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kindkitMy latest reading is a deeply obscure novel called The Cage, by Dan Billany and David Dowie. It's an autobiographical story about their imprisonment as POWs in Italy during the Second World War, and has been described as "the only book about POW homosexuality from the homosexual point of view." (I'm paraphrasing as I had to return the source, Adrian Gilbert's POW: Allied Prisoners in Europe, 1939-45, to the library, but you get the gist).
The fact that the book even exists is a miracle. When Italy surrendered in 1943, the commandant of the camp Billany and Dowie were in defied German instructions and allowed all his Allied prisoners to leave and make their way to Allied lines as best they could. (In camps where this didn't happen, the prisoners were transported to Germany.) During their voyage, Billany and Dowie chose to leave their manuscript in the care of an Italian family who had helped them, with instructions to mail it to England when they could. Along with a third man, Alec Harding, Billany and Dowie made it nearly to the Allied lines but then disappeared in the Apennine mountains in late 1943. Presumably they died there.
In 1946, the people who'd been left the manuscript were finally able to send it to Billany's parents, and it was published in 1949.
Billany and Dowie were probably lovers. The only biography of Dan Billany (written, unfortunately, by two amateur local-history aficionados with no training as historians and some very odd ideas about, among other things, homosexuality) claims they weren't but that Billany was unrequitedly in love with Dowie. It's true that Dowie was engaged to be married, but gay and bisexual men have been known to marry women; Billany was certainly gay, but his surviving diaries talk about his own feeling that he ought to be married someday (he's less than enthusiastic). There's also some evidence that Dowie initially rejected Billany's love--here are the last two stanzas of a poem of Billany's, written on the flyleaf of a book he gave to Dowie:
I like to imagine that after Dowie's initial rejection, they did become a couple. Also that they decided to hide out in Italy rather than return to the war, stayed after the war ended, and did not in any way freeze to death on a mountain somwhere.
As for the book, it's odd and sometimes funny and sometimes heartbreaking. The first half is an honest (as far as I can tell) but rather sprightly slice-of-life POW narrative, told with lots of black humor. The second half focuses on the difficult relationship between David (Dowie) and the fictional character Alan, who the evidence suggests is based on Dan Billany. (Dan also appears as a supporting character, primarily as the advisor who tries to smooth things over between Alan and David.) Alan is in love with David; he shows it by giving David gifts of food and cigarettes and basically following him around with doglike devotion, and eventually declares it outright. David, who is presented as sexually interested in women, finds Alan's love painful and often repulsive, not primarily because of its sexual component (although he does mention being nervous that Alan will want sex from him) but because he feels Alan is too emotionally demanding, that his apparently selfless devotion is a kind of blackmail. Alan, in David's view, is so desperate for his love that he puts on an act, concealing his real self and thus not giving David a chance to care for him.
I found the narrative intermittently agonizing, because I have been Alan, and I have to some extent been David coping badly with the guilt and awkwardness of not sharing someone's romantic feelings, and my heart breaks for them both at times. There are sections from each's point of view, which not only contributes to managing the reader's empathy, it also keeps Alan from being Othered as queer characters were in many straight-focused works of the period.
Nevertheless, there's a level--several levels--on which this book is homophobic. There's a lot of pop-Freudian hoohah about Alan's emotional development being arrested in a childish state, and his fear of women (which I read as fear of the relationship he's expected to have with women, i.e. fear of compulsory heterosexuality), and it's suggested at various points that True Manly Friendship might cure Alan's "neurosis" and make him straight. But other aspects of the book resist this reading; every character basically says that the problem isn't so much who Alan loves as how he loves, while Dan tells David that David's coldness and rejection are as much a problem as Alan's obsession (and David eventually concurs). Alan himself, although he toys with Freudian narratives of neurosis and cure ("A woman substitute? A mother-substitute, I reckon. Yes, by God, that's the source of my longing to sleep in his arms.") but in the end, sticks to his own understanding of his love as love:
Some of the apparent homophobia in the narrative is coding, I think, to produce a book that could be published. Some of it is the time; Mary Renault's strongly pro-gay The Charioteer, published in 1953, gives its main character the standard Freudian background of an abandoning father and clinging mother as the explanation for his homosexuality. (Although other gay men in the book have noticeably different family histories.) Some of it is probably Billany and Dowie working out their ideas about their sexualities and their relationship, trying to make sense of themselves in a world that defined them as sick and criminal. Billany definitely had some self-hatred and desire to be straight, as his diary entries about feeling he should get married testify.
