*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