IN A SPECIAL ISSUE of this magazine, dated November–December 2014, eight novels were nominated for the distinction of being the “first gay novel.” Many of the usual suspects were on the list (The Picture of Dorian Gray, Maurice, The Well of Loneliness, etc.), but a noteworthy novel from 1919, Bertram Cope’s Year, was not among them. In truth, it’s not hard to see why this groundbreaking novel has failed to achieve a lasting place in the gay canon. It would not be the novel of choice for members of the gay male counterpart to Oprah’s Book Club. Nor is it likely to be recommended to a young gay man in the belief that it would inspire him to affirm his nascent sexuality openly and proudly, or to raise his political consciousness.
I first read Henry Blake Fuller’s novel in 1998, when the Quality Paperback Book Club reprinted the Turtle Press’s edition of that year in its Triangle Classics series. I was instantly impressed, but few of my gay friends shared my enthusiasm for this neglected masterpiece. This state of neglect is a continuation of its initial reception in 1919. Unable to find a New York publisher who would accept it, Fuller was forced to have it privately printed in Chicago, where he lived all of his life. Disappointed by the paltry sales and uncomprehending reviews, he burned the manuscript together with the unsold copies, and the novel was virtually forgotten until it was reprinted eight decades later. Since then, the novel has received little attention from academics and has been virtually ignored in the gay world, although in 2000 Fuller was inducted posthumously into the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame.
For many readers today, the novel’s tepid treatment of the gay experience, particularly sex, will seem outdated. The nude bathing scene certainly won’t elicit erotic recollections of the paintings of English artist Henry Scott Tuke (1858–1929). “The novel treads gently around the edge of the erotic,” says Andrew Solomon in his afterword to the 1998 reprinting. “For readers responsive to the uninhibited fiction of Edmund White, Dale Peck, David Leavitt and others,” observed Joel Connaroe in the New York Times Book Review, “Fuller’s approach to sensuality will seem almost comically prim.” Nor does the novel shout “gay liberation” from the rooftops, or even from the closet, whose door is only slightly ajar. None of the gay characters—there are three and probably four—exhibits, or even intimates, a post-Stonewall consciousness of his sexual orientation or confronts the challenges of living as an openly gay person, difficult as that would have been in 1919. In a 1970 essay on Fuller in The New Yorker, Edmund Wilson even claimed that the novel was not really about homosexuality at all.
So, there are admittedly a lot of obstacles for today’s readers today to overcome if they want to approach Bertram Cope’s Year. However, I would maintain that these obstacles are not intrinsic to the novel but result from certain post-Stonewall assumptions and preconceptions that readers have brought to the concept “gay novel.” The reigning paradigm for evaluating the importance of a modern gay novel is succinctly stated by Don Gorton in his essay on E. M. Forster’s Maurice in the “first gay novel” issue of The G&LR: “Maurice is the prototypical gay-affirming, coming-of-age novel. … The theme of Maurice can be described as essentially the search for a compatible social construct by which the protagonist can understand himself and go on to self-actualization. … The book’s publication in 1971 brought it to the attention of a newly awakened audience that could find in it a vision for actualizing the dreams of gay liberation.” Judged according to that standard, Bertram Cope’s Year will inevitably be found unsatisfying and even politically suspect.
If we abandon the preconception that Bertram Cope’s Year is a coming-of-age novel that could provide “a vision for actualizing the dreams of gay liberation,” we can better appreciate what is so striking about a novel written in 1919: the fact that the two gay characters, Bertram Cope and his boyfriend Arthur Lemoyne, have already accepted their sexuality before the novel begins, and they appear to be entirely comfortable with it. When Bertram Cope arrives in the small college town of Churchton for a year as an English instructor and graduate student, he has been in a relationship with Arthur for close to a year, and there’s no evidence in the narrative that their sexuality has ever been an issue for them. There are no indications of angst, shame, or self-hatred. As Andrew Solomon observed in his afterword: “Arthur and Bertram do not seem to find any aspect of their relationship peculiar; they never ponder on it as exclusionary, illegal, or morally suspect.” After they have dealt with the threat posed to their relationship by Bertram’s unintended engagement, the happy couple is able to return to their earlier bliss: “They spent ten minutes [on a walk]in the clear winter air. As Cope, on their return, stopped to put his latch-key to use, Lemoyne impulsively threw an arm across his shoulder. ‘Everything is all right, now,’ he said in a tone of high gratification; and Urania, through the whole width of her starry firmament, looked down kindly upon a happier household.” The allusion to Urania is particularly significant. “Uranian” was a term that was first introduced by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in the 1860s to refer to homosexual men. It was later adopted by such English writers as Edward Carpenter and John Addington Symonds.
