Pervatory: RM Vaughan's endless brilliant duality and perversity

19 Dec 2023.

by Drew Rowsome - Richard phoneo from Coach House Press website

A year ago, I left my home. I was middle-aged, bored, unhealthy, stuck in my habits, and loveless. Perfectly normal, in other words. Hatefully normal. A least that's cured. I hated myself and wanted an an adventure. I got what I wanted. I cannot expect to be forgiven.

Martin Murray Heather introduces himself to us from the institution where he is confined. He claims to be quite content and resigned to being insane. Pervatory then flashes back in time as Heather recounts the year in Berlin that led to his being institutionalized, followed by an epilogue that contains his confession. The year contains many astute, beautiful and searing, descriptions and observations about life in Berlin. A travelogue of horror and occasional delights. Heather moves into a furnished rental that while "actually quite cute, airy and bright," also appears to be haunted. There are noises in the pipes, symbolic and disturbing drawings that keep arriving in the mail for the former occupant, and inexplicable sounds in the walls, cupboards and under the floor. The flat eventually requires an exorcism in a scene that is an uncomfortable blend of satirical comedy and spiritual terror. Pervatory is also a love story. Heather explains how Berlin's lack of boomer nostalgia, and parallel avoidance of its Nazi past, allows him to "learn to be loved." He meets Alexandar and a lusty dom/sub relationship blossoms into love. A gay rom-com Story of O. There is a duality to everything.
 
Throughout, author RM Vaughan (Bright Eyed, Compared to Hitler) applies his unique combination of droll wit and vitriol to all three strands of Pervatory, as well as the central mystery of what led to Heather's incarceration. The ghostly noise that haunts whenever Heather urinates is likened to the striking of a match. Which becomes evocative due to Alexandar's fondness for water sports, individual or groups, private or public, with Heather as the recipient. Heather muses that "I knew Alexandar was a sadist. But in a fun way, not a neurotic way." While the Berlin art scene—Heather is, like Vaughan was, a journalist specializing in fine art—is described as shallow, Heather vivisects the Toronto art scene, his "home," as vicious and narcissistic in passages that are breathtakingly nasty. And accurate. He does the same for the gay scene. Toronto is described as having "disposed" of Heather for being too old, too poor, and too overweight, then lists, hilariously and tragically, a sampling of his Berlin sexual encounters. That is before he meets Alexandar who desires Heather. To gaze at him, to fuck him, to piss on him, to hold him, to hurt him. And to love him.

Heather marvels that "Alexandar had a limitless imagination. There are so many small and big ways to humiliate a lover . . . My ass cheeks grew a layer of tough, flat skin to match the texture of Alexandar's boots, his calloused palms." After one imaginative romp, "I shat blood for two days and still have a lower back ache. I was in love and I hated my body. What, then was I meant to be preserving? Good health? My looks? Alexandar recognized my self-hatred and applied liberal doses of matching sentiment. He beat and fucked the hell out of me, almost." Heather ends the musings on love, lust and BDSM by noting that his apartment is haunted. He is also fascinated with the occult, with magic. He is constantly consulting the tarot, reading tea leaves, and accepting the results as fate. He invites Alexandar to a gathering of his previously unmentioned "queer family" to celebrate Walpurgisnacht. It does not go well and the resultant rupture plays directly, literally and literarily, into the now seen as foreordained crime.

Pervatory is possessed by another duality. The novel was not completed before Vaughan chose to leave us, and it is impossible to read without the lens of memories of him. The parallels between Vaughan and Heather are almost autobiographical and it should be noted that I consistently, unconsciously, referred to the author as "Heather" as I pulled these thoughts together. I couldn't, can't, bear the thought that his self-image could have been so different than the image I had,/have, of him. Pervatory was unfinished at the time of Vaughan's demise, and that probably explains the structural and narrative flaws. If I were able to read Pervatory critically and with remove, there would be concern about the loose ends, something that Vaughan's writing rarely allowed. But that would be compensated for by the passages that are sheer brilliance. The prose jumps off the page when Vaughan writes, almost as an aside though an aside most authors or journalists would kill to have written as an ubertext, of how "artists all want the same thing, me included. They want an antidote." What follows, using puppies and Pollack and Picasso (alliteration as well as incisiveness), is an ingenuous dissection of ego and art. And the human condition.

Pervatory overflows with paragraphs and pages that beg to be re-read and savoured. As if Vaughan's mind was overflowing with ideas, as if he were writing them out in order to make sense of them, to organize them into a gilded coherence. That he did so with his customary fabulous style and venom is a gift to us. Vaughan was also a lauded poet and occasionally the words get away from him, flowing with the sheer joy of sonics and visuals that poetry allows, but which mainstream novels can only dabble in. That continual duality again. As a mystery, Pervatory is easily solved but remain utterly enigmatic. Vaughan was not writing a memoir or confession, but he was providing explanations. As a horror novel, Pervatory does not terrify, but it does chill one to the core because Vaughan demands that the reader understand and relate. Sit in the bleak institution, sit waiting for the flow of urine, wait as the cards turn over to reveal the dictated divined future. As a rom-com, Pervatory, with all the matter-of-fact sexual peccadillos that give it its title, delves into that difficult place where lust, pain, envy, practicality and self-image are stirred together in the witch's cauldron of gay culture to become love. As a novel, Prevatory is revelatory and a beast of its own. There is, thank goddess, absolutely nothing normal about it. Or that needs to be forgiven.