The Family of Max Desir

By Robert Ferro

It was a family dealing with old values, acceptance and death. Max Desir loved his Italian roots and hearing his mother, Marie, recount tales of the old country. And he loved his American family, his father John a successful self-made businessman in New Jersey. As he came of age, Max discovered something else he loved – men – and met the love of his life in Italy. Now, at age 40, the family is split: Marie and his siblings accept Max and Nick as a stable, long-term couple but his father John does not. When a needlepoint family tree is to be hung at Christmas, it's too much for John. Then the spectre of death enters as Marie rapidly declines with brain cancer. Loyalties divided, acceptance of family is re-examined.

 

In this beautiful, haunting tale, told in Robert Ferro's clear, impassioned narrative, he created a classic. 

 

Originally published in 1983, this new edition includes a foreword by fellow author and friend Felice Picano (Like People in History).

 

"Nobody has told this story before, and Robert Ferro has the power to make his telling definitive … his clear, impassioned narrative moves with wit and sensuous energy. It has shaken and excited me more than any recent American fiction. I want to give it to people. I want everyone to read it." – Walter Clemons, Newsweek

 

"A stunning achievement … not limited to the gay experience, but touches upon the very nature of the human condition … renews faith in the American novel … One of the finest (and certainly most moving) novels of the year." – James Fritzhand, The Advocate

 

"An honest, eloquent and entirely original novel … at once realistic and mythological, intensely personal and public … The Family of Max Desir is a triumph." – Edmund White

 

"Sensitive and original … beautifully sustained and often disturbing … at once deeply personal and universal." – New York Native

• Language: English
• Publisher: ReQueered Tales
• Release date: Nov 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781951092092

Book preview

THE FAMILY OF MAX DESIR

by Robert Ferro

Foreword by Felice Picano

RQT_Logo

ReQueered Tales

Los Angeles  •  Toronto

2019

The Family of Max Desir

by Robert Ferro

Copyright © 1983 by Robert Ferro.

Foreword: copyright © 2019 by Felice Picano.

Cover design: Dawné Dominique, DusktilDawn Designs.

Photo of Robert Ferro: © Robert Giard, 1985.

First American edition: 1983

This edition: ReQueered Tales, November 2019

ReQueered Tales version 1.55

Kindle edition ASIN: B07YQBGXW1

Epub edition ISBN-13:  978-1-951092-09-2

Print edition ISBN-13: 978-1-951092-10-8

For more information about current and future releases, please contact us:

E-mail: [e-mail]

Facebook (Like us!): www.facebook.com/ReQueeredTales/

Twitter: @ReQueered

Instagram: www.instagram.com/requeered/

Web: www.ReQueeredTales.com

Blog: www.ReQueeredTales.com/blog

Mailing list (Subscribe for latest news): https://bit.ly/RQTJoin

ReQueered Tales is a California General Partnership.

All rights reserved. © 2019 ReQueered Tales unless otherwise noted.

Novels by ROBERT FERRO

Second Son (1988)

The Blue Star (1985)

The Family of Max Desir (1983)

The Others (1977)

Non-Fiction

Atlantis, The Autobiography of a Search (1970)

with Michael Grumley

Praise for ROBERT FERRO

One of my top five recommendations for lost gay novels is Robert Ferro’s The Family of Max Desir published thirty-five years ago, in 1983. Amazingly, it spans three generations and seventy years in the Desiderio family, from Sicily to Brooklyn to New Jersey, in a mere 215 pages. It works because the writing is so swift and right and alive. Reunited with distant relatives after decades apart: Then he recognized certain faces, older and changed, like music played slower. Pushing forty, the gay character Max worries when he cruises the Village: People will no longer turn to look at him, will see nothing but themselves being seen. Everything rings true about this family, including their complicated, shifting degrees of acceptance of Max’s actor boyfriend of fifteen years, Nick Flynn.

Ferro’s other novels are his debut The Others from 1977, his final book Second Son when he was dying of AIDS in 1988, and his third novel, The Blue Star, which Stephen Greco selected for Tom Cardamone’s The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered

— blogger at Band of Thebes

Praise for THE FAMILY OF MAX DESIR

Nobody has told this story before, and Robert Ferro has the power to make his telling definitive … his clear, impassioned narrative moves with wit and sensuous energy. It has shaken and excited me more than any recent American fiction. I want to give it to people. I want everyone to read it.

