I enjoyed being a Cub Scout. Though Cub Scouts don't, or didn't then, actually do anything, the meetings were non-taxing and well supplied with cookies and punch. I read the Cub Scout Manual with great delight--planning for the day when I would make my own crystal radio set, and go into the woods laying snares and death-traps for birds, rabbits, and deer. It seemed inevitable that as I matured I would go on to join the Boy Scouts like all my friends did. And these were the Fifties, heyday of the pedophile Scout Leader: I knew, for my friends whispered to me of what really went on on those Boy Scout sleep-overs and Jamborees, that it was all one continuous intergenerational same-sex orgy--and yet I hesitated, and in the end declined, to become a Boy Scout. And the reason was that I could not, and would not, do any damned thing, much less my "duty," for "God and Country."


Extrait des Memoires d'Anatole Noziere--premieres Lectures

Seven years old

I was lucky--first wave Baby Boomer, remember?--to have parents who saw in me the fulfillment of a generational destiny which they believed to be magically different from any that had ever existed before. It was my mother and my father, therefore, who really taught me to read; saved for me the favorite books from their childhood, and from that of their parents-- McGuffey Readers, Tales of the Teepee, Grimms' Faerey Tales, The Story of a Grizzly--and helped me puzzle through them, patiently explaining the words I didn't know, encouraging me to take books with me wherever I went, to read myself to sleep at night, and to lie on my bed whenever I wanted in the daytime to read. So it happened that at the age of seven I sat under a tree in the yard and read, in an old McGuffey Reader inherited from a grandparent, a dumbed-down version of the Phaedo. Socrates's speculations on the immortality of the soul lit a fire in my infant heart and brain that I'm sure my parents could not have guessed. And I knew instinctively not to tell them of it. I walked as in a trance back into the house, making sure that I was alone, and got a carving knife from the kitchen drawer and held it with both hands by the handle, point-first against my chest just below the sternum, and contemplated throwing myself forward...I didn't, of course, but I thought about it, in a way that would have scared my poor parents to death. It scares me now, almost, to think how close I came....How I knew to adopt the classic antique Roman posture for throwing oneself on one's sword I have no idea. Only reincarnation (my mother told me a dozen years later that she "remembered" having been my daughter back in the days when I was a Roman Senator) could account for it. But instinctually knowing how, as a noble Roman aristocrat (I don't think plebeians were ever called on to do it) to kill myself, is the only vestige of that life that I distinctly recall.


Eight years old

I discovered the Arabian Nights. In those days there was no damned useless intrusive 'Princess Jasmine,' just a sort of generic Sultan's Daughter who gets dragged in at the very end--after Aladdin and the Genie have got their important central relationship worked out, palaces built, unpleasantness over the Egg of the Roc smoothed over--as a kind of official signatory of the Sultan's satisfaction with his handsome, clever, rich and powerful son-in-law.


nine years old

I began reading simplified histories of Greece and Rome; with particular attention to the bad, or wicked, Roman emperors, Nero and Caligula being my overall favorites. That same year Hollywood issued one of its more dreadful historical pastiches, Quo Vadis, in which the brilliant young Peter Yustinov gave the performance of his lifetime as my old hero Nero. As J-J Rousseau does say, give a kid a chance and he'll pick a villain for a hero anytime. So it was with me: When Yustinov as Nero kicked his empress Poppaea in the stomach, I cheered. When he used Christians as human torches and fed them to the lions, I applauded. And when he brought out a little crystal vial to catch his imperial tears when he wept--and the audience around me laughed derisively--I wept with him. I never really fell out of love with Peter Yustinov after that, and he was certainly to the end of his days a most admired wit and racconteur.


