The Professor of Desire on Sabbatical

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

If good Americans go to Paris when they die, as Oliver Wendell Holmes believed, then Leonard Barkan’s year of feasting and friendship in Rome — chronicled in his charming and erudite new memoir, “Satyr Square” (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 290 pages, $24) — might be described as a little death. Mr. Barkan, a professor of comparative literature at Princeton and a former director of the New York Institute for the Humanities, would be the first to embrace the sexual pun. As a scholar of the Renaissance, he knows that the metaphorical link between orgasm and death goes back to Shakespeare. More to the point, Mr. Barkan’s Roman year, as his title suggests, was one long erotic experience: the Piazza dei Satiri, where he lived during a sabbatical in the late 1980s, was a felicitous address.

Yet Mr. Barkan, as we come to know him in this decorously revealing book, is anything but a satyr. In fact, what makes the eroticism of “Satyr Square” so remarkable, in our age of liberation, is that it remains almost wholly sublimated. In his entire year in Rome, as far as the reader can tell, Mr. Barkan never had sex (not entirely for lack of trying). But for that very reason, sex tinted and flavored everything he did do. Looking at statues and paintings, listening to opera, cooking elaborate meals, tasting wines — all became varieties of sexual experience. The very prose of “Satyr Square” is suffused with a concupiscent flush, whether Mr. Barkan is writing about Caravaggio’s picture of St. Matthew as a “brawny laborer, fingered and encircled by a guardian spirit with blond spit curls,”or a snack of “molten, swimming” mozzarella with “a fine thread of deep green olive oil.”

Italy, of course, has always loomed in the imagination of colder and more sedate nations as the homeland of heat, instinct, and pleasure. Ever since Goethe exclaimed, in his “Italian Journey,””I believe I have been changed to the very marrow of my bones,” foreigners have gone to Italy to experience sensual and sexual renewal, and to write about the process. “Satyr Square” belongs to that humanistic tradition, even though it sometimes yearns after the simpler conventions of touristy bestsellers like “A Year in Provence.” Mr. Barkan gives us some of the ritualized characters and set pieces of that genre: the crafty housekeeper, the grasping landlady, the miraculously undiscovered food market, and so on.

Yet Mr. Barkan’s descriptions of meals prepared and eaten, potentially the most banal trope in travel writing, are precisely where “Satyr Square” becomes most distinctive. That is because his menus and recipes, though detailed enough to gratify the most ardent fellowfoodie, are not simply consumerist fetishes. They are metaphors, referring beyond themselves to more urgent questions of desire and satisfaction. “I don’t know whether dinner is the sublimation of sex or sex is the sublimation of dinner,” Mr. Barkan writes after visiting Raphael’s food-filled frescoes in the Villa Farnesina. But “Satyr Square,”with its tales of magnificent meals and frustrated flirtations, leaves the reader with little doubt which way the equation runs.

Mr. Barkan’s willingness to dwell on those frustrations, to give an honest picture of the obsessive and compulsive patterns of his erotic life, is what makes his memoir so compelling. In particular, the drama lies in the disparity between Mr. Barkan’s carefully acquired worldliness — he is polyglot, well-traveled, well-read, a virtuoso in the kitchen — and his native shyness and self-doubt. For Mr. Barkan, it is the twin subjects of homosexuality and Jewishness that most fruitfully challenge his composure. It is no wonder that the literary work he analyzes most extensively in “Satyr Square” is “The Merchant of Venice,” where those two kinds of difference confront one another in an Italian setting: “God, I love this play,” he exclaims.

Yet it is Shakespeare’s ambivalence that Mr. Barkan finds most potent — an ambivalence about identity that is foreign to most homosexuals and Jews Mr. Barkan’s age or younger. (From clues in “Satyr Square,” the reader can deduce that Mr. Barkan was in his mid-forties during his sabbatical year, which would put him somewhere in his sixties today.) “Around the time I was sixteen,” he writes, “I started pretending I wasn’t a Jew, and I didn’t really quite finish with this impersonation, or with the lying subroutines that followed from it, until I was in my thirties.” Even now, Mr. Barkan can display a painful self-consciousness whenever Jewish subjects come up. He would not visit the Ghetto in Venice, he writes, until invited to go along with friends “of unimpeachably Christian credentials,” as though their Christianity were prophylactic.

Still more important to Mr. Barkan’s Roman year was his sexual ambivalence, which led him to seek love almost exclusively, it appears, from younger, heterosexual, married men. Here is another point of contact with “The Merchant of Venice,” which ends with the melancholy Antonio losing his beloved friend Bassanio to a young wife, Portia; and also with “Don Giovanni,” the subject of some of Mr. Barkan’s best scholarly riffs, where the relation between Leporello and the Don offers him a model of sexual companionship and rivalry. Mr. Barkan recognizes that this is a pattern destined, or perhaps designed, to lead to rejection and frustration — most notably in the case of Giorgio, his best Italian friend, who alternately leads him on and stands him up. The ambiguity in their relationship is deliciously heightened by Mr. Barkan’s uncertain grasp of language: when Giorgio refers to “nostra storia,” does he mean “our history” or “our love story”?

Mr. Barkan’s obsessive parsing of such clues is movingly futile, and his conception of his homosexuality often feels like a relic of the Platonically repressed era of Pater and Housman. When Mr. Barkan waspishly insists, at one dinner party, that “I felt no special bond with the pair of middle-aged men holding hands whose fingernails were painted the identical shade of aqua,” it is less the nail polish than the frank display of affection that seems to unnerve him. Yet in remaining completely truthful about even the painful elements of his sexuality — in writing shamelessly about his shame — Mr. Barkan fulfills the memoirist’s first duty. More than even his erudition and his palate, it is this intrepidity that allows Mr. Barkan to make “Satyr Square”such an intriguing and humane book.

akirsch@nysun.com


The New York Sun

© 2024 The New York Sun Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. The material on this site is protected by copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used.

The New York Sun

Sign in or  Create a free account

By continuing you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use