Love Alone: Eighteen Elegies for Rog

by Paul Monette

An eighteen-poem cycle on the death of his lover from AIDS emphasizes the power of love and its survival through pain and anger, and the tragedy and magnitude of a terrifying twist of fate and its effect on a generation

Genres: Poetry, LGBT, Queer, Gay, Memoir, Queer Lit, Nonfiction

65 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Online Guide to Paul Monette's papers at UCLA:
http://findaid.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/...

In novels, poetry, and a memoir, Paul Monette wrote about gay men striving to fashion personal identities and, later, coping with the loss of a lover to AIDS.

Monette was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1945. He was educated at prestigious schools in New England: Phillips Andover Academy and Yale University, where he received his B.A. in 1967. He began his prolific writing career soon after graduating from Yale. For eight years, he wrote poetry exclusively.

After coming out in his late twenties, he met Roger Horwitz, who was to be his lover for over twenty years. Also during his late twenties, he grew disillusioned with poetry and shifted his interest to the novel, not to return to poetry until the 1980s.

In 1977, Monette and Horwitz moved to Los Angeles. Once in Hollywood, Monette wrote a number of screenplays that, though never produced, provided him the means to be a writer. Monette published four novels between 1978 and 1982. These novels were enormously successful and established his career as a writer of popular fiction. He also wrote several novelizations of films.

Monette's life changed dramatically when Roger Horwitz was diagnosed with AIDS in the early 1980s. After Horwitz's death in 1986, Monette wrote extensively about the years of their battles with AIDS (Borrowed Time, 1988) and how he himself coped with losing a lover to AIDS (Love Alone, 1988). These works are two of the most powerful accounts written about AIDS thus far.

Their publication catapulted Monette into the national arena as a spokesperson for AIDS. Along with fellow writer Larry Kramer, he emerged as one of the most familiar and outspoken AIDS activists of our time. Since very few out gay men have had the opportunity to address national issues in mainstream venues at any previous time in U.S. history, Monette's high-visibility profile was one of his most significant achievements. He went on to write two important novels about AIDS, Afterlife (1990) and Halfway Home (1991). He himself died of AIDS-related complications in 1995.

In his fiction, Monette unabashedly depicts gay men who strive to fashion personal identities that lead them to love, friendship, and self-fulfillment. His early novels generally begin where most coming-out novels end; his protagonists have already come to terms with their sexuality long before the novels' projected time frames. Monette has his characters negotiate family relations, societal expectations, and personal desires in light of their decisions to lead lives as openly gay men.

Two major motifs emerge in these novels: the spark of gay male relations and the dynamic alternative family structures that gay men create for themselves within a homophobic society. These themes are placed in literary forms that rely on the structures of romance, melodrama, and fantasy.

Monette's finest novel, Afterlife, combines the elements of traditional comedy and the resistance novel; it is the first gay novel written about AIDS that fuses personal love interests with political activism.

Monette's harrowing collection of deeply personal poems, Love Alone: 18 Elegies for Rog, conveys both the horrors of AIDS and the inconsolable pain of love lost. The elegies are an invaluable companion to Borrowed Time.

Before the publication and success of his memoir, Becoming a Man, it seemed inevitable that Monette would be remembered most for his writings on AIDS. Becoming a Man, however, focuses on the dilemmas of growing up gay. It provides at once an unsparing account of the nightmare of the closet and a moving and often humorous depiction of the struggle to come out. Becoming a Man won the 1992 National Book Award for nonfiction, a historical moment in the history

Reviews

[LenaRibka · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love Alone was written during the five months after Paul Monette's lover and long-life companion, Roger Horwitz, died of AIDS.

If Grief, Mourning, Pain, Suffering of Loss and Love have been EVER put into words, then by Paul Monette in his eighteen Elegies for Rog. Eighteen poems.

Writing them quite literally kept me alive, for the only time I wasn't wailing and trembling was when I was hammering at these poems.
(Paul Monette)

I don't think anybody can read these poems in one sitting.

The most beautiful, powerful and heart-aching lines I've ever read.

P.S Please, read first Borrowed Time, the chronicle of the twenty months before Roger's death, to know what they meant to each other, how deep was their internal connection to each other to understand these poems.

