Gay Novels of Britain, Ireland and the
Commonwealth, 1881-1981: A Reader’s Guide
by Drewey Wayne Gunn
McFarland. 204 pages, $45.
THIS BOOK is a bona fide curiosity—a volume of 125 short surveys of major, minor, and often totally neglected works of British, Irish, and Commonwealth gay male fiction, published in the hundred years immediately preceding the advent of AIDS. Author Drewey Wayne Gunn—a retired professor of English from Texas with eleven other books to his name—faced with the need for a starting point, has chosen to identify the founding of the genre as the 1881 publication of Jack Saul’s notorious The Sins of the City of the Plain.
In fact, Gunn’s brief introductory rationale for this starting point may be the least persuasive thing in the book. First he justifies discounting all the 18th-century novels in which seemingly gay—or, in the period, more often unmanly or “gender inappropriate”—figures play only a walk-on role. But he also must argue that works of Gothic fiction such as Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), and above all William Beckford’s Vathek (1786, not 1816, as Gunn oddly claims) feature only “closeted characters.” Inevitably, these authors used allusion, symbolism, and subtext to confer proto-gay or -queer qualities upon their protagonists. But so too did the “late romantic” fin de siècle novelists that figure early on in Gunn’s survey: Walter Pater (Marius the Epicurean, 1886) and Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1890). The real elephant in the Victorian room is Tory politician and author Benjamin Disraeli, whose novels indulge a succession of chief protagonists based on the author himself, with confessedly Byronic temperaments—including sexual ambiguity, to put it mildly.
Saul’s book—a work of porn narrated by an “unabashedly homosexual protagonist”—thus announces the chief virtue of Gunn’s study. He’s not interested in distinctions between high and low culture or “literary” versus genre fiction, correctly seeing in the distinction a very recent attempt to enclose an exclusive—and always sexually conservative—concept of what “good novels” should be. Still, it is unfortunate that he excludes not only travel writing—an important means of self-expression for so many gay and sexually ambivalent authors across the last century—and memoirs (leading to the exclusion of Quentin Crisp’s The Naked Civil Servant and George Melly’s Rum, Bum and Concertina), but also the many works that straddle fiction and nonfiction.
Notable casualties include Lord Berners (Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson, also a composer), Denton Welch, and J. R. Ackerley, each entirely missing. Berners’s most impressive writing is found in his memoirs First Childhood (1934) and A Distant Prospect (1945)—but there is a pair of outré novels, too, and a recently reprinted roman à clef, The Girls of Radcliff Hall (1937), featuring a disguised Cecil Beaton as an impressionable female adolescent. Welch’s published works were presented variously as fiction and nonfiction but form a coherent œuvre; and one can hardly complain of coyness in the case of a novel he titled In Youth Is Pleasure (1944). Ackerley is an equally regrettable omission, as We Think the World of You (1960) remains an important work, especially when considered alongside his screamingly camp account of a stay in India, Hindoo Holiday (1932), and the memoirs My Dog Tulip (1956) and My Father and Myself (1968). Another postwar writer who’s missing is the playwright Joe Orton, whose novelistic collaborations with Kenneth Halliwell are now published—though one, Head to Toe, had appeared as early as 1971.
The consideration of only “pure” fiction restricts Gunn in his discussion of such writers as Christopher Isherwood, Rupert Croft-Cooke, Robin Maugham, Jocelyn Brooke, Forrest Reid, and Paul Bailey. Perversely, Gunn allows in T. C. Worsley’s Flannelled Fool (1967), which, subtitled A Slice of a Life in the Thirties, was clearly identified as nonfiction. And there is one unforgivable lacuna: though four of E. F. Benson’s novels of adolescence are discussed (including the David Blaize novels but not the two Colin ones), his matchless novel sequence Mapp and Lucia (1920-39) is not.
That said, no compilation is ever fully comprehensive, and Gunn has, to his credit, uncovered many rarely remembered titles. In each case, he provides a plot summary, details of its critical reception and publication history, and, where possible, some biographical details. And there is even a sense of reward in Gunn’s idiosyncrasies in selection and scope. The overall impression of his study is akin to that of an outmoded but attractive literary form, the “Commonplace Book,” which both W. H. Auden and E. M. Forster, in fact, made into important literary works.
Auden and Forster lead us to Oxford and Cambridge, respectively. It seems unlikely that it can be proven—as Gunn argues—that the “majority” of the authors he considers “attended public schools, and then went on to Cambridge or Oxford,” given how many other universities there are in the UK and how many of the biographies deviate from this narrative. But Gunn’s point is well-taken: there is a remarkable preponderance of public school and “Oxbridge” storylines. The representation of authentic working-class lives—with the single exception of James Hanley’s semi-autobiographical seafaring novel Boy (1931)—really begins in the 1950s. Concurrent with such “kitchen-sink dramas” as Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey (1958) were Gillian Freeman’s The Leather Boys (1961), and Ackerley’s We Think the World of You. Forster, of course, had introduced a working-class man in Maurice (written in the 1910s but only published in 1971) through the character of Alec Scudder.
