The Starwick Episodes

In Wolfe's autobiographical novel Of Time and the River (1935), protagonist Eugene Gant, a struggling writer, physically assaults his Harvard chum, pretentious aesthete Francis Starwick, calling him a ``dirty little fairy''-yet the theme of Starwick's homosexuality is treated obliquely. Temple University English professor emeritus Kennedy, who chronicled Wolfe's literary career in The Window of Memory, now gives us the unexpurgated version of the Gant/Starwick relationship by publishing sections of the novel that Maxwell Perkins, Wolfe's editor, excised primarily because the manuscript was too long. In one key scene, the two friends visit a Parisian brothel where Gant makes macho, homophobic taunts as Starwick reveals his lack of sexual interest in women. Gant's ravings, Kennedy observes, mirror Wolfe's ``own paranoid tendencies'' and fear of homosexuality. Yet through Starwick's soul-baring conversations, we gain sympathetic insight into a gay individual who yearns to escape the torment of the closet. In his introduction to this fascinating volume, Kennedy details the promising career and shocking strangulation-murder of playwright Kenneth Raisbeck, Wolfe's gay friend at Harvard and the man on whom he modeled Starwick. Photos not seen by PW. (Sept.)