[silas denver melvin · Rating 5 out of 5]

wrung my heart out shamelessly like a wet cloth

[Jenny · Rating 4 out of 5]

When Paul Monette died of AIDS in 1995, he had already lost and buried two lovers who had died of the same disease. Monette - author, poet and gay rights activist - gave voice to a community that was suffering from a disease that was often not treated as such, but as a cause of unspeakable shame.

These poems were written in the month after the loss of his partner Roger Horowitz. And in reading I sometimes felt I was listening to someone speak, breathless almost, who's afraid that if he stops speaking, he will have to really let go. There's hardly any punctuation, just a flood of words, of memories, of raw unfiltered emotions that keep pouring onto those pages. These poems were not written in attempt to write poetry of aesthetic precision. They were stunned into being.

"Cover my bald spot will you
you'd say and tilt your head like a parrot
so I could fix you up always always
till this one night when I was reduced to
I love you little friend here I am my
sweetest pea over and over spending all our
endearments like stray coins at a border
but wouldn't cry then no choked it because
they all said hearing was the last to go
the ear is like a wolf's till the very end
straining to hear a whole forest and I
wanted you loping off whatever you could
still dream to the sound of me at 3 P.M.
you were stable still our favorite word
at 4 you took the turn WAIT WAIT I AM
THE SENTRY HERE nothing passes as long as
I'm where I am..."

These poems speak of the stifling weight of grief, but they also convey a sense of dignity and pride in being exactly who they were in times in which homophobia was still very much a social norm.
He once wrote: "I can't conceive the hidden life anymore, don't think of it as life. When you finally come out, there's a pain that stops, and you know it will never hurt like that again, no matter how much you lose or how bad you die."

Highly recommended.


With many thanks to NetGalley and Open Road Media for the arc.

[BookChampions · Rating 5 out of 5]

How do you rank poems like these? Paul Monette's elegies, written in the days after his partner Rog died of AIDS, are painfully raw snapshots of grief—yet they are also an outpouring of love. Even the introduction had me in tears.

The abandonment of commas is an interesting touch, which made me feel like I was lost in Monette's subconscious. It almost felt a little uncomfortable reading these, as if I were at the funeral of someone I've admired but did not know intimately. Fascinating, heart-breaking, memorable.

[Rishi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love Alone is the most beautiful piece of grief I've ever read, so much so that I was too afraid to review it the first time I finished. What could I say that would even touch Monette's own words? Instead I will just include as many of his as I can. Paul Monette wrote this collection in the months after losing his long-time partner Roger Horwitz to AIDS in 1986. They are almost entirely unedited. Monette wrote in the introduction,

"if only a fragment remained in the future, to fade in the sulfurous rain, it would say how much I loved him and how terrible was the calamity.

The story that endlessly eludes the decorum of the press is the death of a generation of gay men. What is written here is only one man's passing and one man's cry, a warrior burying a warrior. May it fuel the fire of those on the front lines who mean to prevail, and of their friends who stand in the fire with them. We will not be bowed down or erased by this. I learned too well what it means to be a people, learned in the joy of my best friend what all the meaningless pain and horror cannot take away–that all there is is love. Pity us not."

Love Alone is relentless. Each poem has no punctuation, flowing without stop from beginning to end in a torrent of grief. Each one is addressed to Rog; each one is so brutal, fierce, and desperate, I had to stop to catch my breath. Sometimes to read a line over and over again; others because I had to stop because my tears were blurring the lettering. It's equal parts a battle cry and a lament, to Roger and to the generations lost with him.


