Customer Reviews

A Crystal Diary

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This book received great reviews in the lesbian press, but it was seriously under-promoted and never got the reader attention that it so justly deserved. After reading the manuscript, I was invited by the publisher to write a blurb for the book. Unfortunately, the blurb was never used, but I want to reiterate it here: A CRYSTAL DIARY is poignant and true and written from the gut. It's about working class lesbian hurt, anger, and alienation--and about lesbian strength, the will to survive, and noble courage. I've long admired Frankie Hucklenbroich's work, and in this novel it comes to brilliant and fabulous fruitiion.

I've read many, many lesbian books. From pulps to advanced theory, from `Nightwood' to `The Bar Stories: a novel, after all'. I'd never have bothered with this one (who wants to read the story of a lowlife street butch in the 50's to the 70's?), except that some of my friends had read it, and were passionately debating it. So I borrowed it to see what all the fuss was, and I read it. And I had to have my own copy! I'm a lesbian feminist, and a great deal of the book rankles my feminism, until I remind myself that the only politics Nicky and her ilk knew was the politics of survival. Nicky is complex and well-drawn. She is a sharp observer of those around her. She's not an admirable character in many ways, but she's understandable, oddly likeable, and has a sharp sense of humor that's directed as much at herself as at anyone or anything else (there are some truly hilarious moments in the book), and she is passionately honest about the ways her particular lesbian subculture worked. She's gallant, kind, cunning, cruel, and not afraid to show us that under all her posturing, what she wants most and fears most is love. She's very unforgettable, and I can't recall a lesbian book that's stirred me more to anger, distaste, laughter, sadness, and a deeper understanding of what the women who came before us were, and why. I understand that this is an autobiographical first novel. If so, my hat's off to Frankie Hucklenbroich for a stunning job, and i will be watching with interest for her future work

This novel, Hucklenbroich's first, is another in a long line of well written works chosen to see the light of print by Firebrand Books. Not that a publisher makes a work worth reading, but this publisher has a history of selecting authors who have talent. A CRYSTAL DIARY is part of that tradition. The fact that Hucklenbroich's other works, poetry and short fiction, have been included in anthologies edited by Lillian Faderman and by Joan Nestle provides those in need of endorsements with substantial ones. While the subject matter is not always what some lesbians might find politically correct, the novel is very well written and gives an excellent sense of place and time. These characters are not so much politically incorrect as they are simply products of their time and culture, and the author gives us an excellent sense of who and why each is as she is. Coming out in St. Louis, or almost anywhere else in the 1950's, and coming of age in a California caught in the cyclones of drug cultures and the open sexuality of the 60's and 70's, informs the self definitions of Hucklenbroich's baby butches and the women they fall in love and lust with. These are real people whom the author draws with believable accuracy and style. Regardless of your political views or definitions of what and who is attractive, you'll find this book engaging simply because it is thoughtfully written and heartfelt. If you have access to America Online, watch for an announcement about a live online interview with Hucklenbroich in late July, 1997. Go to keyword: LAMBDA RISING. If you miss the interview, a text of it will be archived at that keyword for later download.

The beginning of this book was more than promising: the account of a butch lesbian's evolution from the embryonic sense of difference of a born sexual dissident to the archetypal stone butch, Frankie Hucklenbroich's autobiographical opus 'A Crystal Diary' seemed to be a novel about the long and dangerous journey from an early childhood immersed up to the eyeballs in the fierce heterosexism of a blue collar world that was a mid western city in the 'forties, into -the euphoria of self-discovery, and an increasingly confident claiming of self identity.

The beginning was sweet. I was drawn into the story of tall slender Jo Koerner, the author's young across the street neighbour, who returns home after her demobilisation from WWII as one of those fascinating, exotic, mythical creatures - a full fledged dyke. I was hooked by the tense suspense of Jo's stubborn refusal to relinquish her identity: As in defiance of convention she drives her car, wears pants, crops her hair (there is a dramatic telling of this particular incident), and gets a job in a nearby factory. Hucklenbroich made me cringe to read about the narrow-minded neighbours of Jo's world, who trapped in their own bitter lives don't know what to make of her, and how the vicious gossip and prejudice leads inevitably to bullying social rejection.
Of course this made me root for Jo, to succeed - to create a happy life for herself. The anecdote about Joe Koerner is the story I wished this could have been: That story would have I think been infinitely more engaging - and rewarding than 'A Crystal Diary'.

