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).
This is the second book by Martyn Goff that I have recently read, and I enjoyed it. Like The Youngest Director, it is about a young gay man in London, probably set in the mid 1950s.
Laurie (Laurence) our mostly unheroic hero, is an artistically talented young man who works as a bookseller in a London bookshop (apparently working in a bookstore was once considered a decent and respectable job, if not career). He lives by himself in a tiny basement in Chelsea. During the War he was a member of the RAF. Now, he works at the store, paints and sketches, and hangs out with Bohemians at the artsy club he belongs to. His closest friend is a young woman named Sue, who is attending art school. She is beginning to figure out that the reason their long and intimate friendship has never developed into a romance is because Laurie prefers boys to girls.
As the book begins Laurie meets Tom Beeson, a large, handsome, and sexy Guardsman. Tom is uneducated and uncultured, but he is a proud and friendly young man who would like to better his circumstances. Sending a possible patron in Laurie, Tom flirts with him, leading Laurie who, despite a short failed romance with another RAF pilot, has never managed to find a true companion, to believe that Tom might be the one. But Laurie makes the mistake of introducing Tom to Sue, who quickly pounces on the handsome soldier and is soon married to the man Laurie loves.
The inevitable demise of Tom and Sue’s marriage and Laurie’s tangential involvement plays out over two years. A third of the book is set in Florence, where Laurie goes on a disastrous holiday with his employer and companion. Laurie is a weak, thwarted and mostly unlikeable character and there are many sad and disturbing moments in this book. Like The Youngest Director, much of the tension and suspense surrounds Laurie’s fears of being outed and loosing his job, family, and friends. He considers his sexuality a natural anomaly that is nevertheless a serious character flaw. And it seems that, at least in the world of this book, gay men who are upper-class and cultured cannot be sexually compatible, as they all seem to be sexually interested in only rough trade or young boys. Laurie’s older companion, who he lives with for two years, suggests that they continue living together and seek sexual excitement and satisfaction elsewhere. Laurie, still enthralled with Tom, says no.
Fabulous jacket illustration and design by John Minton
Act of Darkness by Francis King (Hutchinson, 1983)
Act of Darkness is set in a Hill Station in northern India where a wealthy Anglo-Indian family spend the hot summer months during the twilightof the Raj. Gandhi is on the move and the natives are turning mutinous. Late one night some terrorists break into the home, abduct the young son, slit his throat, and throw his body into an outdoor latrine, where it is found the following morning.
At least that is what appears to have happened, but over the remaining two hundred pages we discover — through a series of sly twists and gradual revelations — that the boy’s murderer was a member of the family, and several other family members were complicit. The reverberations of this horrific crime continue to affect the entire family over the rest of their lives.
King has written an interesting and suspensful novel that is cleverly plotted, elegantly written, and psychologically complex. That the plot functions by misleading the reader by withholding information is somewhat bothersome, but my irritation was almost completely alleviated by the books compensating strengths (and the fact that I was guilty of this exact narrative crime in my novel Andorra).
Eleanor is a curious novel that chronicles the early life of its heroine, Eleanor Carty, who is born illegitimate in 1905 and raised by two spinster sisters who run a home for children born out of wedlock in a London suburb. She grows into a beautiful young woman and talented pianist, and at 17 makes a disastrous marriage to David Ashken, a brilliant but brutal violinist. She manages to escape from his abuse and eventually divorce him, and moves to America, where she becomes an actress in touring companies of Broadway plays. But after a few years the death of one of her Auntys returns her to London, where she falls in love with a handsome and talented actor who is unfortunately 35 years older than she — an age difference that forces him to leave her. Heartbroken, she once again moves to America, this time living in Santa Barbara in a cottage on the estate of Virginia Heim, a millionaire heiress, who is kind and affectionate and sponsors Eleanor as she resumes her study of the piano, which leads to a career of being two of a four-handed piano duo. She is courted by a beautiful Scottish nobleman who she does not love but marries for security and returns with him to England.
Eleanor is an appealing creation: beautiful, talented, intelligent, honest, independent, strong-willed. Her story is interesting and original and Fane’s writing is succinct and elegant. It reminded me a little bit of Penelope Gilliat’s oddly brilliant and unusual books. I’d like to learn more about Fane, and read more of his work. I remember loving his first book, Morning, an incandescent memoir about early childhood.
Ron Starr (nee Stansky — his Jewish father changed the name for “professional” reasons) grows up in a sort of fake Leave-It-To-Beaver home in upstate New York in the 1950s. His father is an ineffectual and defeated lawyer, his mother is a pretentious hysteric, and both and his older brother, Lenny, are homosexual.
Lenny, who is dark and semitic, is less able, or interested, in hiding his sexuality and is banished from the family when he’s discovered having sex with his high school friend. Ron, a golden boy, learning the value of discretion, keeps his queerness hidden. In college he discovers an interest and ability in playwrighting and moves to New York City, where he falls in with a bohemian theater crowd. But his play gets worse and worse the more he rewrites it, and he finally gives up on his dream of Broadway fame and fortune. He begins selling life insurance, which, thanks to his confidence and charm, he excels at, and is soon managing a team of salesmen, married to a secretary, and the father of a daughter.
But of course his homosexual urges persist and he soon sets up a young lover in a Greenwich Village apartment where he spends about half his time. He begins drinking and misbehaving in various ways that threaten his career and his marriage, but when he is offered a promotion to management he cannot resist the lures and comforts of a straight life and renounces. his true nature.
Ron is crudely conceived and written but does afford an interesting and entertaining, if skewed, look at midcentury queer life in middle America.
A beautiful, devastating short novel by an author I increasingly admire.
Isa Panopoulis is a wealthy, beautiful, supremely elegant and twice-married (and twice-widowed) elderly Englishwoman traveling with her companion and heir, her niece Flora, in Africa.
The entire novel takes place on a single day when the ship they are cruising on stops at an island off the coast of Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique). Isa and Flora go ashore along with Martin, a kind but penniless English young man who is returning to his struggling farm in the interior, and Humphrey Arbuthnot, a middle-aged English gentleman who knew and admired Mrs. Panopoulis when they were both younger.
Mrs. Panopoulis’ heart is failing; the heat onshore is debilitatingly and she grows progressively weaker during the long tiring day. But she succeeds in her secret mission to arrange an engagement between Martin and Flora, thus guaranteeing Flora’s happiness and future. It’s a generous act that concludes her mostly selfish and trivial life, and Godden’s honest depiction of the flawed yet charming Mrs. Panopoulis is engaging and admirable. It’s unusual to encounter an elderly character who, though failing physically, is nevertheless bracingly autonomous.
A gentle, yet surprisingly prickly and affecting book, beautifully written. And in a gorgeously-produced Knopf edition with a stunning jacket and design by George Salter.
The Sheltered Life by Ellen Glasgow (Doubleday Doran, 1932)
I had vaguely heard of this author but didn’t know much about her life and work. I read about The Sheltered Life somewhere — I think on a blog about books written by women — and have had it on my shelf for a couple of years. I’m glad I read it, for it’s a beautifully written book about a well-off and socially prominent family living in Virginia (Richmond, I think, although it is called Queensbury in the book) in the first two decades of the twentieth century.
The first part is set in 1906, and after a short impressionistic interlude, the third part is set in 1916. In this formal way, as well as other stylistic and texturous ways, the book resembles Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Both books are sharply bifurcated by time and follow the internal lives of many characters within a family and small community of friends. And Glasgow’s assured, intelligent, and lyrical writing often reminded me of Woolf’s.
At the heart of The Sheltered Life is a tragic romance between a young girl and an older man. Jenny Blair Archbald is 9 years old in the first section and about to turn 18 in the third; as both a young girl and as a young woman she has been powerfully charmed by George Songbird, a handsome neighbor who is married to Eva Birdsong. Eva is a beautiful and charismatic women whom everyone adores, including George, although that does not stop him from being chronically unfaithful and thereby destroying the woman he so dearly loves. Eva Birdsong is a wonderful character — a supreme creation. Jenny Blair, along with her grandfather, her widowed mother, and her two aunts, who all live together down the street from the Birdsongs in a once-genteel but quickly fading neighborhood, observe the disintegration of the Birdsongs’ marriage, and Jennie Blair’s flirtatious infatuation with George, which he is unable to resist, hastens its tragic demise.
