21
The Gay Novel in the United States 1900–1950
Is the novel fundamentally inimical to queer sexuality? Charles Warren Stoddard was the first American novelist to wonder if this might be the case. Could the fit be so tight between, on the one hand, a literary genre (and its formal conventions) and, on the other hand, the normative organization of sexuality in a given society, so tight that the genre was itself impossible to claim for dissident sexual representation? Stoddard’s 1903 novel For the Pleasure of His Company: A Tale of the Misty City, Thrice Told, confronts this question both implicitly (in its own formal experimentation) and explicitly (in a conversation two characters have about the writing of novels). In the present essay I will return repeatedly to the stakes of the discussion Stoddard stages between his two aspiring novelists (his protagonist, Paul Clitheroe, and Paul’s friend Miss Juno, aka Jack), who articulate contending visions of what a novel must be. Later American novelists who, in one way or another, tried to fit the novel out for queer purposes also confronted the vexing question of the genre’s queer potentiality, and arrived at a variety of general answers and formal experiments.
From one general perspective, the novel might seem well suited to queer sexuality. The novel has a long history of discreditation as a low genre, both on the basis of its ostensible formal appeal to dangerous readerly absorption and emotional vagrancy and because of its frequent attention to sexual intrigue, disgrace, deviancy, and so forth. Why, then, shouldn’t the novel be a perfectly apt genre for exploring the newly organized field of erotic deviancy described by the rubric of the “homosexual” around the turn of the century? If the novel could do well by countless adulterers, courtesans, seducers and other sexual reprobates, why wouldn’t it be perfectly capable of accommodating stories of pansies, dykes, and the like? From another perspective, however, the novel’s long affiliation with conventions of romance – and especially its deep investment in narratives of courtship, marriage, and reproduction – might tend to render it recalcitrant when faced with erotic scripts that ran counter to the novel’s historically heteronormative bias. The novel had been very good at representing threats to marriage, sexual fidelity, and social reproduction, but it had done so (one could argue) in an essentially disciplinary way. The norms were articulated and reinforced precisely by virtue of the novel’s dramatization of what threatened them. Could the novel really do anything with queer sexuality other than add it to the list of disgraceful threats to heterosexual propriety? Could the novel actually defamiliarize received categories of sexual experience, and thus serve the interest of sexual redescription and the remaking of experience? The question of the queer novel, the question of its very possibility, had to be confronted by writers who, whether themselves queer (under some description) or not, meant to bring novelistic art to bear upon historically emergent queer sexual experience.
This is the quandary faced by Charles Warren Stoddard. He thought about and struggled with his only novel over many decades, according to his biographer Roger Austen. As early as 1874 he wrote to a friend that he had an idea for a “San Francisco Novel” (Austen 1995: 71), but it was not until the summer of 1883 that he began writing it (p. 100); in the summer of 1888 he was getting William Dean Howells’s advice on it, although he did not share the manuscript with Howells until 1896 (p. 116). Austen reports that Stoddard wrote most of it during the summer of 1892 in Hawaii. In 1895 he apparently showed it to Rudyard Kipling, who offered constructive criticism (p. 138). Because it is largely autobiographical, and incorporated material from Stoddard’s own life during the decades of its composition, it “thoroughly jumbled up people and events from the late 1860s, 1870s, and early 1880s,” that is, from all the periods during which it was underway in one fashion or another. This protracted process of composition resulted in various literary effects that might be criticized as confusing but that are also an index, so to speak, to the history of homosexuality across those crucial decades. To put it most starkly, Stoddard started writing For the Pleasure of His Company in the nineteenth-century heyday of “romantic friendship” and published it in a new and different century, after the Wilde trial, after the rise of sexology and the other professional discourses that defined and framed queer sexuality. Its constitutive anachronism is its most remarkable quality. And the style of the novel’s prose is genteel, oblique, and more than a bit precious; especially in its highly wrought opening pages, it seems dramatically anachronistic for a novel published in 1903. “She was a smallish moon, looking very chaste and chilly and she peered vaguely through folds of scurrying fog” sounds rather quaint and fussy for a turn-of-the-century novel’s first line.
For the Pleasure of His Company has had the reputation, for the few critics who have scrutinized it, and even for Roger Austen, Stoddard’s biographical advocate, of being “strange,” an “antinovel,” and “a failure, mainly because of its obliquity” (Austen 1995: 146). Before any such aesthetic evaluations are made, however, the powerful generic self-consciousness of Stoddard’s text deserves to be recognized. Its most striking formal feature is advertised by its second subtitle: it is “thrice told.” The book is in three parts, each of which features Paul Clitheroe as protagonist, and describes events in his life over the same period of time; but the plots run on entirely separate, if parallel trajectories. Paul has a fragmented social life, spending time alternately with three different social groups, none of which has any real connection with the others. In Book First, we learn of Paul and his friends and acquaintances among the aspiring young writers and editors of the San Francisco area, chiefly a group of self-styled bohemians who congregate at an inn across the bay in Oakland; in Book Second, we meet Paul in the company of some theatre people who introduce him to an enchanting young woman named Miss Juno, with whom Paul forms a sudden and intense friendship and with whom he later discusses the art of the novel; in Book Third we encounter Paul in the company of yet another discrete group of characters, comprising an eccentric older woman called Little Mama and the various artists and attractive young men whom she collects around herself.
At the same time that the action of the novel is nearly completely divided among these noncontiguous social groups (with Paul the weak link between them), the time of the novel is disjointed. Ostensibly Paul is circulating among these different social groups, shuttling between them, and the time frame of the novel is consistent with this, but of course we read the parts in sequence and do not know, at first, that the action in the three parts overlaps. In addition, as we have seen, Stoddard wrote the novel by fits and starts over the course of several decades, freely incorporating his experiences as he went along, and thus made it impossible to assign the time of the diegesis very confidently to any specific historical moment. Is it all taking place in the 1870s, or 1880s, or 1890s? We cannot say – and this matters, for one reason, because those are exactly the decades when homosexuality was being invented (Foucault 1986). None of the characters in For the Pleasure of His Company seems yet to have heard of this invention, however; there are plenty of same-sex (and gender-bending) erotic attachments being formed and re-formed, but no labels seem to attach to those relationships or to their participants in the world of Stoddard’s novel. Soon enough, by contrast, in Edward Prime-Stevenson’s Imre: A Memorandum (1906), the characters will all have read Krafft-Ebing and other professional analysts of homosexuality, and will knowingly inhabit the scientific descriptions and social categories that had been proliferating over the decades of Stoddard’s writing; but in Stoddard’s novel, the characters have not yet heard of homosexuality as a diagnosis, self-description, or identity. Was Stoddard entering an implicit protest against the onset of sexual categorization, sensing that there might be something pernicious about this new technology of the self? Or was he merely registering – both in the formal manipulation of narrative time in his novel, and in his promiscuous borrowing of experience from three decades of sexual history – the actual unevenness of that history, its complicated interplay of emergent, dominant, and residual sexual formations? (The categories of residual, dominant, and emergent cultural formations are borrowed from Raymond Williams, 1977.) On the one hand, the novel reads as if it belonged to the era of Bayard Taylor’s Joseph and His Friend (1870), an earlier quasi- or proto-homosexual novel, or the period of the countless tales of “romantic friendship” that Axel Nissen (2003) has collected and discussed. And yet Stoddard’s novel seems preternaturally modern, too, in its vision of a postheterosexual dispensation, a time when rigid sexual identities will have begun to lose their grip on us.