"the day has taken you with it and all
there is now is burning dark the only green
is up by the grave and this little thing
of telling the hill I'm here oh I'm here"


"it's only Tuesday there's chicken in the fridge
from Sunday night he ate he slept oh why
don't all these kisses rouse you I won't I won't
say it all I will say is goodnight patting
a few last strands in place you're covered now
my darling one last graze in the meadow
of you and please let your final dream be
a man not quite your size losing the whole
world but still here combing combing
singing your secret names til the night's gone"

"epitaph name no middle initial date then
FOR 12 YEARS ALL THE LOVE IN THE WORLD WAS HIS
OTHERWISE HE WAS A WRITER HERE I AM ROG
not Yeats exactly but there won't be horsemen
passing only if we're lucky some far-off
men of our sort generations hence a pair
of dreamy types strolling among the hill graves
for curiosity's sake this well may be
in a time when dying is not all day and every
house riven and they'll laugh Here's 2 like us
won't that be lovely Rog"

"oh what a page Rog how can they not see
I am only still here to be with you
my best my only page scribbled on cirrus
the high air soaring in its every word"

[Beth Windle · Rating 5 out of 5]

When he died, Paul Monette left some amazing writing for us to experience. I would say this collection is the most exceptional of it all.

Read these poems. They are gorgeous. These eighteen vibrant, strong, rambling, monstrous, angry, thick pieces of poetry will bring to everyone who reads them a fuller understanding of grief, the hugeness of AIDS, and the power of one human being’s love for another. A fellow student in my creative writing class did a report on this collection of poems. Several people (me included) cried as she read them, even right there in class. So if you pick up this work, be prepared for that. It’s worth it, though – way worth it. Unfortunately, though, as I found out this past holiday when I tried to buy a copy of this book for someone, it’s no longer in print. Here’s hoping that it returns to print before all the precious used copies are snapped up.

[Hillary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Picked this up from the sharing shelf at my synagogue the other day and read it while waiting for the kids. I had read most of Monette's prose years ago. These poems - OMG. I started shaking. I am blown away. Extremely powerful, touching, painful and beautiful.

[Jack · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous. I cried and cried.

[Quinn Monette · Rating 5 out of 5]

sacred text

[Shannon Wolf · Rating 5 out of 5]

no words

[Ije the Devourer of Books · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was beautiful, painful and overwhelming, but also empowering and life giving. Paul Monette's words are just so beautiful and even though written in grief they give life and vision. They make me realise that love can make a difference, not just the love of a partner but also the love and compassion of a stranger.

The grief expressed in this slim book is raw and palpable. Written after the death of his partner Roger, Paul Monette gives voice to the pain, anger and loss of losing his lover and best friend. The writing also shows him grappling to understand what has happened. Suddenly the war he fought to keep Roger alive is over and death has won.

But has it?

It took great courage to write this. It is raw and passionate and angry and deeply emotional. It really pulled at my heart and is a fitting tribute to both men.

It also took great courage to read this and to enter into the grief of another. Grief touches all of us at some point in our lives. It is never easy but there are times when it is expected and accepted as part of the course of life. Grief at the end of a long, satisfying well lived life can also be thankful and express gratitude, but there are times when grief is agony because a life was cut off before its time and there is a sense of life not being finished or not flourishing because of injustice.

Paul's grief is angry and painful because there is no peace about Roger's untimely death. In this sense there is something deep to rage against.

'Rage, rage against the dying of the light'!!

Roger's death was grief to rage against because AIDS was ignored by the US Govt as it ravaged the gay community in the early days of the pandemic. Roger's death and later Paul's were individual examples of these untimely deaths, lives from the tip of an iceberg that is still silently growing. I am grateful that their lives were not in vain because their stories have taught many to rage against the complacency of governments, to rage against stigma and discrimination, to rage against people who want to ignore the needs of the most vulnerable and silence them.

Even me with my quiet life and reticence have found ways to write and speak about and rage against AIDS. I too have found my own way to rage against the 'dying of the light' and the millions of people who have died, and the stigma and discrimination that continues along with the brutalisation of minority communities.

It is elegies and stories such as these that help sharpen my vision and give me courage and determination, not just to me but also to others who struggle against injustice in all its insidious forms.

It took courage for Paul Monette to publish these feelings of grief but this grief has somehow given life and vision. I being one of those. Death and grief are not the end. In writing these words he has also emphasised that life is precious. Not a minute is to be wasted and life is to be explored. His words remind me to be courageous and remind me not to be scared. And Paul has reached out to touch me at the beginning of a new year. As I try my best to be a priest and to love my positive brothers and sisters, as I try my best to love my LGBT brothers and sisters Paul shows me how.