Nonetheless, we readers were wrenched from this promising beginning, and compelled to take an abrupt change of direction as the story bumped along. Each new chapter seemed full of jolting herky-jerky turns in the road. The narrative seemed not so much elliptical ripped through with huge gaps, so much as to make the segments seem like non sequiturs.
But perhaps we should be grateful for those gaps - and for the unpleasantness we might probably have been spared.

What we may have hoped to see from this bit of time travel beginning in the 'forties is perhaps a fond and nostalgic look at our hidden lesbian history and our antecedents while safely situated in our relatively safe and un-repressed present. I was rather expecting a look from the through the wrong end of the telescope into the past to the bad old days of bar raids and paddy wagons and corrupt police bullies, and there was some of that, but this was not intended to be a comfortable read.

Instead we are made to follow Hucklenbroich's veritable 'rake's progress' from a not very innocent child to feral juvenile living on the margins of society: From hawker of magazines to liar cheat and thief, vagabond, mugger, crook,depraved exploiter and abuser of women, methamphetamine addict, pimp, business owner, proprietor of a whorehouse and finally writer.

In the historical dramas set in the Roman Empire, we see the robed patricians resplendent in their spotless snow-white togas. That's the way we like to imagine ancient Roman aristocrats. But I can't help wondering if those togas reeked, since the historical truth is that the raw material for the Roman laundromat was found in the city's public urinals.
In Hucklenbroich's telling of our lesbian past, I felt as if my nose was being buried in one of those togas.

I came to this book by a circuitous route - first as an excerpt in Joan Nestle's anthology 'The Persistent Desire', and then Lillian Faderman's 'Naked In The Promised Land'. In Faderman's book she writes of her crossing of paths with Hucklenbroich, and their tragi-comic affair. In 'A Crystal Diary' the favour is returned, and Lillian is 'Jill'. Faderman and Hucklenbroich tell each other's stories. To hear Faderman tell it, 'Nicky' was a likable kid, who fell passionately in love with her - but it was a passion she was unable to return. In Faderman's book Nicky is sketched sympathetically as a lovable outcast, equal parts rube and dork, but with a talent for writing.

I knew this was not going to come close to the gold standard of butch memoirs - Leslie Fienman's achingly written 'Stone Butch Blues' . I expected 'A Crystal Diary' to be gritty: Hucklenbroich's excerpt from 'A Crystal Diary' in Joan Nestle's anthology 'The Persistent Desire: a butch femme reader' prepared me for a gritty read. But I wasn't prepared for this novel's sheer sordidness and squalor - the sleaze, the repugnance of it.

The character who emerges from this tale is an amoral opportunistic monster: A mugger and a thief, meth-addict, parasite, pimp and a sociopath - a predator and a sadist. In the course of reading 'A Crystal Diary' I forgot the the slightly silly picture of the young butch with the elevated eyebrows, delicately bulging hip and breasts hidden by a bent arm, and came to imagine instead a swaggering female thug, an image which was not dispelled by the 'wine turned to vinegar' photograph of the bloated old personage on the back cover.

I was reminded of the shocking and repulsive scene in an old movie - James Cagney with his mean little too-closely-set together-eyes snarling at his long-suffering wife and reaching across the breakfast table to gob smack her... but Cagney has nothing on the remorseless, parasitical, unapologetic exploitation of women cold-bloodedly recounted in 'A Crystal Diary'. I am referring to the unforgettable stomach-turning incident where Nicky, after first publicly humiliating her, throws the woman she is prostituting out into a rain drenched street with the injunction that she not come home until after she had earned over a hundred dollars: This of course is after she had ground out a lighted cigarette on the woman's shoulder. This is woman on woman predation at its most callous. If that was not sufficiently appalling, Hucklenbroich gloats that the woman returned like a whipped cur to hand over her earnings.