Some of these authors have been rediscovered, and deservedly so. Forrest Reid is a case in point, a writer held in high regard by Forster, and several of whose books were remarkably forthright for the period, including Following Darkness (1912), concerning a satanically-minded adolescent boy’s emerging sexuality, and 1905’s very pagan The Garden God, which was dedicated to Henry James, much to James’ chagrin. Gunn only has extensive space for a couple of Reid’s books; and C. H. B. Kitchin—a find of the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press in the 1920s—gets short shrift. Only two of Kitchin’s dozen or so novels are considered. Even then, his masterpiece The Book of Life (1960) does not impress Gunn. (Some of Kitchin’s interwar works, such as 1938’s The Birthday Party and 1931’s The Sensitive One, have recently become available in new editions.)
Another recovered writer is G. F. Green, whose novel of adolescence, In the Making (1952), contains subtleties that Gunn seems not to have noticed. Happily, though, Green’s other lost classic, the Ceylon-based The Power of Sergeant Streater (1972), gets Gunn’s seal of approval. Other authors Gunn persuasively argues for include figures of the so-called British diaspora. There is Irish-born John Broderick (1924-89), author of at least five gay-themed novels, well-known and praised in France; two forgotten South African purveyors of challenging (and risky) Apartheid-era cross-racial romances, Michael Power (Shadow Game, 1972) and John McIntosh (Blood Brothers, 1965); and Frank Sargeson (1903-82), much acclaimed in his native New Zealand both for his memoirs and his D. H. Lawrence-inspired short fiction.
A few authors may warrant their obscurity, but their book titles alone would have raised an eyebrow in a secondhand bookstore. Who, one wonders, sprang for Collinson’s Cupid’s Crescent (1973), G. F. Green’s Street Boy, Swinging London (1972), or Christopher Dilke’s The Rotten Apple (1968)? The gay pulp market never emerged in Great Britain or Ireland as it did in the U.S. in the 1950s and ’60s, and these titles might only have been bought at considerable expense. A small but still surprising number went on to make it onto the big screen, though invariably in less sexually overt guises, including The Leather Boys and John Rae’s The Custard Boys (1960), a sort of gay-inflected Lord of the Flies that was filmed twice (and also an excellent play, recently revived in London).
And then there are the curiosities. The four 1970s pederastic novels by C. J. Bradbury Robinson, starting with A Crocodile of Choirboys (1970), were too frank by half for British publishers but found a successful outlet through a Californian pornographer. Angus Heriot (1927-64) is a forgotten novelist—except by many devotees of Covent Garden or the Met for his study The Castrati in Opera (1956). Straight writers and women come through with unexpected strength—including Iris Murdoch, as expected, but also Susan Hill, V. S. Naipaul, Wole Soyinka, and Hunter Davies.
The sheer longevity of some of these pioneers from pre-liberation days is striking. Gillian Freeman (b.1921) is still publishing novels; Ulster-born Kenneth Martin (b.1939)—author at the age of eighteen of the moving, fictionalized account of a summer romance, Aubade (1957)—left Northern Ireland for London, and then retrained as a research psychologist, settling in San Francisco, where he still lives and writes fiction. Bisexual food writer and novelist Colin Spencer (b.1933)—author of Anarchists in Love (1963) and, in 2013, of the memoir Backing into the Light: My Father’s Son—thrives, and can legitimately claim to be the author of the sole study of flatulence here mentioned, Reports from Behind (1984).
Of course, the history of British gay fiction cannot truly be compartmentalized so much, or concluded so neatly, especially when we get into more recent times not considered in Gunn’s timeline. Anglophone fiction since 1981 was not utterly transformed by the epidemic, as Gunn claims, but partly opened out by it, as well as by many other social and political developments affecting gay lives. Alan Hollinghurst’s five novels in particular are all to some degree historical fictions, even when set in the present day—engaging especially with the legacy of the three novelists the author studied as a postgraduate: Ronald Firbank, L. P. Hartley, and Forster. Just last year, South African writer Damon Galgut disinterred Forster’s Indian life in the novel Arctic Summer in inventive form, just as several contemporary novelists had done with Henry James (Colm Tóibín’s The Master and David Lodge’s Author, Author, both 2004).
Gunn’s book nevertheless stands as a formidable achievement, an unmatched archaeology of the many tentative steps, overlooked one-offs, and even transformative fledgling efforts in gay male fiction. It is a pleasure to read—even if one might sometimes dissent—and will fully reward any reader’s investment. Gunn’s book is a wonderful summary of the byways as well as the highways of a century’s non-American but Anglophone gay male fiction, and it is now for others to take the hint and write the fully realized master narrative on the subject.
Richard Canning is editor of Ronald Firbank’s novel Vainglory (Penguin Classics, 2012) and is completing a critical biography of Firbank for publication in 2016.