— Walter Clemons

A stunning achievement … not limited to the gay experience, but touches upon the very nature of the human condition … renews faith in the American novel … One of the finest (and certainly most moving) novels of the year.

— James Fritzhand, The Advocate

"An honest, eloquent and entirely original novel … at once realistic and mythological, intensely personal and public … The Family of Max Desir is a triumph."

— Edmund White

Sensitive and original … beautifully sustained and often disturbing … at once deeply personal and universal.

— New York Native

robert ferro - nytimes - 300

ROBERT FERRO

Robert Ferro was born in Cranford, N.J., in 1941. He graduated from Rutgers University and earned a master’s degree from the University of Iowa. In late 1965 Ferro met Andrew Holleran at the Iowa Writer's Workshop. He later lectured at Adelphi University.

With Michael Grumley, in 1970 he co-authored Atlantis: the Autobiography of a Search. It is for his fiction, and four novels, that he was most influential. The semi-autobiographical The Family of Max Desir brought him to wide notice and acclaim.

He was a member of The Violet Quill, a group of influential post-Stonewall openly gay writers in New York which included Edmund White, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Christopher Cox, George Whitmore, Ferro and Grumley.

He died of AIDS a few months after his partner, Michael Grumley, in 1988.

THE FAMILY OF MAX DESIR

by Robert Ferro

Foreword

Even in New York, their art, their furnishings, their clothing, their jewelry and their accessories all spoke of Robert Ferro and Michael Grumley’s life, and second home, in Italy. For Robert, the most beautifully made example of anything could be found within a few miles delimited by the Via Corso and the Piazza della Republicana in Rome: except for leather goods – better in Florence – and cloth – superior if from around Turin. Once prices in Europe began to rise, and Robert and Michael found themselves more involved in the New York gay literary scene that they helped create, Italy slowly began to lose its attractions and become more retrospectively appealing, but it also became crucial grist for their essays and novels. At the same time, it became a great treasure house for Robert to rummage through as he delightedly took on the large task of repairing and updating the Ferro family beach house.

I recall the first time I became aware of both the enormity of this labor and also of Robert's commitment to it. The large first floor living room/dining room area encircled one end of the house, as a taffrail semi-circumnavigates a seagoing Atlantic clipper, debouching onto side and back terraces, enclosed porches, foyers and subsidiary corridors. It boasted nearly two dozen windows in need of being re-curtained. At one point, I – and every other guest in Gaywyck (as I styled the place after Vincent Virga’s novel) – was asked to offer opinions on the swatch book of Chintzes that Robert had secured. Later on, when a pattern had, at last, been selected and work begun, Robert proudly offered this update: There isn't enough fabric left for the whole place. They're having to reprint it at the Milan factory!

There were many reasons for this intense interest in the house. The most crucial was that not very long before, Robert's mother, née Gaetana Panzera, had died in that beach house, in the very front bedroom that Robert and Michael took over and subsequently slept in. When she'd been healthier, she'd governed two houses: the newer, larger one in northern New Jersey, a home and an entertainment center for her husband, president of his own generic cosmetics firm; and this Jersey shoreline house, originally named Eagles Nest by its builders and first residents, in honor of the sea birds that occupied the unusual estuary which was the northern border of the property, the only one for miles around without a boardwalk and with the ocean unobstructed except for a romantic lighthouse at the southern end.

Intensely invested both in his mother's death – a major element of his first published novel, The Family of Max Desir – and in keeping her memory alive in the beach house that he came to see as her embodiment, Robert in effect turned himself into a new family matriarch. We Violet Quillians and other big city visitors were welcome, but only off-season.

In the summer, Robert's large family, his two sisters, his brother and their spouses and children, as well as his father, would stay there. Robert seldom wrote during those times, he was too busy cooking, cleaning, keeping house and order – being not unlike his mother had been. But even off season, he would hold parties of women – sisters, aunts, his niece’s – alternating them with parties of men – his brother, uncles, brothers in law and their sons – at the house for weekend card parties that might have come out of the pages of Max Desir.

During those memorable mid-1980’s seaside socializing and redecorating summer visits, what slowly became clear to me was that Robert was writing again. More than once I caught him out at his chic little Olivetti typewriter, which he quickly put aside, once even declaring he was writing thank you notes. That was how I knew that Robert was at last writing a novel, the book that eventually became The Family of Max Desir, his first openly gay-themed book. If I needed proof, it was one afternoon tea when the others were away and he and I were alone. Robert suddenly made it clear that he was approaching the end of his writing and he was frankly desirous of having the book make a splash. Among the members of the Violet Quill, when we seven first gathered to read and discuss our work, two of us, Andrew Holleran with Dancer From the Dance in 1978, and myself with The Lure, in 1979, had hit the big time in Robert's words: i.e. published unquestionably out gay novels with major publishers that had generated publicity, reviews, word of mouth, and especially sales.

Robert was candidly curious about how that had happened. Although he'd known Holleran for years and exchanged letters with him whenever they'd been apart, Ferro found his old pal was simply too flummoxed by success to talk about it. So, I told him what my editor at Delacorte, Linda Grey, and my agent of that time, Jane Rotrosen had discussed and what we’d been able to do and also not been able to do in the way of publicizing and promoting the book. Holleran’s success had more or less fallen on him: he’d done little to support it except attend a publication party. On the other hand, I’d been out in public since my first novel in 1975.

I ended up reading much of Robert's novel in manuscript and it was at his urging that I consented to put together what now appears to be the first gay and lesbian literary anthology: A True Likeness: Lesbian and Gay Writing Today, which I then published as the fifth title of my SeaHorse Press. The high standard of fiction, poetry and drama in that book, and the contributors involved – most of the Violet Quill members (Ferro, Holleran, White and George Whitmore), Bertha Harris, Jane Rule, Jane de Lynn, and a half dozen poets. Within its pages were excerpts from two books that subsequently came to prominence, Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story (1982) and Robert Ferro's The Family of Max Desir, published the following year. Also in its pages was the fragment of a never completed autobiographical novel by Michael Grumley set in Rome. This piece, aside from whatever intrinsic merits it possessed, signaled a sea change within Robert and Michael's relationship – to each other and to the world – that the rest of us wouldn't become aware of until several years later; it continues to haunt and intrigue me decades after their deaths in 1988.

One of the most noticeable of the topics Robert Ferro would write about, the one closest to his life and thought and the one most crucial to his success as a writer in the mid-'Eighties is the relationship of gay men to their birth families, an issue Robert grappled with in his life and in his writing as fiercely as the biblical Jacob wrestled the angel. As the third child, second son, of a large, affluent, ambitious, second generation Italian immigrant family, from birth both Robert's place and his position in the family were predetermined.

Traditionally, the first son of an Italian family both at home and abroad, received all the attention and the bulk of the material bounty of the family. Any opportunity, any benefit, too. But then that first son was forced to bear the complex burden of continuing the lineage, enriching the household coffers, and upholding the family name. Decades ago, in the old country the second son – automatically bereft of power and status by primogeniture – typically accepted his situation, becoming a priest or professor, sometimes a doctor or lawyer, i.e. someone helpful to others – especially helpful to his landowning elder brother. When, that is, he didn't turn instead into a wastrel, gambler and lady-killer. Robert accepted the fundamental rightness of the system and only sought a greater place within it. Secure in his intellectual and moral superiority, Robert rebelled early and in varied ways, although he would never dream of taking the elder's position as active second in command of the family firm or raise a family, as was very much required of a first son.

It’s true that it took Robert some time to prosper. I recall some hand to mouth when he worked as a waiter for a gay catering service – years that he endured, even enjoyed, with a certain noblesse oblige, a well-disposed slumming, but which he afterwards shuddered over whenever they were alluded to or mentioned. Beyond our differing experience, however, Robert and I disagreed on the role of the family in gay life on a far more essential level. When I'd discovered I was gay, it had been with joy, providing me another potent arrow in the quiver I'd amassed in my attack on all that was rigidly establishment. I embraced homosexuality with the goal of tearing down society and starting all over again. While Robert claimed to admire the Aquarian revolutionary in me, he secretly desired a more Libran accommodation in which he eventually shared in what had been amassed. It was only natural that his tenets would prove more agreeable to mainstream reviewers and critics than my more subversive ones. It's equally comprehensible that his books will continue to win favor and be read by a younger generation of gay people who seek the same ends Robert wanted, to marry, to have families, to serve in the military. To radical me, that was to be just like most of the dreary hetero world.

