Decoding Kirkwood’s ‘Good Times, Bad Times’

The love that dare not tell its story:
Something else lurks behind it.

The gift of a book may be intended to say any of a number of things, or none at all: about the giver, about the recipient. A book may indicate share interests and like minds, or it may suggest new ideas and unexplored territories. Or it may mean next-to nothing at all: that the giver felt the need to get you something and a book was the only item handy.

I don’t know why I received a copy of James Kirkwood’s Good Times, Bad Times as a gift in 1979, my first semester at Brown. My benefactor was an older student — I’ll call him Ben — to whom I turned for guidance on matters great and small during my first year in Providence. In giving me the book, was Ben trying to communicate a message? He said he thought I’d like it — I remember that — but he didn’t say why he thought so.

The novel is, after all, a fairly lurid spin on the conventions of the prep-school coming-of-age novel. Combine the homoerotic friendship of A Separate Peace with the creepy Mr. Antolini episode in Catcher in the Rye, then spread it out over an entire novel. Toss in an element of Grand Guignol, as the book’s antagonist, the prep-school headmaster, becomes more and more unhinged — picture Edward Herrmann playing Bette Davis as Baby Jane — and what you get is pretty much Good Times, Bad Times.

What’s striking is how much energy Kirkwood’s narrator expends in denying homosexuality. Despite whatever you may think, he says again and again, there was nothing sexual in his relationship with his best friend, a wealthy, dissolute older boy with a bum ticker and an enormous penis. No, seriously. Whatever you may have heard, there was nothing “funny” going on.

In 1968, the subject matter was still taboo — and Kirkwood’s story borrows certain elements from gay pulp fiction of the period, though that stuff was mostly set in reform school, not prep school. (Thanks to my friend Brooks Peters for periodically digging up this stuff and writing about it.) The only way to talk about some things, in those days, was to insist that you weren’t talking about them, or to discuss them primarily in terms of false accusations. (Consider the film adaptation of Toys in the Attic.) And a real-life boy in those days probably would have bent over backwards to deny that he and his best friend were lovers, just as Kirkwood’s narrator does. The Stonewall riots were still a year away.

Kirkwood went on to write the Pulitzer Prize-winning book to A Chorus Line and the Mary Martin–Carol Channing vehicle Legends (which played the Shubert in Boston just before Rags did), as well as successful novels of which I know only the titles: Some Kind of Hero and P.S. Your Cat Is Dead. As his plays demonstrate, he knew something about homosexuality and about camp, and it’s interesting that the narrator of Good Times, Bad Times shares with its author certain traits, including a father who’s a movie actor. But is this story autobiographical? I have no idea.

At 18, the tender age of Kirkwood’s protagonists, I read the book with a fevered mix of excitement and embarrassment. I kept it on a shelf, in plain view (it was a gift from a friend, after all), yet I read it furtively, as if it were pornography. What if somebody were to see it and get the wrong idea about me? Didn’t the picture on the cover look a little like a certain friend of mine? Supposing he saw it and made inferences about my feelings toward him?

The book was terrifying, it was thrilling, it was exhausting. After a few years, I got rid of it: I think, though I’m not sure, that I threw it away. Because it must not be linked to me in any way.

Years later, more comfortable perhaps in my own skin, or at least tortured by different matters, I remembered Good Times, Bad Times. The boy who gave me the book is a man now, but I’ve not seen him since he graduated college, and the only news I’ve had of him has been indirect. If he remembers me at all, does he remember his motive in giving me the book? Would my asking, if I could ask, yield any answer?

Kirkwood’s narrator rhapsodizes over the importance of “finding that one special friend,” and at the time I, too, was looking for a soul-mate. Platonic, of course. It seems unlikely that Ben saw himself as my soul-mate, or that the gift of the novel was in some way a proposal of a deeper friendship.

Had he spotted something in me that he hoped to address, through another man’s prose? Did he seek to reassure or to warn me? After all, Kirkwood’s narrator is the lone survivor of the fraught triangle he describes: it’s not exactly a happy ending. Gay desire is treated as shameful, possibly even more shameful than I believed it to be when I was 18; the headmaster’s recompense is death at the hands of the boy he craves.

Was Ben trying to tell me about one of our teachers who, I have since learned, was closeted and married, like the headmaster in the story? (That teacher always behaved himself impeccably with regard to me, I hasten to add.) What, if anything, was this book supposed to mean?

Good Times, Bad Times is out of print, and as I wander among the shelves of used-book stores, I don’t find a copy; at last I resorted to ordering from an Amazon dealer, whose modest shipping fees were more expensive than the book itself.

And so I read. I found no answers at all, really, and the book, no unjustly neglected classic, seems more quaint than thrilling to my grownup eyes. The relationship between the boys, which struck me as so titillating years ago, now seems either implausible or very sad.

Here, after all, are two bright, attractive boys who share a host of interests: opera, old movies, piano bars, campy remarks and bitchy gossip. Their closeness is physical, to the point of sharing (sexlessly, of course) a bed every night, but their emotional bond is greater. It’s a love story, and so far as the book has any strength at all, it is this: depicting great love between young people. And yet we are asked to believe that theirs is merely friendship.

How sad! Or so it would be, in that alternate universe where all fiction is real truth. If the boys’ story had continued, would they have gone beyond the single kiss they exchange, one New Year’s Eve in New York? Would they have admitted their love? Or would they have continued to deny it?

Ultimately, Good Times, Bad Times is a product of its own times — just as my first reading of the book was — and I’m glad I don’t live there any more.