AS A SUPERFAN of Neil Bartlett—I’ve raved about four of his works in these pages—I recently went back to his first novel, Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall (1992), reissued in 2017. In the new introduction, Bartlett acknowledges his debt to “two of my favourite collector’s items in the pre-history of British gay fiction, Rodney Garland’s The Heart in Exile (1953) and the screenplay for the film Victim (1961).” I’d seen the film (Dirk Bogarde suffers, fabulously), but didn’t know the novel, and wondered what a seventy-year-old novel might have to say to me. Fortunately, the always valiant Valancourt Books reissued it in 2014, with a splendid introduction by none other than Bartlett himself.
Rodney Garland was the pseudonym for Adam Martin de Hegedus, born in Hungary in 1906. He moved to London in 1939, where he wrote several books. The Heart in Exile was his only success, going through multiple printings in Britain and the U.S. It received respectable if predictably condescending reviews. According to The Observer: “Its detached picture of barren tragic love and desire … can arouse no disgust but only a deep pity coupled with a new understanding.” It is assumed that his death in 1958 was a suicide.
Some of the chapters slowly nudge the plot forward, but the real point of the novel consists in the chapters of Tony’s conversations with gay men who knew Julian. As they discuss Julian, they also discuss homosexuality, and Tony uses his authority as a psychiatrist to analyze and explain the nature of “the invert,” his preferred term, and of “the underground” that the inverts inhabit. We get disquisitions, forcefully delivered but of dubious merit, on “the queer pub” as opposed to “the queer club,” which is “improper without being naughty,” on why “inversion has increased everywhere in the last twenty years,” on how “the biggest enemy of the invert is the feminine man who becomes a homo-Puritan,” on how “the homo is more inclined to use sex as a means of escape from the adversity of life than a normal person, who is likely instead to escape into something else: religion, drink, or sport and so on.”
But it’s not just homosexuality in general that they explore. Prodded by Julian’s working-class mystery man, Tony has a particular focus. The men he talks with are all middle- or even upper-class: a stock broker, a member of Parliament, a playwright, a Lord. And, as one says: “We don’t like people like ourselves. We don’t want anybody who shares our standards. I mean educated, middle-class and so on. In fact, we want the very opposite. We want the primitive, the uneducated, the tough.”
So the real mystery isn’t why Julian killed himself. The explanation, when it comes, isn’t particularly interesting. The other, deeper mystery is why inverts are attracted to working-class men and, even more mysteriously, why working-class men sometimes reciprocate. The first has a simple answer: inverts like such men because they’re virile and “sometimes just because they’re dirty. Dirt may act as a symbol of physical reality from which the middle-class invert is divorced.”
As for why working-class men respond, Tony has plenty of theories. He notes that “The war had made most members of the underground profiteers in an emotional bargain basement,” because vulnerable young men far from home became available. He adds: “My private guess on Freudian lines is that they have fewer anal fears than the upper classes.” There’s a lot about working-class solidarity between “mates” and about “that primitive type of man which, like our ancestors, made no rigid distinction between the sexes, but followed his instincts of lust and affection.” When we actually hear from a working-class man, he simply says: “if a working man likes someone, he’d do anything for him, wouldn’t he?”
Tony firmly believes that the working-class man’s normality must be protected, even if he responds to an invert’s attention. He admonishes such a man: “You’re a normal person who’s been infected. You must get it out of your system. Being queer’s no good for you.” It is his credo: “The only moral scruple in my emotional life was against corrupting someone who was normal, especially if he were young. … I felt I had no right to provide the decisive push towards an anchorage which made life on the whole more miserable than the so-called normal attitude.”
Tony also turns his attention, and his contempt, to the inverts who populate the space between his own class and the working class. One of the most interesting, and off-putting, aspects of the novel is this relentless obsession with class. Tony pigeonholes everyone by class. At a party, “one could pick out the boys from the lesser residential suburbs … who were ashamed of the semi-detached, the fumed oak, the thwarted aspirations.” In a bar, he recognizes a man he knew in the past: “The upper part of his face grinned, but the lower, with the weak chin and the peevish, shopgirl lips, betrayed the fear, the uneasiness, the many rebuffs against which education at a cheap public school was inadequate armour, and eight hundred a year no compensation.” The man is introduced for the sole purpose of being thus witheringly dismissed. Almost every description of person or place consigns its object to a particular, and inferior, social class. The language is admirably precise, intelligent, and vigorous, but always nasty. There’s no joy in it, no redeeming queeniness.
Garland does craft a happy ending for the heart-exiled psychiatrist. This isn’t a spoiler. It’s obvious from the moment on the third page when we see Terry, his housemate, “in his dark blue singlet, busy peeling potatoes.” Terry, Tony tells us, likes housework and “in that respect he was decidedly feminine, but attractively and touchingly so—not a bit like those tragic parodies of women: the little, tripping pansies with high-pitched voices, whom I understood, but detested all the same.” The doctor lands the working-class boyfriend, butch and domestic, that Julian couldn’t. It isn’t believable in the least.
So, seventy years later, is there a reason to read this odd novel narrated by an unpleasant man? Bartlett thinks so. And, even though everything I’ve said has been negative, I would also recommend the experience, precisely because of the narrator. I doubt that there’s much distance between author and narrator here: there’s no ironic undercutting of the unpleasantness, not even any awareness of how unpleasant he is. The result is that Garland, behind his pseudonym, makes himself more naked than he realizes. He stands completely exposed for our examination, in his pomposity, his snobbishness, his dubious explanations and theories, his profound unhappiness. It is instructive, and oddly moving, to see what an intelligent gay man in 1953 made of his world and his place in it, even if he gets so much of it so wrong.
Michael Schwartz is an associate editor for this magazine.
