The way we write now: the reality of AIDS in contemporary short fiction

"She knew as much about this disease as she could know."(36)

The line comes from "Philostorgy, Now Obscure," a short story first published in The New Yorker. Its author, Allen Barnett, died of AIDS in 1992. The "disease" the line refers to is, in fact, AIDS, and the "she" is a woman named Roxy, who asks her friend Preston whether he intends to go on DHPG.(1) Roxy knows DHPG is a drug used to treat CMV (cytomegalovirus), and that it requires "a catheter inserted into a vein that fed directly into an atrium of his heart" (36). Roxy has done her homework. In her room, Preston finds "a photocopy of an article from the New England Journal of Medicine," as well as "a book on the immune system and one on the crisis published by the National Academy of Sciences, and a fist of gay doctors"(43). She has read extensively, and she cares deeply, but there is still much she cannot know. I identify with Roxy: I have read extensively (though not as much as she has), written some, and care deeply, but like her, there is much I cannot know. What I do know, however, I have learned not so much from television documentaries, though I have watched them, and not from articles and reports, though I have read them. What I know about AIDS - about living with it and dying from it - I have learned from literature, from novels and poems and essays, and, most of all, from short stories.

Most of us knew little about AIDS when Susan Sontag's story "The Way We Live Now" was published in 1986 in The New Yorker. "The Way We Live Now" was one of the first stories on AIDS to appear in a mainstream periodical, and it is still-by far-the best known story on the subject. To illustrate, not only was Sontag's story included in Best American Short Stories 1987; it was also chosen for the volume Best American Short Stories of the Eighties. Last spring, to raise funds for AIDS charities, the story was released once again, this time as a small and expensive volume, complete with illustrations by British artist Howard Hodgkin. In The New York Times Book Review (1 March 1992), Gardner McFall proclaimed this newest incarnation of the story "an allegory for our times" (20).

Presumably, the allegorical elements of the story are in what is left out: the name of the main character - the man who is ill - and the name of the disease. These two subjects, person and illness, we learn about through hearsay, second and third hand in a variety of voices:

I've never spent so many hours at a time on the phone, Stephen said to Kate, and when I'm exhausted after the two or three calls made to me, giving me the latest, instead of switching off the phone to give myself a respite I tap out the number of another friend or acquaintance, to pass on the news. (253)

Surely, one of Ms. Sontag's intentions was "to pass on the news" to the reader. However, the message may not be getting across, at least not to everyone, and perhaps not to those most in need of hearing it. Last fall, I taught "The Way We Live Now" in a fiction writing class at Drake University. Five years had passed since the story's first appearance in The New Yorker, a period in which approximately 120,000 Americans died of AIDS. Even so, several students in my class insisted that the disease in question might not be AIDS at all. One young man was adamant; no amount of argument would serve to convince him. Enlightened members of the class pointed to lines such as this one: "Ellen replied, . . . my gynecologist says that everyone is at risk, everyone who has a sexual life, because sexuality is a chain that links each of us to so many others, unknown others, and now the great chain of being has become a chain of death as well" (262). But the student would not be persuaded; he simply preferred to believe that Sontag intended some other disease - any other disease. The meaning of the allegory, if indeed "The Way We Live Now" is an allegory, was certainly lost on this student.

While Sontag's story may well have been the first to avoid the name of the illness, it certainly was not the last. The first volume of stories on AIDS, A Darker Proof, by Edmund White and Adam Mars-Jones, mentions the acronym only once in 233 pages. In the foreword to his newest collection of stories, Monopolies of Loss, Mars-Jones comments that the "suppression" (4) of the term in the earlier book was intentional.(2) My own experience with writing about AIDS is similar. In writing a story about a foster mother to a baby with AIDS, I deliberately sidestepped the term until page 6, and thereafter used it only twice. My concern was that editors and readers would be turned off by the subject, so I made sure my audience was well into the story before I divulged the truth. Even in fiction, it seems, we are invested in keeping AIDS a secret.

But more problematic than avoiding the name of the illness is the practice of evading the person with AIDS. In Sontag's story, we never learn the man's name - or much else about him, for that matter - except that he has a large number of devoted and talkative friends. In a very real sense, Sontag's story has no main character. What it has, instead, is, at best, a subject of conversation, at worst, grist for the gossip mill. As several of my students pointed out, "The Way We Live Now" is reminiscent of the children's game, "Telephone," in which players sit in a circle and whisper a message in turn: