*Bachelor's Hall by Reginald Underwood (The Fortune Press, 1937)

 

Bachelor's Hall is one of the many queer books the Fortune Press published in the first half of the 20th-century.  It's an odd, singular book because its ideas about homosexuality seem very strange and dated, as does the world of the book, ostensibly set in the 1920s, after the Great War.  It seems much more like a 19th-century world -- perhaps because it is set entirely in a small, rural English village that seems years behind the times.

Adrian Byfield is our interesting hero.  He is a bastard or perhaps the legitimate product of his mother's first, brief, secret marriage, but grows up believing he shares a father with his two younger brothers, although he shares nothing else with them: from an early age he is disgusted with the idea of physical love, hates women, and longs for a "pure" romantic friendship with a male friend.  He finally finds this with Ronald, a sweet lovely boy a few years younger than Adrian.  They love and admire one another, but eventually it becomes clear that Ronald's love isn't as pure as Adrian's: he has carnal desires for his beloved friend, which disgust Adrian, whose cruel abandonment drives poor Ronald to suicide.  The book ends with Adrian, devastated by the loss of his friend, perhaps understanding that love can possibly be physically manifested and expressed.

An odd subplot has Adrian being pursued by a local woman who is ten years older.  When she finally realizes that Adrian is not the marrying (or fucking) type, she gets pregnant by an evil married doctor and secretly gives birth prematurely to a ghoulishly deformed baby she kills and throws down an old well.

Asexuality seems to be the ideal in this book, and procreative heterosexual sex is seen as being animalistic and crude.  Of course Adrian's fear and loathing of all kinds of sexual intimacy seems to be a product of his total homosexual repression.