Do I wish this book was more clearly gay-positive? Of course. But it would be tremendously unfair to blame its authors for not having the advantages of the significantly less homophobic culture we in the west now benefit from. (Obviously I'm not saying everything is sweetness and light for queer people now. But even the most perfunctory reading in queer history shows how much better things have gotten since the 1940s-1950s.)
If you can get hold of it, I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in gay history, POW experiences, or the Second World War generally. It's long out of print, although supposedly a new edition is being prepared that will include material omitted when the book was first published, which I'm hoping includes more specifically queer content. For more info on the new edition, go here and scroll down.
The copy I read, I got through interlibrary loan from the Air University Library on Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama. If the circulation card in the back is to be believed, I may be the first person to have requested this book since 1963. As I look at the list of names of the men who borrowed it in the 1950s and early 1960s (majors, lieutenant colonels, etc.) I wonder what they were looking for in this novel--were some of them gay men who'd heard this was a queer book?--and whether they found something that helped them.
The fact that the book even exists is a miracle. When Italy surrendered in 1943, the commandant of the camp Billany and Dowie were in defied German instructions and allowed all his Allied prisoners to leave and make their way to Allied lines as best they could. (In camps where this didn't happen, the prisoners were transported to Germany.) During their voyage, Billany and Dowie chose to leave their manuscript in the care of an Italian family who had helped them, with instructions to mail it to England when they could. Along with a third man, Alec Harding, Billany and Dowie made it nearly to the Allied lines but then disappeared in the Apennine mountains in late 1943. Presumably they died there.
In 1946, the people who'd been left the manuscript were finally able to send it to Billany's parents, and it was published in 1949.
Billany and Dowie were probably lovers. The only biography of Dan Billany (written, unfortunately, by two amateur local-history aficionados with no training as historians and some very odd ideas about, among other things, homosexuality) claims they weren't but that Billany was unrequitedly in love with Dowie. It's true that Dowie was engaged to be married, but gay and bisexual men have been known to marry women; Billany was certainly gay, but his surviving diaries talk about his own feeling that he ought to be married someday (he's less than enthusiastic). There's also some evidence that Dowie initially rejected Billany's love--here are the last two stanzas of a poem of Billany's, written on the flyleaf of a book he gave to Dowie:
Whatever you may think or say or do,On the other hand, they were emotionally intimate enough to write a tremendously intimate novel together (yes, I promise I'll talk about the book soon), and Adrian Gilbert, who interviewed men who knew Billany and Dowie and who, unlike the authors of Billany's biography, doesn't seem weirded out by homosexuality, takes it for granted that they were a couple. They were certainly widely assumed/rumored to be by other camp inmates.
I love you and will love you 'til I die,
And those are facts which don't depend on you
And which I cannot alter if I try.
You say your heart is hard and will not yield -
So much the worse, since there my love is sealed.
So why not make the best of the position?
Let's lay our self-protective armour by,
There's common kindness in our disposition
And common sense and plain humanity.
For God's sake let's be easy as before,
And trust each other and be sane once more.
I like to imagine that after Dowie's initial rejection, they did become a couple. Also that they decided to hide out in Italy rather than return to the war, stayed after the war ended, and did not in any way freeze to death on a mountain somwhere.
As for the book, it's odd and sometimes funny and sometimes heartbreaking. The first half is an honest (as far as I can tell) but rather sprightly slice-of-life POW narrative, told with lots of black humor. The second half focuses on the difficult relationship between David (Dowie) and the fictional character Alan, who the evidence suggests is based on Dan Billany. (Dan also appears as a supporting character, primarily as the advisor who tries to smooth things over between Alan and David.) Alan is in love with David; he shows it by giving David gifts of food and cigarettes and basically following him around with doglike devotion, and eventually declares it outright. David, who is presented as sexually interested in women, finds Alan's love painful and often repulsive, not primarily because of its sexual component (although he does mention being nervous that Alan will want sex from him) but because he feels Alan is too emotionally demanding, that his apparently selfless devotion is a kind of blackmail. Alan, in David's view, is so desperate for his love that he puts on an act, concealing his real self and thus not giving David a chance to care for him.
I found the narrative intermittently agonizing, because I have been Alan, and I have to some extent been David coping badly with the guilt and awkwardness of not sharing someone's romantic feelings, and my heart breaks for them both at times. There are sections from each's point of view, which not only contributes to managing the reader's empathy, it also keeps Alan from being Othered as queer characters were in many straight-focused works of the period.
