Show The Salt Lake Tribune THE ARTS Sunday April 11 1993 C9 Train writes about a friend he never really knew Remembering Denny By Calvin Trillin Farrar Straus & Giroux $19 Denny Hansen was bright (Phi Beta Kappa Rhodes scholar at Oxford) popular (a member of one of Yale's prestigious senior societies Scroll and Key) and drop-deahandsome (someone once remarked that he had "a n-dollar smile") He seemed destined for great things His college classmates used to say that he would someday become presid millio- half-serious- So why at age 55 when he should have been basking in the light of a brilliant life did he commit suicide by breathing carbon monoxide gas? Journalist Calvin Trillin who went to college with Hansen (he hoped to be a speech writer in the Hansen Administration) addresses that question in this brief '' l'i---4 4 I ' At "trgi- " ) 1 - ii L I N P--- e 1 4 t- - c 1 '4 1 ' i te'- - 4' o e' 1 -- to I im- 0 - :' 1 OA (4 - el 'tjlbt'4ir 0kt ) Calvin Tri Ilin examines the life of a Yale classmate in his latest book "Remembering Denny' year When he graduated Life maga- zine covered the event it wanted to profile a graduate and some- Hansen had a gloomy time at Oxford He became moody and distant and in a follow-ustory Life portrayed him as a bit of a loser Upon his return to the United States he worked for a New Jersey senator the National Planning Association a TV news sta- body suggested the kid with the million-dolla- r smile Trillin makes much of the Life story he observes that the magazine "had the cultural impact of p all three television networks rolled into one" and adds "It was probably the Life piece that made Denny a symbol of achievement " and promise But of course that did not necessarily mean he was a happy person Trillin was aware at Yale that Denny was going through a Freudian analysis But even that wasn't enough to alter his view of Hansen as a golden child Trillin writes "The views on mental health I had acquired growing up in Kansas City did not leave much room for Freud: I had always explained the stability of people from my hometown by recalling a sign on the city limits that said 'Psychoanalyst don't let the sun set on your - in this aged in midlife because he never attained the greatness everyone expected of him By definition unlimited potential can never be fulfilled But there is more to it than that Trillin one of our most skilled and insightful reporters exposes our tendency to see things as we wish they were instead of as they are He and his Yale buddies considered Denny Hansen a close friend an important part of their lives but only after he died did they really begin to understand him Roger Dennis Hansen entered Yale in 1953 the same year Trillin did His rise to greatness was Ar '''''' 140'i so::naX portant freshman committee g I ' 11 t''411 joined a fraternity and won a major academic prize in his junior book Part of the answer is simple: Despite laudable achievements as a professor of international relations Hansen became discourthought-provokin- A OLV ) For a while Hansen's rise was automatic He served on an - fet- it) dent r ' supposed to be automatic not only because of his intellectual gifts but also because he was a white man in a society dominated by white men "(We) came of age at a time when the privileged position of white males was so deeply embedded in the structure of the society that we didn't even think much about it" Trillin writes (He mentions that his father scrimped for years to put him through Yale but never saved a penny for his daughter's college education — and nobody thought anything of tion and finally the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies Along the way he wrote a book called "The Politics of Mexican Development" But he never seemed satisfied He once told a friend he had unreasonably high standards for himself and that he punished himself for not meeting them Complicating everything he was a homosexual Hansen denied the fact for many years after all he grew up in a time when it was decidedly not all right to be "that way" Certainly he never let on to his friends that he was anything well-respect- a-- town' Writing of genes brains and sexuality It is this fascinating theme and variations on the physical mechanisms behind basic drives and feelings ranging from cultural diversity to courtthat LeVay examines in ship to "The Sexual Brain" Elegantly even wittily written the work merges evolutionary theory endocrinology molecular genetics and cognitive psychology into a