In his very last elegy he writes of finding a roll of undeveloped film 3 years after Roger's death. He rushes to develop the pictures and finds photos of a trip to Tuscany. He and Roger visited a monastery where they were embraced and welcomed by one of the monks. And this monk, Brother John, in his love and hospitality makes Paul and Roger welcome. He can't speak english and they can't speak much italian but Brother John welcomes them and makes them laugh and shows them around. Brother John takes pictures with them and for them, and three years after the devastating loss of Roger, Paul finds this beautiful picture. A picture which graces the front page of this book of beauty and pain. A picture which Paul calls his wedding picture. A picture which I spent much time gazing at, reflecting thinking.

And I read this last elegy and I cried not just for their loss but for the simplicity of love and hospitality. And because even though Paul rages against a hostile and excluding church, I can see the touch of love and the presence of the divine in a simple monk who reached out to two men before the darkness descended and in that small way brought a little light to somehow help when the darkness of grief seemed so utter.

And that simple touch of love is something that I can do in this world around me. And I feel hopeful, empowered and comforted.

And I feel privileged. I feel privileged that I have been able to share in the lives of Roger and Paul. Their lives and losses are not in vain because their lives are giving life to others.

'Oh death where is thy sting? Oh grave where is thy victory?'

[Ricky Schneider · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I would rather have this volume filed under AIDS than under Poetry, because if these words speak to anyone they are for those who are mad with loss, to let them know they are not alone." -Paul Monette

These are the soul-shattering reflections of the author's final days with his partner Rog as he succumbs to the AIDS virus. Heartbreaking is an ill-fitting understatement. Though often bleak, this cycle of poems expresses all the erratic emotions of grief. It oscillates between being devastatingly sad, then bitterly angry, then somehow managing a wistful sense of humor. It's difficult to rate someone's raw emotional reaction to watching the love of their life die in front of them. Regardless of any star rating, Monette clearly leaves his heart bleeding on each page of this book and it's beauty and importance is without question.

He wrote these with his pain still fresh and his wound still achingly open in the five months after his partner died. He wrote them almost back to back in a steady stream of sorrow. So it may be difficult to read, not only due to the subject matter but, because he uses no indentations or line breaks. This didn't really bother me because I felt it so effectively expressed his frenetic state of mind. It also had a deliberate intention behind it that I respect. In his preface Monette says, "I don't mean them to be impregnable, though I admit I want them to allow no escape, like a hospital room, or indeed a mortal illness."

Monette's writing is luscious in intimate detail and vicious in it's emotional velocity. He invites the reader into the most beautiful moments of his relationship so long as they can stand the intense suffering they also endured together and that he continued on with alone. I didn't find his poems depressing as much as moving and unflinching.

While we (especially those of us who belong to the PREP generations) cannot possibly relate to or fully understand his experience, we can all empathize with his profound sense of loss. He himself says that writing this saved him and I know that his vulnerability and honesty in its pages has done the same for so many others and will only continue to save more. It's devastating to think that if these men were living through this now, the outcome would probably have been much different. We may not enjoy reading their painful experiences but, because we do enjoy the luxury of living in a time when AIDS is no longer a death sentence, as it was for Rog, we at least owe them the honoring of their memory through reading their story and acknowledging how very fortunate we are.

"If we're lucky some far-off men of our sort, generations hence, a pair of dreamy types strolling among the hill graves... in a time when dying is not all day and every house riven, they'll laugh 'Here's 2 like us'"

[Joan]

The people at Amazon who assign the categories call this book "Gay and Lesbian". No, it's "Human". Monette himself said, ". . .I would rather have this volume filed under AIDS than under Poetry, because if these words speak to anyone they are for those who are mad with loss, to let them know they are not alone."

I remember that I was driving into the city on the Kennedy Expressway when I heard on the news that Paul Monette had died. It was a shock, even knowing that it was coming, any day. Oddly, I was on my way to a class on Plato.

