The Evenings : A Winter's Tale by Gerard Reve

London : Pushkin Press, 2017

"It was still dark, in the early morning hours of the twenty-second of December 1946..."

The Evenings (De Avonden in the original Dutch) was  published in 1947 when the author was just shy of 24 years old. It describes the final 10 evenings of 1946 in suburban Amsterdam from the perspective of  23-year-old Frits van Egters. The focus, as the title suggests, is on the evenings. The days are largely ignored as Frits is at work, a job that he describes as follows:

"I work in an office. I take cards out of a file. Once I have taken them out, I put them back in again. That is it."

Frits lives with his parents and spends much of his time avoiding the simmering conflict between them. He spends time with friends and seems to want a real connection with others but instinctively sabotages the possibility through his use of caustic humor. Others aren't sure how to interpret the humor, some ignore it, others join in.

While it isn't a perfect analogy, there's something of a Holden Caulfield in Frits, something of a lost soul wondering through town trying to find himself and avoiding his own feelings. While others seem to be getting back to some semblance of normal after World War II, Frits seems lost.

The Evenings isn't a gay novel per se, but Frits' interaction with the petty criminal Maurits offers the slightest suggestion that Maurits is gay and maybe that's part of why Frits puts the most effort into avoiding him throughout the novel. As well, the general feeling of being out of place that is so present in the novel speaks strongly to the gay experience.

A Little Boy is Safely Lost in Chicago by Fritz Peters

Chicago Tribune, December 4, 1949, H12

"With an expression compounded of fear, surprise, wonder and interest, the little boy searched the faces in the crowds hurrying past him, glanced occasionally upwards to be certain that he was under the big Marshall Field clock, and returned from time to time the questioning smiles of a few sympathetic passers-by. The important thing was that he was lost. The edge of excitement and fear was removed from his heart as well as his face when his mother found him, and the experience remained in his mind colored with faint regret and the knowledge that it was not entirely genuine."

Thus begins Fritz Peter's clearest memory of his early years in Chicago; of his mother taking him and his brother Tom shopping at the Marshall Field's toy department before Christmas and of her telling them to meet her under the big clock at the corner of State and Randolph streets "if you should get lost."

This reminiscence was published on December 4, 1949, 69 years ago today shortly after the release of his very successful novel, The World Next Door.

Illustration for Richard Wagner's Tannhauser by Willy Pogany

Illustration (c.1921)
Willy Pogany (Hungarian, 1882-1955)
From Tannhauser : A Dramatic Poem by Richard Wagner

Queer Saint : The Cultured Life of Peter Watson by Adrian Clark & Jeremy Dronfield

London : John Blake Publishing Ltd., 2015

I recently found this on my shelf. I purchased it in late 2015 but had put it aside. I should never have waited so long to read it! Clark and Dronfield have crafted an amazing biography that I read as voraciously as an intensely plotted novel. It includes everybody who was anybody of the time.

After Peter Watson finished at Eton, and having significant wealth, he traveled in Europe and the Americas, mostly with Cecil Beaton. Theirs was a solid friendship but Cecil always hoped for more. In the years leading up to World War II, like most gay artists and writers in Europe, Peter spent time in Berlin with the boys in the clubs à la Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories.

He had a home in Paris with an extensive art collection, including a particularly risqué work by Pavel Tchelitchew titled Bathers. The central nude figure seen from behind and below was modeled on Charles Henri Ford, best known for his novel written with Parker Tyler, The Young and the Evil. With the invasion of Paris by the Nazis, Peter was forced to flee and his art eventually fell victim to Nazi plunder.

Having returned to Britain for the duration of the war, Peter started a new literary and arts journal called Horizon. with Cyril Connolly and Stephen Spender. It became well known for promoting works by British artists and writers at a time when the country really needed it. Horizon was also a particularly important vehicle for promoting George Orwell and his essays on politics and the war.

After the war, Peter focused on British artists, particularly young up-and-coming ones, helping to launch the careers of Francis Bacon, John Craxton, and Lucian Freud, among others. He supported many artists with homes, studios and living expenses well into their careers. He was also instrumental and doggedly devoted to the creation of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.

The artists he was supporting weren't the only young men he supported. He had a long-standing romantic relationship with the now infamous Denham Fouts as well as Waldemar Hanson and Norman Fowler who was with Peter at the time of his mysterious death by drowning.

Peter Watson appeared as a character in two dishy novels, Lord Berners' The Girls of Radcliff Hall published in a private edition in 1932 where all of the characters are based on gay men but appear as lesbians in an all girls boarding school, and Michael Nelson's 1958 novel A Room in Chelsea Square originally published anonymously and taking aim at the relationships around Horizon (Peter Watson, Cyril Connolly, and Stephen Spender).

Narcissus by Lucien Freud

Narcissus (1948)
Lucian Freud (German, English, 1922-2011)
Ink on paper
21 x 13.7 cm
Tate, London

Los Angeles Review of Books: In Youth is Suffering: Denton Welch and the Literature of Convalescence

Denton Welch (1935)
Gerald Mackenzie Leet (English, 1913-1998)

Reblogged from Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB):

In Youth is Suffering: Denton Welch and the Literature of Convalescence
By Daniel Felsenthal

"In 1935, the writer and artist Denton Welch, then a 20-year-old student at Goldsmiths’ College in London, was struck by a car while biking to his aunt’s house in Surrey. It was the beginning of a bank-holiday weekend, and if his autobiographical fiction can be taken as fact, Welch was unused to the amount of traffic on the road. The vehicle crushed his legs, leaving him catheterized and sporadically impotent, with ultimately fatal injuries to his spine and kidneys. Before he died at the age of 33, Welch drafted three novels, Maiden Voyage (1943), In Youth Is Pleasure (1944), and the posthumously published A Voice Through a Cloud (1950), along with numerous stories and poems. He also produced oil paintings, watercolors, and a refurbished dollhouse now in the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum of Childhood. His biography places him in a lineage of doomed literary geniuses, one that includes Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers, whose premature awareness of their own mortality gave their artistic visions an askew acuteness."