Seasons of a Lost Writer

Every once in a while I think I sniff autumn in the air.

A distinctive coolness laces through the evening, tantalizing those of us who yearn for easier seasons.

The chill carries a perfume all its own, a sense of forest and jasmine blended with memories of long ago.

There’s a look to the coming autumn, too, a trace of gold on the leaves of the liquidambar trees and a flatness to the pale, blue sky that hints of transition.

The breezes whisper, if you’re willing to listen, that something’s coming, something’s near, and I respond with relief as summer fades.

Autumn is my favorite time of the year.

I think of it as a hesitation in time, a moment when we are not swept forward to an uncertain end. Paul Monette felt that way too.

I remember sitting with him in his West Hollywood garden talking about the seasons, and though AIDS was ravaging his body, he also felt that there was a distinctive pause to the rush of days when autumn came.

His garden at the time wore a somber face. The bloomless rhododendrons looked oddly forlorn beneath a lowering sky, and the Chinese elm, shorn of its leaves, was skeletal and grim.

Monette knew the end was near but faced eternity with an equanimity of spirit rare among the terminally ill. Dying is not the best thing we do.

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He was a gay writer I first met through his book “Borrowed Time” and met again the other day through a documentary film of his life called “The Brink of Summer’s End.”

Monette was an eloquent stylist whose prose soared with the lyrical freedom of poetry. The book was about the death of his “beloved friend” of 10 years, Roger Horowitz, encapsulating the pain and anguish of AIDS in an age of loathing.

“I am only saying,” Monette wrote, “that I loved him, and that love became the only untouched shade in the dawning fireball.”

More than a chronicle of death, it was a deeply personal front-line report on the war against a disease that continues to kill our dancers and our poets at a horrifying rate.

He would go on to write other books and win a National Book Award for his autobiography, “Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story,” but nothing affected me more than the explosive writing passion he brought to “Borrowed Time.”

I interviewed him three times over a five-year period, each during a different season of the year. I hadn’t realized that was so until the last interview, two months before his death in 1995, when he announced that he had stopped using medications and would probably die soon.

“I am ending the time I bought,” he said to me as the autumn leaves of his elm tree lay scattered on his garden floor. “I will die in the winter. I must confront that.”

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Both of us knew that I was using Monette as a metaphor for what AIDS was doing to our young. The seasons had come to represent the phases of his decline in my columns as they do in the documentary film.

“Summer’s End” was written and directed by Monte Bramer and was shown on Cinemax television. Monette’s image on the screen begins with a powerful presence and ends with the man barely able to speak.

The film is an attempt to define the inner fire that fueled his life from initial confusion to its final power of direction. In the end, Monette knew what he was about: to assure his generation of AIDS victims “that history would not erase us.”

Autumn is mentioned many times, from the first autumn of his relationship with Roger Horowitz to the pain of an autumn afternoon, and many of the scenes are shot in the very garden where I watched life’s vibrancy fade.

Monette was a mixture of hope and despair.

Although he knew the fear and hatred of homophobia, he was a man without hatred whose mission, as he told an audience at the State University of New York, was “to serve witness to the calamity that has befallen my brothers.”

He added: “Go without hate but not without rage. Heal the world.”

In a way, that is the legacy of Paul Monette. He left us to ponder love in its grander sense, understanding that if his words were to matter, they would have to be delivered with a compassion energized by mission.

On our last meeting, facing his final weeks, he quoted the poet Jorge Borges: “Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.”

Al Martinez can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com