Love and Demons
Pervatory, RM Vaughan. Coach House Books, 2023.
In Pervatory, the posthumously published last novel by the spectacularly talented RM Vaughan (Richard Murray Vaughan), the iconic queer multi-hyphenate (think novelist, poet, filmmaker, critic, essayist, playwright, and visual artist — squirrel saloons made of pizza boxes, anyone?) moves his character, Martin Murray Heather, from Toronto to Berlin: “Because in Berlin, so very little counts. In Toronto, whatever I do counts too much.” Martin spins the twisted tale of how a freedom he had never known before gets him locked up in a criminal mental health facility: “. . .I feel so much freer here,” he tells the reader. “Too free, my Canadian mind tells me. . .I fuck, I write, I wander. I’ve lost my footing.” Martin loses his footing alright — it’s his mission. In the inimitable and sardonic voice that only Richard could lend to the page, nothing is solely what it seems to be here. The fields are seeded with ancient magnets and eyes will be gouged there.
In Berlin, Martin is freed from the need to grind out a weekly newspaper column for seven hundred and fifty dollars per week in Toronto (“No vacation, no vacation pay, no prescription, no glasses, or dental benefits. No union protection, no security, no pension.”). He’s there to fuck, write, and work. The clacking and groaning pipes of his rented flat are the Greek chorus (or cheerleaders) to his incessant plotting, Tarot card readings (“a stumblebum forecast”), and sexual sublimation. He’s hungry for chaos and direction.
While Martin stumbles along, the author does not. The skill and ease with which Vaughan navigates the multiple levels of narrative delivers the reader into anything but norm-core scenes described with a biting, sardonic wit — and poignancy. Martin hits every leather bar and sex club he can find. He has a smorgasbord of nail-biting flings and remarkably recalled hook-ups and oneoffs: “I’m perverse in the true sense — I must remember as perfectly as possible things it would probably be better to forget. . . . A pervert knows too much.” Undaunted and insatiable, Martin takes a dizzying tour of bad boys and bad babys (Böse Buben), badder bosses (Qualgeist), and slave scenes high and low. A non-stop chuckle for the reader as horrors unfold.
In the tradition of caged-psyche literature (think Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground or Sky Gilbert’s Brother Dumb), Martin’s confessions are affecting, raw, and often hilarious. There’s no limit on what he’ll do to escape his human condition. Martin’s problem is that he thinks there might be a way out. So, he fucks (and fucks and fucks). He pulls himself to orgasm, plays doggy on all fours, cums (and cums and cums), and is subsumed by love. There are no soft landings on Martin’s hunt. Every respite is pummelled, flipped, jerked off, and sweated for. But, when the ache of loneliness pits itself against the desire to disappear and die alone, he meets his match.
Alexandar kisses Martin without asking and leads him into a play room. Twisting him into a pretzel, he finger-fucks him before wiping his hand on his shirt with a smirk and walking away. His smirk hints at what awaits them both. Alexandar is the agent of a force far greater than themselves: the Viy. ‘“The Viy,” Alexandar whispers, “knows the true name of the Devil.”’ He should know. “The Viy is a fever is a fugue is a dizzy spell. . .is disorder incarnate.” To speak of the Viy is to speak of Alexandar.
Pervatory would mistakenly be described solely as an auto-fiction of a period that changed Richard’s life. That said, the two of us did cook up plans to move to Berlin at his kitchen table on Rusholme St. in Toronto. He reached the end of his rope with that city before I did. The time in Berlin did change him. He never seemed more content or more in his own shoes, so to speak. Richard’s return to Canada seems to underscore a point that Pervatory makes plain: what is a middle-aged artist/writer/critic/filmmaker with no steady income, health insurance, or pension supposed to do? An artist’s expertise, voice, and brilliance are not enough to count for something in a capitalist society. Martin, though, has the perfect plan: dive headlong into chaos to find order and connection. Richard, too, knew full well what to do to matter. And he did it. Until he couldn’t.
Pervatory makes fucking the false doorway to freedom. In the tradition of Hubert Selby, Jr.’s Last Exit to Brooklyn or Requiem for a Dream, Jean Genet’s Querelle de Brest, or even Kevin Lambert’s more recent Querelle de Roberval, the book cracks the reader into the disaster, torment, and liberation wrought by aging: “Time is standing in front of me with a switch blade and a mean look,” Martin says. If facing the future with a switch blade isn’t a recipe for a middleaged artist’s survival in merciless capitalism, I don’t know what is. At the end of the book, the editors note: “If there’s a tragic dimension to Vaughan’s life, it was that he was a writer who never truly knew how loved he was.” To say that Richard was not nearly as impressed with himself as many of us were with him is, I project, an understatement. He pshawed me every time I told him what a catch he was. He didn’t buy a word of it. Like Richard, Martin knows: “I don’t belong anywhere in Toronto, and I’m about as coveted as an empty tin can . . . Toronto trains gay men to weed out men like me . . . . I’m spent.”
Martin may be spent but he’s not finished. It is only by killing the Canadian Martin that he could be free enough to catch his demon — Alexandar. At Templehofer airfield, the sacred ground of National Socialism, he follows Alexandar to the Viy — and catastrophe. To say more would be to give away the game. Pervatory is RM Vaughan’s final word on what many discover the hard way: the only sane response to capitalism is madness, and the only sane response to madness is love and art. Pervatory poses the question: what’s to become of us when neither is possible?
— thom vernon is a writer, actor, and academic whose latest novel is I Met Death & Sex Through My Friend, Tom Meuley
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