Reading Roundup, September 2024
Sep. 27th, 2024 11:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
phantomtomatoBrideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
I started this three times before it took. No one told me that Brideshead was a frame story! The first chapter, introducing us to a narrator broken down by the second world war and resurfacing long-buried memories upon revisiting Brideshead Manor, is truly very dull. I wanted a story about English social class, not a war story. It isn’t actually a war story, but you must hold out for a little while to get there.
I described Brideshead elsewhere as slotting in-between the earlier Victwardian model of books with strong homoerotic subtext but no textual queerness and later explicitly-queer novels. It is very obviously the transition from one to the other, and it does neither very well, nor does it sell me on the idea that this transition had a lot of merit as a separate, unique form. Reading this was extremely valuable for understanding the development of queer British lit in the 20th century, but it was frustrating to come at it hoping for fannish excitement.
Charles is our narrator, an upper-middle-class man who meets the aristocrat Sebastian Flyte when they are both students at Oxford. They form a fast and intense friendship which sees them both drop out of Oxford and flounder in the years after, with Charles eventually landing on his feet as a working painter of some note, and Sebastian falling into debilitating addiction. Their relationship is heavily colored by Sebastian’s large, messy English Catholic family: separated mother and father, who live in different countries; eccentric elder brother; two sisters, one much younger and one just around their age, who becomes a love interest for Charles down the line. Their faith is largely a wall between each of them and true intimacy with Charles—each Flyte he becomes close to eventually balks at his inability to understand or accept their Catholicism.
Going in, I knew that Charles/Sebastian was a popular ship in the fandom. It is real and present, and in an Edwardian version of this novel, the depth of their romantic friendship would likely have powered the whole story. That is a version I could have shipped. But I think that the book falls apart for me in its inclusion of an explicitly gay character, Anthony Blanche. Anthony is textually homosexual. He takes Charles to a gay bar, he keeps lovers throughout the story, and the narration and other characters don’t shy away from calling him a fairy. He’s gay. So the net effect is to show us that people in the Brideshead world can be gay… and Charles simply isn’t. Perhaps Sebastian is! We know that he and Anthony had sex at boarding school; Anthony tells us so. He implies that Charles would like to do the same thing with Sebastian, but then Charles doesn’t really seem to follow, nor does he ever act on anything, not even so much as one of those typical lingering embraces or wrestling matches. In fact, the deterioration of the Charles and Sebastian friendship is so thoroughly and convincingly written that I really can’t buy it as continuing to have real power over Charles afterwards.
Meanwhile, in the second half of the book, we do see Charles pursue Sebastian’s sister Julia. This attraction and affair is convincing. Like the explicit queerness of Anthony Blanche, it feels a bit before its time, presaging the divorce-and-affair litfic plots of the later 20th century. I have read many books like this part of Brideshead, and I think that Brideshead is a good entry into that canon. The Charles/Julia plotline compellingly convinces me that Charles is not sexless or repressed, and in fact is quite capable of recognizing his desires and pursuing them, even/especially when they are bad ideas and damaging for all involved.
Which leaves me reading the novel as Charles Ryder simply not being queer, or at least not interested in Sebastian romantically or sexually. Sure, they were good friends. Sebastian, whose perspective we never get to see, may well have been attracted to Charles. But Charles… his love for Sebastian is not sexually-inflected, as is his love for Julia. The development of the Sebastian relationship is a bit stunted, and perhaps it had room to grow into a romance, but the book’s focus just was not there. Charles ignores Sebastian’s self-destructive spiral, and he doesn’t even fixate on another man while it’s all happening. I might have still been able to brush this off if not for Anthony, who reminds us at every appearance that Waugh could write gay men, and chose not to do so with Charles.
None of this is to invalidate the queer readings of Charles/Sebastian, or reactions to the TV and film adaptations (which I have not seen), so much as to say that I’d hoped to come away with love for this queer classic couple and unfortunately cannot claim that.
Decent Fellows - John Heygate
Denis Bailey attends Eton College. He’s about sixteen, short for his age, and just behind his longtime friend in moving through the school—a new term separates them as the friend joins an elite society of senior boys, leaving Denis to find new friends to share tea with. He settles on a motley bunch of slackers, all of whom are united by their families’ wealth and status. Within Eton, the impact of this is limited to what they can bring to tea or how many new suits they have made in a year; during the holidays, Denis finds out just how much their home lives diverge.
This is a school novel that is also a takedown of Eton, published just one time, in 1930. It has had no lasting cultural legacy, and I wouldn’t have heard about it if not for this intriguing two-paragraph mention in Quigly’s school novel retrospective (discussed in last month’s reading roundup):
This description is factually correct and effectively inaccurate to my experience of reading the book.
I was drawn in by the promise of both class consciousness and homosexuality—enduring interests, as you probably know. They are gloriously present in Decent Fellows, in fact so gloriously that I am baffled by Quigly’s comment that the book only “touches” on homosexual relationships, and “not in any detail.” This is not a Gay Book in the sense that David Blaize is a Gay Book, but likewise it is wild to suggest that this is a book only vaguely presenting the reality of homosexuality in public schools—in many ways it is more frank about the extent and character of gay sex at public schools than Blaize or literally anything else that I’ve read. I think that’s a fascinating testament to how much the barriers had been broken down by books like Blaize and The Loom of Youth about a decade before it. Some of the homosexual activity “touched upon” in the book:
These are on top of the usual ‘trusted mentor warns hero about the temptation of gay romance/sex’ and ‘hero’s admiration of socially superior friend is suspiciously romantic’ and ‘hero is confused by the idea of romantic interest in girls.’ The book also features a really lovely bathroom scene with Denis weighing up his own self-image and considering his physical development, or lack of it. He’s clearly embarrassed to be slower through puberty than other boys his age. This is so familiar to queer literature that comes a bit later in the 20th century that it made me pause—I really hadn’t expected it to exist in a forgotten novel from 20+ years earlier.
There is also the singular most erotic caning scene that I have read in any school novel. I’m talking bare-bottomed headmaster caning. “His whole body seemed to tremble. But as the sharp twigs broke the flesh, he bit his lip to restrain a sound. … Gradually in the heat and damp of his clothes, rucked up from the waist, he felt detached from the deadening pain below. Far away, another stroke fell.” Woof. The spanking writers on AO3 could learn from Heygate.
I think this all must be observed in the context of this book attempting a serious, literary take on the school novel. I appreciate and borrow that distinction from Quigly, despite her flaws, because it helps to understand the audience. I don’t think that Heygate was writing this for current Eton students to read. I think he was writing it for other disillusioned former public school boys, now in their twenties and building careers and families, to read. Denis’ interiority and sexuality, whether or not they were meant by the author to come across as gay, are presented with reflection from a mature perspective, landing as “relatable in retrospect” about the experience of being awkward and adolescent.
The novel is also striking in its description of class: there are so many passages that are affecting and grounded and real for how they show Denis struggling with the rituals of his upper-class friend’s family, or using the fantasyland of Eton to ignore the expectations his family places on him, as a middle-class boy who will need a scholarship to afford Cambridge. His is the consciousness of the upper-middle-class, to be clear; his father is a lawyer and attended Cambridge himself, but his parents are so beautifully written to illustrate the tension that results from doing well enough to place one’s children in proximity to true wealth/status while knowing that is definitionally out of reach for them. Agh! I loved those bits. In many ways they were better than the class-consciousness in Brideshead, a novel famous for its class-consciousness.
