extreme legibility

*The Harness Room by L. P. Hartley (Hamish Hamilton, 1971)

 

This intense, short novel reminded me very much of Joycelyn Brook's The Scapegoat.  Both novels are about a young, sensitive, passive boy who is entrusted to a macho military man in order to be masculinized.  And both transformations end up killing the boy as a result of homosexual attraction -- mostly repressed in The Scapegoat but overtly expressed in this book.

The boy's father, a military man and a long-time widower, marries a much-younger woman from an old but insolvent family.  While they honeymoon for a month, the father enlists his handsome, masculine and bisexual chauffeur to make man of his son.  The chauffeur obliges by seducing the boy while teaching him boxing and bodybuilding calisthenics.  When the father and his bride return, the boy suspects that his step-mother's affections and interest are directed at him rather than his father, and decides he must run away with the chauffeur to avoid a tragedy.  But before that can be achieved they have a boxing match in order for the father to witness his son's newly acquired manliness.  The chauffeur intends to hold back and allow the boy to triumph, but trips over a hole in the rug and accidentally deals the boy a lethal blow.

The brevity of the book prohibits any of the characters or themes to be successfully developed, so The Harness Room seems slight and sensational, and consequently disappointing,

 

(left to right) Sir Maurice Bowra, Sylvester Govett Gates and Hartley,

by Lady Ottoline Morrell

*Why We Never Danced the Charleston by Harlan Greene (St. Martin's/Marek, 1984)

 

A southern gothic tragic novel about a group of young gay men in Charleston.  They form the "Sons of Wisteria Society" and congregate nightly in Peacock Alley, a gay bar owned and managed by a dwarf.  They are all attracted to the preternaturally masculine and beautiful Hirsh Hess, whose tormented inability to accept his degenerate sexuality leads to inevitable violence and death.

Greene, in his first novel, writes with sensual ripeness about the dark, haunted world of Charleston, where so much is hidden, repressed or ignored.  Three of the men, including the narrator and Hess, work in the museum, which is run by Miss Wragg, a no-nonsense Yankee who seems intrigued by the gay boys surrounding her but also manipulates them.

I wasn't entirely or consistently convinced by this world and these characters -- Greene presents it all with a gothic voluptuousness  that is entertaining but often unsubtle and distorting.

 

*N***** Heaven by Carl Van Vechten (Knopf, 1927)

 

This unfortunately titled novel, written by a white man, is set entirely among the Black community in Harlem, a world Van Vechten experienced and felt he knew well enough to write about (his friend, Langston  Hughes, wrote the many spirituals that are quoted often throughout the book).  It was extremely interesting to read this book, which would never be published today.

Van Vechten's characters are wealthy, well-educated, sophisticated, and have established their own jazz-age world in Harlem because they are excluded from the downtown white world.  The plot revolves around a doomed love affair between Mary, a well-brought up librarian, and B, a handsome young man just graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, who wants to be a writer, but because of his race can only find employment as an elevator operator.  He drops the good Mary when he is taken up by a beautiful, wealthy, and sensual woman who tires of him rather quickly, with disastrous consequences.

An odd, problematic book that illuminates (and most probably misrepresents) a fascinating world that one wishes one could experiences less circuitously.

 

*The Ant Colony by Francis King (Constable, 1991)

 

Yet another book about a community of British ex-patriots living in Italy, this time in Florence sometime after WWII -- probably the early 50s, but published, and written (one supposes) in 1991.

The book follows Iris Crediton and Jack Prentis, two very young Brits, who have arrived in Florence to each English for a year at a Language Institute.  Iris is pretty and titled,  has lovely clothes and is socially poised; Jack is middle-class, handsome, has a very limited wardrobe, and is shy but charming.  They are both embraced (literally and figuratively) by the much-older -- some rather ancient -- British expats who, for one reason or another (homosexuality included) have remade their lives in more tolerant (and affordable) Italy.

Iris lodges in a pensione and Jack boards with the school's sub-director, Giles, who is unhappily married to an unhappy woman, Margot, their two children, Prunella and Piers, and Maria, their attractive maid.  Both Iris and Jack get involved romantically, sexually, and/or professionally with many members of the expat and local community, including a hunchbacked Italian poet, a Fascist Countess, a wealthy alcoholic woman, a homosexual man, a lesbian mourning the loss of her life partner.

Francis King is an engaging writer, and The Ant Colony is vividly charactered and located.  The book is episodic and not strongly plotted, and consequently not particularly potent or coherent.  But it is warm and gentle, and reading it is much like taking a pleasant but forgettable Italian holiday.

Indiana by George Sand

 

Indiana is a novel about marriage but Sand's wide-ranging interests and intelligence inform the book, and substantially broaden and deepen the canvas.  

Indiana is 16 years old when she moves from the Ile de Bourbon in the Indian Ocean to France, and marries a much older man, who is an ex-soldier and successful factory owner -- he has money but no class or sophistication.  The match is loveless, and Indiana falls in love with a rakish, titled neighbor who, while seducing Indiana, has an affair with Noun, Indiana's Creole maid.  Noun tragically kills herself when she becomes pregnant.  The plot is operatic and melodramatic, and neither Indiana or Reynaldo, her lover, are very sympathetic or interesting.  But Sand's writing is vivid and vigorous, and the frequent philosophical asides about society and marriage are modern and engagingly expressed.

An unusual book, difficult to place in the chronology of literature, as it is many ways old-fashioned and romantic and in others quite modern and bold.