Paul Clitheroe seems, in fact, to lack a sexual identity, or a very strong identity of any kind. He is an aspiring and modestly successful poet, reviewer, and local literary celebrity; he is personally attractive and socially agreeable, and manages to survive his penury by dint of frequent dinner invitations. But even his friends find him curiously elusive and somewhat frustrating. He appears to find physical intimacy only with other men, but enjoys the social company of women and forms his most intense bond with Miss Juno in Book Second, a bond that involves their mutual disregard of gender norms:
If Paul and Miss Juno had been formed for one another and were now, at the right moment and under the most favorable auspices, brought together for the first time, they could not have mated more naturally. If Miss Juno had been a young man, instead of a very charming woman, she would of course have been Paul’s chum. If Paul had been a young woman – some of his friends thought he had narrowly escaped it and did not hesitate to say so – he would instinctively have become her confidante.
(Stoddard 1903/1987: 88)
Miss Juno is the only daughter of her mother’s loveless first marriage, a regrettable marriage of convenience; she now lives in a bucolic valley outside San Francisco with her mother and her mother’s lover, Eugene, a painter. They form a happy family amid their unconventional domestic arrangements, and Paul envies their freedom, mutual affection, and casual disregard for social propriety. When Paul and Miss Juno share confidences about their romantic lives, he learns that she had a brush with trite romantic conventionality once; she was engaged to a young army officer, with whom she exchanged many florid letters while he was stationed far away: “it was rather like a seaside novelette, our love affair,” she now admits (p. 94). But her mother and Eugene put an end to the engagement, and, despite her misery at the time of the breakup, Miss Juno now realizes it was for the best. Paul reciprocates her tender confidence with one of his own:
There was a time when I felt that marriage was the inevitable fate of all respectable people. Some one wanted me to marry a certain some one else. I didn’t seem to care much about it; but my friend was one of those natural-born match-makers; she talked the young lady up to me in such a shape that I almost fancied myself in love and actually began to feel that I’d be doing her an injustice if I permitted her to go on loving and longing for the rest of her days.
(Stoddard 1903/1987: 94)
This conversation about their futile, abortive heteronormative pasts allows them to dispose of the looming question of marriage between the two of them; henceforth they will be “chums” only (p. 99), and like Miss Juno’s best friend at boarding school, Paul will now be allowed to call her by her fond masculine nickname, “Jack.” They henceforth spend as much time together as they can, enjoying their shared unconventionality and conversational and behavioral freedom.
Jack intuits that Paul is writing a novel; he in turn asks whether she has ever written a story. She hasn’t, and initially dismisses the notion; but he encourages her to try it, because she is a naturally gifted story-teller, and he is sure she can just put down with her pen the stories she tells so fluently and artlessly in ordinary conversation. Jack resists Paul’s advice, arguing that a writer must inevitably work within established narrative conventions; ordinary conversation would seem commonplace and unformed, and would not command attention if merely transcribed. Paul grows impatient with her insistence, and thus begins the deterioration of their friendship over a matter of literary technique. Here Stoddard draws attention to his own novelistic practice, by having Jack call attention to their present colloquy – “Our conversation is growing a little thin, Paul, don’t you think so? We couldn’t put all this into a book” (p. 103) – whereas Paul feels their conversation could very well take its place in a novel (and Stoddard, of course, as we can’t help noticing, has done exactly that right here in his novel).
Finally Paul and Jack agree that each of them shall write a novel, but they will do so on very different plans. “If we are to write a novel apiece,” Jack avers, “we shall be obliged to put love into it; love with a very large L” (p. 104). Paul disagrees vehemently – “I’m dead sure we wouldn’t; and to prove it some day I’ll write a story without its pair of lovers; everybody shall be more or less spoony – but nobody shall be really in love” (p. 104). To Jack, it seems obvious that such a story wouldn’t pass muster: “It wouldn’t be a story, Paul,” she states categorically (p. 104). For her part, she decisively proclaims, “I shall have love in my story” (p. 105). But Paul is determined to resist the generic requirement that there be “love,” and a “pair of lovers,” in his novel. When he describes his idea for a different kind of novel, he is basically describing the unusual novel of Stoddard’s that we are here, in fact, reading:
It would be a history, or a fragment of a history, a glimpse of life at any rate, and that is as much as we ever get of the lives of those around us. Why can’t I tell you the story of one fellow – of myself for example; how one day I met this person, and the next day I met that person, and next week some one else comes on to the stage, and struts his little hour and departs. (1903/1987: 104)
Growing rather heated in the face of what he eventually implies is Jack’s literary obtuseness, he concedes rather tartly that she “may have all the love you like, and appeal to the same old novel reader who has been reading the same sort of love-story for the last hundred years” (p. 105). On the contrary, he says, “My novel shall be full of love, but you won’t know that it is love – I mean the every-day love of the every-day people. In my book everybody is going to love everybody else – or almost everybody else … ” (p. 106). It seems wrong, given this dramatic discussion of the novel and its generic requirements, and its critical recognition of the erotic norms that are embedded in novelistic form, to judge For the Pleasure of His Company to be a “failed” novel; perhaps it is fair to call it an “antinovel,” given its strident contestation of novelistic conventions. But it is most important to notice that Stoddard, like Paul, sought a way to turn his literary performance into an instrument of resistance to what (to be anachronistic myself) has been called compulsory heterosexuality (Rich 1994). The “same old novel-reader” has been reading “the same old love-story” for a long time; Stoddard, like Paul, aimed to produce a different sort of love story, one not centered on the usual pair of gender-opposite lovers; one bearing little or no resemblance to the trite “seaside novelette” whose script Miss Juno had enacted in her youth. Stoddard’s novel aimed to surprise and disorient the “same old reader” and perhaps, in turn, provide that reader with a different erotic script, or with a different sort of imaginative space in which erotic possibilities were relatively open-ended and undetermined rather than one option – heterosexual marriage – being “the inevitable fate of all respectable people.”
Imre: A Memorandum by Edward Prime-Stevenson (1906) is a story that emphatically has “love with a very large L in it” (as Miss Juno would say approvingly), and even strikingly resembles the “seaside novelette” on which her first quashed romance with the young soldier was patterned. Miss Juno fell in love with a handsome young military officer; the narrator of Imre, an expatriate American named Oswald, falls for a young Hungarian lieutenant, Imre von. N., whom he chances to meet at a café-garden alongside the Danube River in Budapest on a pleasant summer afternoon. Oswald and Imre quickly establish an intimate friendship and become virtually inseparable; more slowly, they acknowledge their homosexuality to themselves and to each other; soon enough they are convinced of their perfect mutual love and their ideal lifelong compatibility. While this story might gratify Miss Juno, fulfilling her essential criterion for a successful novel, it would certainly disappoint Paul Clitheroe. His favored narrative model, as we have seen, would involve a protagonist who “met one person and then another,” and so forth – a narrative of social and perhaps sexual multiplicity experimentation, and waywardness, not coupledom and fidelity. And Charles Warren Stoddard, whose novel adhered to the Clitheroe model of aimless narrative and emotional promiscuity, might be expected to have disdained Imre as resorting too readily to tired narrative conventions – “the same old story.” But contrary to expectation, his biographer reports that Stoddard copied a line from Imre into his journal, which would seem to imply a positive interest in his successor’s novel, if not approval. “The silences of intimacy stand for the most perfect mutuality,” Stoddard transcribed (Austen 1995: 167).1 Perhaps Stoddard recognized that, for the sake of granting dignity to homosexual love, it was also important to bestow upon it all of the usual romantic conventions, to stake a queer claim to the culturally ingrained patterns of romantic narrative. And perhaps we can recognize that, in 1906, for homosexually inclined readers whose subjectivity had been formed (however uncomfortably) within the regime of those same conventions, a queer love story that in every other respect conformed to mainstream expectations would provide a powerful consolation to other isolated gay men, and perhaps an avenue to understanding for straight readers. Prime-Stevenson implied as much when he had his narrator, Oswald, write in his Prefatory remarks that he hoped it would comfort “any other human heart” or “solitary soul” that was in pain similar to his own (1906/2003: 32).
