Somehow, his condition did not daunt or dispirit him, and he continued to work relentlessly, often in concentrated bursts, turning out 30 or 40 pages a day, every day.

Now, shortly after the release of Comfort and Joy (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill), his fourth novel, the writer looks robust and healthy, and certainly happy when PW catches up with him in Durham, N.C. At a small ceremony celebrating the donation of his papers to Duke University's Southern Literature Collection, Grimsley is smartly dressed in a black turtleneck and jacket. His cinnamon hair is still cropped close to his head, and his open face is covered with freckles, but his thin features have filled out a bit. Friends say he can sing with a voice like Aaron Neville and seriously knock back martinis. His big, frequent laugh and the mischief in his eyes make him seem more like an Irish street punk than an award-winning playwright and novelist whose papers have been sought to join those of William Styron, Bobbie Ann Mason, Padgett Powell, Anne Tyler, Josephine Humphreys and other Southern literary lights.

But novelist he certainly is, and Comfort and Joy carries on his literary project. Telling the story of two very different families coming to terms -- or not -- with their adult sons' male lovers over a Christmas holiday, the novel explores the problems of any blossoming relationship between two people of widely disparate economic backgrounds, while capturing the special poignance of a committed relationship between men when one is HIV positive. "What I wanted to do was write about the very real difficulties of having this strange virus which deadens relationships," Grimsley said.

Although one of the main characters of Comfort and Joy is Dan Crell, whom Grimsley has essentially modeled on himself, and who is also the child protagonist of his first novel, Winter Birds, the new book is neither a sequel nor, strictly speaking, autobiographical. "It's really more of a revisitation than a sequel," he says. "In Comfort and Joy, I wanted to write Danny away from me. I never really had a relationship like Danny and Ford's -- not one that lasted. It was also a way to explore a gay relationship in the real world, not just as it might be in the gay ghetto. And it was a chance to talk about social structure in the South. Danny's family lives in a trailer and Ford's is Savannah society."

The Long Way Around

It took Grimsley 10 years to get Winter Birds published in this country. Publishers kept rejecting it, citing what they saw as its grim hopelessness. More autobiographical than Comfort and Joy, Winter Birds reflects Grimsley's early life in rural North Carolina, where he was born in 1955 into a family scrabbling for the slightest shreds of security and dignity, its members bracing themselves against a drunken, abusive father and brutal poverty. After his father took his own life, Grimsley began Winter Birds. "My writing feels very powerful when I am working out of this material," he says. "These memories are often very unpleasant and lead to stories that are cathartic to read, but hard to sell to publishers. I think you see people writing now from a class that hasn't spoken at all. Larry Brown is amazing and Push, by Sapphire, is an extraordinary book. But the attitude toward that class of people, until recently, has been that poor people were just like everybody else, only with fewer things. Nobody dealt with just how animalistic your life can become when you don't have anything."

Even though he saw and still sees himself as a fiction writer first, when he had a difficult time finding a publisher for Winter Birds Grimsley turned his full attention to playwriting, where he was meeting with considerable success. "I became playwright-in-residence at 7 Stages Theatre in Atlanta," he says. "The plays worked financially more quickly than any fiction I was writing, and I'd sort of bought into the talk about how Winter Birds was too dark. But I never believed it was a bad book."

Finally, a German publisher at Zebra who had seen and liked Grimsley's plays brought out Wintervogel in 1992, followed by Metaillie's publication, Les oiseaux de l'hivre, for which the French Academy of Physicians awarded him its distinguished Prix Charles Brisset, the first time the award has gone to a writer who is not French. Winter Birds had been turned down at Algonquin initially, but the German translation was brought to the attention of editor Elizabeth Sharlatt at the Frankfurt Book Fair. "Elizabeth read it a month later and then bought the American rights, although she likes to say that she read it on the plane coming home," Grimsley says with a smile. "When Algonquin bought it, it was just an amazing moment. I didn't have much else to prove to anybody if I could just get Winter Birds published." When Algonquin published Winter Birds in 1994, it was runner-up for the PEN/ Hemingway Award and won the American Academy of Arts and Letters Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction in 1995.

A second novel, Dream Boy, was published by Algonquin in 1995. Nominated for the Lambda Award and winner of the American Library Association's GLBTF award, it is a haunting story of young country boys who, not entirely willingly, fall into a kind of skewed love. Even darker than Winter Birds, Dream Boy is not without hope, and reaches out to many impoverished readers. "The majority of gay novels are about urban settings, and they're not about adolescents. What's out there now is a Northeastern, prep school point of view. It was never about my life," Grimsley says. "And gay novels are not very often about relationships, and until Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison came along [1992], there were none set in the South."