synthesis that is brilliant and entertaining With no map to guide him LeVay courageously mucks about in the claustrophobic hypothalamus the no man's land at the base of the brain "a witches brew of slimy pulsating neurons adrift in a broth of chemicals" This mysterious underground occupies only a scant level teaspoonful of brain tissue yet plays a key role in sex growth eating drinking cardiovascular performance temperature stress emotion and many other functions Why do humans not reproduce asexually like bacteria? Sexual reproduction mixes genes and gene mixing is the raw material of evolution But if reproduction is the game what would be the point of "gay genes" as LeVay calls them? He sickle-cemodel for leans toward the homosexuality The defective hemoglobin gene responsible for sickle-ceanemia does not cause the disease in carriers but helps protect them against malaria Only when offspring inherit two copies of the bad gene does the disease result — an unwanted byproduct of a strategy that probably kept the gene in circulation By the same token LeVay writes if there is such a thing as a gay gene and it is recessive it might be preserved in a population because it fers some advantage for heterosexuals that improves their reproductive success That means homosexuals who inherit two copies are actually losers in a genetic roulette game The notion LeVay admits "may not appeal to many gay men or lesbian women — it certainly doesn't appeal to me — but it nevertheless has some plausibility" — Peter Corner Chicago Tribune Author's theories thrust him into center of political fray The Sexual Brain By Simon LeVay: MIT Press $22 50 Freud said But what deter- Biology is destiny g cross-dressin- mines sexual orientation? How do the brains of men and women differ and what effect do those differences have on sexual behavior? mind-alterin- In 1991 Simon LeVay a neuroscientist at the Salk Institute in La Jolla Calif reported a tiny physical difference in the brains of dead heterosexual and homosexual men Cells in the hypothalamus believed to regulate sexual activity were less than half the size in gay men as in heterosexual men (about the same size as in women) raising the possibility that sexual preference like sex or skin color may be something we are born with g ll Genes don't work alone — they always interact with life's experiences — and LeVay never has called his finding conclusive For instance all the gay men died of AIDS a disease that can devastate the brain And he is quick to point out that he doesn't know "whether the structural differences were or whether they arose in adult present at birth life perhaps as a result of the men's sexual toLagn- - ll But LeVay's discovery tantalized science and him in the center of a political storm that has intensified LeVay is gay and began his re- search after emerging from a deep depression when Richard Hersey his lover of 21 years died of AIDS Here he presents further research hinting at brain differences that may influence sexual identity Along with studies of twins the work is opening new doors about the biological roots of con-thru- st self-delusio- apoki-m- tretd 47 pqi f ' lq'i - z 1274 1:1- I: - 1 1 k -- F -- -- (:117:::' 4:' )r 4I''' ' e - 0 1 t sTO 1"dill $131'it - ‘ oi - 4 4 15 1:11) 1 f 1( I i: J -- -- - -- ° ei 71' )4 t : 41 -- - ' - - e t t:itie i'l 1- '''' J: 4L - t 4 :: ' Or': t I I - i- 1 4 - 4' - I ( 1'--- - 4 t ''' ' eltii 1k p- 6111-I i - (- Winter Prey iltoi- i l It '1041 ' ' '' '0 -' : GP Putnam's Sons $2195) What's colder than a northern Wisconsin blizzard? The heart of the serial killer in John Sandford's Winter Prey The fifth installment in the Prey series is fresh and predictable Fresh because Sandford puts hero Lucas Davenport in fairly original deadly situations predictable because Sandford's fans know: 1) There will be plenty of fine plot twists 2) Davenport's final confrontation with the killer will be something extraordinary and 3) They'll have trouble putting the book down This time Davenport a disenchanted former detective from St Paul Minn who has dispatched more than his share of multiple murderers decides to get away from it all in rural snowbound Wisconsin Fat chance Someone has wiped out a family there for no apparent reason and the local authorities soon realize they'll never catch the killer without Davenport's help The problem is the closer Davenport gets to the killer the more likely the people between them are to meet violent ends What could be more Bob Ellis Newspapers