I will not deny that 'A Crystal Diary' both powerfully and compellingly written - So one star for that, and another for it's sheen of honesty, which exerted on me the kind of hypnotic revolted fascination that one feels when catching a glimpse of unspeakable aberrations, madness, roadkill, or exhumed bodies.
But this writer makes of us her readers the voyeurs of her sadistic and sociopathic compulsions. We eat the meal that is set before us, but the aftertaste is putrid. The monumental self-absorption of this crook - this pimp - is not redeemed by the brutal honesty of her writing style. Here style and content are incommensurate. The ugliness in this litany of one distasteful incident after another seeps indelibly into our consciousness like a nightmare that won't go away. I would rather have read a novel about cannibalism or vampirism than this heartless tribute to a life of dissolution.

Faderman uses words like 'poignant' and phrases like 'lesbian strength' and 'noble courage' to describe ' A Crystal Diary', but in my view 'despicable and 'contemptible' would have served us better. Faderman blames the publishers of this book for not doing a better job of promoting it, and for not including what must have been the flattering blurb she was asked to write, and wrote. However I can see the dilemma faced by the publishers had they tried to aggressively pitch this book to p.c lesbians. It would have been like trying to sell rotten meat to devout vegetarians.

I am not an uncritical respector of p.c. ( p.c lesbians would blench to read this book ), and I have no difficulties with squeamish themes. Much maligned Humbert Humbert, the professorial pedophile in Vladimir Nabokov's 'Lolita' is in my estimation quite a sympathetic character: But Humbert is a paragon of propriety and sexual epicureanism compared to this vulgar bit of autobiographical depravity, which also contains some disgusting graphic sex - sex minus humanity. I found particularly galling the glib and callous (no doubt meant to be humourous and satirical) pseudo-commandments of the butch's code.

We cheer when the ruthless seducer Don Giovanni in Mozart's opera gets his final comeuppance. The audience feels a certain satisfaction when the earth splits open, and the Don is helplessly dragged into the fiery inferno of hell. This is not vindictiveness, but the wish for a moral symmetry. We feel a little uneasy when evil deeds go punished, or the murderer gets away with his crime. Such things are not to be passed over with a wink and a nod. But the Don ( who never tortured and prostituted the women he seduced) is a choirboy in comparison to this monster. Even other well-known sexual miscreants like Cassanova and the picaresque Encolpius of the 'Satyricon' appear in comparison to be likable philanderers and harmless rogues whose seductions are decidedly non toxic.

So in my view it would have taken an act of retribution - a punitive fiat, or at the very least an expression of remorse for this story to have been redeemed. Suddenly I find in myself feeling a new and unexpected empathy for Dante (I have read him in the original Italian and still think he is overrated) whose over-the-top delight in and unsparing descriptions of a thousand hellish scenes, was little more than a crude revenge fantasy finished off with a careful sugar coating of literary virtuosity.

But there is no sugar to be found here.

... In Faderman's book, Frankie Hucklenbroich is Nicky, a baby butch with a puppydog crush on Faderman, a teenager who is already a pinup girl for men's magazines. Faderman is a lesbian, but leaves Nicky to marry a gay man, which temporarily pleases parents all around. Nicky, in despair, disappears for years. A Crystal Diary fills in what happens in that time (in a lightly fictionalized way -- here Lil is Jil) as Nicky, never forgetting her first true love, tries to hide the pain of the loss of both that love and her family's love behind a facade of "butchinality" and pimphood. Nicky stays on the move, hustling her way from city to city, but can't leave her unhappiness behind. When she finally asks for help, it is Faderman -- now a professor who stripped her way through college and graduate school -- who comes to her rescue. Not only is the life story amazing -- the writing in A Crystal Diary is both economical and vivid; it takes the author very few words to paint an incredible picture of a world where attitude is everything and femmes are the prize.