If the basic plot of Imre is stunningly conventional (true love leads to permanent happy coupledom), and its central narrative structure is fundamentally normative, Prime-Stevenson nevertheless surrounds his standard romance plot with intriguing formal delinquencies of various kinds. It may be that while this novel aspires to quasi-normality within the diegesis, its erratic or rebellious energies are embodied at the level of form. And on this level it is, indeed, somewhat eccentric. We might even say that it disclaims the status of novel altogether. Ostensibly the narrative originates in a partial autobiography written by Oswald and sent privately to his friend “Mayne” (Prime-Stevenson himself had published popular boys’ books under the pseudonym “Xavier Mayne,” so the author is here coyly outing himself). Oswald authorizes Mayne to do with the manuscript as he pleases, and even to publish it after he applies his “editorial hand” to its pages (p. 32). Mayne, we are to infer, has now presumably done the necessary editing, having agreed with Oswald that this narrative is “something for other men than for you and me only” (p. 32), and has consequently published it in a limited fashion. Imre was first issued in a private printing of only 500 copies from an English language press in Naples, and it no doubt found its discreet way to at least some of those imagined “other men” – among them, as we have seen, Charles Warren Stoddard – and helped them to feel “a little less alone” (p. 32) as Oswald and his surrogate Mayne intended. But if it is important to note that this “memorandum” (as Imre’s subtitle calls it – another marked departure from novelistic convention, calling attention to its intellectual purpose) is expected to circulate among an extended, albeit confined, group of readers whose “hearts” will be linked by it, the diegesis itself projects no homosexual social world beyond the twosome of Oswald and Imre. In this way it is very different from Stoddard’s novel, which imagined a postheteronormative world and various complex and oddly sorted networks of friends; Oswald and Imre imagine only their own sanctuary within an unendingly hostile world. They find each other, and find invaluable consolation in their secret love; but they do not expect their private romance to have any public consequences. Rather than hide singly, they will now hide their love together; and their relations with other gay men will consist exclusively of the virtual ones mediated by the discreet circulation of their story in a limited private edition.
But this distinction between the two novels can be framed in another way, too: in For the Pleasure of His Company we are told that Paul Clitheroe’s private letters, if we could read them, would have been scandalous (pp. 125–6); we never have the opportunity to read them, however, but are left only with the public narrative of the omniscient unnamed narrator relating Paul’s outward life. Presumably Paul’s private letters are more emotionally and sexually explicit; Stoddard thus gestures toward a form of writing that is less veiled than his own novel. With Imre on the other hand, in a sense we are reading Oswald’s private letter to his friend Mayne, in which he has disclosed the truth of his powerful but outlawed same-sex desires. While it is true that this private communication is made public in a discreet fashion (small private printing abroad), the formal frame of Imre breaches the privacy and violates the taboo on public expression that Oswald and Imre preserve vigilantly within the diegesis.
Just as Imre is formally unlike For the Pleasure of His Company, its conceptualization and representation of same-sex sexuality is utterly different. Oswald’s narration is replete with the terminology of late nineteenth-century sexological science: homosexual, homosexualism, Urning, Uranian, uranistic, similisexual, queer, secondary sex, intersex, the sex within a sex, man-loving man, and so forth. The constant churning of this “juggling terminology,” as Oswald impatiently terms it (p. 68), testifies to the “incitement to discourse” that sexuality famously became in this era, according to Foucault (Foucault 1986: 17 ff.). Oswald has an extensive familiarity with such vocabularies because, he reports, he read a book: “a serious work, on abnormalisms in mankind: a book partly psychologic, partly medico-psychiatric, of the newest ‘school’ ” (1906/2003: 90–1). The author of this book was a famous physician, an American, and Oswald was led to consult him personally when the doctor was in London; the man was sympathetic, and relatively nonjudgmental, which was valuable in its way for Oswald’s self-acceptance, but he did treat Oswald’s queerness as a disease to be cured – by prompt marriage. Oswald initially heeded this advice, and became dutifully engaged; but at the last minute a powerful attraction to a new male friend led him to conclude that he in fact “had no disease” (p. 95), but “was simply what I was born” (pp. 95–6). This conviction of a natural, inborn homosexuality as “the secret of my individuality” (p. 64), the deep truth of “myself, my secret, unrestful self” (p. 91), is a classic expression of an essentialist point of view. It leads Oswald to embark upon a course of additional reading: “I met with a mass of serious studies, German, Italian, French, English, from the chief European specialists and theorists on the similisexual topic: many of them with quite other views than those of my well-meaning but far too conclusive Yankee doctor” (p. 96). Oswald’s research eventually brings him to the conviction that, while his same-sex erotic orientation is a natural aberration, it is not morally blameworthy and should not be socially punished. He shares this account of his researches and this line of reasoning in the course of revealing himself and his attraction to Imre. Imre, in turn, makes his confession to Oswald: “I am a Uranian, as thou art. From my birth I have been one. Wholly, wholly homosexual, Oswald!” (p. 117).2 And it turns out that Imre, too, already “had some knowledge of such literature,” and, Oswald relates, had “formally consulted one eminent Viennese specialist who certainly was much wiser, far less positive, and not less calming than my American theorist” (p. 118). Theirs is thus a relationship for which the most recent type of socially progressive sexology provides the essential imprimatur.
Plainly Prime-Stevenson’s novel aims to provide for its readers the same psychological comforting and moral strengthening that Imre’s “Viennese psychiater” (p. 118) provided for him; it could even serve as a guide, for less well-educated readers, toward the burgeoning archive of sexually progressive literature.3 This therapeutic and pedagogical purpose can only be recognized for the humane program it represents, even as it may give us pause, at our historical distance, because it so completely and avidly adopts the taxonomic apparatus of the sexological field of inquiry. Indeed, an essential aspect of what underwrites the perfect compatibility of Oswald and Imre is that the former is a self-avowed “type,” a super-masculine man (“too much man,” p. 125), whereas Imre is another type, a man who bears “the psychic trace of the woman” inside him (p. 125); the novel thus fully accedes to an ideology of desire grounded in essential gender difference that is very much of its historical moment.
The contrast I have described between Stoddard’s novel and Prime-Stevenson’s (involving overt formal experimentation for Stoddard and a comparatively conventional romantic plot for Prime-Stevenson; involving also Stoddard’s eschewal of sexual identity categories and Prime-Stevenson’s enthusiastic embrace of them) is a contrast that can be located within the recently rediscovered Bertram Cope’s Year (1919) by Henry Blake Fuller. Written toward the end of his career by this once-celebrated author, self-published in Chicago at the age of 62 when New York publishers all rejected it, the novel features a young protagonist who bears a striking resemblance to Paul Clitheroe. Bertram Cope is a graduate student and instructor in English literature living in Churchton (a thinly disguised Evanston, Illinois), whose handsome appearance and social grace attract the attention of a local matron named Medora Phillips as well as an older bachelor called Basil Randolph. Medora wants Bertram’s company, and perhaps wishes to marry him off to one of the young female boarders in her house; Basil wants Bertram as a social companion, traveling partner, and overnight guest. Bertram is generally compliant – he likes people to be pleased with him – but he also passively resists Medora’s and Basil’s designs, while enjoying the advantages of their friendship and social connections. Bertram does become inadvertently engaged to one young woman (almost exactly as unwittingly as Paul Clitheroe did, and with as little enthusiasm as Oswald did), but he is helped out of that unwanted commitment by the arrival in Churchton of his intimate friend Arthur Lemoyne – someone recognizable as fulfilling the stereotype of the effeminate homosexual (whether or not he recognizes himself in this way). When Bertram Cope’s Year was reprinted in 1998, the author of its afterword, Andrew Solomon, wrote confidently of its central male characters (Bertram, Basil, and Arthur) as “homosexual,” and stressed the nonchalance with which Fuller depicted them as such. This ascription is, of course, entirely unobjectionable, and an argument to the contrary would be plainly absurd. But it also evident that Fuller wrote the novel in such a manner as to make such an easy ascription inadequate, and possibly misleading.