It’s not all good. Well, arguably it’s mostly bad, as the actual plot of the novel is not nearly as angsty as the Quigly summary (sent away to a crammer school!) implies, nor is it as fun as an earnest take on the genre can be. But in particular, this book suffers from two racist scenes that are really excessive—compared to other things of the era, these are definitely worse in their use of racial stereotypes, the narrative supporting the racism, and their use of slurs. These are about eight pages out of three hundred in total, but during the first I took a break from reading and re-evaluated whether I wanted to continue. The second comes much later, closer to the end. Given the difficulty of sourcing this book, these scenes push me over into “do not recommend” territory. I’m genuinely glad to have read it, and I can tell that it will have an impact on how I think about the trajectory of the school novel and especially depictions of queerness and class, not as an artifact that influenced those things but as a product of how social mores were changing. But is it worth tracking down, let alone buying? No, probably not.
Which leaves me in a strange place! I still have the book out from the library for a few more weeks. It enters the public domain in 2026. I feel as though I should scan it… the copy I’ve got is falling apart, and I can’t imagine that most others will hold on very long. I don’t want to lose a book from existence. But will anyone else digitize it? I really don’t know, and I also don’t know that I want to be the one to do it. If I scan it, though, I at least have the option, should no one else come along in a year.
I started this three times before it took. No one told me that Brideshead was a frame story! The first chapter, introducing us to a narrator broken down by the second world war and resurfacing long-buried memories upon revisiting Brideshead Manor, is truly very dull. I wanted a story about English social class, not a war story. It isn’t actually a war story, but you must hold out for a little while to get there.
I described Brideshead elsewhere as slotting in-between the earlier Victwardian model of books with strong homoerotic subtext but no textual queerness and later explicitly-queer novels. It is very obviously the transition from one to the other, and it does neither very well, nor does it sell me on the idea that this transition had a lot of merit as a separate, unique form. Reading this was extremely valuable for understanding the development of queer British lit in the 20th century, but it was frustrating to come at it hoping for fannish excitement.
Charles is our narrator, an upper-middle-class man who meets the aristocrat Sebastian Flyte when they are both students at Oxford. They form a fast and intense friendship which sees them both drop out of Oxford and flounder in the years after, with Charles eventually landing on his feet as a working painter of some note, and Sebastian falling into debilitating addiction. Their relationship is heavily colored by Sebastian’s large, messy English Catholic family: separated mother and father, who live in different countries; eccentric elder brother; two sisters, one much younger and one just around their age, who becomes a love interest for Charles down the line. Their faith is largely a wall between each of them and true intimacy with Charles—each Flyte he becomes close to eventually balks at his inability to understand or accept their Catholicism.
Going in, I knew that Charles/Sebastian was a popular ship in the fandom. It is real and present, and in an Edwardian version of this novel, the depth of their romantic friendship would likely have powered the whole story. That is a version I could have shipped. But I think that the book falls apart for me in its inclusion of an explicitly gay character, Anthony Blanche. Anthony is textually homosexual. He takes Charles to a gay bar, he keeps lovers throughout the story, and the narration and other characters don’t shy away from calling him a fairy. He’s gay. So the net effect is to show us that people in the Brideshead world can be gay… and Charles simply isn’t. Perhaps Sebastian is! We know that he and Anthony had sex at boarding school; Anthony tells us so. He implies that Charles would like to do the same thing with Sebastian, but then Charles doesn’t really seem to follow, nor does he ever act on anything, not even so much as one of those typical lingering embraces or wrestling matches. In fact, the deterioration of the Charles and Sebastian friendship is so thoroughly and convincingly written that I really can’t buy it as continuing to have real power over Charles afterwards.
Meanwhile, in the second half of the book, we do see Charles pursue Sebastian’s sister Julia. This attraction and affair is convincing. Like the explicit queerness of Anthony Blanche, it feels a bit before its time, presaging the divorce-and-affair litfic plots of the later 20th century. I have read many books like this part of Brideshead, and I think that Brideshead is a good entry into that canon. The Charles/Julia plotline compellingly convinces me that Charles is not sexless or repressed, and in fact is quite capable of recognizing his desires and pursuing them, even/especially when they are bad ideas and damaging for all involved.
