The publisher and date listed always refer to the edition of the book that I read; illustrations are chosen for the graphic appeal and may not correspond to the edition that is cited. Photographs are always of the author (unless otherwise indicated).
Lord Dismiss Us by Michael Campbell (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1968)
Lord Dismiss Us is a big, ambitious, and mostly successful novel about homosexuality in English public schools, circa 1960.
The novel is set entirely at Weatherhill, a small (200 students, all boys) second-rate (one boy is sent there because he can no longer afford to attend Eton) public school in Buckinghamshire. Its large scope is made up of intimate portraits of a wide cross-section of Weatherhill citizens: Mr. and Mrs. Crabtree, the new headmaster and his sepulchral wife (and their deeply unhappy daughter, Lucretia); a variety of schoolmasters, including Rowles, who has been there for 45 years, hates women and boys older than 18, and gives the boys some stoic and begrudging compassion; Ashley, a young master, brilliant and creative, who is unhappily languishing at Weatherhill, his alma mater, because he did not get a position at Cambridge; Cyrus Starr, the chaplain, who is dying from stomach cancer and lives a strange life of indolence and indulgence in his sumptuous private apartment, attended to by a pack of dirty boys called the “Starlings,” ; and several boys of various ages, including our hero, Carelton, who experiences his first overwhelming love with Nicky Allen, a circumspect and beautiful boy a year or two younger
The action takes place over a sing summer term, which is Carelton’s last — he will attend Oxford in the fall. Carelton is blessed — he is athletic, beautiful, intelligent, moral, kind, and creative and his first experience of love is overwhelming and poignantly described. The plot of the book revolves around the Crabtree’s mission to cleanse the school of “moral laxity” — meaning any and all relationships between the boys, emotional or carnal, casual or profound. Crabtree (with much sinister and underhanded help from his wife) goes about this in a brutal and stupid way that produces tragic and devastating results, despite the tepid interference of a few enlightened masters.
Campbell creates a rich, complex, and engaging world full of original and interesting characters. The book is quite funny and involving, and I enjoyed reading it very much. There are a few places where the action blurs and the reader wonders what is actually happening, but the overall picture is beautiful and bright.
Iris Murdoch heralded this novel with a blurb that perfectly captures my response: “Marvelous. I read it very slowly because I was enjoying it so much. I think it achieves a sort of tragic beauty and is really about LOVE, which all novels profess to be about, but hardly any are.”
The Chameleons by John Broderick (Ivan Obolensky, Inc., 1961)
The Chameleons is a short novel set in a small village outside of Dublin about a strange group of nastily inter-related people: Michael Glynn, a middle-aged, closeted homosexual, bedridden with rheumatoid arthritis; Stephen, a creepy (mostly) homosexual young man who cares for Michael; and Julia, Michael’s wife, who married him for comfort and security (he’s rich) but is having a passionate affair with Jim Glynn, Michael’s handsome nephew who also happens to be his doctor. Father Victor, the ever-tippling parish priest, hovers around them all, mooching whiskey and planning a trip for them to Lourdes, to seek a miracle cure for Michael.
Early in the book Jim abruptly ends his affair with Julia to marry a girl from a good family, and Julia immediately starts an affair with Stephen, who has been blackmailing her about her affair with Jim. Their affair gets off to an awkward start when Stephen rapes her. Two young homosexual men in Dublin also appear in the book, and neither of them is happy: one kills himself and the other attempts suicide.
This is all rather sordid and unpleasant, but Broderick is a good writer, and the characters, despite their damp and dark lives, are vivid and engaging. Especially Julia, who’s an odd heroine to find a mid-century novel: she enjoys and values sex, and does not hesitate to use men to satisfy and occupy her. She pursues her eventful sex life without guilt or misgivings, which makes her an unusual and refreshing character.
The illustration is a portrait of John Broderick by Sean O’Sullivan
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (Delacourt Press [Seymour Lawrence], 1969)
I was underwhelmed and disappointed in Slaughterhouse-Five, which I had been led to believe was a classic of anti-war and counter-culture literature.