Other themes in Dream Boy take it far toward breaking down the lines between "gay fiction" and fiction. Religion is one. Grimsley considers himself a spiritual person and a Christian, but not religious in the traditional Southern Baptist sense of the word. "The church was really important to me when I was growing up, and it was such a pervasive influence. Christian teachings, Christian mysteries, not the church, have stayed important to me. My thinking was totally shaped by the notion of a Jesus who lived a legendary life and died for people's sins," Grimsley says. "I don't think I'll ever shake those very powerful Bible stories that I got so often and so young that they've become part of how I write."

My Drowning, published in 1997, shows Grimsley's range. Told from the point of view of a child, Ellen Tote, who will grow up to be the beleaguered mother in Winter Birds and later Comfort and Joy, My Drowning is harsh, but Grimsley finds a good deal of humor in its tough, tragic characters and their cornered situations. "Humor, for us, was another way out," says Grimsley. "My family is uproarious. My dad would go out and we'd laugh about these terrible things we hoped might happen to him. You could feel better by laughing."

In My Drowning, other interesting influences on Grimsley's writing can be seen. As a child, Grimsley did a lot of reading because he was often bedridden with hemophilia -- a brother, Brian, died of the disease. "The first books I bought were comic books. Superman, Batman, Aquaman, Flash Gordon -- the Justice League of America. I spent hours reading comic books and classic adventure stories, like Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan books. There were a lot of things about Tarzan, the hom roticism and the sort of savior figure that he was. I think that this is actually where the impulse to be a writer came from -- all those her s," he says.

Grimsley's earliest writings were what he describes as "escapist space operas" and science fiction. He went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he studied creative writing under Max Steele and Doris Betts, whom he says were "both incredible -- very caring. Between them they taught me that most of what we think of as writing is re-writing." Grimsley now has his own students. He teaches a fiction course and a playwriting course for undergraduates at Emory University in Atlanta. "I love teaching. It fits perfectly in my life. You get so beaten down by the need to publish, and one of the things the kids have done is remind me how little you should really have to compromise your work," he says. "I have wonderful colleagues, and Emory has one of the few curricula that includes playwriting in the creative writing department instead of theater." Algonquin has also published Mr. Universe and Other Plays (1998), a selection of some of his best dramatic work.

Earlier in the day, Grimsley gathered with students for an informal lunch meeting sponsored by the Duke LGBT Association. Framed by Gothic windows that look out on a sparkling Carolina afternoon, Grimsley answered questions that, surprisingly, were not about the problems of writing, about sexuality or dysfunctional families or abuse. Every question was about getting agents or getting published, and Grimsley gave forthright advice: "Gay presses tend to look at you like you owe them something." "They don't do enough to promote your work." "Writing programs need to have a course in self-promotion." "Check your agent's batting average." "You can usually spot a review on Amazon that was posted by your publicist or your family." "Stay away from reviews. If you open yourself to the good ones, you're going to be open to the bad ones."

By early evening, a festive crowd has gathered in the richly wood-paneled Rare Book Room of the Perkins Library. There are flowers, champagne and beautiful hors d' uvres. Among the friends and admirers are novelists Elizabeth Spencer and Reynolds Price; Grimsley's family; David Perkins, publisher of Brightleaf magazine in Raleigh; Shannon Ravenel and other Algonquin staff. Grimsley begins his reading from Comfort and Joy by singing the melancholy carol "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen," confirming his friends' reports. His mother, petite and attractive in a trim red suit, leans forward slightly as she listens to what her son has chosen to read: a quiet and compelling scene between Dan's lover and his mother.

Ms. Hotaling is modest about accepting responsibility for her son's talent, tenacity and success: "I'm very, very proud of Jim, but I didn't have anything to give him. He was a brain. If the rest of the children were playing, he was reading and writing." She admits that Winter Birds was especially painful for her to read because it brought back so many unpleasant memories. "The writing is beautiful," she says with a sureness that hints at how Grimsley came by his strength and sinewy spirit.

Later, having a nightcap (Beefeater, straight-up, olives) in the lounge of the Washington Duke Club, Grimsley relaxes on a couch and talks about the future. He is still playwright-in-residence at 7 Stages, and they will be producing another of his plays in the fall of 2000. He's at work on a novel set in New Orleans and has just finished a fantasy novel that will be released in April by Meisha Merlin, a small independent publisher in Decatur, Ga. Movie people are circling around his books, and a documentary about his life is in the works. A Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award was given to him this year. If he thinks that talking about his recent success or his future plans is bittersweet, he d s not reveal it. "A couple of journalists have asked me how long I thought I'd live," he says, smiling. "I plan to live to be 100. I don't feel at all mortal. I started hearing that I was going to die young, so young that I don't think about it. It makes a lot of difference that I'm happy. Every time I get a new book in my hand, it's just always the coolest thing in the world. It's been a hell of a ride."

Howorth is a freelance writer living in Oxford, Miss.