Oddly, I say, because my favorite poem in this book is "The House on King's Road", with the lines:
". . .the lamp
pooling on the blue-bound Plato as we held
our ground through August let the material go
what you cannot buy or have in your name
is the ghost of a touch the glancing stroke
as a man passes through a room where his love
sits reading later much later the nodding head
of the one on the other's shoulder no title
usurps that place this is its home forever"

Monette wrote these poems after the death from complications of AIDS of his lover, Roger Horwitz, on whose grave are Plato's last words on Socrates, "the wisest and justest and best".
Monette was later to lose another lover, and then his own life, to the epidemic. Larry Kramer called these poems "gorgeous, heartbreaking screams". There are moments when they are maudlin, self-indulgent. He was entitled. They move me deeply, past mere sentimental tears. If one is not angry at this loss, at the many losses, one is not human.

[Andrea · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection is so painful to read. Every poem is literally full of pain, and there is no escape, no chance to breathe, either in the form or content of these poems. Monette's writing style reminds me just a tad of Ginsberg, and the pain of the book reminds me of Hall's "Without." Whew. I could use an anti-depressant right about now.

[Christopher Parsons · Rating 5 out of 5]

Terribly painful, wonderfully passionate, ultimately vital. Monette's visceral poetic outcry and memorial to his partner who died of AIDs (as later did Monette himself) lives on as one of the best works of gay literature. I wish all those who cast a yes vote on proposition 8 here in California would read this. It might unfreeze their hearts.

[Shanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

These poems are raw and real. Written directly after the loss of a loved one of a disease that slowly stripped the man he loved away and replaced him with only memories. I'm not a poetry reader but these are some of the most powerfully written words I've ever read. Anyone who's ever lost someone will find solice in these words.

[Jeffrey Richards · Rating 5 out of 5]

powerful and raw, all 18 poems were written in the 6 months after his lover died of AIDS-related complications (and while the author battled the disease himself), they are bare and striking in their passion, fear, loss and above all love.

[Elizabeth Thorpe · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book that needs to exist. It's a sad comment on our society that it has been allowed to go out of print, along with too many other movies and books about the early days of AIDS.

[Vicki · Rating 5 out of 5]

More brilliance from Paul Monette about the loss of his lover, Roger, to AIDS in the 1980's.

[Jes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ugh, cried many tears on the airplane over this book.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, affecting, full of vitality. I wept.

[Marcelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

THE WORRYING

ate me alive day and night these land mines
all over like the toy bombs dropped on the
Afghans little Bozo jack-in-the-boxes
that blow your hands off 3 A.M. I’d go
around the house with a rag of ammonia
wiping wiping crazed as a housewife on Let’s
Make a Deal the deal being PLEASE DON’T MAKE
HIM SICK AGAIN faucets doorknobs the phone
every lethal thing a person grips and leaves
his prints on scrubbed my hands till my fingers
cracked washed apples ten times ten no salad but
iceberg and shuck the outer two thirds someone
we knew was brain dead from sushi so stick
to meatloaf creamed corn spuds whatever we
could cook to death DON’T USE THE D WORD
EVEN IN JEST when you started craving deli
I heaved a sigh because salami was so de-
germed with its lovely nitrites to hell with
cholesterol that’s for people way way over
the hill or up the hill not us in the vale
of borrowed time yet I was so far more gone
than you nuts in fact ruinous as a supermom
with a kid in a bubble who can’t play and ten
years later can’t work can’t kiss can’t laugh
but his room’s still clean every cough every
bump would nothing ever be nothing again
cramming you with zinc and Haagen-Dazs so wild
to fatten you up I couldn’t keep track of
what was medicine what was old wives’ but see
THERE WAS NO MEDICINE only me and to
circle the wagons and island the last of our
magic spoon by spoon nap by nap till we
healed you as April heals drinking the sun
I was Prospero of the spell of day-by-day
and all of this just the house worry peanuts
to what’s out there and you with the dagger at
your jugular struggling back to work jotting
your calendar two months ahead penciling
clients husbanding husbanding inching back
and me agape with the day’s demises who
was swollen who gone mad ringing you on
the hour how are you compared to ten noon
one come home and have blintzes petrified
you’d step in an elevator with some hacking
CPA the whole world ought to be masked
please I can’t even speak of the hospital fear
firsts bone white the first day of an assault
huddled by your bed like an old crone empty-
eyed in a Greek square black on black the waiting
for tests the chamber of horrors in my head
my rags and vitamins dumb as leeches how did
the meningitis get in where did I slip up
what didn’t I scour I’d have swathed the city
in gauze to cushion you no man who hasn’t
watched his cruelest worry come true in a room
with no door can ever know what doesn’t
die because they lie who say it’s over
Rog it hasn’t stopped at all are you okay
does it hurt what can I do still still I
think if I worry enough I’ll keep you near
the night before Thanksgiving I had this
panic to buy the plot on either side of us
so we won’t be cramped that yard of extra grass
would let us breathe THIS IS CRAZY RIGHT but
Thanksgiving morning I went the grave two over
beside you was six feet deep ready for the next
murdered dream so see the threat was real
why not worry worry is like prayer is like
God if you have none they all forget there’s
the other side too twelve years and not once
to fret WHO WILL EVER LOVE ME that was
the heaven at the back of time but we had it
here now black on black I wander frantic
never done with worrying but it’s mine it’s
a cure that’s not in the books are you easy
my stolen pal what do you need is it
sleep like sleep you want a pillow a cool
drink oh my one safe place there must be
something just say what it is and it’s yours