Like so much auto-fiction being published today, Vonnegut writes himself into the story of Billy Pilgrim, his stand-in; in fact, Vonnegut acknowledges himself as author as narrator, and includes his own stories from the war alongside and often conflated with Billy’s. For a book purportedly about the bombing of Dresden, the tragedy itself is barely acknowledged and quickly dispatched. A few incidents about the war are alarming and affecting, but much of the book, especially the sections about Billy’s post-war life as an optometrist in a small town in upstate New York which involves ceaseless time travel and a stint being displayed in a zoo on a distant planet after being abducted by aliens — all of this, which is much of the book, just seems silly and childish, neither funny nor chilling.
And Vonnegut’s inability to write ten sentences without including “so it goes” is maddening; you just want to get away from this storyteller with a relentless tic. Perhaps I’m missing something, but Slaughterhouse-Five seems like an inferior book that has not aged well.
Scented Gardens for the Blind by Janet Frame (George Braziller, 1964)
I read this book because I had so admired and enjoyed Frame’s Owls Do Cry, but I was very disappointed. The three characters here are all crazy in different unbelievable ways, and Frame attempts to capture, or convey, their craziness by unconventionally using language, which makes the writing seems self-indulgent, and doesn’t have anywhere near the effect and brilliance of Owls Do Cry.
Even worse than being a book about three crazy people, it is ultimately revealed that this is a book about one crazy woman who thinks she is three crazy people.
I suppose the reason I’ve never read John Updike’s Couples is because, based on everything I’ve ever heard about it, I thought I would hate it. It is, in many ways, a hateful book–in every sense of that word–but I didn’t hate it. It exasperated and disgusted me, but I also found it compelling, vividly observed, and often beautifully written.
My problems with the book come from the characters, as conceived and presented by Updike. They are all portrayed crudely and simplistically, stereotypically: the Asians are sallow (if not yellow); the Blacks, while mainly non-existent, are sub-human when they do appear; women are not much more than a sum–or cipher–of their sexual parts (tits, ass, and cunt); and the Jews have hooked noses and pockmarked skin.
The character at the center of all this white hetero smug male cluelessness is Piet Hanema, married to the beautiful and implacable Angela and fucking Georgene, Foxy, Bea, and Carol. He is not a sizable or interesting enough character to support the book’s length and scope, which are overreaching. Most of the interesting things he thinks seem to be Updike’s ideas grafted inorganically upon the character, and he sinks below the surface of authorial weight.
I actually, and surprisingly, liked some of the women characters: both Angela, Piet’s wife, and Foxy, his (primary) mistress and second wife, are smart, funny, and refreshingly straight-forward and practical. They are both much too good for Piet.
Men and Cupid: A Reassessment of Homosexuality and of Men’s Sexual Life in General by Harold Martin (The Fortune Press, 1965)
This book, as its subtitle suggests, is an exploration of and explanation for (male) homosexuality written by an apparently crackpot layman and published during the interval between which the Wolfeden Report was submitted (1957) and its recommendations legally adopted (1967).
Martin proposes there are two distinct types of homosexuality: contingent/optional and positive/independent. The first includes men who seek sexual relief with other men only because sexual intercourse with a woman is not possible. The second includes men who have sex with men because they are physically disgusted by women and are naturally attracted to men. (He also proposes a third category, a sort of combination of the two: heterosexual men whose long-term exposure to their wives renders them impotent from lack of desire and who then turn to sex with men because it is novel and therefore stimulating.)
Martin does argue that homosexuality is not a disease and cannot be cured, that it is (in the second instance) an innate quality that can be found in any man, disregarding physical attributes and gender-stereotypical appearance. (He informs that although he is undoubtedly heterosexual, he has a slight, feminine build and a voice that is often mistaken as a woman’s on the telephone.) That is all well and good, but beyond that Martin proposes several theories that are rather absurd. He posits that there is a natural difference between genders that feminism wishes to negate, resulting in dominate women who are also by virtue of their smaller stature and softer bodies, incapable of become real adults (like men) but remain illogical, petulant, and selfish children all their lives. (One wonders about his poor wife, and their “happpy” marriage.) Because these childlike attributes of women are physically innate, the goals of feminism are doomed and dangerous. So this is why homosexuality is much more prevalent in the Western (European) world, where women are not properly subjugated as the inferior creatures they are.