The rapidly changing world of the South, becoming less genteel and stratified in the wake of the Civil War and the advent of the Industrial Revolution, is deftly suggested throughout the book. Glasgow creates a world that is richly detailed and sensually evoked. The book is longer than it needs to be and would have benefitted by a tighter editorial vision, but it’s a rich and complex novel of wisdom and compassion. I’m not surprised that Glasgow, a very fine writer, would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1941 for her novel In This Our Life.
Helmet of Flesh by Scott Symons (Dutton/NAL, 1986)
People (or at least people in books I read) seem to go to Morocco to misbehave and/or fall apart, and York, the Canadian hero of this book, does both. He leaves his partner John and their quiet life in a village in Newfoundland and travels to Marrakesh, where he falls in with a very gay and dissolute group of expatriots and visitors who are taking full advantage of the readily available men and boys offering (or selling) themselves for sex. York makes a dangerous and debauched journey out over the Atlas Mountains into the Sahara, which ends in Suddenly-Last-Summer violence and mystery. Back in Marrakesh, York takes shelter in a queer hotel populated exclusively, it seems, by eccentrics and degenerates, has a scary visit to a sadistic sheik’s isolated castle, and pursues an affair with a decent and beautiful young Moroccan man, who he heartlessly (yet somehow poignantly) abandons when he decides to return to Canada.
Symon’s writing is ambitious and intelligent, if sometimes chaotic and puzzling, but his imagistic and impressionistic prose hits more often than it misses. This book doesn’t quite hang together or amount to anything entire, and includes a fairly dreadful flashback to York’s life back in quaint Newfoundland, but it’s filled with captivating scenes and amusing and engaging characters,
I made it 2/3 of the way through this intentionally silly novel, a far-fetched thriller/adventure story about two middle-aged gay men. Bizarre (and unbelievable) circumstances thrust them out of their quiet life in a village rectory into the world of decadent nightclubs and international terrorists. The writing is breezy but it lacks the brilliant British zaniness to allow it to levitate and consistently entertain — thus my premature exit.
This is a novel based upon the lives of Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds, two Victorian men who collaborated on the book Sexual Inversion, which attempted to destigmatize and decriminalize male homosexuality by placing it in a historical context and detailing case histories of homosexual men. Addington is a homosexual who has married and produced three daughters and hides behind this shield of heteronormative domesticity, destroying both himself and his long-suffering wife in the process. Ellis, who seems to be only sexually excited by women urinating, is married to a lesbian writer and feminist, who is living with her female lover. Theirs is not a happy marriage.
The novel, which follows the two men in alternating chapters, is set in the few years the men spend collaborating on the book and the few years after it is published in the wake of the Oscar Wilde scandal. A bookseller is arrested for selling the “obscene” book, and the resulting court case destroys both men and their marriages.
The book is cleverly conceived and vividly imagined. I read it with much pleasure and engagement, although I found much of the writing oddly inexact and estranging, as if Crewe was trying to be inventive and poetic and more often than not failing. A less ambitious, more straight- (no pun intended) forward style would have made the book even more affecting and effective.
The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher (Knopf, 2008)
I had read and enjoyed King of the Badgers (another inscrutable title) by Hensher many years ago, and remember thinking that it was amusing and somewhat diffuse and inconsequential. I felt much the same about The Northern Clemency.
Like King of the Badgers,The Northern Clemency is a big book (600 pages), a saga that follows two families in Sheffield from the late 70s into the late 90s, in jumps of five to ten years, chronicling the lives of all the family members, particularly the wives/mothers and the children (one family has 3 children, the other has 2). It touches rather obliquely on socio-political issues like the miner’s strike and the rise of Margaret Thatcher, but politics is always subverted to the exigencies of the character’s personal life.
While evoked in great and authentic detail, none of the lives are particularly unique or interesting. Hensher writes adroitly about everyday life and minor disturbances, and the stakes and subsequent drama seem rather low for a novel of this scope. I read it with flagging enthusiasm, and while I think Hensher is accomplished, I don’t think his novels are brilliant or noteworthy (that is an observation more than a criticism, for I did enjoy reading this book and felt sympathetically engaged with its world and its characters).
