Conflict by Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson

Conflict (c.1926-27)
Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson (English, 1889-1946)
Drypoint, printed in red
34.9 x 26.1 cm.
Victoria & Albert Museum

 

Behind the Mirror by Robin Maugham

London : Longmans, 1955
Jacket design: John Minton

David Brent is a screenwriter for a film company based in London. The latest project about the life of Daphne Moore, a famous actress from the 1920s, has hit a snag. Norman Hartleigh, a former diplomat who was deeply involved with Daphne has ignored all correspondence from the firm regarding permission to depict him in the film. David journeys to Tanganyika (a British colonial territory that now makes up a portion of Tanzania) to secure Hartleigh's blessing.

Although it covers a significant amount of land, the fictional Aruna feels like a small town where rumors fly and everyone believes they know what everyone else is doing. Hartleigh is ostracized by the other residents for what they perceive as an inappropriate relationship with the young man, Bill Wayne, who lives with him. The colonists see the local residents as servants, not as equals so when Hartleigh moves an African girl into his home it creates another set of concerns for them.

While David negotiates permission from Hartleigh for the film, rumors are confirmed and secrets are revealed, endangering everyone. Hartleigh eventually reveals the truth of his relationship with Daphne Moore and their falling out, upending everything David thought he knew.

Bibliographies & Ratings: Cory (III); Garde (OTP, **); Mattachine Review (III); Young (2559/2560)

Matelot accoudé by Frans Masreel

Matelot accoudé (1929)
Frans Masreel (Flemish, 1889-1972)
Oil on canvas
100 x 81 cm

 

Aubade by Kenneth Martin

London : Chapman & Hall, 1957

Aubade is a heartfelt coming of age novel written when the author was just sixteen. Paul Anderson has just finished school and has taken a job at a tobacconist's shop for the summer before beginning university. His mother is insisting that he attend university although Paul really doesn't know what he wants to do. He spends some time with friends but often quarrels with them. He is lonely and seems to prefer his own company. 

One day, the young man Paul has named Gary (we later find that his name is John Knight) enters the tobacco shop. Paul had noticed him in church sometime earlier and had thought about what it might be like to be friends with him. Those overwhelming feelings of wanting to spend time with him initially go unclassified, but when they do start spending time together it begins to be clear there is mutual feeling and also what those feelings mean. The battle between one's own feelings and desires versus what one's parents or society expects is ever present as is a pervasive loneliness.

The writing is straightforward, almost blunt. It is easy to judge the authorial skill based on the author's age. To do so, though, would be unfair. The straightforward style is in keeping with Paul's desire to keep people at a distance. Many of the things he says are harsh and in many ways they serve to insure that he will remain lonely. He even says at one point that there is joy in misery. Early on in the novel, the author uses the poem, Black Marigolds, foreshadowing  the feelings of sadness related to remembering a first love. Later in the novel, Paul says he "want[s] to remember Gary, and be sad, always."

Black Marigolds is a poem originally written in Sanskrit a portion of which appeared in John Steinbeck's Cannery Row.

Bibliographies & Ratings: Cory (IV); Garde (Primary, **); Mattachine Review (IV); Young (2539,*)

Bibliographies & Ratings II: Gunn (British 59a)

Playwright Christopher Adams to Adapt Screenplay for Undiscovered LGBTQ Classic ‘Finistère’

Christopher Adams

 

Playwright Christopher Adams to Adapt Screenplay for Undiscovered LGBTQ Classic ‘Finistère’

By Matt Donnelly
Variety : April 20, 2022 12:52pm PT

 

"Playwright Christopher Adams has been tapped to pen a screenplay based on the novel “Finistère.” While not widely known, the novel is a groundbreaking early tale of a gay man who falls in love with his tennis instructor at a French boarding school in the 1920s. It was written by Fritz Peters, whose entire catalogue was recently acquired by Hirsch Giovanni Entertainment. ... Adams is a noted English playwright who recently adapted the limited series “Aubade” for FilmNation. That series is based on a controversial 1957 queer Northern Irish novel [by Kenneth Martin]."

David by Eric Gill

David (1926)
Eric Gill (English, 1882-1940)
Intaglio print on paper
111 x 70 mm
The Tate

Leopard in the Grass by Desmond Stewart

London : Euphorion, 1951

The setting for Leopard in the Grass is Cyropolis, Media in the years after the second World War. The British have relinquished control of the Middle-Eastern country to the native peoples but still have a significant presence in business and industry. 

John Stirling, a young British archaeologist has arrived in Cyropolis with the intention of working for the local government on archaeological digs. The locals however, think of an archaeologist as the thinnest euphemism for British agent.