Which leaves me reading the novel as Charles Ryder simply not being queer, or at least not interested in Sebastian romantically or sexually. Sure, they were good friends. Sebastian, whose perspective we never get to see, may well have been attracted to Charles. But Charles… his love for Sebastian is not sexually-inflected, as is his love for Julia. The development of the Sebastian relationship is a bit stunted, and perhaps it had room to grow into a romance, but the book’s focus just was not there. Charles ignores Sebastian’s self-destructive spiral, and he doesn’t even fixate on another man while it’s all happening. I might have still been able to brush this off if not for Anthony, who reminds us at every appearance that Waugh could write gay men, and chose not to do so with Charles.
None of this is to invalidate the queer readings of Charles/Sebastian, or reactions to the TV and film adaptations (which I have not seen), so much as to say that I’d hoped to come away with love for this queer classic couple and unfortunately cannot claim that.
Decent Fellows - John Heygate
Denis Bailey attends Eton College. He’s about sixteen, short for his age, and just behind his longtime friend in moving through the school—a new term separates them as the friend joins an elite society of senior boys, leaving Denis to find new friends to share tea with. He settles on a motley bunch of slackers, all of whom are united by their families’ wealth and status. Within Eton, the impact of this is limited to what they can bring to tea or how many new suits they have made in a year; during the holidays, Denis finds out just how much their home lives diverge.
This is a school novel that is also a takedown of Eton, published just one time, in 1930. It has had no lasting cultural legacy, and I wouldn’t have heard about it if not for this intriguing two-paragraph mention in Quigly’s school novel retrospective (discussed in last month’s reading roundup):
Decent Fellows by John Heygate* takes a much more interesting look at Eton around the end of the First World War and the early twenties. It is dedicated to Henry Williamson, and was first published in 1930 by Gollancz, both of which suggest that something unexpected may be found in it. Mild though it now seems, like most once-shocking books, it nonetheless created some stir when first published and bookshops in Eton, I have been told by someone who, an Eton boy then, remembers the fuss and shock, refused to stock it. Probably the tone, rather than any particular incidents, was thought offensive, or at least alarming to authority and the status quo. A subterranean weariness and disgust - at times almost violent, and always extremely uncosy - comes across in a laconic style, with staccato sentences and throwaway descriptions, reeking of sour adolescence, ambiguous attitudes and momentary regrets, sharp retorts and sensual moments.
Denis, the hero, after three miserable years at Eton, is beginning to enjoy life and chucks his best friend Robin - his one-and-only, inseparable friend since he arrived - in order to 'mess' with an earl's son, Peter Ockley, Denis's family is poor by Eton standards and cannot afford to keep up with Peter's family, the Peritons; cannot even manage to send Denis to Scotland when they ask him to stay, and removes him from Eton, to send him to a crammers, when he fails to get the Kings scholarship he needs if he is to go to Cambridge. After which, without explanation, Denis writes rather shortly to Peter's mother refusing another much-wanted invitation to stay in London. The theme of snobbery - of the glamour of rank and riches yet of Denis's self-disgust because he finds them glamorous - runs through the story; which also touches on homosexual relationships at school, though not in any detail, and is highly exact on boy-girl friendships, chat among the young, social attitudes in general at the time. As a novel of character it is far more interesting than The Oppidan, but, presumably because the facts and folklore did not interest Heygate, it lacks The Oppidan's documentary exactness.
This description is factually correct and effectively inaccurate to my experience of reading the book.
I was drawn in by the promise of both class consciousness and homosexuality—enduring interests, as you probably know. They are gloriously present in Decent Fellows, in fact so gloriously that I am baffled by Quigly’s comment that the book only “touches” on homosexual relationships, and “not in any detail.” This is not a Gay Book in the sense that David Blaize is a Gay Book, but likewise it is wild to suggest that this is a book only vaguely presenting the reality of homosexuality in public schools—in many ways it is more frank about the extent and character of gay sex at public schools than Blaize or literally anything else that I’ve read. I think that’s a fascinating testament to how much the barriers had been broken down by books like Blaize and The Loom of Youth about a decade before it. Some of the homosexual activity “touched upon” in the book:
- A senior boy going into new boys’ rooms after lights out. “He’s a fool to meddle with new boys, and I told him so. It’s nothing to do with me what chaps do; but I rather draw the line at new kids.”