Martin also suggests that Western Christian religion makes sex tabu and that men can not engage in it, especially during their sexual prime (late teens) when they are not yet married. The preponderance of men with enlarged prostates in the Western world is evidence of this: in other cultures men are sexually active throughout their lives and their prostates are regularly emptied (he doesn’t consider how masturbation fits into all of this–he appears to think that if men feel guilty about having sex, the idea of masturbation is simply too devastating to even contemplate). Therefore, all Western men become celibates with enlarge prostates.
His theories of the innate physical and mental immaturity of women and the cultural scourge of prostatitis don’t seem to have much bearing on his theories of homosexuality, but most of the book, and by far the most passionately argued passages, concern these two irrelevant subjects.
The only book I’ve read by Stella Gibbons is the creepily hilarious Cold Comfort Farm, so when I came across some of her other books I bought them and began with The Bachelor.
It’s a novel set in a country house just outside of London during WWII, or “the Nazi War,” as it is always referred to here. The house, Sunglades, is inhabited by Constance Fielding, her brother Kenneth, and their cousin Frances (“Frankie’) Burton. A third Fielding sibling, Joan, lives with her husband in London. The occupants of Sunglades are all unmarrried, in their 40s (Kenneth), 50s (Constance), and 60s (Frankie). Because their house is large and comfortable and a safe distance (23 miles) from London, it becomes a much-desired refuge for evacuees from the blitz, and the novel features four in particular: Betty Marten, a beautiful and jolly woman, a friend of the family’s (and once a particular friend of Kenneth’s–her refusal to marry him has thwarted his romantic life); Betty’s 27-year-old son, Richard, a tall and sensible intellectual and semi-invalid (lung problems); Vartouthi, an immigrant from a tiny made-up European country somewhere between Italy and Turkey and now occupied by Italians; and the elder Mr. Fielding, a gay roué of 78 whose involvement with night clubs and fast living has estranged him from his family for many years. Alicia Arkwright, a well-bred young woman and a neighbor of the Fieldings is also involved.
The plot, which spins around three or four romances amongst these characters, is funny and engaging (although over-extended at nearly 400 tight pages). The characters are all cleverly conceived and portrayed, some sympathetic, some endearingly ghastly. Miss Fielding is particularly entertaining–she finds fault with everyone and everything with a blithe hostility she thinks is humanitarian. And Vartouthi, the young foreigner in their midst, hired as maid-of-all-work, ends up running the household and stealing (almost) everyone’s heart. She receives two marriage proposals in the book, and accepts the second, from Kenneth, much to Miss Fielding’s chagrin. She (Vartouthi) is a unique and delightful character, refreshingly honest and free-spirited.
Half-way through I felt that things slowed down and that the book was much too long, but as I continued reading I liked it more and more and was sorry when it (finally) ended.
The Bachelors by Muriel Spark (J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1961)
An early novel–the fourth?–of Spark’s many novels, The Bachelors is set in London and revolves around two groups: one (mostly, or ostensibly, heterosexual) bachelors, the other a group of spiritualists, who conduct seances with a venal criminal as a medium. The plot centers upon a court case and trial that brings these two groups together in an entertaining way, and the novel has a large and varied cast of vividly eccentric characters.
One of these, Ronald Bridges, a graphologist and epileptic, is the decent moral center of the book, and endears himself to the reader and pretty much everyone around him.
My Own Unaided Work by Hermione Gingold (Werner, Laurie, 1952)
A collection of sketches, monologues, lyrics, and a short autobiography by the truly fabulous La Gingold.
Her uncanny intelligence and sly, original sense of humor are much evident in these souffle-like pieces, that are delicious but melt like spun sugar as one reads them.
Mr. Bridge by Evan S. Connell, Jr. (Picador, 1987; originally published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1969)
A companion volume to Mrs. Bridge (see below), published ten years later in 1969.
Mr. Bridge is a much less pleasing book than Mrs. Bridge, mostly because Mr. Bridge is a much less sympathetic character. And the book is a third longer than Mrs. Bridge, so one feels overexposed to Mr. Bridge, and grows tired of him long before the book ends. Many of the incidents related are repetitive and Mr. Bridge is impervious to just about everything that happens to him, maintaining self-control and small-mindedness and bullying confidence until the very end. It’s written in the same style as Mrs. Bridge, in brief, glancing chapters capturing specific moments and encounters, but it lacks Mrs. Bridge‘s bonsai-like exquisiteness–it’s somewhat lumpy and unpleasant.