PLACE youR AD - though she discloses sa- - - - cred LDS temple rituals and rejects Mormonism as controlling and superstitious she elic- - ibirr -- I i k1 i II !9 ( :p 1! ' 41-ik- i 1'14tR its sympathy i'Mpili ' by portraying herself 4 V - i'y 4 (at least her former self) as naive credulous and pliant in the hands of authority Sharper than a edged sword her wit is wielded at both her own and others' expense This gives her an edge — but it also tends to cut down her image as an ingenue (My own biases pro and con should be stated up front I knew and worked with the author of Secret Ceremonies in 1980 when she was the managing editor of Utah Holiday magazine and I was the editor I am mentioned in the book in this connection and also by name in the acknowledgments — I was among those interviewed — but nothing I told her made it to print) Laake's book begins at Brigham Young University (1970) where she quickly is embroiled in romantic relationships controlled by the revelatory certainty of her male companions flashes back briefly and occassionally to her priveleged but sheltered upbringing in Scottsdale Ariz then proceeds through two desperate marriages: the first to a BYU student "the runt of the litter" of her brother's roommates "remarkable because he was even less profound than 1" and the second to a lonely agnostic engineer "When I remarried" she writes "it was automatically the way I wash my hands after handling the dog I was ridding myself of the stain of divorce as best I could" What follows Laake's second divorce is a gradual awakening from her state of trained helplessness her initial working life in Salt Lake City a mental breakdown in Washington DC and her maturing of independent consciousness in Phoenix Paradoxically Laake's discussion of temple ordinances and their personal impact on young minds is among the book's most successful passages (Many will identify with her struggles but the disclosure will invite condemnation and obliterate further interest for many Mormons: hence double-- Y ME BEST SELLERS Publishers Weekly The listings below were compiled from data bookstores bookstore chains from large-cit- y and local best seller lists across the United States Fiction The Client John Gnsham (Doubleday) 2 The Bridges of Madison County Robert 1 James Waller (Warner) 3 J Is for Judgment Sue Grafton (bolt) 4 American Star Jackie Collins (Simon & Schuster) 5 Einstein's Dreams Alan Lightman (Pantheon) 6 Winter Prey John Sandford (Putnam) 7 The Talismans of Shannara Terry Brooks (Del Rey) 8 Degree of Guilt Richard North Patterson (Knopf 9 Like Water for Chocolate Laura Esquivel (Doubleday) the paradox) Also valuable are her sexual candor and her detailing of the harrowing gantlet of Mormon bishops and therapists — whose counseling usefulness often is hedged up with hypocrisy and shame — that many young people must run in relation to love and sex While Laake's book seriously critiques institutional authoritarianism in the LDS Church she implicates herself by an almost lobotomized submissiveness to the system and to the patriarchal arrogance of the Mormon males in her early life Were her father's and her mother's acquiescence a prism through which she refracted the church and her relationship to male authority? There are hints but she treats the subject gingerly While the title Secret Ceremonies has commercial punch (a one two punch with the cover's headless bride in an eerie wedding gown) and Laake credits it to a friend ("the best headline writer in the world") it may the project It carries emotional baggage from the 1968 film "Secret Ceremony" with Mia Farrow as a rich crazy English girl and Robert Mitchum as a stepfather in which Farrow's anguish is identified with Christ's suffering on the cross The title also may have tempted Laake to juice up her otherwise unsensationalized account of LDS rituals with "voodoo" "sorcery" and "mumboheavy-handedne- child-molestin- g jumbo" While Laake's book is a frontal attack on religious secrecy one confidence she does protect is the identity of most people in her book by changing their names including her own (Laake is the name she gave herself after leaving Utah in the 1980s and she applies it in the book to her parents) She inadvertently changes one name misidentifying polygamist John Singer as Paul The most touching (and probably most honest) passage in the book is Laake's memory of her stay in downtown Washington's Psychiatric Institute There she recognizes a comic caricature of herself in a psychotic