RICKY IAN GORDON (born 1956): Seeing Through: a Chronicle of Sex, Drugs, and Opera [Released on 23 July 2024, by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Picador/Macmillan); ISBN 9781250390424, 480 pages; Available from Macmillan Publishers (hardcover, paperback, and e-book), Amazon (hardcover, digital, and audio), Barnes and Noble (hardcover, paperback, and e-book), and major media retailers]
Readers of autobiographical works by eminent artists sometimes meet therein either the artistry or the humans whose experiences molded it but must look elsewhere to find comprehensive evaluations of all aspects of the lives of creators and their creative processes. Perhaps this is truer in music than in other disciplines, owing in no small part to music being an ephemeral assimilation of instincts and inspirations that continually evolves. Perhaps, too, there is a predisposition amongst musical innovators to celebrate and perpetuate their own ingenuity by fashioning personal mythologies as Hector Berlioz did in his Mémoires. What musical artists’ self-penned reminiscences sometimes lack is neither fact nor fascination: rather, the resulting fusions of sincerity and sensationalism are deficient in objectivity, showing not who artists are but who they believe themselves to be. The pointed self-awareness that fills each of the 480 pages of renowned composer Ricky Ian Gordon’s memoir Seeing Through: a Chronicle of Sex, Drugs, and Opera is therefore made all the more exceptional and courageous by its piercing introspection and clear-sighted candor, the author’s self-analysis proving to be most endearing when it is least flattering.
Ricky Ian Gordon the artist hardly needs any introduction to music-loving readers who are familiar with American song, opera, and musical theater of the past quarter-century. A native Long Islander whose educational trajectory took him to Pittsburgh for studies at Carnegie Mellon University, Gordon has established himself with works like the song cycles Green Sneakers for Baritone, String Quartet, Empty Chair and Piano and Rappahannock County and the operas The Grapes of Wrath and Intimate Apparel as a peer of Douglas Moore, Ned Rorem, Carlisle Floyd, and William Bolcom. Despite his ravenous consumption and absorption of Classical traditions and the accents of uniquely American musical voices, none more consequential than that of Stephen Sondheim, Gordon’s growth as a man and an artist was most enduringly affected by his relationship with his beloved partner Jeffrey Michael Grossi (1964 – 1996), whose passing after a harrowing five-year battle against AIDS shaped the composer as profoundly as it shattered the man. Grossi’s voice is heard in all of the music written by Gordon since 1 August 1996, and his spirit smiles on every page of Seeing Through, sometimes angrily, sometimes wistfully, sometimes playfully, but always with boundless love.
Though there are many dolorous passages, as there are likely to be in any account of the life and losses endured by a sensitive man, Seeing Through is not a melancholy book; nor is it a queer book or an artistic treatise. Like the best novels of Ernest Hemingway, Seeing Through succeeds on multiple levels. For the casual reader in pursuit of entertainment, it offers an immersive narrative with sufficient doses of the sex and drugs promised by the title to quicken the pulse of thrill seekers. ‘With the help of speed,’ he recounts on page 89, ‘I was a very different actor in the [Carnegie Mellon] drama department,’ yet even these episodes of decadent adventure are tempered by abundant moments of grace like that of describing Broadway star Audra McDonald as ‘an explosion of everything good’ (p. 226). Moreover, a central theme of the book is the ambiguity of the link between uncertainty and self-cognizance and the rôles that both have played in Gordon’s life since adolescence. Recalling the prevalence of behind-closed-doors sexual encounters in the bathhouses and nightclubs frequented by his gay friends in the 1970s, Gordon cites his ambivalence concerning his inclinations as a subconscious blessing of self-preservation, writing that ‘some of this confusion may be why I am still alive’ (p. 181).
As he chronicles them, even the most painful events in Gordon’s life are viewed from a perspective of gratitude. A pervasive tone of his sagaciously-paced, beautifully-formed writing is appreciation for the people and places of significance in his journey, tinged with regret and self-recrimination. Honoring the all-encompassing love that he shares with his late partner, as powerful today as in that sorrowful August twenty-eight years ago, is an expected focus of the book, but beauty, art, and irrepressible wit are always visible through the tears that his observations of simple occurrences like visiting New York’s Central Park impel.
After Jeffrey died, I walked to Central Park one day to weep at the Bethesda Fountain, because Tony [Kushner] had given it to me [in the Perestroika segment of Angels in America] as my own monument, our monument. I have never been able to walk past it again without thinking about that. (pp. 370 – 371)
The doubt and fear that make Gordon’s writing about the time at which Grossi determined to forgo pharmaceuticals and combat AIDS holistically one of the book’s most wrenching parts disclose a subtle but gnawing survivor’s guilt that also arises in the context of his mother’s decline and death.
Why wasn’t I the kind of son who moved in with my mother when her death was imminent, or moved her in with me? Why, in the last few years of her life, did we put her in the place she never ever wanted to be—a nursing home? (p. 427)
In addition to the personal but universal difficulty of these situations, all of the emotional tribulations and triumphs of Seeing Through are imparted with language that is at once accomplished and accessible. This is a book that never seems to grasp for literary virtuosity: it achieves that distinction with the same effortless directness that characterizes Gordon’s music.
Too many memoirs ultimately are not what their subjects strive to be: memorable. Marooned in vast oceans of words, the basic elements that give lives their commonality and thereby their interest to others are obscured. The most effective, unforgettable memoirs are distinguished not by tales of glamor, excess, and familiar names, no matter how eloquently they are told, but by accounts of decency, empathy, and familiar emotions. On page 181 of Seeing Through, Ricky Ian Gordon shares, ‘I have never known where I fit in.’ The reader sees through the pages of this book that this remarkable artist fits in wherever hearts are open to healing.