I only met Christopher Coe a few times, toward the end of his life. He was very sick by then, yet in his face you could still discern the vestiges of an abruptly cancelled youth. From what I gathered, he had been rich but had lost all his money, first through profligacy then through lack of medical insurance. Now he lived in poverty, in an apartment on Christopher Street the shabbiness of which was in its way seigneurial. Home health aides had stolen his last Baccarat tumblers, a detail that might have come out of I Look Divine. For there was no question that Christopher was an aristocrat—which did not stop him from displaying extraordinary modesty, in particular when it came to his own literary talents. I doubt he realized how much he had already achieved by the time he died, how close he had already come to mastery.

Though AIDS is never mentioned in I Look Divine, its specter haunts the novel. Contagion is always a step away here—in a justly famous scene, Nicholas, on a whim, dives into the contaminated waters of the Tiber—just as the body, rather than a site of pleasure, is a site of vulnerability. Near the end of the novel, the narrator recalls traveling in Mexico with his brother and seeing “a horse or a cow that has been hit, burning.”

One sees the animal in flames. On many roads in Mexico, when a horse or a cow is hit, the natives ignite it with gasoline. Sometimes the animal is alive when it is ignited, and one can see, from one’s car, or on foot if one is walking, the animal dying of the impact while it is dying also of the fire. One sees the animal convulse. The smell of the fire and the flesh is also a taste. It gets into the throat, the carcass taste, with the smell of smoke and the taste of blood in the swallow of each breath.

For all its charm, and elegance, I Look Divine has “the carcass taste.” Early in the novel, the narrator describes an antique lacquer table that he has found in his brother’s apartment, made according to an “old Japanese process that, over time, makes the black base show through in random patches under the red layers laid over it.” Lacquer, he goes on to explain, “comes from toxic sap…When raw, if touched, the sap will burn through skin.” Though certain monks discovered a means by which the exposure of the black base could be hastened, Nicholas’s table, his brother is sure, “is the real item, lacquer aged the valued way, before the monks learned to coax the base, by artifice, to come up through the many sheer layers of red.” The same might be said of I Look Divine, a novel of self-evident authenticity, through the radiant surface of which a dark core of suffering burns.

—David Leavitt

Dedication

For Hans Guggenheimer