Reading Roundup, June 2023

[phantomtomato]

On the first day of June I read A Single Man, by Christopher Isherwood, in one sitting. (I then spent the remainder of the month meaning to watch the movie adaptation and not succeeding. Alas.) This has been a to-do for a while, since I read Isherwood’s career retrospective last year and, on that movie version, have been curious to see what Tom Ford is like as a filmmaker for years. (He is a recently-retired American fashion designer, and a giant in that sphere; I really wonder what he’s like as a creative in other fields. If Hedi Slimane can be a great photographer on top of his fashion contributions, perhaps Ford is a great director?) Anyway, the foreword of my edition was written by Ford, which I found quite charming. He talked about being 19 and meeting Isherwood and making zero impression on him, which was very adorable and candid.

On the book itself—I was delighted by the authenticity of the academic scenes. The protagonist—George, the titular single man—is an English professor at a school in California. Isherwood, through him, makes eminently relatable comments on the experience of being an academic:

[The students] don’t want to know about my feelings or my glands or anything below my neck. I could just as well be a severed head, carried into the classroom to lecture them from a dish

After making an esoteric joke during a lecture:

Nobody sees this joke. George still sometimes throws one away, despite all his experience, by muttering it, English style.

The plot as a whole is messy, following George over the course of a single day some months past the premature death of his lover, as we see him reckon with being a widower whose widowhood is largely invisible to the world around him. It’s a Vibes novel—nothing much happens, we meet a lot of deeply-sketched characters in a slightly absurdist series of events, and we get a loving and irreverent portrait of the main character’s emotional landscape. I like it all the way through until the last line, which is an intentionally provocative vagary. Which is another reason I mean to watch the movie, to know how that was adapted.

Finally, on Isherwood broadly, I think that what I like most about him as a writer is that I connect with his influences, the sorts of romantic-friendship boys novels which I’ve been devouring lately. He has a lighthearted, nostalgic fondness for them that seems to be referenced in his projects. In this, George contemplates an “obscene” novel in relaying an anecdote about another character:

Not that one isn't broad-minded, of course; let them write about heterosexuality if they must, and let everyone read it who cares to. Just the same, it is a deadly bore and, to be frank, a wee bit distasteful. Why can't these modern writers stick to the old simple wholesome themes - such as, for example, boys?

Why can’t we stick to the simple wholesome theme of boys, indeed? ;)

I read only one short story from a collection by Algernon Blackwood, H.S.H., but I was amused by a line from it so I’m mentioning it anyway.

The narrator of this Edwardian era horror story describes the entrance of a frightening visitor to his lonely mountain cabin in very dramatic terms, and then corrects himself:

These impressions, however, were but momentary and passing, due doubtless to the condition of his nerves and to the semi-shock of the dramatic, even theatrical entrance.

I love this quote because it pokes fun at the excessive language of the time. I've gotten better about it since reading more Victorian and Edwardian (and even interwar) literature, but when I started out, the overstated and melodramatic prose could sometimes throw me off of what I was reading. It's always cool to see reminders that this was always just a style, more popular then than now, but recognized as such. (And I've come to love the style, so!)

Also, sweetsorcery wrote a fic based on the story, which I recommend for a demon/human sex romp: here!

Finally, I read Poor Dear Esme by A. M. Burrage, who is notable for being the author of that horror short story I wrote a fic for, The Attic. This novel is not horror! It is a boys’ school story—kind of.

I originally heard about Esme a few months back when soliciting some boarding school novel recs, and a recent re-rec pushed me to take the plunge. This one, despite being old enough to be public domain, isn’t up on Gutenberg or Google Books or anything, so I had to buy an ebook. I hate that. The ebooks are never that nicely done, there’s always scanning errors, etc. Too bad the physical copies of this seem to be rare enough as to make rectifying this a real challenge.

This novel appealed to me because it was about a crossdressing boy—amazing, I know. Esme has been raised by a family friend (Uncle Dick) for his entire life, his mother having died in childbirth and his father leaving the country in grief soon after. Only there’s a catch: the real Esme, who was lost on a seaside vacation when she was very young, was a girl! Uncle Dick panicked and found another lost child (?? there were apparently lots of these ??), a boy about the same age, and raised him as Esme instead, the name being applicable to either gender. Anyway, Esme’s father was never going to come back to England and expect to see his daughter, right?

This goes as well as you would expect. Esme, a boy, is entreated by Uncle Dick to dress as a girl and attend a girls’ school for a term, just until the father leaves again. This works because “Nature had cast his [Esme’s] features in a girlish mould, and had completed the job by giving him a girl’s rosy cheeks and sensitive small mouth.”

The character of Esme is a treat: he smokes, drinks, and gambles; he’s rude and brash and terrible at behaving “like a girl should”; he’s got a moral streak, but he sometimes fails to live up to it; he romances a man; he torments his teachers and the school bully. He also makes some delightfully queer insinuations, like when he’s asked about his career plans and answers, “I thought about the merchant service.” Unfortunately, Esme’s partner in the romantic farce portion of the story is a dolt who would take some real effort to make interesting in a fic context. I would love to fic this, because oh my god canon crossdressing, but it needs a bit more creativity than I’d hoped from the premise!

With that said, the story is very tightly plotted and a rewarding read from that angle. Burrage is a good writer and I enjoyed his plot very much. There’s one major secondary character who speaks in eye dialect, which I don’t love, but I’d rate this as one of the better school stories from a narrative perspective, if not as slashy as many others. That’s the price of putting the boy at a girls’ school, I suppose!

Comments

[black_bentley]

I haven't read (or seen) A Single Man, but I do have Goodbye to Berlin on my TBR pile. I suspect (given the sort of books/writing I normally like) I'll probably get on quite well with Isherwood!

[phantomtomato]

Oooh, I haven’t picked up a copy of Goodbye to Berlin, so if you do read it I’d be very interested in hearing what you think! I’ve only read two of Isherwood’s later books, now (including this one), where he openly discusses homosexuality. I’ve heard the earlier ones might be more circumspect on the subject?

His prose is really enjoyable and clever, so I bet you would get on well with him!