Arctic Summer by Damon Galgut (Europa Editions, 2014)

I was engaged by this book and read it with sustained interest, but felt that there was something perplexing and unsatisfying at its core, perhaps due to the constraints of its hybrid nature.  Arctic Summer is a novel based upon E. M. Forster’s personal life, mostly concerning itself with two of his curious relationships with men: the first with a cultured and educated Indian named Masood, and the second with a humble and indigent Egyptian named Mohamed.  It also chronicles Forster’s decade-long struggle to write A Passage to India.  All of this is very interesting and Galgut does a fine job creating a fictionalized narrative from Foster’s biographical details, but there is nevertheless something a bit flat and ersatz about the resulting book.  It lacks both the (supposed) veracity of biography and the animation and energy of good fiction, and leaves the reader feeling in abeyance, with nothing really real, or really imagined, to cleave to.

I also felt that Galgut was unsure about how he felt about the unbalanced and unsatisfying aspects of both these relationships.  There is much talk of love and affection, but neither of his lovers offer Morgan any genuine or reciprocal physical or sexual affection, and both men eventually marry women whom they seem to love in every possible way, which leaves very little affection, or even attention, for Morgan.  Yet Galgut seems to share, or at least endorse, Forster’s acceptance of this, although there are moments when Galgut’s Forster clearly sees  the limits and ambivalence of both these relationships, so perhaps the portrait is more complex than these comments imply.

The Blind Bow-Boy by Carl Van Vechten (Knopf, 1923)

An amusing, risque novel set in Manhattan in the early 1920s.  Howard Prewet’s mother died in childbirth, a fact that displeased his father, who was also disappointed that Howard was not born a girl.  So Harold is paternally disowned and exiled to his Aunt Sadi’s farm in Connecticut, where he is raised in the benign and unenlightening  company of women and animals.  He’s sent off to a college, and when he graduates, his father, who he has never met, summons him to New York City and tells him that he has arranged to support Harold for a year, allowing him to do whatever he wants.  He provides his son with an apartment on East 18th Street, an enabling English butler named Drains, and a dissolute, amoral tutor whose job is it to expose Harold to the worldly vices his bucolic childhood sheltered him from.  Mr. Prewet Sr. made a fortune in the “cloak and suit” trade, a business that Harold loathes and refuses to enter because while at college he was teased for his expensive and fastidious wardrobe.

Paul Moody is Howard’s tutor, and introduces the boy to his charming, eccentric, wealthy group of friends, which  include the Duke of Middlebottom, a British peer slumming in New York City who dresses in a sailor’s costume and carries an umbrella (something a real sailor would never do); Bunny (Titus) Hugg, an avante garde composer of very short, atonal pieces; and Campaspe Lorillard, a beautiful woman with exquisite taste and remarkable cleverness and empathy.  She, particularly, oversees and guides Howard’s sentimental education, which involves an unsuccessful seduction by a nubile 17-year-old faux-ex-snake charmer named Zimbule O’Grady, and a brief but disastrous marriage to Campaspe’s boring and conventional sister Alice Blake.

Campaspe is a delightful and original character.  She’s married to an unattractive but wealthy man she does not love and ignores, and has two sons she does love but also ignores.  She lives a life of indolence and luxury and invests more energy in other people’s lives than in her own.  Although she appears to be happy and content with the life she has fashioned for herself, a poignant rueful sadness permeates it.  For an ethereal character fashioned out of lace and silk and crepe de chine, she possesses a haunting realness — more than any of the other characters.

Van Vechten’s giddy style and tone are modeled on Firbank, who is directly evoked in these pages, but Van Vechten’s world, though gilded and bejeweled, is more realistic and recognizable than Firbank’s.  Van Vechten indulges his penchant for art, design and fashion by paying an inordinate amount of very detailed attention to books, music, paintings, clothes, and interior design.  The character’s costumes are all described in exhaustive detail (from their hats to their shoes and slippers), as are the beautiful and opulent rooms (and gardens) they inhabit.

I wasn’t sure what to make of the ending, where Campaspe discovers Howard and the Duke of Middlebottom, an avowed sexual deviant, traveling together to Europe aboard the same boat she is on.  I suppose that Howard, having tasted and despised conventional married life, is fleeing even further into eccentricity and debauchery.  Good for him.

An interesting, unique, delightfully vivid and well-written book.

