Date: Sun, 26 Feb 1995 12:29:20 +1100
From: shazam@ozemail.com.au (Tony Begbie)
Subject: Paul Monette: Lament for a Lost Voice




PAUL MONETTE: LAMENT FOR A LOST VOICE



Paul Monette is dead.

"We lost him a week ago" (actually Friday Feb 10) his New York
publishers told me when I called. And a fine obituary in the Times
two days later confirmed the loss.

To those of us who grew to manhood during the Fifties and Sixties,
Paul's record of his own transition, Becoming a Man, shines bright
with truth. The path may have been easier for some of us, but on every
other page, we find an echo of our own experience, something that
jogs a memory. Yes, that's what happened...Yes, yes, yes...
that's just the way it was...

And now he's gone. God, it makes you weep.

Of course, he saw the end coming. His autobiography concludes,
"but the fevers are on me now, the virus mad to ravage my last
fifty T cells.'" If AIDS can be likened (and it has been) to a military
campaign, with the virus attacking, pulling back, re-grouping,
attacking again until the final battle that overwhelms, then perhaps
another poet's voice, another battle (Rupert Brooke, World War I) can
serve now to mourn and salute a great American writer and, indeed,
all our fallen brothers.

These hearts were woven of human joys and cares,
Washed marvellously with sorrow, swift to mirth.
The years had given them kindness. Dawn was theirs,
And sunset, and the colours of the earth.
These had seen movement, and heard music; known
Slumber and waking; loved; gone proudly friended...

All this is ended.


Tony Begbie
shazam@ozemail.com.au