Solomon draws attention to the fact that Basil and Arthur both sense that they are rivals for Bertram’s affection, and he argues that this “moment of recognition” between the two entails their mutual membership in “a community within which each can be seen as a threat to the other” (Solomon in Fuller 1919/1998: 290). Fair enough, but what this analysis misses is that Basil and Arthur palpably loathe one another, actively disidentify with one another; their mutual visceral aversion is grounded in their respective adherence to very different canons of sexual personhood. To put it another way, it is not clear that either one of them actively owns up to a particular sexuality, but each of them ascribes to the other a distasteful style of sexual subjectivity – Arthur thinks Basil is a fussy old bachelor whose interest in younger men like Bertram is unseemly, and Basil thinks Arthur is an effeminate twit and a bad influence on Bertram. They are thrown into communication with one another by dint of their mutual interest in Bertram, but they belong to different economies of sexual subjectivity altogether; we might also say that they belong to different eras of sexual history. Bertram is suspended uncomfortably between the two men and the two eras they embody.
Basil is a discreet bachelor, a 40-something man of comfortable means and genteel tastes, always available to complete the guest list at a dinner party; he makes a specialty of befriending attractive young men for whom he provides (he believes) valuable mentorship as well as social introductions. Basil passes muster in the broader Churchton social sphere without any trouble. Does he want physical intimacy of some kind with Bertram or with any other young man? On this point Fuller divulges nothing. Arthur, on the other hand, already enjoys some form or fashion of physical intimacy with Bertram – they share a bed when Arthur visits Bertram at his family’s home over Christmas break, they live together in a flat that pointedly is described as having just “the bed” (p. 198) after Arthur arrives in Churchton, they circulate socially as a pair, and carry on an intense and often jealous correspondence when separated (more on their correspondence below) – but his style of sexual being is very different from Bertram’s. His theatrical and effeminate mannerisms are repellent to others, a harsh reaction to which Bertram is sensitive. Even the narrator seems to find Arthur unappealing:
Lemoyne presented himself … as a young man of twenty-seven or so, with dark, limpid eyes, a good deal of dark, wavy hair, and limbs almost too plumply well-turned. In his hands the flesh minimized the prominence of joints and knuckles, and the fingers (especially the little fingers) displayed certain graceful, slightly affected movements of the kind which may cause a person to be credited – or taxed – with possessing the “artistic temperament.” To end with, he carried two inches of short black stubble under his nose. He was a type which one may admire – or not.
(Fuller 1919/1998: 183)
Arthur is more devoted to Bertram than the reverse, and Bertram comes to feel that Arthur is a psychic burden and a social liability. When Arthur undertakes to perform in female drag in a play, and does the feminine not with evident reluctance and comical incompetence (as he would apparently be expected to do), but with great relish and enthusiastic precision – and gets so carried away with his enactment that he makes an inappropriate approach to a fellow actor, who takes severe and violent umbrage at Arthur’s pass (pp. 270–1) – he is finally rendered decisively detrimental to Bertram’s social standing, and leaves Churchton in disgrace.
Basil and Arthur belong to different gay worlds, we might say; their rivalry over Bertram is waged from positions in those different worlds. Basil would like Bertram to join him in a life of decorous bachelor leisure and social respectability, on a residual model that would have been normative in the nineteenth century. Arthur seems to be itching to have Bertram join him in an emerging world of newly licensed sexual and gender deviation. Bertram does not appear to know what he wants, except, perhaps, that he is not interested in signing on for either of these options – at least not yet. Bertram Cope’s Year stages the historical transition from one economy of sexual subjectivity to another, and poises Bertram on the cusp of change.
Bertram Cope is fundamentally elusive, indecisive, and opportunistic. The year he spends in Churchton is also a year in which he struggles fitfully with his literary vocation. The novel in which he appears is itself fairly conventional, a campus novel (or a novel of manners), full of muted social comedy, told in the third person, mixing narration and dialogue fairly freely. There is only one place where the extradiegetic narrator explicitly betrays a certain knowingness about Bertram and Arthur, and that moment comes just when Bertram has been relieved in the nick of time (with Arthur’s help) of his unwanted fiancée, Amy Leffingwell (who soon marries a young businessman whose occupation makes him the very “type” we had earlier been informed “constituted, ipso facto, a kind of norm by which other young men in other fields of endeavor were to be gauged: the farther they deviated from the standard he automatically set up, the more lamentable their deficiencies,” p. 82). Once Amy has been disposed of, and Bertram and Arthur during a winter walk are both relieved to have that mess behind them,
They spent ten minutes in the clear winter air. As Cope, on their return, stooped to put his latch-key to use, Lemoyne impulsively threw an arm around his shoulder. “Everything is all right, now,” he said, in a tone of high gratification; and Urania, through the whole width of her starry firmament, looked down kindly upon a happier household. (p. 211)
“Uranian” was a coded term for homosexual, as we saw in Imre: A Memorandum, and this seems to be the narrator’s broad hint that Bertram was not just not interested in marrying this girl, and not only emphatically not the marrying kind at all (we already know that Bertram felt a “fundamental repugnance,” even an “essential repugnance” toward matrimony, pp. 171, 176), but against marriage because his desires are oriented in a different direction, and because he is a different “type” himself, whether he knows it or not. Cope’s relief, though – he plainly doesn’t share the narrator’s knowing view of the matter – has mainly to do with his ability now to concentrate on his research, so that he can complete a master’s thesis and receive his degree in the coming June. Throughout the novel he has been unable to settle on a topic: he is tempted by the question of the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays (pp. 59–60), and by “Paradise Lost” (p. 60), among other topics, but he is also drawn to a contemporary field – “I think I shall end by digging something out of Here and Now. ‘Our Middle-West School of Fiction,’ – what would you think of that?,” he asks Basil (p. 100). This is one of Fuller’s many somewhat oblique ways of linking the question of the literary with the matter of sexuality.4 Naturally we are not told what he finally decides to write about (p. 221), only that “It was a relief to have come to a final decision” (p. 230). Likewise, at the end of the novel, once Bertram has graduated, we learn that he has “obtained a post in an important university in the East, at a satisfactory stipend” (p. 282), but readers are left to make their own decisions as to whether Bertram is likely to do what Medora predicts – resume his relationship with another of her female boarders, Carolyn Thorpe, propose marriage to her once he feels professionally secure, and send for her to join him in the East – or what Basil anticipates: resume “keeping house together” with Arthur Lemoyne (p. 287), who will have rejoined Bertram once again and begun his own graduate studies in psychology. Ending on this note of uncertainty – with two characters, Medora and Basil, composing for the amenable protagonist of this fiction alternate fictions of their own involving divergent emotional and sexual paths for him – ratchets up the analogy between literature and sexuality once again, and leaves readers, along with Medora and Basil, in the position of attributing romantic and erotic choices, and narrative trajectories, to a young man who feels in no hurry to commit himself to any of them.