roommate and teaches an ungainly male inmate to dance at 2 am in a darkened auditorium Her warmth and her generosity are in evidence here and her humor as well (When she can't bring herself to remove the quotation marks around "liberals" in describing Mormon progressives or when she plumbs individual Mormon lives these qualities sometimes fail her) A key Mormon couple in Secret Ceremonies whom Laake names Jacob and Elizabeth told this reviewer that while she deals with the material she used from their lives the account lacks nuance and context specifically humor "Now instead of Jacob and Elizabeth if she had " called us Bart and Lulu semi-accurate- ly Paul Swenson is a writer in Salt Lake City free-lanc- e 10 Griffin & Sabine Nick Bantock (Chronicle Books) Nonfiction 1 Beating the Street Peter Lynch with John Rothchild (Simon & Schuster) 2 Healing and the Mind Bill Moyers (Doubleday) 3 Women Who Run With the Wolves Clarissa Pinkola Estes (Ballantinel 4 The Way Things Ought to Be Rush Limbaugh (Pocket Books) 5 Harvey Penick's Little Red Book Harvey Penick & Bud Shrake (Simon & Schuster) 6 Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J Edgar Hoover Anthony Summers (Putnam) 7 Preparing for the Twenty-firs- t Century Paul Kennedy (Random House) 8 Bankruptcy 1995 Harry E Figgie (Li(tle Brown) 9 Men Are From Mars Women Are From Venus John Gray (Harpereollins) 10 Care of the Soul Thomas More (Harper 'I Teresa Jordan will read and sign copies of 4 Riding the 1171ite "A Wyoming Family Album" (Pantheon Books) Wednesday April 21 7:30 pm A Wonzan's Place Bookstore mt in Foothill Village - DIC0911 -- II '111 0 7 - - J1 1 - Itri-- to i ‘w:1 - of 1 ti q!t i 1ili ii1(itviiliPlill!c14 - t oldsft - ivi:-- i i tr)!!1' 41141' t 44- r -- -- iii flit viii 11 - i TS ra iiltisl I - ! 4 e - : ''' t - -A It's going to be difficult for mainstream Mormons who succumb to curiosity and read Deborah Laake's confessional about religious and sexual submissivness to shrug it off as invective Laake's writing is literate funny and painful — which is to say personal and human And al- AUTHORSIMMWOONS0 Horse Home tr: i4 4 :- - 1 -- --- 914 ' e:'''' r7---- I- 1 I vAvii11100-14- u 74?:- si torn 7 ' - l OM - : c - La i IIs : 1 K - iI i Artefzutsp: ism Illi q Or! 0 - i ' A 1 11 '5 1 - ':': ' 3' t t 4:::11—rilrelc----- : 4-- I IIIVAMelbit iiVINIMWMIWASP7MINOCSIMP1111131MOVIVI 11 - Rin By Deborah Laake: William Morrow and Co: $20 Denny's friends should have seen beyond the smile For Trillin the first tragedy was learning of Hansen's suicide The second was discovering that he never really knew Denny at all Mike Wilson Knight-Ridde- r Newspapers John Sanford Intimate Diary of Marriage and Beyond PICK YOUR CARD :i i141 --4- '' - A - : ' 1k 0102WenhaterVikOFAMPM01011111MMW ' I 2'w-- ii -- kN't4'0 '' Secret Ceremonies A Mormon Woman's lin makes superbly is that By Paul Swenson t - paliWA1WWh ig- '"—'7:A1"V'bt lk ' 44 -- - By n 'Winter Prey' is exciting yet predictable BOOK 1011101001110NoWAREA other than a ladies' man Trillin writes "Until the day Denny died it had never occurred to me that he might be gay For me Denny was in a compartment in my mind that had to do with Yale in the '50s and there simply weren't any gay people in the compartment" Trillin's only mistake in the book is that he makes too little of Ilansen's homosexuality A classmate tells the author "(Denny's) years at Yale were unambiguously happy times" But how could that have been true? Hansen apparently was always anxious about his sexual identity As Trillin reports he once told a friend he began therapy in part because "if he didn't get some help he might end up a homosexual" It is hard to understate such a man's pain In his 1992 memoir Becoming a Man Paul Monette (coincidentally a Yalie class of '63) wrote of growing up gay "I've come to learn that all our stories add up to the same imprisonment The of uniqueness The festering pre tense that we are the same as they are The gutting of all our passions till we are a bunch of eu" nuchs is There ample evidence that Hansen also gutted his passions deluded himself became a eunuch — did all the things an intolerant society required him to do Trillin should have made more of all this But the ultimate point one Tril- Knight-Ridde- r I UTAH UNDER COVER Ibt Sea tag P'eme 'W DESERET NEWS r 'i D Books by about and for women - (tVoman's H 143 South Main Utah Salt Lake City Foothill Village 0 Pkice 1 Cottonwood Mall Park City Plaza 583-643- 1 278-985- 5 649-272- 2 BOOKSTORE )4 |