SEEING THROUGH: A Chronicle of Sex, Drugs, and Opera, by Ricky Ian Gordon
Even devotees of symphony orchestras sometimes struggle with the opera — its muchness and pomp. “The uproar,” my father called it, and he was a serious amateur chamber musician who collected and played the works of obscure composers on a Montagnana violin that he most certainly would have saved from a fire before my guinea pig, Percolator.
But enough about my daddy issues — let’s discuss Ricky Ian Gordon’s. Gordon is one of our foremost composers of modern opera (for what that’s worth, as he notes mournfully, to Generation iTunes), including works based on “The Grapes of Wrath” and “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis.” Now he’s also the author of a messy and mesmerizing new memoir called “Seeing Through.”
“If I had my way, the whole world would look like a carnival,” writes Gordon, who has a synesthesiac “thing about color,” and this book is certainly pinwheels, sideshows and waxy litter scattered on the ground. Very entertaining; a little dizzying.
Ricky was the youngest of four children and the only boy born to Eve and Sam Gordon, né Goldenberg, a dishonorably discharged World War II veteran — he’d punched an officer who’d made an antisemitic remark — who became an electrician and Masonic master, prone to lightning bolts of rage at home.
This overstimulated family’s struggles were previously documented in the excellent 1992 book “Home Fires,” by Donald Katz — you can listen to it on Audible, which Katz, in one of those intriguing pieces of life-arc trivia, founded — and a year later in “Take the Long Way Home,” by Susan Lydon, the eldest daughter, a successful journalist who descended into serious addiction.
Here, Sam’s neglect and maltreatment of his children, especially Ricky — who failed to be the expected “mirror” to his brute-force masculinity — comes in for more uncomfortable scrutiny. Sam never bothered to learn birthdays or look at schoolwork, cruelly beat his son and demanded sex from Eve multiple times a day, even when she didn’t want it.
Overhearing this, Ricky developed incestuous fantasies. “In my mind I turned his penis into a breast,” he writes about a semen “fetish” that persists to this day. “I craved my father’s milk.”
Has the fat lady sung yet? Not even close.
Eve was a vampish, funny former chanteuse once summoned to perform at Grossinger’s, the famous Catskills resort. The music and glamour that wafted through their household in the then-Jewish enclave of Harbor Isle, Long Island, would save her son’s life, which he’s lucky to be living, even with a bundle of ongoing neuroses, like bathroom anxiety that makes an $800 remote-controlled toilet seat possibly the best gift he’s ever gotten.
If I had a dollar for each person who told me they have A.D.H.D. this year, I could fly first class to the Olympics — it seems to be the new gluten intolerance? — but Gordon makes a good case for his.
He was still a child when he became so addicted to cigarettes, bribing elders to buy them or stealing abandoned butts from ashtrays, that he got pleurisy. Around him adults were sharing their dope and perishing in ugly ways from alcoholism. He had the misfortune to be only 12 in 1968, when he had his first LSD trip, coating his bedroom in projectile vomit.
Quaaludes catalyzed his sexual encounters at 15 with married men, a tangle of family friends and even in-laws. Some of them worked as steamfitters on the twin towers, “which you could see being erected across the water, giant penises like dots on the skyline.” In contrast to Jill Ciment’s recent memoir, “Consent,” Gordon resists recasting this as abuse. “I would forever be relegated to seeking to duplicate those experiences,” he writes, “for how could anything ever compare with those thwarted doors into the impossible, the incomplete, the wished for but inappropriate.”
His musical taste is infinitely ranging and refined — there are chapters on both Joni Mitchell, whose response to his 1970 fan letter is framed in gold above his piano, and Stravinsky (“so mind-blowing you want to explode out of your skin and run backward on water!” he writes of “Marche Chinoise”) — and no insult is intended by noting that “Seeing Through” can call to mind the Julio Iglesias-Willie Nelson hit “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before,” except for men.
AIDS was another bomb Gordon dodged, though not the fallout. A marche funèbre of friends and associates who died of the disease snakes through “Seeing Through,” hitting its most mournful, sustained note in Jeffrey, a younger boyfriend he nurses through to the terrible end, swathed in feathers and flowers. (Jeffrey is memorialized with a monologue in Gordon’s 2010 musical, “Sycamore Trees.”)
Institutional religion was Sam’s thing, which the son rejects (their relationship improves with the advent of email —“now he was Ann Landers!” — and the cowboy poem Ricky writes for his funeral is not to be missed). But general prayer, mysticism, astrology and numerology — every carnival has a fortune teller — have all helped him cope. And: “Gossip keeps you sober,” as John Lennon’s former heroin dealer tells Gordon in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting that’s anything but.
Unfiltered as a Pall Mall, though he gulps inspiration like actual air, the author gives minute details of grievances, rivalries and misunderstandings with Stephen Sondheim, Adam Guettel and other mentor-colleague-friends who have prospered and prize-won in ways Gordon has not quite. Though as Tony Kushner points out in a series of letters to “Ricky Ann” after they strike out at collaboration, “POSTERITY,” which is uncontrollable, is the point.
These towering trees of American theater and music are aflame with collective scorn for critics and arts journalists, though they share the same fragile, threatened ecosystem. Kushner again: “I hope they fuse together and form one big shrieking lump of moldering smoldering tissue and burn together for all eternity.”
Yikes! I am glad to have so thoroughly enjoyed “Seeing Through,” some protection against this powerful hex.
SEEING THROUGH: A Chronicle of Sex, Drugs, and Opera | By Ricky Ian Gordon | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 480 pp. | $32
Read More: A Memoir That Delivers on Its Promise of ‘Sex, Drugs, and Opera’