Clifton Snider: Clifton Snider is the author of eight highly-acclaimed books of poetry, including The Alchemy of Opposites (Chiron Review Press, 2000). His novel about a bisexual rock star, Loud Whisper, was published by Xlibris in 2000, and his coming out/coming of age novel, Bare Roots, was published by Xlibris in 2001. His most recent novel is Wrestling with Angels: A Tale of Two Brothers, also from Xlibris (2001). A specialist in Jungian literary criticism, Snider teaches writing and literature at California State University, Long Beach.
Letters to Montgomery Clift is a powerful first novel by Noël Alumit, a native Filipino and performance artist raised in Southern California. Narrated by Bong Bong Luwad, the novel is structured elegantly by his letters to Clift, whom he discovers in childhood by means of, what else, a movie. The letters begin almost all the many chapters and a final letter serves as an epilogue. Variously addressed as Mr. Montgomery Clift, Montgomery, but usually Monty, Clift serves as a father-figure, a supraordinate being, a god, a guide, a friend, and eventually a lover for the boy whose father is arrested by Marcos's thugs in the Philippines of the seventies when Bong is only eight.
His father, a writer accused of being a subversive, is imprisoned and hideously tortured. Bong's mother puts him on an airplane flying to California, where her sister, Auntie Yuna, is supposed to take care of him till his mother fetches him. She never does. Auntie Yuna turns out to be an abusive drunk who writes letters to “saints or dead relatives.” Soon she becomes yet another in a long line of people who abandon the boy.
Like Marilyn Monroe, he is sent to one foster home after another. Finally he finds himself in the home of a well-to-do Filipino family, the Arangans, whose one child, Amada, becomes his best friend. Mrs. Arangan gives Bong an American name, Bob. She and her husband, however, gravely disappoint him when he discovers they have been laundering money for the Marcoses. He blames them for the imprisonment of his father and the disappearance of his mother.
If Bob/Bong's gayness is taken for granted in the novel, so is his psychosis, which takes the form of not only a relationship with a dead movie icon but also self-mutilation and the blotching of page 168 in every book he can get his hands on. These are methods of displacing his interior pain, of managing the incalculable loss of his father and mother, all the more horrible because he doesn't know till the end of the novel when he's in his mid-twenties what happened to his mother. (The fate of his father he has already learned, but this is not the place to reveal that.)
The ending is perhaps a bit too tidy, but not unbelievable. The prose is remarkably original and vivid, and the story is one that needs to be told. My guess is that most of today's young people, gay or straight, do not even know who the Marcoses were and have no idea where the Republic of the Philippines is; such is the state of modern education—or ignorance. Letters to Montgomery Clift stands as an artistic monument to the life of one brave Filipino who happens to be gay, his family (or perhaps I should say families), his best friend, and his lover.
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