[Becky · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every elegy tears a piece of your soul, hands it over to grief, and takes a bite of it. You can literally smell the grief in the words, you can see it (if youre not blinded by your owm tears). Gardenias is probably my favourite, alongside the worrying. I cried at them, then stopped, and cried some more.

One of my favourite parts is from Readiness.
“passing only if we’re lucky some far-off
men if our sort generations hence a pair
of dreamy types strolling among the hill grave
for curiosity’s sake this well may be
jn a time when dying is not all day and every
house riven and they’ll laugh _Here’s two like us_
won’t that be lovely Rog make the grass shiver”

This fragment made me sob. As a queer person, it struck me to my core that we still haven’t managed to fully accept those who aren’t straight or cis. Maybe the next generation, Monette. Once I read and they got their wish and are buried beside the other, i wept some more. Some gorgeous poetry. Through and through.

[maría · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The story that endlessly eludes the decorum of the press is the death of a generation of gay men. What is written here is only one man’s passing and one man’s cry, a warrior burying a warrior. May it fuel the fire of those on the front lines who mean to prevail, and of their friends who stand in the fire with them. We will not be bowed down or erased by this. I learned too well what it means to be a people, learned in the joy of my best friend what all the meaningless pain and horror cannot take away— that all there is is love. Pity us not."

love alone es un poemario sobre el duelo y la perdida de amores y amigos y la lucha por la memoria en la crisis del sida, y no se le puede poner un puto pero. desconocía por completo a paul monette hasta esta misma mañana, pero pienso leer cada uno de sus libros hasta q no me quede nada por destripar. necesitaba desesperadamente sumergirme en una rabia que me recogiera justo así, justo ahora.

[Drew · Rating 5 out of 5]

I made the mistake of reading a few poems from this blistering collection before a meeting and ended up showing up with red eyes. Word to the wise: Pace yourself here. Paul Monette's jagged journalistic verse of the grief-stricken days after his lover died of AIDS will destroy you. There's plenty of love amidst these poems too but the pain, the bewilderment, and the rage of loss have rarely been expressed with such candor and care. A staggering work.

[G · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heartbreaking. The lack of punctuation means that you’re constantly reading too far in and having to go back to find the beginning or end of a phrase, considering the words from a different angle, returning to what you thought you understood and finding it totally changed - it’s disorienting and breathless, which is I think the point.

I could quote every line but I don’t know what to say about any of them except - heartbreaking. And so unfair that they had to be written at all.

[anna feng · Rating 5 out of 5]

how do you rate a collection like this? haven't been turned inside out so badly since obit
"he's an ancient Greek like me I do/all the negotiating while he does battle/we are war and peace in a single bed" (no goodbyes) -- perfect elegies.

[Lexie ❤️‍ · Rating 4 out of 5]

This. Broke. My. Heart.

[CJ]

Avoiding rating this, because rating a real person's personal experiences with disease and loss within a five-star system feels weird to me. This was fantastic, though.

[Ruth · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think I cried through every single poem. It's pure grief on paper, agonizing gut-wrenching grief. I can't stop thinking about it.