writes in Green Hills of Africa: “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” What would Hemingway have thought of Life Drawing?

In his essay on Life Drawing in The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered (Haiduk Press, 2010), Sam J. Miller insightfully observes, “Mickey does not objectify or exoticize James, and their love is neither predatory nor exploitative. But Mickey . . . has been shielded from life in a way that James has not been.” At the time of their affair in New Orleans, Mickey is not really ready for James. After his infidelity destroys his relationship with James, Mickey, like Huck, heads out for the territory, to California.

In the Norton Critical Edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (199), Toni Morrison makes some comments about Huck and Jim that can apply to Mickey and James. She writes, “The consolation, the healing properties Huck longs for, is made possible by Jim’s active, highly vocal affection . . . Talk so free of lies it produces an aura of restfulness and peace unavailable anywhere in the world.” Substitute Mickey for Huck and James for Jim here; it’s perfect. Morrison asks, “What would it take for Huck to live happily without Jim? . . . without Jim there is no more book, no more story to tell.” Again, substitute Mickey for Huck and James for Jim.

At the time of their affair in New Orleans, Mickey is not really ready for James. After his infidelity destroys his relationship with James, Mickey, like Huck, heads out for the territory, to California.
But Grumley does understand that Mickey has no further story without James. No spoilers here!

Another gay novel that bounces off of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn is George Whitmore’s Nebraska. Grumley and Whitmore were members of the famous Violet Quill group of gay writers in the early 1980s. Michael Grumley was lost to AIDS on April 28, 1988 at the age of 45. George Whitmore was lost to AIDS on April 19, 1989 at the age of 43. Grumley’s Life Drawing has been reissued as an e-book by ReQueered Tales.

[Dieter Moitzi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has been provided for free by the publisher. The review below has also been published on Rainbow Book Reviews.

Mickey is your average, cute little boy, growing up in the 50s in Lilienthal, in the US Midwest not far from the Mississippi, with his dad, mom, and older brother. Nothing seems amiss, out of place, odd or different; his happy boyhood and teenage memories could be those of any kid of his age, upbringing, and geographical origin if it weren’t for the fact that they were genuinely his alone. When he turns seventeen, he has a sort of first epiphany: he has sex with a slightly older boy, and that event makes him feel bolder, more alive, more empowered, as if he had at last been let in on an essential secret: “This body I had, this thing that had been lacking its own authority for so long, had suddenly come together, and hardened to a purpose I recognized as natural and just, no matter how outlandish it might seem to others. The secretness of it was part of it – I had never, as far as I could remember, been admonished against making love to a man. The subject hadn’t come up.”

Then, in the last year of high school, one night he up and runs away. He wants to go to New Orleans. By chance, he stumbles upon an old acquaintance who works on a boat and who agrees to smuggle him downriver. On board, Mickey meets his acquaintance’s cocky and handsome son James. The second epiphany strikes: he falls in love with James, and as he seems to be a very lucky boy, that deep, churning feeling is reciprocated. The two young men find a dwelling in New Orleans, where they openly live together, doing the odd job to earn their living. And then, one day, Micky allows himself to be seduced by another man, a mere chance encounter, and when he confesses this, James walks out on him. Heartbroken, Mickey heads west to California, where other adventures, insights, epiphanies await him…

I seem to have signed a subscription for work by Violet Quill writers—lucky me (recently I’ve read and reviewed novels by Felice Picano, Andrew Holleran, and this author’s longtime lover Robert Ferro)! Once again this book, a hidden, forgotten gem, has been rereleased by the excellent ReQueered Tales team, and I cannot thank them enough. Because this was one helluva great read (Grumley’s only novel, it was released shortly after his untimely death). Grumley’s prose is crystal-clear, evocative, sensual, creating atmospheres and invoking emotions on each page. The whole childhood part is soaked with the low-humming nostalgia of a paradise lost forever whereas the other parts of the book astonish with the naïve, heartfelt innoncence of first discoveries. I vibrated with each turn and twist, and I loved the whole experience as it made me forget I was reading a story—I felt as if I were living it!

The book is more a coming-of-age than a coming-out novel, which is in itself rather surprising. The setting in time and space made me surmise I would be getting the difficulties and hardships of a young man coming to terms and accepting his homosexuality, but that was not the central theme. As it were, the narrator discovers who he is, sexually and emotionally speaking, almost with a shrug. The focus lay on what came after that. How to fall in love, whom to love, how to love, and most importantly, how to understand what one is feeling—all the things most of us go through at that age, by the way. Often we also experience the same results, namely confusion, broken hearts, resilience, gain of self-knowledge.

A powerful story, which swept me up without drama, almost as if Grumley had walked in on me on tiptoes, taken me softly by the hand, and led me down his narrative path. An amazing book, one I won’t forget and whill certainly reread many times. Joins my classical gay writing pantheon, joining novels such as ‘Like People in History’ or ‘Dancer from the Dance.’ Both books by Violet Quill writers, by the way.