Nevertheless, there's a level--several levels--on which this book is homophobic. There's a lot of pop-Freudian hoohah about Alan's emotional development being arrested in a childish state, and his fear of women (which I read as fear of the relationship he's expected to have with women, i.e. fear of compulsory heterosexuality), and it's suggested at various points that True Manly Friendship might cure Alan's "neurosis" and make him straight. But other aspects of the book resist this reading; every character basically says that the problem isn't so much who Alan loves as how he loves, while Dan tells David that David's coldness and rejection are as much a problem as Alan's obsession (and David eventually concurs). Alan himself, although he toys with Freudian narratives of neurosis and cure ("A woman substitute? A mother-substitute, I reckon. Yes, by God, that's the source of my longing to sleep in his arms.") but in the end, sticks to his own understanding of his love as love:
I feel you always keep a certain barrier of distrust, David, and unless you can drop that entirely and guard nothing from me, you will never know how good I can be. You see, I really do genuinely care for you--you can let me put my arm round your shoulder and not feel any embarrassment or aversion, but just relax in the knowledge that I genuinely feel like that about you. You really are safe with me, but you will never know that until you try it out. And I see all the time that you are afraid to commit yourself so immensely. Yet it is yourself you are afraid of--not me. You are afraid of the deep human sympathy and warmth in you which urges you to trust me. I think you may in time learn not to be afraid. I really am trustworthy. You need have no defences against me."And David has a revelation, coming to see the love for Alan that he's actually felt all along:
It was truth all right. He cared for me, in myself . . . The barrier between us was gone completely, not a trace of it remained. God, but I felt purged. Light and fresh air flowed into me; God, how I stretched and soaked in the relief from the strain of doubt and fear that had weighed on me so long. He and I were at last--at last--in the same world. I felt like crying. I could have put my arms round him. He knew it. He could not understand it, but he knew it. If there had been no one else to see, I would have put my arms around him. I could, I wanted to. I was not afraid of him now."There are still problems. David won't put his arms around Alan because someone might see. And in the next paragraph, the last in the book, it's said that David wants to "lead [Alan] back to the world of life," which can be interpreted as leading him into a "normal" heterosexual life. But it doesn't have to be interpreted as such, I think; the previous narrative has emphasized how isolated Alan is, how until he fell in love with David he'd had no ability to feel anything for anyone. So I think the conclusion doesn't have to be "David will teach Alan how to be straight," but "David and Alan will teach each other how to love better, with trust and openness and self-respect." Certainly, at the end of the book David sees his future as bound up with Alan's, and as a happy one. The book's concluding sentences are: "We should not be fighting each other any more. For us the war was over."
Some of the apparent homophobia in the narrative is coding, I think, to produce a book that could be published. Some of it is the time; Mary Renault's strongly pro-gay The Charioteer, published in 1953, gives its main character the standard Freudian background of an abandoning father and clinging mother as the explanation for his homosexuality. (Although other gay men in the book have noticeably different family histories.) Some of it is probably Billany and Dowie working out their ideas about their sexualities and their relationship, trying to make sense of themselves in a world that defined them as sick and criminal. Billany definitely had some self-hatred and desire to be straight, as his diary entries about feeling he should get married testify.
Do I wish this book was more clearly gay-positive? Of course. But it would be tremendously unfair to blame its authors for not having the advantages of the significantly less homophobic culture we in the west now benefit from. (Obviously I'm not saying everything is sweetness and light for queer people now. But even the most perfunctory reading in queer history shows how much better things have gotten since the 1940s-1950s.)
If you can get hold of it, I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in gay history, POW experiences, or the Second World War generally. It's long out of print, although supposedly a new edition is being prepared that will include material omitted when the book was first published, which I'm hoping includes more specifically queer content. For more info on the new edition, go here and scroll down.
The copy I read, I got through interlibrary loan from the Air University Library on Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama. If the circulation card in the back is to be believed, I may be the first person to have requested this book since 1963. As I look at the list of names of the men who borrowed it in the 1950s and early 1960s (majors, lieutenant colonels, etc.) I wonder what they were looking for in this novel--were some of them gay men who'd heard this was a queer book?--and whether they found something that helped them.
no subject
Date: 2011-12-29 11:16 am (UTC)I have ordered the Billany bio in hopes that the authors are better on progressive education at the period!
no subject
Date: 2012-01-07 06:40 pm (UTC)