- During a practice military camp for the junior corps, two boys have sex in the cot next to Denis. He is warned this will happen, and the discussion leading up includes teachers being sacked for sex with boys, and how school romances are fine if they’re “between uppers and blue-eyed lower boys.”
These are on top of the usual ‘trusted mentor warns hero about the temptation of gay romance/sex’ and ‘hero’s admiration of socially superior friend is suspiciously romantic’ and ‘hero is confused by the idea of romantic interest in girls.’ The book also features a really lovely bathroom scene with Denis weighing up his own self-image and considering his physical development, or lack of it. He’s clearly embarrassed to be slower through puberty than other boys his age. This is so familiar to queer literature that comes a bit later in the 20th century that it made me pause—I really hadn’t expected it to exist in a forgotten novel from 20+ years earlier.
There is also the singular most erotic caning scene that I have read in any school novel. I’m talking bare-bottomed headmaster caning. “His whole body seemed to tremble. But as the sharp twigs broke the flesh, he bit his lip to restrain a sound. … Gradually in the heat and damp of his clothes, rucked up from the waist, he felt detached from the deadening pain below. Far away, another stroke fell.” Woof. The spanking writers on AO3 could learn from Heygate.
I think this all must be observed in the context of this book attempting a serious, literary take on the school novel. I appreciate and borrow that distinction from Quigly, despite her flaws, because it helps to understand the audience. I don’t think that Heygate was writing this for current Eton students to read. I think he was writing it for other disillusioned former public school boys, now in their twenties and building careers and families, to read. Denis’ interiority and sexuality, whether or not they were meant by the author to come across as gay, are presented with reflection from a mature perspective, landing as “relatable in retrospect” about the experience of being awkward and adolescent.
The novel is also striking in its description of class: there are so many passages that are affecting and grounded and real for how they show Denis struggling with the rituals of his upper-class friend’s family, or using the fantasyland of Eton to ignore the expectations his family places on him, as a middle-class boy who will need a scholarship to afford Cambridge. His is the consciousness of the upper-middle-class, to be clear; his father is a lawyer and attended Cambridge himself, but his parents are so beautifully written to illustrate the tension that results from doing well enough to place one’s children in proximity to true wealth/status while knowing that is definitionally out of reach for them. Agh! I loved those bits. In many ways they were better than the class-consciousness in Brideshead, a novel famous for its class-consciousness.
It’s not all good. Well, arguably it’s mostly bad, as the actual plot of the novel is not nearly as angsty as the Quigly summary (sent away to a crammer school!) implies, nor is it as fun as an earnest take on the genre can be. But in particular, this book suffers from two racist scenes that are really excessive—compared to other things of the era, these are definitely worse in their use of racial stereotypes, the narrative supporting the racism, and their use of slurs. These are about eight pages out of three hundred in total, but during the first I took a break from reading and re-evaluated whether I wanted to continue. The second comes much later, closer to the end. Given the difficulty of sourcing this book, these scenes push me over into “do not recommend” territory. I’m genuinely glad to have read it, and I can tell that it will have an impact on how I think about the trajectory of the school novel and especially depictions of queerness and class, not as an artifact that influenced those things but as a product of how social mores were changing. But is it worth tracking down, let alone buying? No, probably not.
Which leaves me in a strange place! I still have the book out from the library for a few more weeks. It enters the public domain in 2026. I feel as though I should scan it… the copy I’ve got is falling apart, and I can’t imagine that most others will hold on very long. I don’t want to lose a book from existence. But will anyone else digitize it? I really don’t know, and I also don’t know that I want to be the one to do it. If I scan it, though, I at least have the option, should no one else come along in a year.