But if Bertram’s Cope’s Year is not a coming-of age novel about a gay man coming to terms with his sexual identity and the challenge of affirming that identity in a hostile society, then what kind of novel is it? It is essentially a comic novel. In fact, it is in my view the first comic novel to deal with the problems of a happy, well-adjusted gay couple trying to live as such in society—in this case a parochial Midwestern college town. This community is doing its utmost to find a wife for Cope, who in turn is doing his utmost, albeit with comic incompetence, to stay happily “unmarried” to his boyfriend.
Bertram Cope’s Year is clearly indebted to the conventions of romantic comedy and the comedy of manners rather than to the tradition of the bildungsroman or coming-of-age novel. (It’s worth recalling that, in addition to being a novelist, poet, and essayist, Fuller was also a playwright. His 1896 play At Saint Judas’s, boldly published only one year after Oscar Wilde’s trials, is widely recognized as the first American play on a homosexual theme.) Not surprisingly, then, there are numerous references to the theater and acting in the novel. Arthur is an actor who plays a female role (in full drag!) in the college dramatic society’s production of The Antics of Arabella. Bertram, who is considering writing his MA thesis on Shakespeare, is named after the hero of All’s Well That Ends Well, and his sister Rosalys is confused by one of the characters with Rosalind of As You Like It. (Either of those titles would make a fitting subtitle for Bertram Cope’s Year.)
The novel’s comic plot hinges on the fact that the heterosexual characters are unaware of Bertram’s homosexuality, although the two older gay characters, one of whom is infatuated with Cope, certainly are. Bertram’s life becomes complicated when he finds himself pressured into an engagement with a woman after he is falsely credited with saving her life in a boating accident (she actually saves his life!). Arthur arrives from Winnebago, Wisconsin, where the two met the previous year, to rescue his imperiled and befuddled boyfriend from a life of heterosexual marriage in staid and parochial Churchton. (The name of the town is carefully chosen.)
This unconventional comic plot reverses the standard plot of romantic comedy, which typically focuses on a pair of (heterosexual) lovers whose union is thwarted by a blocking character, typically the heroine’s father or guardian, whose objections are finally overcome, allowing the happy couple to proceed to the hymeneal altar. In Fuller’s clever and subversive reworking of this formula, the (male) lovers are already together when the action begins, and their continued happiness is threatened by the machinations of Churchton’s preeminent socialite, Medora Phillips, who is cast in the role of the blocking character as she seeks among her protégés a suitable wife for Churchton’s newest eligible bachelor. (Medora is a literary descendant of Wilde’s Lady Bracknell. Fuller’s “light, bright, and sparkling” novel is heavily indebted in style and form to Wilde’s comedies of manners.)
Bertram Cope’s Year is the first novel to portray a gay man’s successful resistance to the pressures of a repressive and conformist society trying to enforce its norms. It is also one of the wittiest of gay novels, and its innovative form is perfectly adapted to its comically subversive treatment of what in 1919 was still a taboo subject. For its ingenious fusion of comic form and subversive messaging, it deserves greater recognition as a “first” in English literature. Had it been made into a film, the ideal scriptwriter and director would have been the Billy Wilder of Some Like It Hot and The Apartment. If you’ve never read it, a rich and satisfying experience awaits you. If you read it long ago but failed to succumb to its subtle and varied charms, I urge you to try again. But try to read it as if reading it for the first time, and without any presuppositions about what a “gay novel” is supposed to be like.
Nils Clausson, emeritus professor of English at the Univ. of Regina (Saskatchewan), is the author of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Art of Fiction: A Revaluation (2nd ed., 2019).