The obliquity of Fuller’s representation of sexuality in Bertram Cope’s Year is undoubtedly calculated. Stoddard, I speculated earlier, may have been eschewing sexual identity labels in For the Pleasure of His Company on purpose. Fuller was certainly doing so. But more to the point, he depicted a range of characters who were all maneuvering – awkwardly sometimes, adroitly on occasion – amid the categories. Among the most telling formal devices in Bertram Cope’s Year is its presentation of the private correspondence of Bertram and Arthur; the irony is that the candid revelations we might expect (remember Stoddard’s insinuation that Paul Clitheroe’s private letters would shock our sensibilities and cause scandal) are missing from Bertram’s and Arthur’s missives. Even in the privacy of his letters to Arthur, when Bertram is complaining that he does not really relish social dancing between the sexes, he will say with seeming innocence, “I like to see soldiers or sailors dance in pairs, as a straightforward outlet for superfluous physical energy” (p. 51). Who is he kidding? Himself? (Surely not Arthur.) Or is he really not kidding at all? The nearest approach to explicit disclosure comes in Arthur’s exasperated reply to Bertram’s sheepish letter admitting to his inadvertent betrothal to Amy Leffingwell. “The thing can’t go on,” Arthur remonstrates, “and you know it as well as I do. Nip it. Nip it now. Don’t think that our intimacy is to end in any such fashion as this, for it isn’t” (pp. 178–9). In Arthur’s petulant tone, and in his “you know it as well as I do,” one hears him impatiently summoning Bertram into a settled sexual personhood. But in that unfixable word “intimacy,” hovering between avowal and euphemism, we can also sense him allowing for Bertram’s reluctance, his difference. Bertram, and maybe Arthur too, we might say, would understand Stoddard’s prizing of Prime-Stevenson’s judgment that the silences in (or of) intimacy could be the ground of perfect mutuality.
There was a spate of gay novels published between 1931 and 1934, according to historian George Chauncey in his authoritative Gay New York (1995), an indispensable guide to the historical and cultural context in which the early twentieth-century gay novel appeared. Chauncey lists Blair Niles’s Strange Brother (1931), Twilight Men by André Tellier (1931), A Scarlet Pansy by Robert Scully (1932), Kenilworth Bruce’s Goldie (1933), Richard Meeker’s Better Angel (1933), and Butterfly Man by Lew Levenson (1934) (Chauncey 1995: 324). The list could be extended, either by widening the temporal parameters or loosening the definition of what constitutes a “gay novel.” Elsewhere in his study Chauncey also mentions Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry (1929) and Infants of the Spring (1932), novels of the Harlem Renaissance that feature gay and lesbian characters, as well as The Young and Evil (1933), coauthored by Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler, and Bruce Nugent’s celebrated prose poem “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade” (1926). Very recently a previously unpublished novel by Nugent, Gentleman Jigger, has belatedly come to light; its editor, Thomas Wirth, reports that it was written “for the most part between 1928 and 1933,” and it is a roman à clef featuring fictionalized versions of the same cast of characters that appeared in Thurman’s Infants of the Spring, the self-named “Niggerati” or younger members of the New Negro movement. It would also be an egregious error to omit mention of Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood (1936), but the essential point remains: the late 1920s and the 1930s – the years of the Great Depression and its social upheavals – saw an unusual concentration of novelistic depictions of, explorations of, and literary reconfigurations of sexual cultures. Some of these novels are committed to what Scott Herring in a recent book calls “sexual intelligibility,” the public definition of sexual types and the clarification of sexual experience that we have seen most clearly in Imre: A Memorandum, while others resist the incipient codification of sexuality, as Stoddard’s and Fuller’s novels arguably do (Herring 2007). For the purposes of this essay I will focus on two of the novels Chauncey mentions (Strange Brother and The Young and Evil) and a third novel he does not talk about, Dawn Powell’s Come Back to Sorrento (first published in 1932 as The Tenth Moon, but rediscovered and reprinted in 1997 under Powell’s intended title). Published in quick succession between 1931 and 1933, these three novels together epitomize the concurrent widely varied possibilities for representing same-sex desire, and the equally various ways in which sexual politics was embedded within formal novelistic choices.
Although at least one recent critic has bestowed upon Strange Brother the honorific “queer,” crediting it with depicting in the currently approved fashion “multiple identifications across categories of race, sex, and gender” (Boone 1998: 266), this novel is unambiguously devoted to the parsing of categories of sexual identity, even as it liberally allows for the possibility of social mixing between and among those categories. “Blair Niles” was the pseudonym of a popular travel writer, journalist, and novelist, a white woman originally named Mary Blair Rice, who first wrote under the name Mary Blair Beebe when she was married to the scientist C. William Beebe. Together the Beebes published Our Search for a Wilderness: An Account of Two Ornithological Expeditions to Venezuela and to British Guiana (1910), which details their efforts to observe, classify, and collect birds, mammals, and reptiles for the New York Zoological Park. After her divorce from Beebe she married Robert Niles, and adopted the pen name that combined her middle and his last name, and most of her writing appeared thereafter as the work of Blair Niles. The classificatory frame of mind evident in her early account of the ornithological expedition, however, can be seen to persist long afterwards in her fiction, explicitly (as in the character of Philip Crane, a manly naturalist whose entomological expedition to the tropics the novel’s gay protagonist, Mark Thornton, dreams of joining as a scientific illustrator; and as in the expert opinions of the sexological theorist Irwin Hesse, who generously extrapolates from the large “number of sex forms existing among the social insects” that there must be “more than two hard and fast sex forms in man” as well, p. 173), and implicitly, too, in the pervasive will to know the truth of sex that propels June Westbrook’s sympathetic curiosity about Mark’s deviant erotic nature.5 Strange Brother is a novel of progressive social purpose, dedicated to elucidating the problem of sexual classification, and wishing to increase moral tolerance of sexual diversity. And it is incidentally highly informative about the morphology of sexual self-understanding, self-representation, and public ascription that obtained in the late 1920s.
Mark Thornton is a poor orphan from the Middle West, living in a settlement house in New York City and teaching art to children while he cherishes ambitions of a career as an illustrator and holds on to hopes of a satisfying emotional and erotic life with another man. June Westbrook is a divorced society woman, a sometime journalist, who meets Mark in a speakeasy in Harlem, where she is slumming with some of her white friends and he is socializing with some of his gay black friends. Mark and June strike up a close friendship of their own, which provides him with solace as well as social connection, and which satisfies her desire to expand her emotional range and social purview. Mark lives a double life, acknowledging his sexual tastes to himself and to a few trusted confidantes, but masquerading in public as straight; he is familiar enough with the discourses of sexual description current in his day to have internalized a sense of himself as a homosexual, although it pains him to be subject to scorn, blackmail, and ostracism, and he cannot shake his own shame. He adheres to a conventional model of masculine gender behavior, and is repulsed by the flamboyant styles of queer effeminacy he sees around him in the city (although he sympathizes with the plight of these fairies). He is altogether miserable, in short, and we as readers can see fairly early on that this story will not end happily.
Like Stoddard and the others before her, Niles gives the literary as such a prominent role in the diegesis, and connects it intimately with sex. Mark sometimes writes his own poetry, and throughout the story he is engaged in the compilation of “an anthology of what poets and philosophers and scientists had written on the subject of man’s love for man” (Niles 1931: 230). An important mentor from his youth, Tom Burden – a gay man who carefully and chastely introduced Mark to the idea of his being homosexual, and helpfully called it “our handicap” (p. 141) – sent him a copy of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and Mark had found a copy of Edward Carpenter’s Love’s Coming of Age in a used book store (p. 78). Eventually it occurs to him that he might find moral legitimation for his present sexuality in esteemed literature from the past, and he hopes that after selecting and compiling his anthology he might publish it in an effort to ameliorate the prejudicial sexual standards with which he is often confronted.
