More on the Age of Jim
To the Editor:
This is in reply to Richard Berrong’s letter in the July-August 2010 issue. I’m glad that my review of Axel Nissen’s book, Manly Love (in the March-April issue) encouraged him to read Huckleberry Finn, and that he found it to be a masterpiece, as do I. Berrong wrote: “It’s true that there’s a very strong bond of affection between Jim and Huck. However, I saw no sexual overtones to it.” I agree, and am sure Axel Nissen would too. After all, the subtitle of his book is “Romantic Friendship in American Fiction.” On the question of Jim’s age, Berrong writes: “Lauritsen is technically correct that ‘Jim’s age is never given explicitly.’” On the basis of an exchange between Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Berrong concludes that Jim is “considerably older than his early twenties,” which is how old I imagined him to be. He notes that, in a scene in which Tom and Huck discuss digging Jim out of a shed where’s he’s being imprisoned, Tom points out that this could take years, to which Huck replies: “Jim’s too old to be dug out with a case knife. He won’t last.” As I read Huck’s statement, it is humorous hyperbole. Tom and Huck are only about fourteen years old, and might regard even a man in his twenties as “old.” At any rate, there is ambiguity here. As I wrote in my review: “Illustrators and readers over the last century have imagined Jim’s age at anywhere from his teens to about forty.”
John Lauritsen, Boston
A Lesson in SoCal Geography
To the Editor:
Philip Gambone’s “The People I Met, Mostly in Cities” (July-August 2010 issue) refers to the “suburban L.A. neighborhood, Silver Lake,” which his interview subject, filmmaker Arthur Dong, “describes in glowing terms.”
As I write from my 1921 Silver Lake/Echo Park bungalow just five minutes from downtown and the older East L.A., where Sunset Boulevard becomes Avenida Cesar Chavez (once named Brooklyn Avenue), I hear constant police helicopter surveillance, and live with gang activity, shootings most recently at a medical marijuana dispensary, unlicensed street-food vendors, and loose dogs whose owners take no care to rein them in. Or I take a drive on my stretch of Sunset Boulevard, just two blocks from my house. As a white gay male, I am also a willful minority in a Spanish-speaking majority community of Latinos, Filipinos, and Asians of many origins. My partner and I are involved in our local public elementary school even though we don’t have kids.
It’s true that there are plenty of nice old houses here, especially the expensive homes in what used to be called the “Swish Alps” on the hilly, western edge of this area. Compared to Alphabet City, even my more humble slice of Silver Lake seems bucolic; but this is not a suburb. We are the northern edge of the inner city, and the 1992 riots erupted here also, ten minutes north of the University of Southern California in South Central. To call Silver Lake (where the L.A. gay movement was formed) a suburb is like calling the East or even West Village a suburb of Manhattan.
When my house was built, Hollywood Boulevard was a barely paved road and the entire West Side of L.A., not to mention the Valley, were for the most part orchards. When my partner and I moved to Silver Lake 25 years ago, it was all “gangs and gays,” leading to the now-controversial but vibrant annual Sunset Junction street fair. Now Silver Lake and its neighbor Echo Park are hipster destinations for the new breed of “gay daddies” and straight breeders, frequenting hip music clubs and shops that no one could have imagined a quarter century ago, with gangs still around and those of us gays who didn’t die of AIDS, getting older.
That doesn’t make Silver Lake a suburb, no matter how pretty with gumdrop hills and mountain views it is. We’re still smack in the center of the old L.A., the irony being that Westsiders moving here refer to our ’hood as the Eastside, which really only exists just east of Silver Lake across the Los Angeles River (yes, there is one).
Ty Geltmaker, Los Angeles
Giving Davis Her Due
To the Editor:
Cassandra Langer’s review of Richard Schickel and George Perry’s Bette Davis: Larger Than Life in the July-August 2010 issue is not only well-written but also right on target. Starting with Schickel’s introduction, Langer rightly points that he “damn[s]Davis with faint praise.” What’s more, this introduction is basically a rewrite of what Schickel offered in his previous book, Matinée Idylls (1999). To top it all off, he produces virtually no critical analysis of Davis’ work in her over 100 films. It was simply another compilation.
