They grew the boys down on the farm the same sex starved way they did on the East Coast. No wonder Willard (”Sonny”) Burns of Indianapolis is reminiscent of Portnoy and Holden Caulfield, as portrayed in Dan Wakefield’s 1970 novel, Going All the Way. This is an unlikely read for me but I was led to it via a recent New York Times obituary of the author, by a NYT writer who had, himself, died three years earlier, David Stout.
As Wakefield was 91 when he died and had no longer been writing, retiring to the community he came from in the environs of Indianapolis, and had stature as a writer of non-fiction, fiction, and as a magazine writer, this was one of those prepared obits waiting for its inevitable moment.
I am now a regular reader of obits as I consider them to be an overlooked source of sometimes great writing (and Stout’s is among the best), reflecting on the lives of others who are about my age who were enveloped by the same times as mine. More frequently there are ones of people I either knew or at least knew of.
Also, my friend Ron is from Indiana and he has told me a lot about his childhood experiences. Between those and reading this obituary, scenes of “Hoosiers” and the evocative music of Jerry Goldsmith drifted through my mind.
Wakefield was like a Thomas Wolfe character in “You Can’t Go Home Again” as when he left Indianapolis, he felt he couldn’t return having written about his childhood memories and friends. But he finally returned after becoming a very successful writer of both fiction and nonfiction. His memoir Returning: A Spiritual Journey was highly praised, detailing his personal round trip journey from being a man of faith to becoming an atheist and then to humanism and spiritualism in his later years.
The obituary led me to what is considered to be his definitive work of fiction but I was really drawn by the concluding paragraph:
Asked to define his philosophy of life, Mr. Wakefield quoted Philo, the ancient philosopher of Alexandria, Egypt: “Be kind, for everyone you know is fighting a great battle.” As for his life beyond writing, reading and reflecting, he said, “No golf, no horseshoes, no stamp-collecting, no hobbies.” And, he added, “No regrets.”
Amen to that.
Wakefield’s seminal novel Going All The Way (an amusingly lurid title), was published in 1970 and a movie was made from it in the 1990’s. His novel was praised by another graduate of his high school, Kurt Vonnegut. I have no idea how the novel and the film went under my radar at the time other than I still had my shoulder too much to the grindstone of work
This would have appealed to me, and still does as the travails of its protagonist, Sonny, are painfully familiar. I was the same timid boy in high school, wanting to fit in, but not considered to be part of the chosen cliques. That was usually reserved for the jocks and the extraverts who also had their fair share of sex, if you believed them.
The level of testosterone level ran high. It is almost laughable in retrospect as to how much of our lives were consumed by trying to have sex. And that is what Wakefield’s novel is about, Sunny trying to fit in, having his sexual fantasies fulfilled, and breaking loose from the hypocrisy of parental expectations.
Returning from a stint in the service on the train in the early 1950s he has a chance meeting with another ex serviceman, one of the “chosen ones” in high school, Tom Casselman (“Gunner.”); you get the picture, a handsome popular boy, a jock.
Sonny tries to act cool and is surprised that Gunner remembers him: “You were one of the quiet ones, you just sat back and observed. Watched us run around chasing our tails, a bunch of green asses. You were a detached observer.” Sonny shifted uneasily and took a gulp of beer. “Well sort of,” he said. The truth was he had been an unattached observer because he was never asked to be a participant. Now it was like he was getting credit for being something he had no other choice than to be. It was sort of weird….Denying the credit for having been something he couldn’t help being, Sonny realized it probably sounded like genuine modesty making him seem even more nobler.”… Gunner had this particular picture of him, and he liked the way that picture of himself looked.
It gradually becomes a coming-of-age buddy novel. Ironically, Sonny had a steady girlfriend who would have done anything for him sexually, but, oh no, he wanted what we all wanted at that age, the idealized, hard to get girl next door as pictured in popular culture and our favorite magazine Playboy, if you were fortunate enough to find your father’s stash, or successfully buy one at the corner store without being recognized.
As Sonny’s quiet presence with Gunner is mistakenly interpreted as his being profound, a notion he continues to do nothing to discourage, it culminates in Sonny having the opportunity to meet his ideal, set up by Gunner and his girlfriend, a blind double date in a parent’s empty house stocked with booze. The latter renders Sonny unable to perform and this in turn leads to the kind of humiliation which Sonny (spoiler here) thinks about resolving with a razor blade and his wrist.
As a consequence, Gunner now feels an obligation to “fix” Sonny, which leads to an automobile accident (again, booze), minor injury to Gunner, but a major one to Sonny with a long recovery period during which Gunner sets out for NYC to find himself and reconnoiter for Sonny when he eventually emerges from the hospital and the cocoon of the mid-West. Then life can begin as it so often does in the big Apple. Mine did. My wife’s did. Wakefield’s did. Add millions before and after.
It is a touching coming of age novel, funny, uncomfortably true, a young man making his way through the uncertainty about the future. Page after page there were experiences I can relate to. Dan Wakefield could have been a friend if I had met him. And now I feel as if I did.
