The book bounces along with vigorous and joyous language, much like the rhythmic poetic downhill step he beautifully describes, ‘Walking has a prosody: when I walk downhill, the legs do dactyls.’ (For the unschooled: one long stride, two doorstop jambs, a stressed syllable and two unstressed: ‘dithering’, ‘wearying’—’Corsica’)
The confluence of prosody and footfalls fills Honorable Bandits with an exquisite poetic sensibility, but Bouldrey also savors the playful and cheeky use of language. This is great fun but also helps us spelunk deeper and deeper into his world. What a moving (multiple meanings there!) soulful (oh god, more multiple meanings there too!) and wonderful book about living and walking. It was a joy to read.
This epic walk across the lunar landscape of Corsica provides Bouldrey with a red-hot template to take us where he will. I felt such trust for the writer as he followed the confluences and tributaries of his memories and associations. Perhaps the strongest of these side trails is ‘the Rake’s Progress,’ which is one of the most moving AIDS memoirs I have ever read, razor-sharp in its specifics and sensibility. Rather than seeming like digressions, they are charged and writerly leaps into the most intimate spaces of the book.
In a lovely tip of the hat to the Divine Comedy journey that lives in Honorable Bandit, the end of the book has such a feeling of Paradiso as out two travelers find the perfect place of rest at the end of the trail. Bouldrey has become a different man, ‘The Bouldrey we have sent to Corsica is not the Bouldrey they have returned to us.’ And the reader has changed too. Any book that calls us to deep knowledge of ourselves and also manages to make the reader want to get up and walk across Corsica is doing something very right. Honorable Bandit: A Walk Across Corsica will find a large readership among the community of walkers, gay readers, and those drawn to a juicy, dactyl-filled journey.
Tim Miller: What is it about queers and hitting the trail? Is there something that pulls gay people to slip into those hiking boots and rewrite our Boy Scout history?
Brian Bouldrey: It may be that walking helps make some fine distinctions you could never perceive while moving so quickly through a noisy world. I have discovered that the difference between being alone and being lonely is big, and only comes to you when walking, which one must do alone, even if you are with a dozen other people. The fact is, I never learned how to be alone until I grew older. There’s something in our culture (and by our culture, I mean gay culture) that equates ‘alone’ to ‘failure.’ And while gay men seem lonely, that’s not the same as alone.
TM: There is a really visceral, physical, rhythmic sense of language and play in Honorable Bandit that is so compelling. How does all this walking change your writing?
BB: I’m always thrilled when somebody notices something I thought I was doing for my own personal enjoyment. Thanks for that! I have been very conscious, lately, of rhythm in prose. It’s different than, say, meter in poetry, and it shows itself not just in sentences, but paragraphs and chapters and even a book as a whole. When I read writers who have good rhythm, I don’t necessarily say, ‘Wow, that Joan Didion, she sure knows how to cut a rug.’ But when I find a writer with two left feet (and they can be brilliant people, like Susan Sontag or Fyodor Dostoyevsky), I do find myself saying, ‘Damn, she ain’t got no rhythm!’ If you’ve got a pretty good mind like Sontag or Dostoyevsky, you can get away with that, but I blew my mind on sex and drugs, so I have to rely on style. Having two left feet is not good for dancing, and it’s disastrous for, say, hiking across a mountain range. When I’m hiking, I’m listening to the sound of my own trudge all day long, as well as birdsong, the rise and fall of wind, the call and response of other hikers, awful and wonderful yodeling, even the ‘ommmm’ of cars on a distant road. That stuff is bound to rub off on you, right?
TM: In Honorable Bandit, the maquis—the elusive, haunting Proustian smell of the spiny scrub plants of your island—is really important. I suppose we all have to imagine our own personal maquis! What does the maquis mean for you in the book?
BB: Oh, that bigger-than-life maquis! I had read about it, talked about it, and studied it long before I actually smelled it or got scratched up by it. (The maquis, dear reader, is the general name for the idiosyncratic collection of wildflowers, plants, and brambles that cover up the island of Corsica. It makes the honey distinct and catches on fire every other Wednesday, at best.) There is something about encountering a thing in one’s own imagination that makes it bigger than life you fill in all the blanks with your mind. Then it turns out to be something different Âfor me, it’s usually something less romantic, more annoying, and, well, smaller. But the maquis turned out to be a different thing that was better: better smelling, stranger, bigger.
But, yes, every reader will have to imagine, just as I did—and isn’t that what every journey is like, too? No matter what the guidebooks say it’s going to be, no matter what your friends say, the ones who have already gone there, it’s going to be better, stranger, and bigger.
TM: I love the deep current of the ‘meander’ in the book—the Meander being a winding river in Turkey after all!—and having that wandering take us to places like the AIDS memoir section is so important. What psychic maps did you follow as you wrote the book?
BB: I have this whole tragicomic section about my impossibly bad sense of direction somewhere in Honorable Bandit. I build the act of getting lost into my itinerary. ‘Meander’ is a word that suggests an orderly way of getting from one place to another, in my life. But there is something to be gained by meandering, and even by getting lost—provided, of course, you don’t get too lost, and nobody is waiting for you at the other side. Any time I’ve taken a detour, any time I’ve taken the long way, or the crooked and wide way, it has always been the better thing. I see more, I understand more, and I come away with one more story.
TM: And those pesky psychic maps?
BB: The psychic maps! That’s really a beautiful question! There are landscapes I go to because they make me feel most at home (fjords, for some reason, and forests) and landscapes I walk through because they are alien to me (open desert, the maquis). I have enthusiasm for nearly everything, but they are not constant. I’m a horrible NetFlix guy, because one day I’ll want to watch all of Tarkovsky’s films, and by the time Andrei Rublev arrives, I’m over it; I wish I had the third season of Veronica Mars instead. That’s another reason why I like to walk. I think it forces me to focus; it doesn’t stand for my moods. It makes me pay attention and teaches me, weirdly enough, to sit still.
TM: So, are you still on speaking terms with your oldest brother? I’m trying to convince my relatively young father to walk the Appalachian Trail with me, but we need to do something a little [shorter] to see whether we’ll kill each other somewhere along the piste. I am depending on your honest answer before going forward with that trip.
BB: Yes, my brother and I speak quite a bit. Mostly about the Civil War and how Bush is the worst president ever! My advice is take that trip with your dad!
As to what I hope the reader will discover, I like to read travel lit as much as I like to write it. But after reading Redmond O’Hanlan’s No Mercy: A Congo Journey, I must say that the only way you could get me to take a trip to the Congo is by tying me up and shipping me in a box. With dirt in it. I’m so glad O’Hanlan went, however! I certainly hope reading about my travels in Corsica will make readers want to visit this amazing place. But also understand that the best way to get there is on one’s own steam if not walking, at least stepping off the road most traveled. Usually, that means you step into goat shit. But you have to sniff a lot of crap before you get a whiff of the maquis.
Tim Miller is a solo performer and the author of the books Shirts & Skin, Body Blows and 1001 Beds. He can be reached at his Web site http://hometown.aol.com/millertale.
Bouldrey will be at the Evanston Public Library, 1703 Orrington, on Mon., Dec. 10, at 7 p.m. See http://www.brianbouldrey.com.