The earnest purpose of Strange Brother is typically on display in one of the great set pieces of the novel, when June and Mark go together to one of the famous drag balls in Harlem. June wants to go because she is attracted to what she feels to be the bodily freedom and experiential daring of the Harlem social scene. Mark wants to go because it is a vivid exhibition of sexual energy and some of his queer friends will be there. The scene devolves into a weird kind of pathos when June, sitting in the stands with Mark (they are both rapt spectators, but certainly not participants), notices a man in elaborate (masculine) drag in the adjacent box – he is wearing “the old-time dress of a Venetian gondolier,” and shares the box with another man wearing “the dress of a woman of the Turkish harem” – and realizes the gondolier is her ex-husband, Palmer Fleming. “Palmer Fleming at a Drag Ball in Harlem!” (p. 218). She is glad, when she moments later watches him enter the dance floor and select a feather-bedecked young fairy for a partner, that she had restrained herself from greeting him: “for the first time, June saw him for what he was” (p. 219). Here, we might say, Niles has reached a limit of her empathetic ethnography, retreating from curiosity about the culture of the drag ball to focus on the chagrin of the shocked heterosexual.
Dawn Powell’s Come Back to Sorrento resembles For the Pleasure of His Company as well as Strange Brother in that it features an unusual central friendship between a man and a woman, a friendship that finds no ready-made social sanction, fits no available description. Connie Benjamin has fallen from prosperity and social position by running off as a young woman with a handsome circus performer; she now scrapes by as the wife of the village shoemaker, a simple and devoted man named Gus who was willing to overlook her disreputable erotic past, and she feasts on memories of the brilliant career as an opera singer she fancies she might have had.6 She is delighted when she meets the new music teacher in town, Blaine Decker, who has recently spent time in Europe in the company of his intimate friend, a novelist named Starr Donnell. Connie and Blaine become closely attached to one another, feeling that they are the only two literate, sensitive, and truly artistically cultivated people in town, and there is some sharp but rueful comedy in the novel about their enablement of each other’s delusions; but their mutual dedication to music, their identification with it, and their investment in its sustaining role in their lives is genuine and moving. The jacket copy of the 1997 reprint of Come Back to Sorrento has it that Blaine “is a homosexual in a closeted era,” and while that categorical assignment certainly doesn’t seem wrong, it also seems flat and reductive. We might recall here the challenging argument made by Tim Dean (2000) that sexuality in the twentieth century is misconstrued if we understand it to be only about what people prefer to do with their genitalia. Sexual identity is built as well from broad cultural tastes and activities, Dean argues; plenty of people are less interested in what we would call sex per se than in artistic endeavors and cultural undertakings, styles and forms that are associated contingently with particular sexual cultures.7 That is why someone can be gay and celibate; that is why someone can be straight in bed but “culturally gay” (or nongay-identified, a fan of professional sports, but incidentally into sex with other men). It would have been simple for Dawn Powell to make it explicit that Blaine Decker was a closeted homosexual, but she did not; in her notebooks she recorded observations of identifiable homosexual types she encountered in her New York social life. On February 14, 1934, for instance, Powell recorded some flaming repartee between “two young colored fairies” (Powell 1995: 84). Powell did make it clear in Come Back to Sorrento that Connie Benjamin went rather avidly with men, but she showed as well that Connie (like June Westbrook) chafes under the restrictions placed upon a straight married woman, and is strongly drawn to an unconventional intimacy with Blaine that is grounded in something other than a narrowly construed “sexuality.” Although Connie is at one point puzzled by Blaine’s obvious lack of physical desire for her, and although she notices that other “men look at him a little oddly” because of his affected mannerisms (Powell 1932/1997: 33), she finally thinks “contentedly” that “To Decker she was without gender” (p. 96). For his part Blaine is distinctly averse to the very thought of physical intimacy with Connie or with any woman, but he plainly finds it refreshing and consoling to happen upon a friendship with a woman who is oblivious to the protocols of gender and sexual conformity that elsewhere in his life hold sway.
When the novel ends Decker is on a ship crossing the Atlantic, returning apprehensively to Paris, there to seek out Starr Donnell and resume the role of “Blaine Decker, cosmopolite” rather than “the village music teacher” (p. 184). He has been generously staked to this European sojourn by a wealthy woman in Dell River, Laurie Neville, who also fashioned herself one of the sophisticates of the little town; in his cabin on the steamer he has some books sent along by another of the misfits of the village, a spinster schoolteacher: “On the washstand lay the books from Miss Manning. He picked them up and examined the titles. Novels. He’d never liked novels but probably Starr’s crowd would talk about them so he’d better read them” (pp. 184–5). It is a curious note on which to end a novel – this evocation of Decker’s dislike of novels on account of their association with a pretentious crowd of Parisian sophisticates in whose company he will feel, he expects, naive and unaccomplished. This correlation of the novel as genre with a brittle scene of cultural aggression is the obverse of Blaine’s and Connie’s creation of a singular relationship grounded in sentimental musical expression.
It is not literally possible that Miss Manning could have sent Strange Brother along with Blaine, but as a thought experiment we might try to imagine what Blaine would have thought of the tortured Mark Thornton. Would he have recognized himself in Mark’s sad “type”? Identified with Mark’s misery? Been appalled by the conscious sophistication of Mark’s New York City crowd? Found the whole matter merely mystifying? It is quite possible that Dawn Powell read Strange Brother then played its story backwards in her novel of one year later. Mark flees the small-town Midwest where his sexual nature finds no room for expression and no social welcome, and comes to a big city where educated, well-meaning people take a kindly if condescending interest in his plight. But this fate is not satisfying, for in the world of this novel he is condemned to be a “type” and his type is understood to be defined by a “handicap.” Blaine Decker, on the contrary, finds it possible to improvise a life of some meager satisfaction for himself, involving an unconventional emotional attachment, in a provincial Midwest town not unlike the one Mark Thornton (and, for that matter, Bertram Cope) eagerly fled. Come Back to Sorrento satirizes sentimentality (but it also sentimentalizes small-town life), and it casts a critical glance at the violent fate that, in Niles’s novel, awaits Mark with grim inevitability.
Coauthored by Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler, The Young and Evil (1933) is one of the truly remarkable novels of the twentieth century. First printed in Paris by the Obelisk Press in a limited edition (which customs authorities in England and in the United States blocked on the grounds of obscenity), it had been rejected by commercial publishers at the time and has rarely been readily accessible to readers in the time since then.8 Among those who initially declined to publish it was Horace Liveright, who had recently issued Niles’s Strange Brother. Liveright returned the manuscript to its authors accompanied by this charming expression of regret: “I read with infinite pleasure your brilliant novel, but I could not think of publishing it as a book – life is too short and the jails are unsatisfactory” (quoted in Steven Watson’s introduction to the 1998 reprint, p. xxiv). Ford and Tyler shared the ambition of some of their predecessors to experiment in novelistic form as a means of exploring erotic freedom and dissolving fast-hardening sexual identity categories. Curiously, Djuna Barnes provided a blurb for the book that emphasized the exactitude of its representation of a congealed homosexual personality: “Never, to my knowledge, has a certain type of homosexual been so ‘fixed’ on paper,” she claimed. And the critic Louis Kronenberger, who published its only American review, said it was “the first candid, gloves-off account of more or less professional young homosexuals” (Watson in Ford and Tyler 1933/1998: xxv). The tension between these claims is revealing: Barnes implies that the homosexual is a pre-existing natural type awaiting candid and accurate literary reproduction. Kronenberger, alternately, picks up on the fact that these characters are, in effect, expertly schooled and skilled in their chosen profession of homosexuality – they have made an art of it, we might say. In Ford and Tyler’s novel, the artful inhabitation of a certain style of homosexual existence is itself a literary project.