Thin Ice by Compton Mackenzie (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1957)

I’ve had this book on my shelf for many years, acquiring it for its purported “homosexual” content.  It’s an interesting but frustrating read — a self-serving and supposedly neutral depiction of a homosexual man’s life as observed by his straight best friend, who is in many ways his worst enemy. 

Our unlikable narrator, George Gaymer (!) (nicknamed and usually referred to as “Geegee”) meets Henry Fortescue at Oxford at the turn of the (20th) century, and is charmed by the handsome and intelligent boy.  Henry is a woman hater and a boy lover, predilections that interfere with is political ambitions.  For many years, while he actively pursues a political career, he renounces his sexual life, but when he’s looked over for a cabinet post and feels that his political life is essentially finished, he reverts to his risky pursuit of boys.  This is discouraged by both his friend Geegee and his sanctimonious sister-in-law.  They perfectly illustrate England’s attitude to homosexuality in the 20th century — as long as it is done discreetly and correctly, it is tolerated.  But any behavior that occurs outside of these very narrow margins is condemned, mocked, and punished.  Any overtly queer behavior is ridiculed and abhorred.  Geegee, who seems to be a closeted old maid, was briefly married, but after his young wife conveniently dies in a car crash, he leads a celibate life that is never questioned or explored.  Very British in that way.  A vividly described trip to the Seychelles is the high point of this dreary, judgemental, unpleasant book.

The Dog Star by Donald Windham (Doubleday, 1950)

Stone in the Hourglass  by Donald Windham (Sandy Campbell, 1981)

drawing of Donald Windham by Paul Cadmus

Blackie Pride, a handsome and charismatic 15-year-old boy, runs away from a “farm school” for delinquent boys after his close friend and role model Whitie kills himself.  Blackie returns to his fractured family in what seems lto be 1930s Atlanta, and the book follows him through the dog days of summer as he tries, and fails, to find a place for himself in this world.

He has an affair with Mable, a young woman who lives in a hotel room, and crashes with his older sister Pearl, who lives alone with her baby, having left her husband (as did Mabel).  Blackie’s younger brother Caleb is farmed out to live with two wealthy elderly ladies for the opportunities such an arrangement might provide him.  The bonds that hold families together in this book are elastic at best and non-existent at worst.  Blackie lives a strangely adult life, vacillating between tenderness and savagery.  He gambles, and drinks, and beats Mabel, and is beaten up himself, and the book ends with him shooting himself in the head with a stolen pistol, just as his friend Whitie did.

Windham writes evocatively and the world of book is sensual and alive.  The characters are also vibrantly evoked, and the reader feels completely suspended in a complex fictional world.  At times I had trouble reconciling Blackie’s adult behavior with his young age, and at times the writing feels strained and unsuccessfully abstract.  The book strives for a literary poetical tone it does not need: the writing is best when it is clean and direct.  Windham liks to coin compound words: glassjeweled, orangedark, largeleaved, yellowgreen.

In its own quiet way, a beautiful and redolent book.

Subsequently, I tried reading Windham’s later novel Stones in the Hourglass (privately published by Sandy Campbell), but didn’t get very far.  It’s a novel about the gallery world in New York City in the 1960s and full of unlikable and unbelievable characters.  In this case, Windham’s  grudges and prejudices prevent him from creating a welcoming fictional world, and I put the book down with a feeling of exasperation after about 50 pages.

 

The Cage by Dan Billany and David Dowie (Longman, Green & Co., 1949)

The Cage was mentioned by Eric Newby in When The Snow Comes, They Will Take You Away as book exploring love between men in Italian POW camps, and it does explore that phenomenon, but in a rather strange and disappointing way.  The Cage was written by two British POWs  while they were imprisoned in Italian camps during WWI.  They left the manuscript behind when they were freed by the Italians, but were presumed to be recaptured by the Germans; they disappeared and their “fates are [still] unknown.”  The book mostly details life in the camp, a life of deprivation and containment that results in boredom and depression.  A significant part of the book is dedicated to an ill-fated love affair of one man for another.  The beloved is straight and mostly irritated and repulsed by his admirer’s dogged affection and attention, which is compounded by the proximity in which the two men exist, and the lack of any other diversions or stimulus.  The soldier who suffers this love is truly pathetic in his self-absorption and dimness; he aggravates the reader as much as he does the poor soldier who patiently endures his annoying devotion.

The book is composed as a collaborative collage of sketches, letters, diary excerpts, dialogues, and other bits and pieces.  An interesting and worthwhile read.

photo of Dan Billany