John meets Sophie Abbas, a Jewish divorcée returning home from the United States and they quickly fall into a sexual relationship. While Sophie is looking for a relationship, John seems to enjoy the sex for what it is but isn't interested in attachment. Instead, he often thinks of the relationships he had with other boys during his school days. 

Owing to Britain's former colonization of the area, British citizens living in Cyropolis continue to hang together within their own enclave and within their own clubs. It becomes clear to John that he is expected to follow along.

When John finds himself in the middle of a political demonstration on the streets of Cyropolis, he is rescued by a young local and brought to his employer's car. John becomes friends with Q, the gay British artist who saved him. Q hasn't joined with the others in their clubs and has been ostracized because they believe he has 'gone native.' To be clear, it isn't the fact that Q is gay that is a problem for the other British citizens, for there are others who are as well, but it's his embrace of the local culture that seems to be the issue.

When Nimr, a Bedouin man who Q took in as a child (and seems to have had a sexual relationship with), returns after having been dismissed by Q in favor of a younger choice, Q, Sophie, and John find themselves in the middle of a drama that is both personal and illuminates the terrible consequences of colonialism.

Bibliographies & Ratings: Cory (III); Garde (OTP, a**); Mattachine Review (III); Young (3645)

Bibliographies & Ratings II: Gunn (British 45a)

Jerry (Jared French) by Paul Cadmus

Jerry (Jared French), 1931
Paul Cadmus (American, 1904-1999)
Oil on Canvas
Toledo Museum of Art

 

Riding by H. S. Cross

New York : Fox Books, 2008

As mentioned in an earlier post, Riding by H.S. Cross is an early version or draft of her novel, Grievous (2019). While Grievous tightens up the story and improves the writing, some of the original structure of Riding is unfortunately lost. The major headings of Lent, Easter, St. Stephen's (appearing at Trinity in Grievous), Summer, Michaelmas, and Christmas remain. The individual chapter titles have been dropped in favor of simple numbering. A nod to early boy's school fiction, the chapter titles suggest what is to happen in each chapter. Many early boy's school novels were originally issued serially in publications directed to school age boys and the individual chapter titles may be an artifact of this publication process. 

Below is the original table of contents from Riding. Grievous, has 57 chapters in six sections. Riding also has six sections but is comprised of 95 chapters and issued in two volumes. 

Riding : a novel, volume 1

ISBN: 978-0-6152-1366-8 — Fox Books 2008, 513p

Lent

They Longed for the Sheltering Sky

There Was a Book

Mr. Grieves Is Not Amused

Something to Remember

She Envied Her Own Pens

The Propagation of Knowledge

Cartomania

Forgive Our Foolish Ways

Eels, the West Wind, and People Like Us

The Boredom Is No Longer Exquisite

Why Does He Deserve It?

Night

Morning

Friend Indeed

Caveats

The Trial

Perfect Gifts

Triangulation

The Tower

The Doctor is In

That Hideous Recognition

The Chair Loft

Souls of Men

Easter

Passage

Curses

London

Zapped

The Channel

The Key

Paris

Mazes, Continental and Otherwise

Drought

The Weapons of Pacifists

Quicksand, With Beacons

St. Stephen's

Return

Winds of Change

I Write This Not to the Many, but to You

Code That Sets the Miles at Naught

Stratigraphy

Touch

Heartbeat, Heartburn, Heart Attack, Heartbreak

Pursuits, Intellectual and Otherwise

The Persistence of Memory

Orders of Magnitude

Patron's Day

The Exigencies of Time

The Cure

In Which the Geomaniac Ventures, and Is Lost

Progress

Pioneers

Riding : a novel, volume 2

ISBN: 978-0-615-26248-2 — Fox Books 2008, 550p

Summer

To Wake, as if From Dreaming

Irresistible

Messages, Direct and Indirect

The Quick and the Dead

Nothing Shall Be Impossible

The Lady From the Sea

Michaelmas

Rank by Rank

A World Gone Mad

Something in Their Midst

Hounded by His Adversary

Ely

Lamentation of Swans

Venture

Chariot of Fire

Experiences

The Contract

Hypnos and Son

Crime and Punishment

The Passage of Time Vexed Them

The Encircling Gloom

Orders of Magnitude, II

The Pillar of the Cloud

The World as We Know It

The World as It Has Known Itself

This Howling Insanity

Exeat

An Approximation of the Moon

Night, II

Another Gift

The Ninety-Second Day of Michaelmas Term

Keeper of a Hundred Secrets

A Kind of Mercy

The Coming Storm

Ice

As Bad as All That

What Girls Are Made Of

The Most Brutal of Punishments

Unfamiliar Sun

Christmas Tea

Christmas

The Future

The Present

The Past

Like the Wildness of the Sea

The Winters of Your Grief

And Christmas Comes Once More

Swimmer by John La Farge

Swimmer (1866)
John La Farge (American, 1835-1910)
Watercolor
32.5 × 28.2 cm (12 13/16 × 11 1/8 in.)
Yale University Art Gallery

