a card from morocco

A Card from Morocco by Robert Shaw (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969)

I don’t know how this book found its way onto my shelf.  It seems an unlikely book for me to buy: the jacket of the American edition gives it a mid-century espionage/thriller look that would not have attracted me.  Perhaps it was mentioned in one of my catalogues of books with gay content or of gay interest.  If so, it was mis-categorized, for although it is the story of a friendship between two (straight) men, there is little to no homosexual content.

In any case, I’m glad I read it, as I enjoyed it very much and also very much admired the terse, fire-bright prose, which reminded me of James Salter, combining as it did terrific dialogue with crackling descriptions of the physical world.  Set in Madrid and other parts of Spain in the 1960s, A Card from Morocco examines the unlikely friendship of the British Lewis and the American Slattery, both men in their 50s who have wound up in Spain after failed lives elsewhere.  Lewis, a former Major who has been passed over for a government job, has retreated to Madrid and married a much younger woman.  He is devoted to her but worries that he cannot sexually satisfy her and wants her to take a lover.  Slattery has been exiled by his wealthy Boston family and is paid by them to stay away.  He’s a good painter but a depressed and dangerous drunk.  He sabotages his own engagement to a nice French girl by sleeping with her mother (while his fiancee watches).  Both men are very good at self-destruction, and their friendship is based on their trying to save one another from his worst self.  They both fail in this attempt, but a tenderness and respect grows between them that comes to seem a lot like love.  The book is shocking in its sexual frankness (and darkness) and surprising in its tender unabashed depiction of affection between men.

A Card from Morocco is very similar to Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime (1967) with its European setting and its triangulated tensions between men and women.  Shaw even employs many of Salter’s stylistic tics; scenes could almost be lifted out of one book and placed in the other, although Shaw’s men are cruder and less-well behaved than Salter’s.

An interesting book, and surprising to find such a brilliantly written book by an author I knew nothing about who doesn’t seem to have received due appreciation, perhaps because his acting career overshadowed his literary accomplishments.