Secret Life
By Michael Ryan
Pantheon, 356 pages, $25
As a boy of 5 the poet Michael Ryan was molested by a pederastic male neighbor. This is the truly terrible and core “secret” of the title. Ryan’s disordered history–growing up around a father’s raging alcoholism; a compensatory drift toward obnoxious one-upmanship in sports and social life; finally a Wade Boggs-like “sex addiction” bringing with it disgrace and disgust–served as the “life” that cradled this early secret. The syllogism of this book is: “Secrets were always true. And the truth was secret.”
A university-trained poet with all the right skins hanging from his belt–Iowa and a Yale Younger Poets selection and a Guggenheim and a Princeton teaching job–Ryan, as the book begins, reveals himself at a fateful pass: “. . .I was so tired of being myself, disgruntled and predatory and hungry, creeping around with a secret agenda, trivialized by it, racked by the self-loathing I was beginning to understand I had both blocked and enacted with my sexual behavior. Well, it wasn’t being blocked anymore. . . . I felt wrong in the innermost fabric of my being.”
Like Leporello’s list, a dizzying roster of very recent conquests (“. . .my acupuncturist, the wife of a struggling poet who admired me, an anesthesiologist I met at my health club, the director of a Ronald McDonald House I also met at my health club. . .”) is about to be added to by a seduction of the willing young daughter of a friend.
But Ryan stops himself, he can’t do it; and this seemingly random border of taboo sends the book back, a mere 10 pages in, to the Wound itself, the rotten center of Ryan’s past. A young neighbor named Bob Stoller, a Korean War vet returning to St. Louis, someone Ryan’s family knew and liked, lured Ryan to a basement photographic studio in Stoller’s mother’s house–where soon enough he was regularly mouthing, and being mouthed by, little Michael. After the man’s mother walked in on the two of them one day, it all immediately stopped.
Warned not to, Ryan told no one ever. The only one he told, so to speak, was his own life. For what happened in Stoller’s basement “sexualized” Ryan’s whole subsequent existence, he feels. At first, he says, it was sex wearing a camouflage of acceptability and power. Michael as a boy first tried to be an angel–the best pitcher, the best bowler, a pious favorite of the nuns in his parochial school–and when that didn’t quite work, he settled comfortably into being a devil: a nasty boaster and rabid winner. When as a freshman at Notre Dame he was slipped a pornographic story, his soul seemed to evert and turn pornographic once and for all. From its restless appetites an adult bisexual Don Juan and the Predatory Professor inexorably flowed.
The tired sex-as-power idea (Foucault’s, recycled, oddly enough, by the Recovery movement) echoes through “Secret Life” in all its dimensions. But the notion itself tends to slam two doors shut for every one it wedges open. Once Ryan has accepted, as he has before the writing here, that his problem was sex addiction leading back to one awful source, a numbing incuriosity falls over the book.
Who are these men and women going to bed with him so much? With heroin or thoroughbreds or gin, you’re not easily allowed into the particular absorbencies of the addicting matter. Yet with sex you certainly might be. At the very least you have the opportunity to take a good, analytic look at whom it is you’re taking advantage of and vice versa. But here Ryan, in a sense, is the Bob Stoller of his own book, telling us only that which will make us attend to him, to Ryan’s feelings, Ryan’s swallowed experiences; the human cast surrounding him is left unanimated except for a rich, scouring portrait of his alcoholic father (whose tragic drinking seems as much to do with the buried cables in Ryan’s life as anything else).
Emotional trauma faces difficulties, narratively–and narcissism seems the big one. But it can be sidestepped. Lucy Grealy’s recent, remarkable “Autobiography of a Face”–18 years of bone cancer, facial disfigurement, dozens of desperate attempts at reconstruction and finally a properly uneasy peace made with her face–brought with it an inherent consideration of what it is we look like to other people as well as what it is we look like to ourselves. And surely the truth of us lies somewhere in the middle distance between our self-registration and others’ opinions.
Ryan–and his poet’s self-absorption–do not get that far. Even his mortification is showy. He admits to being the smarmy Eddie Haskell (of “Leave It to Beaver” TV show fame) of his high school class, always complimenting a mother of a friend on her drapes: his prose style is Haskell-like too, playing repeatedly to the cheap seats (“There were enough pheromones in that basement to ripen a warehouse of green peaches.”; “The Dodge probably had last had its wheels aligned during the Pleistocene era, and the tires were as bald as Jell-O.”; Ryan’s childhood ball cap had a lining that “looked like a mattress pad in a crack house. I had shaped the bill just so, an arch Brunelleschi would have envied. . .”).
The cheesy prose and can-you-beat-this-for-abjectly-honest tone are only sub-annoyances here. What’s most disturbing about Ryan’s book (and others of its Arise From Victimhood genre) is that finally it forces you to judge his horror on some kind of sliding scale. One is coerced as a reader and critic to say of and to Ryan: Well, are you coming clean enough? Can it possibly be that this one incident determined your whole life? Can this one suffering have bled so much so long? This skepticism, of course, is manifestly unfair. Yet what has Ryan done but assiduously curry it by writing so one-dimensional a book? Skepticism that does neither the writer nor the reader much good is the only crop raised.
Even the title itself, its lack of an article, gives off a warning. “My Secret Life” wouldn’t have done–being already spoken for by the classic work of Victorian smut–but “A” was forsworn as well. One life among many others might have tied the book to Ryan as a particular provincial boy and cleverly ambitious man. In the doing, of course, the focus might have slipped somewhat to the side of the one big Secret and Truth, the Bob Stoller lollapalooza. If you prefer your Truth the way Ryan seems to like his–reductive, highly cautionary, ringed in neon–“Secret Life” is your kind of confession exactly.