 

Fritz Peters, Early LGBTQ Literary Icon, Coming to Screens and Bookshelves in New Rights Deal

Fritz Peters c.1965
Collection of Edward Field

Fritz Peters, Early LGBTQ Literary Icon, Coming to Screens and Bookshelves in New Rights Deal

By Matt Donnelly
Variety : February 23, 2022 12:32pm PT

"Peters’ most notable work was his second novel, “Finistére.” It is regarded as one of the first gay-centered novels to come out of the era not concerning WWII. It details the adolescence and homosexual encounters of its main character and is said to be inspired by Peters’ own life. Acclaimed by Vidal, it received an unheard of first-run printing of 350,000 copies, according to his estate.  It is also the first up for adaptation, with a screenwriter to be announced imminently."

Finistère by Fritz Peters

New York: Farrar, Straus, 1951

Finistère was promoted as a divorce novel—focusing on the detrimental effects of divorce on children. While that may have been the company line and no-doubt created an opening for larger acceptance of the work, it cannot be denied that the focus of the novel is a gay relationship—an adolescent's first love and his family's response to it. An odd sort of boarding school novel, the story of the tragedy of divorce, and a classic of gay literature, Finistère has appeared in more editions than any other fictional work by Fritz Peters.

Peters' second novel focuses on the tumultuous adolescence of Matthew Cameron. As Gore Vidal noted in his much quoted book review in The Saturday Review of Literature (Murder of Innocence, v.34:no.8, p.13, February 24, 1951), the first third of this book lays out the many betrayals experienced by young Matthew. The middle third lays out the story of Matthew's relationship with Michel, and the final third follows the rapid disintegration of Matthew's world. 

It is the summer of 1927. Thirteen-year-old Matthew's parents are divorcing and he and his mother are relocating to Paris. She has decided Matthew is too attached to her and to Scott Fletcher, a close friend of the family so Matthew is to be enrolled in the boarding school, St. Croix École des Garçons. Soon after Matthew's arrival at the school, André, a classmate, shares some dirty pictures with him and they become friends. The headmaster approves of them sharing a room and before long they are having a sexual relationship—a relationship about which Matthew feels quite guilty.

While with his family at the Christmas holiday, Matthew meets his mother's new 'friend', Paul Dumesnil. While Paul makes an effort to include him in conversations and activities, Matthew now feels like an outsider. As a condition of his parents divorce, Matthew isn't permitted to see his father until he reaches age 16. His father effectively disappeared from his life, and now he feels he is losing his mother as well. 

By the following fall 1928, his mother marries Paul. Scott, whom Matthew has idolized for years, has become engaged to Françoise. Scott, who had always been available to him is now focused on his relationship with Françoise and seems to have no time for him. Françoise seems to be the only adult who recognizes Matthew's attachment to Scott for what it is.

After a summer with his family, Matthew returns to school in the fall of 1929, to discover that André has gone, having moved to a different school. Alone and without support from any of his relationships, he feels lost. Michel Garnier, a new athletic coach, has joined the school and upon the boys' first outing for a swim in the Seine, Matthew swims too far and seems to give in to the current pulling him under. The relationship with Michel begins after he saves the drowning Matthew and helps to nurse him back to health. Their relationship brings Matthew back to life, feeling true love for the first time without all of the guilt he felt about his relationship with André. However, Matthew is innocent and this idealized first love can't insulate him from the cruelty of the world or of the adults in his life. 

It is no surprise that the ending of a gay novel from this time is likely to end tragically—most (but not all) did. As might be surmised by the many editions over the years, Finistère was popular among gay men despite the ending. The central message of the novel isn't that gay people are bad, or in this case, the problem isn't that Matthew is gay. The problem is that the adults in Matthew's life are incapable of supporting him. 

TOP ROW FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: [1] London : Victor Gollanz, 1951   [2] New York : Signet/NAL, 1952   [3] Fin de la Tierra, Spanish translation by A. S. Glanz, Buenos Aires : Editorial Dintel, 1953   [4] The World at Twilight, New York : Lancer Books, 1964
[5] New York : Lancer Books, 1966   [6] London : Victor Gollanz, 1966.
⸻
BOTTOM ROW FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: [7] New York : Lancer Books, 1968   [8] London : Panther, 1969   [9] Los Angeles : Seeker
Press, 1985   [10] New York : Plume/NAL, 1986   [11] Vancouver : Arsenal Pulp Press, 2006.