The Young and Evil makes an instructive contrast with Strange Brother: it covers much of the same topical ground (penurious writers and artists with punishable sexual tastes living in New York City in the late 1920s), but its approach could hardly be more different. Several scenes in The Young and Evil might even be construed as pointed revisionary responses to scenes in Strange Brother, and for the sake of focusing this brief discussion of a complex and challenging novel I will concentrate on two such telling comparisons. One such scene in Strange Brother involves a stark encounter between sexual aberrance and the law. A “poor simpering boy” called Nelly is entrapped and arrested by a plainclothes detective in Harlem, and his case engages Mark’s interest: “The whole thing sickened him,” but “Nelly sickened him too” (p. 66). Mark goes to the court house to see what happens when Nelly is brought before a judge the next day, and is sorry that Nelly doesn’t have the sense to modify his effeminate mannerisms in court; Nelly is sentenced to six months in prison, and Mark is led to visit the public library to read about the penal laws respecting “Crimes against Nature” (pp. 122–5), and leaves the library demoralized and scared. Certainly Niles wants her readers to agree with her that such laws are absurd and unjust, but the drama of her story involves only Mark’s futile intellectual skepticism toward such laws and his despairing abjection in the face of their power. The comparable scene in The Young and Evil is framed and rendered very differently. There, two of the main characters, Karel and Frederick, are cruised (and then gay-bashed) by some sailors in Riverside Park, and when the sailors turn on them two policemen intervene to protect the young men. They are, of course, taken in to the police station (together with one of the sailors), and spend an uncomfortable night in custody, then face a judge the next morning. Frederick kindly advises the rather hapless sailor on courtroom strategy, and inquires with genuine curiosity as to why the sailor tried to hurt them, but the policeman prompts the sailor to lie and say that Karel and Frederick had offered to pay him for sex. The judge, however, is no fool; he meets Karel’s eyes, sizes up the situation accurately, perceives immediately that the charges are implausible, and winks at Karel and Frederick to intimate that he knows the score. He discharges them summarily. “Then the magistrate leaned over and said sweetly but be more careful next time!” (p. 191).
The comparison I am making between these analogous scenes is not meant to be merely invidious, although it is hard not to prefer the way Ford and Tyler hilariously and aggressively expose the hypocrisy of law enforcement and imagine a queer-sympathetic judge whose wink allies his authority with their erotic adventuring, while Niles can only stage a scene of pity and abjection. More interesting here and throughout The Young and Evil is the way modernist textual techniques and what we might call coercive narrative focalization recruit the reader as a sympathetic and situated participant in the scene rather than a cowering spectator of it. Because the style of the narrative is by turns elliptical, compressed, campy, allusive, and ironic, and shifts quickly and unpredictably between various uncoordinated registers, a reader must work hard to fill in the gaps and connect the dots – read closely, provide a good deal of supplemental information (which implicates him or her as an insider already), follow the allusions, attend to the shifts, veer compliantly between campy gay argot and high intellectual discussion, and so forth. In other words, the various formal devices and extravagances and difficulties of the narrative induct readers, willy-nilly, into a very specific gay milieu, and even coerce readers into sympathetic identification with the renegade sexual culture of the protagonists.
The most brilliant scene in the novel, and the most formally inventive – the section that most stridently performs this queer initiation of the reader – also bears comparison with a scene in Strange Brother, the Harlem drag ball scene mentioned above. It is Julian and Frederick who go to the drag ball – who knows, maybe the very same ball that Mark and June observed from the sidelines. Whereas Mark and June were detached spectators (and the novel’s readers were interpolated as curious onlookers alongside them), The Young and Evil does not allow such distance. The characters are “swallowed” by the ball (p. 152), and so are we. Neither Julian nor Frederick is in full drag, but they are wearing enough makeup “to be considered in costume and so get in for a dollar less” (p. 151). They don’t sit at tables in the boxes alongside the dance floor (as Mark and June did), but join the boisterous crowd on the floor, as we in effect do too. “Dancing drew the blood faster through their bodies. Drink drusic drowned them. A lush annamaywong lavender-skinned negro gazed at him” (p. 154). That sentence, picked almost at random, gives a taste of the text’s experimental modernist strategies. One fairly commonplace sentence of readily intelligible third-person narration (which prepares us for the textual effects of physical stimulation and sensory disorientation to follow). Then an ostentatiously alliterative sentence that rehearses the phonetic transition in the previous sentence from the hard d of “dancing” to the compound dr of “drew,” but tripled in “drink drusic drowned,” which evokes the kind of slurry mispronunciation of “music” drunkenness might produce. Then a glancing allusion to Anna May Wong, a Chinese-American movie star of the day, whose characteristic style the oddly hued (“lavender-skinned”) dancer is presumably copying, while “lush” semantically recalls the drunkenness of the scene, and the object of the pronoun “him” is not at all clear. They are all moving around a wild dance floor, where people’s costumes play wantonly with racial as well as gender identities, and interested glances are skipping promiscuously from person to person. Soon enough the rapidity and fragmentation of the prose, reproducing shards of bright conversation, campy commentary, and obscene innuendo, creates the sensory effect of immersion in the excitement of the dance floor – we seem to be circulating there drunkenly along with Karel and Frederick:
shut your hole watching
them for a moment but when she opened her upstairs cunt and started to belch the greetings of the season I retired in a flurry her boyfriend with the imperfect lacework in the front of his mouth
was a thunderclap could indeed would have been
gentler Fairydale Bedagrace a prize bull in the 2000 pound class and his proud owner is Harry A.
Koch there’s my uncle looking for
me Beulah calm your bowels two o’clock
and not a towel wet that
would be both justice and
amusement Jim! I told you to stay home and mind the babies wished for nothing better well who could? than a man lover and a woman lover in the same.
(Ford and Tyler 1933/1998: 155)
This careful effect of sensory immersion – even reproducing through its enjambments (I would argue) the acoustic effect of turning abruptly in relation to another moving dancer’s utterance and hearing it first in one ear and then in the other – leaves the reader, struggling to find some coherence or continuity among such fragments, no allowance for distant spectatorship.
The Young and Evil has attracted remarkably little acute critical attention, and deserves a closer and more extended analysis than can be provided here. Ford and Tyler were both wont to minimize their technical artistic achievement, preferring to treat the novel as a near-transcription of their own lives as bohemians and sexual renegades in New York in the late 1920s. It is obviously not (merely) that. It is tempting to treat it as a knowledgeable revisionary response to the erratic history of the gay novel as practiced in the United States in the period since Stoddard’s For the Pleasure of His Company first imagined that innovation in novelistic form could disturb the historical emergence and limiting consolidation of types of sexual personhood. Ford and Tyler’s diegesis involves a set of writers and artists and the sexual freedom that often seems to have obtained in such circles; in this sense it recalls not only Stoddard’s novel but, in various ways and degrees, Prime-Stevenson’s, Fuller’s, Niles’s, and Powell’s novels too (as well as several other gay novels mentioned in passing above – Thurman’s Infants of the Spring, Nugent’s Gentleman Jigger). Parker Tyler is on record as having claimed that The Young and Evil was stitched together by Ford largely from private letters written to him by Tyler (Watson in Ford and Tyler 1933/1998: xx). Whatever the literal truth of this claim, it links their text broadly to the history of the novel as genre, with its long involvement with epistolarity, and more particularly to the novels that have been discussed here, most of which insistently invoke and cite and sometimes include the private letters that ostensibly allowed the sexually dissident characters to express themselves more candidly and to position the novel’s discourse in relation to protocols of publicity and decency.