ten years old

And so we come to that biggest of all big moments in any man's life: when he first ejaculates. Mary Smick was the most delightful of my mother's friends, and her husband Del was far and away the handsomest, and maybe the nicest, man in the hamlet of Lamont. Between them they had three wonderfully various children: David, two years younger than me, already as handsome as his father and as full of espieglerie as his mother, the only boy younger than myself that I ever liked; Neil, my age, full of charm, wit, and taunting, cruel beauty such that I trembled in his presence, half afraid of him, and more than half in love with him; Melanie, virtually a clone of her mother (skinny, angular, charming), a year or two older than me, and, though a girl, I quite liked her and enjoyed talking with her. Mary Smick was the librarian of the local library--as large as the town of Lamont, pop. 538, could afford--a smallish room upstairs in the back of my uncle Byron's grocery/drygoods store, open two days a week, from one to five O' clock in the afternoon. Mary therefore knew quite a bit about me, because of the books--histories of Greece and Rome, books on art and architecture--that I checked out and that she would always tell my mother (when they met at Wednesday night Methodist prayer meetings) about, when it was time to return them. So it happened one day in May of my tenth year when I showed up as usual at her tiny library that Mary Smick said she had a book for me that she knew I would "just love." It was The Athenian, and indeed I did love it. Gore Vidal mentions the book in his memoirs with something of the same nostalgia and utter smittenness that it still evokes in me--and also says that, like me, he has never been able to find it since, and cannot remember who the author was. Ah, well. As I shall never forget, it is the story of a boy (Demetrius?--yes) whose father is Athenian and whose mother, a Spartan, when the boy's father dies, takes the boy, aged seven, back to Sparta to be raised a companion in arms of King Leonidas, and sweetly and decorously to die with 299 others fighting a rearguard action against the Persians at the pass of Thermopylae. O manly valour! Not so much of a speed reader then as I am now, I remember starting to read it after supper in the living room, and, after a chapter or two extolling the beauty and the love of beauty of an Athenian boy raised among strength-and-beauty loving Spartans, I realized that this was way too hot to be reading en famille, with my mother right there for Christ's sakes; so I retired as early as I decently could and read in bed as far as our eponymous hero's return from a consultation with the oracle of Apollo, what time my flesh failed and I fell asleep as though in a fever, waking with my finger on the page just at dawn, to read of the first meeting of Demetrius and his youthful shield-bearer-to-be: being strung up and flogged, as it happened, by the frenzied, ugly, weak and wicked devotees of Artemis. Our hero does not hesitate: Though they are many and evil, and our hero but a single beautiful nineteen year old male, he wades into them like a refining fire, utterly routing them, and unbinds the fair youth, embracing and comforting and tending to his wounds (none too serious), and leads him away to their glorious future together....And for the first time in my life, my dick which I was scarcely aware of fingering, erupted with two or three drops of totally unexpected pearly ejaculate, and I was filled with extasy. I rested for half an hour or so and tried it again--same text, same result. And again. By the time my mother called me to get up and get ready for school, I was in a state of rapture and quiet delirium that did not go unnoticed. After breakfast, I went into the living room and knelt in front of the couch with my hands folded in front of me, staring into the vast abyss of pleasure and desire within myself. In which attitude my mother found me long after I should have been out the door and headed towards school; and of course she did what she could to spoil it for me: "What's the matter with you? Why aren't you out of the house yet? Are you sick? You act sick. You want me to take your temperature?" Which, when I think about it, is how she had reacted to the visionary state that the image of Errol Flynn in his galley-slave rowing shorts had thrown me into: Worry that something was wrong with me, and that I must be sick. Mothers know.


eleven years old

Mary Smick again, in her official capacity as my librarian, obtained for me--I'll never know how--through the Inter-Library Loan system, Clive Bell's many-volume History of French Architecture, with all the original elevations and plans of Andre Le Notre, Francois and Jules-Hardouin Mansart, Jacques-Anges Gabrielle, etc. Oh God, those Cascades, at St-Cloud and Vaux-le-Vicomte, and Marly-le-Roi; those infinitely inventive Parterres de Broiderie of Le Notre, the exquisite fenestrations of Francois Mansart! I bought rolls of art-paper, scotch-taped them together (for nothing else was large enough) and proceeded to design my own chateaux with surrounding parks, cascades and gardens. The last I saw of my pubescent ventures in real, French architecture in a closet in my parents' house when I was a young man, I was amazed at the heroic scale and diligence of that apprentice self.