I was lucky enough to have my 2002 book, Bette Davis: The Performances That Made Her Great, reviewed in the G&LR. So you can surmise my interest in this Schickel–Perry book. I was genuinely looking forward to an original analysis of her career and life. What a disappointment—but not altogether a surprise. Several years ago, during all the celebrations of 100 years of movies, Schickel was one of the critics on a TV show to share a list of their top ten movie stars of all time. Among the guests on the show was Meryl Streep. When it emerged that not one of the ten stars on Schickel’s list was a woman, Streep questioned this omission. When he asked her what female star she would include, Streep advanced the name of Bette Davis. He replied simply, “Well, why not you?” never acknowledging the validity of Streep’s suggestion.
Langer’s review was exceedingly fair to this new book, which had, by my count, at least 45 errors of various kinds, including many incorrect picture credits (at least one of which Langer passes on in her review). If you’d like to read what I believe is a new look at Davis’ career and her major work during her halcyon days, I’d recommend David Thomson’s Bette Davis. It is a small book in the Great Movie Stars series. But he writes with real feeling, insight, and originality.
Peter V. McNally, Buffalo, NY
What Did We Learn about India?
To the Editor:
I am not a chronic complainer or letter-writer. But I am uncommonly disappointed in your introduction to the issue billed as “The Persistence of Malice.”
Your vagueness about India is frustrating. A. “population pressures.” The context does not help; India’s history is different from China’s. What pressures? To have babies? Not to have babies? Poverty? Laws? Colonial heritage? B. “other demographic shifts.” What other? What shifts? The Partition? If you mean religious [ones], spell it out. I do not know what you mean. Are you sure this sentence has meaning? Have you helped me to understand India?
Paul H. Stacy, Bloomfield, CT
Editor’s Reply:
It’s true that my references to India—and China, and perhaps other countries—were a tad on the telegraphic side. The reason is that this brief introduction was drawn from a much longer piece on the roots of homophobia that I’ve been working on forever, so in trying to hit the high points, I’m afraid I didn’t offer enough of a foundation.
First, let me provide all of the relevant passage for the sake of context: “Both India and China are liberalizing, too, the former having thrown out its colonial-era anti-gay law, the latter by quietly allowing gay organizations and meeting places to take root. … India’s growing tolerance may also be a pragmatic response to population pressures and other demographic shifts.”
What happened in India is that last year (on July 2, 2009) the Delhi High Court struck down Section 377, India’s severe anti-sodomy law—a 19th-century holdover from the British Raj—thereby
legalizing private consensual sex for all adult couples, gay or straight. The second comment refers to the thesis that I could only begin to develop in the ensuing paragraph, namely that homophobia is at root a subset of the norm of “pronatalism,” one of the many rules and restrictions that societies impose on their members to encourage procreation. Following this logic, a lifting of homophobic laws could be seen as a practical response to a social reality that both India and China happen to be facing: a large surplus of males relative to females now reaching marriage age. In India, this surplus is due to a cultural preference for boys and the widespread use of ultrasound to determine a fetus’s sex and terminate female pregnancies. It would seem to be in both countries’ best interest to find outlets for this potentially volatile population, so making it easier for gay men to form relationships could be a matter of sound social policy dressed up in a moral argument.
Even this is probably too brief an explanation to unpack my earlier comments, but I hope that helps a little.
Corrections
In the July-August 2010 issue, the short bio accompanying Brian Stachowiak’s review of David A. B. Murray’s Homophobias was inaccurate. It should have read as follows: “Brian Stachowiak is a gay activist and an active member of the Institute for Contemporary Uranian Psychoanalysis.”
In the May-June 2010 issue, the feature article titled “Unearthing the ‘Knights of the Clock’” stated incorrectly that Edward Sagarin was the pseudonym for Donald Webster Cory. In fact, Edward Sagarin was his real name and he used the name Donald Webster Cory—an homage to André Gide’s book Corydon—as a penname in several books on homosexuality.