Novels that might be construed as gay in the period after The Young and Evil tended to resemble Imre: A Memorandum and Strange Brother: they took the homosexual category of person for granted, were not particularly sensitive to the historicity of sexuality as such, and usually constructed melodramas of shame framed as progressive social critique. They ought not to be dismissed as summarily as this, but the arc of development traced here from For the Pleasure of His Company to The Young and Evil – in which the generic form of the novel was both exploited for its received properties and inventively deformed in the interest of literary remaking of the social organization of sexuality – this conjunction of ambitions seems to have lapsed in the 1930s and 1940s. There are noteworthy partial exceptions, Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding (1946), for instance. In this gorgeous composition the protagonist, Frankie, persistently feels “the need to be known for her true self and recognized” (McCullers 1946/2004: 62), but that true self is difficult if not impossible to name under the regimes of sexual subjectivity available to her. Maybe her small friend and neighbor John Henry, a sissyish six-year-old, is somewhat more intelligible within the system of sexual recognizability that obtained in the late 1940s; he likes to wear the housekeeper Berenice’s clothes, and takes a special interest in her mentioning a man by the name of Lily Mae Jenkins who “prisses around with a pink satin blouse and one arm akimbo,” fell in love with another man, and “changed his nature and his sex and turned into a girl” (p. 81). The narrative tempts us to pigeonhole Frankie as a tomboy tending toward lesbianism, but also frustrates our inclination to do so. It places its faith in the power of imaginative fiction to complicate such reductive assignments: this is represented by a game Frankie and John Henry and Berenice play after dinner in which they “criticize the Creator.” Essentially, they redesign the universe to suit themselves better. Frankie has a long list of improvements to the world she would make, which notably includes the provision that “people could instantly change back and forth from boys to girls, which ever way they felt like and wanted” (p. 97). Berenice says “that the law of human sex was exactly right just as it was and could no way be improved” (p. 97), but John Henry too thinks gender and sexual categories ought not to be fixed. His reconfigured world “was a mixture of delicious and freak,” and would bestow on people a “sudden long arm that could stretch from here to California,” and would add to the world “chocolate dirt and rains of lemonade, the extra eye seeing a thousand miles, a hinged tail that could be let down as a kind of prop to sit on when you wished to rest, [and] candy flowers” (p. 96), but his most important improvement would be the provision that “people ought to be half boy and half girl” (p. 98). By 1946 when The Member of the Wedding offered such “delicious and freak” fantasies, their utopian ambition was decidedly backward.
NOTES
1 Prime-Stevenson’s text actually reads “The silences in intimacy stand for the most perfect mutuality” (pp. 46–7). One is tempted to believe that Stoddard approved of this gesture toward the unsaid – toward discretion and obliquity – in a novel that was, by comparison to his own, generally more direct and outspoken.
2 Imre’s rather stilted and old-fashioned style of speaking is meant to stand in, it seems, for his actual Hungarian tongue, or to indicate that he learned to speak a rather old-fashioned formal English. But it does have the curious campy effect of placing him in a different literary register – the “seaside novelette” register, perhaps – from Oswald, who speaks a more idiomatic English.
3 James Gifford uses a 1913 short story by Prime-Stevenson, “Under the Sun,” in which the contents of a private library owned by a homosexual named Dayneford are listed, to indicate the way in which one text can be a guide to a larger archive of homosexual writing.
4 The novel does this in countless ways, but most incisively in its depiction of the ongoing relationship between Basil and another bachelor, Medora’s crippled brother-in-law Joseph Foster, who occupies a wheelchair in the attic of her house and has a visual deficiency that makes it difficult for him to read. Basil visits Foster regularly, to read to him from histories and newspapers and the like, and to engage in guarded speculation about Bertram and Arthur. It is on a day when Foster is feeling particular “blue” and bitchy that Basil wishes he “had brought a novelette” (p. 42).
5 There is an uncanny resonance between Strange Brother’s staging of this analogy between human sexual classification and insect taxonomy, on the one hand, and the curious scene staged in For the Pleasure of His Company when Paul and Jack first meet in a special room in the theatre director Harry English’s house, a “chamber of entomology” crowded with “cases of brilliantly tinted butterflies” that Harry and a friend collect, preserve, and display (pp. 85–6). For Stoddard, this orderly exhibition of an entomological collection serves to set off, by ironic contrast, the natural unclassifiability of Paul and Jack. Mark Thornton, however, does not defy classification at all; he merely awaits his proper description and emplacement within a natural schema ordered according to morally neutral scientific principles rather than punitive heteronormative principles.
6 The intricate relationship between vocal music performance and sexual dissidence – in Powell’s novel, in Bertram Cope’s Year (Bertram is a talented singer and his performative animation in song grows in Arthur’s presence), and elsewhere – would, like the relationship between literariness and sexuality I am tracing here, reward examination.
7 Dean contends, revising a Freudian psychoanalytic concept of sublimation, “that we can have intensely pleasurable experiences and intimate relationships with verbal and visual forms even when those forms aren’t ostensibly erotic at all. Such relationships should not be considered secondary to or necessarily less intense than interpersonal sexual relationships, because they draw on the same libidinal sources and fantasies” (p. 277). He is perhaps being hyperbolic when he says soon after that “some people ‘love literature’ in exactly the same way as others love sex” (p. 277), but his theoretical stringency is useful. Another way to put this would be to revise Foucault’s (1986: 157) admonition that we cease to speak of “sexuality” and instead speak of “bodies and pleasures,” and extend the list: bodies, pleasures, novels, music, food, gardening, etc.
8 The out-of-print 1988 edition published by Gay Presses of New York, with an indispensable introduction by Steven Watson, is the only starting point for informed discussion of the novel. It reprints in facsimile the Obelisk Press edition, adds an informative introduction and notes, and supplements the text with color reproductions of watercolor illustrations from the novel by Pavel Tchelichew, Ford’s lover. There is a cheap edition from Olympia Press available, but it is riddled with textual errors and unsuitable for reading, let alone scholarship. I have been unable to obtain a copy of a recent reprint edition from Metronome Press in Paris.
REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING
Austen, Roger. (1995). Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard, ed. John W. Crowley. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Boone, Joseph Allen. (1998). Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Chauncey, George. (1995). Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890–1940. New York: Basic Books.
Dean, Tim. (2000). Beyond Sexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ford, Charles Henri and Parker Tyler. (1933/1998). The Young and the Evil. New York: Gay Presses of New York.
Foucault, Michel. (1986). The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books.
Fuller, Henry Blake. (1919/1998). Bertram Cope’s Year: A Novel. New York: Turtle Point Press.
Gifford, James. (1995). Dayneford’s Library: American Homosexual Writing 1900–1913. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Herring, Scott. (2007). Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
McCullers, Carson. (1946/2004). The Member of the Wedding. New York: Mariner Books.
Niles, Blair. (1931). Strange Brother. New York: Horace Liveright.
Nissen, Axel (ed.). (2003). The Romantic Friendship Reader: Love Stories Between Men in Victorian America. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press.
Nugent, Richard Bruce. (2008). Gentleman Jigger, ed. and intro. Thomas H. Wirth, foreword Arnold Rampersad. New York: Da Capo Press.
Powell, Dawn. (1932/1997). Come Back to Sorrento [The Tenth Moon]. South Royalton, VT: Steerforth Press.
Powell, Dawn. (1995). The Diaries of Dawn Powell 1931–1965, ed. Tim Page. South Royalton, VT: Steerforth Press.
Prime-Stevenson, Edward. (1906/2003). Imre: A Memorandum. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press.
Rich, Adrienne. (1994). Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence. In Blood, Bread, and Poetry (pp. 23–75). New York: Norton.
Stoddard, Charles Warren. (1903/1987). For the Pleasure of His Company: A Tale of the Misty City, Thrice Told. New York: Prentice-Hall.
Williams, Raymond. (1977). Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.