Matthew's Happy Ending

Tobias Schneebaum (1922-2005), in his introduction to the 2003 re-release of his 1979 work Wild Man (University of Wisconsin Press), discusses the reception of his early work's gay themes and the ways in which authors, such as Gore Vidal and Fritz Peters conformed to expectations of publishers of the time. In 1965, a new edition of the 1948 novel The City and the Pillar was released "in order to return to it the strength, the temperament and the animus that Vidal had wanted in the first place." Schneebaum further states that Fritz Peters was forced by his editor to change his original happy ending for Finistère to "an ending that was tragic, to conform with contemporary ideas concerning what interested the public and what was obscene." 

Fritz Peters correcting galley proofs of his second novel, Finistère
November 27, 1950  [cat 3119-0007]
Private Collection

As Fritz Peter's novels were published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, the business files related to his work are included in the Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. collection at the Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library. When I spent the day with the collection on December 14, 2002, I found that the collection did not include any manuscript material nor was there any correspondence that suggested a back-and-forth regarding the ending of Finistère. The files about this novel were limited to a copy of the original contract, lengthy and  ongoing correspondence regarding the republication of Finistère by publishers other than FSG, and correspondence with reviewers and prospective reviewers of Finistère.

Columbia University Libraries announced in the Our Growing Collections column in Columbia Library Columns (v.13:no.2 1964:February, p.55) that "Mr. Fritz Peters has presented the manuscript of his novel, Finistère, published in New York in 1951." Interestingly it was listed under the section for medical library gifts. It is now housed in Columbia's Rare Book and Manuscript Library within the collection, General Manuscripts, 1789-2013. The type-written manuscript with minor changes in ink follows the published work, including the tragic ending.

If there was an original happy ending to Finistère, it appears to have been lost to history. What might Matthew's life have looked like, had Fritz Peters been free of the cultural and moral restrictions of mid-twentieth century American publishing?

Bibliographies & Ratings: Cory (IV); Garde (Primary, **); Mattachine Review (IV); Young (3019/3020,*)

Bibliographies & Ratings II: Austen (174); Gunn (American 54a); Levin (121)

Ynglingen och döden (Young Man with Death) by Gösta Adrian-Nilsson (GAN)

Ynglingen och döden = Young Man with Death (1908)
Gösta Adrian-Nilsson (GAN) (Swedish, 1884-1965)
Gouache and watercolor on cardboard
56.5 x 38 cm (22.2 x 15 in.)

 

Coup de Grâce by Marguerite Yourcenar

New York : Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1957

Not released in English until 1957—after the success of Memoirs of Hadrian—the original French edition of Coup de Grâce had been published in 1939. The novel opens with our main character Erick von Lhomond, recently injured during the Spanish Civil War, returning to Germany by way of Italy. Among the other mercenaries, he begins to tell his story of war, going all the way back to the Bolshevik Revolution.

Although he had trained to join the German military during World War I, he was still too young to fight before the war ended. His father, having died at Verdun, left the family in debt. Between his need to fight and his family's need for money, he decides to join German forces fighting the Bolsheviks in Kurland (Courland) in what is modern-day Latvia. Erick had spent the happiest times of his youth there with relatives in the home of the Count of Reval, which now served as a barracks for the fighters. Erick's childhood friend Conrad fights alongside him and Conrad's sister, Sophie helps to care for all of the soldiers. 

Only a few years have passed since the happiness of his youth and Erick easily reconnects with Conrad. What he doesn't expect is the more mature attentions of Sophie. He continuously deflects her attentions, which become quite overt. He seems unwilling to be honest about the reasons for his dismissal of her advances—his feelings for Conrad. His youth means that he doesn't really know what he feels. He refers to his 'indispensable vice' and how it 'is much less the love for boys, than for solitude.' In the end, his time in that house, both as a child, and as a soldier was never about games or war, it was always about Conrad.

Told only from Erick's perspective, we hear about his inner feelings and only the perceived feelings of those around him. His tendency toward solitude, largely brought on by the uncertainty of a future in war-worn Europe, kept him from sharing his feelings with those around him. It's a heartbreaking story of lost youth and lost love.

Bibliographies & Ratings: Cory (III); Garde (OTP, c/d*); Mattachine Review (III); Young (4273)

Bibliographies & Ratings II: none