I could be fanciful and call these years of striving, Robert's lost years. The truth is less glamorous and rather more interesting. Between the time Robert and Michael left the Iowa Writing Program and the publication of Atlantis: the Autobiography of a Search was a mere three years. However, it would be another seven years between the publication of Atlantis and Robert's novella, The Others. And it would be another six years after that to the publication of his next book, The Family of Max Desir.

During those years, Robert’s partner, Michael Grumley, published three well received non-fiction books, There Are Giants in the Earth, Hard Corps, and After Midnight. Robert, meanwhile appeared to be dragging his feet, content to play spouse and domestic mainstay. He seemed to have been working at a novel in one form or another several years even before the Violet Quill began meeting. It would be another two and a half years after we’d stopped meeting before it was ready in any kind of readable form. At the time, this was understandable, especially given Robert's stratospheric aspirations and incredibly high standards.

Then something strange happened. No sooner had Bill Whitehead, senior editor at Dutton – then an independent company – accepted his first novel, that Robert began writing a second novel, The Blue Star. That book was nearly finished by the time Max Desir was receiving its last reviews. Robert could barely wait for his first novel to come out in paperback, before issuing the second book in hard cover, in 1985, again through Dutton. He'd barely completed that book, when he was already laying out the outline for a third novel, to be titled – interestingly – Second Son. He wrote that volume faster than any previous book and the only reason Robert's third novel had to wait till early 1988 to come out, was because in the meanwhile Whitehead had sickened and died of AIDS. Robert's agent took the book to Crown Books – also then an independent company – otherwise it would have come out in the Spring of 1986.

Suddenly Robert Ferro's work was everywhere. Putting into service his recent friendship with Newsweek book critic Walter Clemons, he managed to get Walter to write a cover piece for the influential national magazine on gay books and literature, with of course a special emphasis on his own work. Robert arranged to call in every favor, play off every connection he'd made in previous years to ensure getting his books reviewed as widely as possible. Sales weren't at all bad, either: Max Desir in paperback especially, sold well.

Although Second Son has the title that ought to make it more personal, The Family of Max Desir is actually the book closest to the Robert Ferro I knew so well. When I first saw Robert and Michael in public some years before I actually met them, gay artist David Martin showed me a drawing he’d done of a centaur like profile of a handsome, long-haired, bearded man he called Max which served as a party invitation for a party at Twelve West discotheque. That drawing was of Robert Ferro, who was actually known as Max among many of his non-writing gay contemporaries.

Having to read Robert's work again I'm pleased to declare that it holds up wonderfully well. The Family of Max Desir is certainly his calling-card, richly and accurately conveying his voice, his mind, and his life. For years after he was gone, I've heard Robert's voice in my mind, prepping me, and then going on to laugh or threaten or invite, or drop an apothegm, and I now realize I've left out many anecdotes illustrating his sophistication, his vanity, his wit, his generosity. So, I'll leave Robert Ferro with one moment I can never forget: it was on the top deck outside his bedroom at Gaywyck, before AIDS was even a shadow – and he turned to me and repeated Blanche DuBois' line, Someday, I shall die – of an unwashed grape! And Robert's smile after he said those words was amazingly enigmatic.

— Felice Picano,

West Hollywood,

September 2019

Felice Picano is the author of more than thirty books of poetry, fiction, memoirs, nonfiction, and plays. His work has been translated into many languages and several of his titles have been national and international bestsellers. He is considered a founder of modern gay literature along with the other members of the Violet Quill. His most recent novel, A Bard on Hercular, was published in 2022.

For Michael Grumley

THEN CAME A LONG GENTLE CURVE IN THE HIGHWAY, like the bottom of an arabic letter. On the outside of the curve lay a flat sloping field and the remnants of an orchard. It was a hot day at the end of August, 1977. The man at the wheel of the car was Dan Defilippo, Max Desir’s uncle. He was driving to Philadelphia to see a man to whom he hoped to sell printing supplies. On the seat next to him a heavy machine of some printing use shifted as the car entered the curve. Traffic was light. A car of coeds returning to Temple University followed fifty yards behind. As the machine leaned toward him, Dan put out his arm to steady it. This sudden movement did not startle or alarm him particularly; nor was it the first time it had shifted. But as he steadied it on the seat he felt a tingling sensation rise up his left arm and shoulder, so that he had difficulty gripping the wheel. He had the impression of being hit with something soft and wet, like thrown fruit. It seemed to splatter behind his eyes. The car left the highway, casually it appeared, and drew a gentle curve of its own across the field, although on the slope it picked up speed. An impact, to which last purpose a certain ancient apple tree had survived, threw him thirty feet clear.

