The Beholding
A Novel
by
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About the Book
At last, a novel that was slated for publication in the 1960s, then suppressed because of its sexual frankness, will finally be brought into print, newly revised, so that you can judge for yourself if the writing is "tasteless, coarse, lewd, obscene, and salacious" — or a work of fierce perception written to address crucial issues of male and female sexuality a decade before Feminism and Gay Liberation. Pitchford says, "Of all my books, this one is my favorite, my masterpiece."
It’s a good novel, by God, it’s right and good. It frightened me sometimes … by its power and rightness and painful lyricism. The Beholding will stand up. It will be around for a long time. … Kenneth Pitchford is a great writer.
~ Robin Morgan, Going Too Far, Random House, 1977
The Beholding is a dazzling and overwhelming novel — a spectacular record of what happened to all of us in the 1960s.
~ Frank O’Hara
I’ve just finished reading Kenneth Pitchford’s novel, The Beholding, for a second time and I feel it is truly a remarkable book, utterly original, serious and beautiful. … It concerns people earnestly attempting to change their lives, in the face of the death of the central character, and in the climate of apparent outer changes in the early 1960’s. It’s a book which … will make painful and exhilarating reading, because it explores the underlying problems of relation, love, loyalty, identity with which all of us — women and men, whether heterosexual or homosexual — have been grappling.
~ Adrienne Rich
I liked Mr. Pitchford’s novel The Beholding so much. I am deeply grateful for the experience of having read it.
~ Jacqueline Onassis
This powerful novel chronicles the dying of a young poet, Leonard Porterfield, at the height of his promise in the summer of 1960. His lover and cousin Alden Porterfield has found a refuge for him at an art colony in Connecticut where he can have solitude during the final phase of his Hodgkin’s Disease, a cancer then predictably terminal.
But solitude is the last thing Leonard finds at Ashbourne Manor, the artist’s haven where Agnes Deighton reigns as matriarch over her mentally ill daughter Delia and Delia’s psychiatrist Raymond Ferris, whose real object, far from curing Delia, is to marry her and so to acquire possession of the Manor. What none of them know except Delia is that Leonard and she briefly lived as lovers in New York City the summer before.
Two uninvited guests come to visit: Jed Jones, a black twelve-tone composer with whom the Porterfields share a mescaline trip, and painter Melora Jacobs, once Leonard’s lover, a troubled woman who failed to seize her one chance to claim him as her own.
In spite of everything, Melora and Alden become friends and try to curb Delia’s fascination with the Manor’s original owners, especially her fixation on Dorothea, the daughter who died tragically as a teen-ager. At the same time, Melora starts painting Leonard’s portrait, a task she abandoned when they broke off their affair.
An instant dislike between Jed Jones and Ferris erupts one night in a brawl while Leonard and Melora are safely off on a ‘date’ in the nearby town. From that point on, conflicts of all kinds boil over as Leonard’s health deteriorates.
On the verge of collapse, Leonard presents Delia with a piece of the Manor’s history that he has dug up and that he hopes might disaffect her of any love for the Manor and all it contains.
Leonard’s death follows with hideous speed, but frees Delia neither from her ghosts nor from Ferris. After his death, however, some surprising facts emerge which offer an un
About the Author
A resident of New York City, Kenneth Pitchford is a poet, a playwright — and a novelist with two novels newly published by Xlibris, The Temple Wall (2001) and The Zipper Mask (2004). His short novel The Brothers was published by Lippincott. His play The Wheel of the Murder was produced by Joseph Papp at the New York Public Theater. A one-act play Shellac for the Wheels of Progress was produced in Paris, translated and directed by Natalie Stern. His work has appeared in more than eighty-five magazines, including The New Yorker, Poetry (Chicago), Ms. magazine, The American Poetry Review, The Village Voice, The Nation, The New Republic, Rat, Liberation News Service. His most recent appearance: a sonnet in The Gay & Lesbian Review. His writing has appeared in 19 anthologies, most recently in Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time (1989), The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature (1998) and The Gay Rights Movement (Gale 2003). He has taught writing workshops at the New School, New York University, Columbia University,. He has given talks and readings at the YW/YMHA, the Manhattan Theater Club, Chumley’s, Shakespeare and Company (Vienna), and the universities of Washington, Minnesota, Kentucky (Lexington), California (Berkeley), Massachusetts, Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge. His poems set to music include “Song for Lying in Bed During a Night Rain,” Poems of Love and the Rain, a song cycle by Ned Rorem; “Farewell in a Dry Sum mer,” a song by Lockrem Johnson; “Absence in Winter,” a cantata by Robert Phillips. He graduated from the University of Minnesota summa cum laude, served as an infantry sergeant during the Korean War, and attended Magdalen College as a Fulbright Scholar, where he won prizes for his work in the short story and the sonnet. He worked in CORE during the 1964 Freedom Summer, was an antiwar activist in Yippie, a founder of the profeminist Men’s Movement, a member of the Gay Liberation Movement in its first year, and co-writer of The Effeminist Manifesto as a member of The Flaming Faggots. He currently lives in New York City. Pitchford is a long-time resident of Manhattan. Critical Comments on the Writing of Kenneth Pitchford As a poet, Pitchford is the real thing. —Ned Rorem, The Final Diaries This new version of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus by Kenneth Pitchford is masterful, sensitive, faithful, radiant. It should certainly take its place as the most authentic version in English from now on. —Edward Field I read The Contraband Poems — as I read all of his writing — with intense interest. —Susan Sontag The incantatory eloquence of “Magnificat” is stunning. The Contraband Poems are superb. —Norman Rosten Kenneth Pitchford’s poetry opens new doors of perception. It may have the power to change lives. If that seems an exaggeration, read “Water-Bearer” and see if standards for a human relationship can ever be low again. —Gloria Steinem His is the best possible English translation of Rilke’s sonnets. —Tennessee Williams I feel that Kenneth Pitchford’s novel The Beholding is a truly remarkable book, utterly original, serious, and beautiful. It makes exhilarating reading. Pitchford has created a new kind of male character in the poet Leonard. —Adrienne Rich Color Photos of the Atrocities is an amazing document for a woman to read—and recognize as part of her private chaos, while knowing it is a man writing it, a man deeply human and embracing the female in himself. … In Pitchford’s new collection of poems, we are forced to question our own acquiescence to the often mindless current of the present. —Kathleen Fraser, Book World I liked Kenneth Pitchford’s novel The Beholding so much. I am deeply grateful for the experience of having read it. —Jacqueline Onassis