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 5 out of 5]

"A simple, classic, engaging, and beautifully written tale of a boy who ran away from home, a man who didn’t make it in the movies, an artist who found himself earlier than most and did it all west of the Mississippi, in places which, while very American, few Americans have ever been.” – Andrew Holleran

“Life Drawing affirms the rich complexity of passion in the story of a small-town boy’s difficult journey to manhood. Michael Grumley’s crisp, direct language brings to life the demanding wonder of sexuality and the delicate tightrope of love between black men and white men.” – Melvin Dixon

“Grumley’s graceful and telling memoir of a youth at first nearly idyllic then very nearly misspent is rooted as deeply in the American Midwest – its river-rich loam, its high moral soil – as any story by Mark Twain or Sherwood Anderson. Like their work, I expect it will continue to charm and surprise and provoke for some time to come.” – Felice Picano

“Life Drawing is the work of a true writer. It’s the most physical book I’ve ever read this side of pornography. Not a word’s out of place.” – Ned Rorem

“What a moving experience to have Michael Grumley with us again in the energy, shape, beauty, and wisdom of his first published novel. The economy of his line is remarkable, as is the powerful story he tells. Once I started the book I couldn’t put it down.” – Julia Markus

I have prefaced my review with the above quotations from the praise the novel garnered when first published because while I am delighted that this novel is back in print I am astounded that until then it had attracted no reviews on Goodreads and because if ever we forget what was lost in all those early terrible years of the AIDS epidemic this beautiful little novel is a devastatingly poignant reminder. Not because it is about AIDS but because it is Michael Grumley's only published fiction and stunning foretaste of what he could have done and a monument to all that never was produced by him and so many others.

This perfectly wonderful story is still powerful and clearly speaks of, but past, the time of its creation. Like 'The Sorrows of Young Werther' and countless other classic bildungasromans it is about gaining wisdom and losing innocence. At heart, like all classics, is a love story, even if it is a story of love found and lost and never recaptured which is inevitable with an 18 year old hero. Love transforms youth but is a cruel and challenging emotion and, if we are lucky we master it, but only at a price. Learning to know what matters is a matter of trial and error and of mistakes and hard lessons learnt. I can think of few novels that so succinctly, and beautifully, portray the process of learning about love and growing up and that both are a one street - you can never unlearn experience, you can never go back.

A completely perfect and wonderful book - considering how many inexpensive copies of its first edition are available (as of March 2024) there is no reason for anyone not to read this book.

[Ross · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Life Drawing" is a greatly misunderstood work of literature. This is a great shame, as the story preoccupies itself not with the self-loathing and self-doubt we have come to identify with gay literature, but a subtle exploration, and celebration, of interracial pairings. Indeed, as George Stambolian pointed out in the afterword, race is presented in all its breadth, with no character being stripped down to the zestless form of a "typical" white or black man.

The novella's very erasure from readers' collective consciousness, in no small part due to its being out of print now, reminds us of the countless writers, editors, publishers and audiences that constitute the lost generation of the AIDS epidemic. It's heartbreaking to think how the thriving queer literature of the 1970s and 1980s was demolished, both by the virus and the mounting condemnation of the gay world by pseudo-religious fanatics.

Samuel J. Miller, whose reflections capture a vivid depiction of the story's depth, expressed his views on "Life Drawing" in the following words:

"It survives to move readers in ways at once more ineffable and more devastating than the mainstream emotional juggernauts. It's a sketch, a simple thing, really, but no less moving for being simple. 'Life Drawing' has the same slow emotional impact of fireworks bursting over a suburban golf course or the sight of a boat on a river at dusk, dark against the bright sky."

[Jerry Jensen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am biased as Michael Grumley is my cousin, and this is for me, the best book he wrote. My partner, who never met him, agrees. He and Robert Ferro were indeed an out couple, when it wasn't generally accepted. And yes, they died of AIDS early in the crisis in the 80's. Having spoken personally with the three living members of the 8 authors who formed the Violet Quill, I know that Edmund White, Felice Picano and Andrew Halloran all respected both of the Ferro-Gumleys, for their writings and contributions to the NYC Gay scene in the 80's. I greatly miss Michael, as we grew through the years, just a couple years apart in age.

[Mark P. Batenburg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous

Such subtle prose, every word meaningful, no extra words. It’s just gorgeous writing.

And hats off to the organization that’s reviving these classics of pre-AIDS gay fiction.

[Kimberly Macias · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF
idk this book just didn’t hook me at all and I read 50 pages.
I don’t really know the point the author is trying to get across as well.

[Brian Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm currently revisiting Men on Men, the first installment in that enduring series of short story collections. Included within is an excellent excerpt from Michael Grumley's then-unpublished novella, Life Drawing. In the excerpt we meet Mickey, a young white boy from Iowa, who runs away from home and falls in love with a young black boy on his way to New Orleans. The full novella expands on Mickey's childhood and adolescence, and explores more of his search for identity and place in the world. This is a beautiful poetically written novella, thankfully brought to life 3 years after the author's death, and now again available via ReQueered Tales. It's a tragedy that Life Drawing was Grumley's only published work of fiction.