Peter Wells: Long Loop Home: A Memoir

By MARGIE THOMSON deputy books editor

When we try to find the meaning of a life, we usually talk about outcomes: what we amounted to, what effect we had in the world. But, looking back over his life so far, Wells has a different take on meaning.

Of his achievements in the "real," public world - his books, his films - there is very little. It's the process of "becoming" that he is appraising: his private, evolving sense of himself as a gay man, and his place in his family, not only with the benefit of hindsight but with a gaze as sharp and determined as a scalpel.

You might think that by the age of 50, as Wells is now, there would be nothing to lose in looking back at one's childhood. Events, surely, would be scoured clean by time, consequences blunted, intensity muted.

But no. Wells applies a freshness, a clarity to events and feelings of so long ago that wrenches the heart as if they happened yesterday. The decisions of childhood reverberate in the man, and looking back can be a dangerous business.

"Increasingly, gay men and women wish to distance themselves from the past and project an adamantine surface of sexiness and success. In this world, to look back is to risk turning, not to stone, but to the uncertain being we all once were ... "

Born in 1950, Wells grew up in Pt Chevalier, "an ordinary enough Auckland suburb," younger brother by two years of Russell, son of parents who were very much people of the pre-war era, bound by "the inadequate ideas that conceptualise our time and place."

They were ordinary people: the father, a corrosively disappointed man who had fought in the war, been an All Black trialler, and worked as a bank teller but was never to become the bank manager he aspired to be. The mother was clever, intelligent, but constrained by the age into a life where she could excel only at baking, bottling and mothering.

Neither was equipped for the trauma, the "unspeakable truth," that not just one but both their sons were homosexual.

It seems it was clear from an early age that Russell and Peter were "different" ("being homosexual," Wells notes, "is something delivered to you by other people's reactions"). It's bizarre that a love of fabric and domestic detail, and a talent for spatial design, flower-arranging, or the desire for a doll should be so incriminating, but in the semiotics of the age they were, literally, alarming. With the unerring antennae possessed by those in the main pack, the boys were singled out, "dyed with unusualness," the subject of humiliations and, in the case of adults, assessing, speculative looks or, by their father, outbursts of frightening rage.

Younger brothers everywhere will identify with Wells' feelings of resentment towards his trail-blazing, confident, talented, older brother.

While Wells was terrified and disgusted with his sexuality and wanted for many years to "save his family" by "passing" in the heterosexual world, Russell instead "exploded his personal search outwards," indulging in rough and public acts of sex with other boys and announcing, at 14, his homosexuality to his stunned parents.

The 11-year-old Peter was so appalled that he severed their relationship with the injunction that "it all had to stop." It was an act that Wells sees as one of the significant markers of his life, freezing his relationship with his brother in an attitude of hostility and shutting the closet door on himself.

It was almost another decade before Wells could admit the truth of his identity to himself or anyone else, and when he did, it was to the Army doctor: Wells, standing there terrified and shaking in his singlet, refusing to undress any further. "I'm a homosexual," he blurted, giving himself a glimpse, like light through a keyhole, of "an intoxicating future."

At the heart of the memoir is a long story that seems at first to have only the most tenuous association with Wells' personal quest: the murder of his best friend Frankie's lesbian aunt by her lover.

But as the court case progresses and the defence's case - that the victim was a lesbian predator from whom the accused was simply trying to escape - wins ascendancy, we see the point Wells is making: that in an environment of fear and blame, where even murdered homosexuals are denied their humanity, to be homosexual oneself is a legitimately terrifying thing. With that case, he writes, came the end of his childhood.

Many contemporary writers choose the memoir as a form for personal story-telling that allows for liberating, reflective subjectivity. Wells has adapted its form to suit himself, writing not in a linear way but suiting the title of his book elliptically, in a collection of essays that begin in the Pt Chev of his childhood and end with a different sense of home by journey's end.

Even within each essay he roves around in a circular way, beginning with an image or scenario, seeming to move away, and then closing in on himself again, covering an enormous amount of ground (the introduction of television, racism and the Pakeha proclivity for guilt, the many details of suburban life).

His unflinching memoir is as full of drama and contrast as any novel. The dull mundanity of Pt Chevalier is posed against magical Napier, the home of Wells' maternal grandmother, where Wells is held in thrall by the trappings of an assumed English gentility (butter knives, serviettes, afternoon teas), but this in turn is only able to be reached after travelling the "barbarity of the emptiness" of the Taupo-Napier road.

In constructing his own history and self, Wells also offers us our own country, in pieces as chipped but as clue-laden as any mosaic.

And, as in a novel, he offers us resolutions. Russell, dying of Aids, is visited daily by his brother, although even here Wells has too keen a sense of personal irony to resist noting that with the death of his brother and father, he at last has what as a child he most wanted: to have his mother to himself.

His mother becomes an almost Shakespearean figure, enduring disappointment, loss, death and even madness before emerging into a calmer place where she can better accept her remaining son, rescued from all blame for her son's sexuality - from "the madness that breathes in the suburbs at night" - by, of all things, the science of genetics.

How lovely to have a happy ending, however equivocal.

Near the end, in a typically lovely piece of writing, Wells stands at the ninth-floor window of his brother's hospital room and looks out over Auckland to trace a map of his life, of his own becoming.

"I could see so many of the streets we had driven along, to go to the Domain, to visit the museum; I could see flats I had lived in when I was a university student, the window of a room where I had once made love; I could see all the streets and houses and the odd thing was that at that moment they all seemed to have resolved into a singular path, which had led to one place, which was where I was standing: the crossroads, I guess, of my life."

Vintage

$27.95