The coeds were student nurses at the university hospital nearby. Still, for five or six minutes he did not breathe, and in that time most of his brain died.

In intensive care they said the brain stem was damaged; that cranial fluid, which had built up to cause severe pressure, must be drained. His face and body were covered with plum-dark bruises in swirls like marbleized paper, but he was otherwise unharmed. He lay amidst the chaotic medical welter of emergency. A respirator tube entered directly into his trachea. Others were fitted into his nose and the vein in his wrist. His head was tilted back awkwardly, to accommodate the tubes, but to Max this angle seemed more the result of the struggle Dan’s spirit was waging, in a place just behind the eyelids—a war in which the spirit fought for space in which to continue living.

The days went by. The bruises lightened, faded. The family was allowed, two at a time, to spend five minutes of each hour at Dan’s bedside. They were encouraged by the nurses to talk to him, to call him back, as if he were just off in the distance, headed in the wrong direction. Max could not bring himself to say a word. He held his hand instead, and thought thoughts that beckoned, that reached into a void of sleep and oblivion. The nurses told of patients emerging from comas remembering everything that had been said to them. They had heard and understood but were unable to respond.

The women wore dark clothes to the hospital. It was an endless wake. Their strengths, their reserves were drained. Anxiety, fear, strain, fatigue, one by one were drawn in Marie Desir’s eyes, as if these emotions could help in some prescription for her brother’s recovery. Dan’s wife, Phoebe, seemed sturdier. She cried often quietly for short periods, after which she seemed restored. There were dark circles under her eyes and she didn’t look well, but her skin did not begin to whiten, sag and crease up like Marie’s; the capillaries did not suddenly map themselves out on her cheeks. Phoebe was younger, stronger, with a history of self-reliance. She saw perhaps what a distance lay ahead of them. It was Marie who seemed to have made the decision to decline as Dan declined, to release her grip on life until he regained his.

After three weeks intensive care was no longer thought necessary. Dan had stabilized into a deep, apparently irreversible coma. Sometimes his eyes opened. The pupils reacted to light, to movement, like those of a small, wary animal in the hollow of a tree. At times he would yawn, stretching his mouth around an endless moment of air. His younger brother Frank spent hours of every day speaking to him, convinced he could eventually get through. It did not seem to Frank that any amount of blackened brain could prevent him from calling his brother back.

Toward the end of the second month Dan made a struggle and lost. It was as if he tried to wake, to fight his way back. Alternate periods of rigidity and relaxation progressed through a feverish restlessness that built nearly to convulsions. Finally his eyes opened and swept the room, resting momentarily on everyone present. The eyes blinked once; round, focused and clear. Then they closed. The mind, as if having come to the surface for a moment, sank down; the fever cooled. The body lay abandoned and derelict, anchored by tubes. In another month he was moved, to a nursing home near Phoebe on Long Island. He was given fourteen hundred calories of nutrients a day, intravenously. His face seemed younger, without lines or strain. A therapist exercised his useless arms and legs twice a day. Marie and John Desir went to see him regularly, usually on Sunday. Max asked his aunt Phoebe if she understood that he did not want to see Dan out there. And Phoebe replied that they must all deal with this in their own way.

I.

MAX’S MOTHER, MARIE DESIR, BORN DEFILIPPO—sixty-eight years old, five foot two, favoring Barbara Stanwyck playing a lady—was shopping for another dark dress in a mall not far from her home. She was to meet her maid Greta for lunch in fifteen minutes and was in something of a hurry. A glamorous young woman carrying a tray of perfume came up beside her.

Would you like to try our newest scent? the woman asked, spritzing a tiny flagon in Mrs Desir’s direction. A nauseating moment of sweet flowers and lacquer went by.

It’s called Lovewish. The woman smiled, waiting for a compliment.

It’s horrible. Marie Desir waved the air in front of her face. You shouldn’t do that to people, she said, and left the store.