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kindkitI've been reading bits and bobs from The Weird, the newest anthology edited by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer. It's huge and full of cool stuff, and through it I've discovered a couple of queer genre writers I didn't know about: Algernon Blackwood and Hugh Walpole.
Blackwood is difficult to read, because he will never use one word when twenty will do; an amazon.com reviewer describes his novel The Centaur as a great short story stretched out to 200+ pages, and for once that's actually a fair summary. But The Centaur is so heavily and fascinatingly queer-coded that I had to keep reading, although I skipped over a lot of woo hoo nonsense about Nature. The basic premise is: young man travelling by ship to the Mediterranean meets older man and his young son, is fascinated by the strong and commanding older man, feels repressed longings emerge, wants to be around the older man constantly and be guided by him, watches older man sleep, is warned by a well-meaning doctor that this is an unhealthy attachment which he should resist, but decides that it's damn well not unhealthy and he's going to pursue it whatever the world may think. All very obvious, even though Blackwood tells us that this attraction is because the older man isn't quite human but a throwback to a primitive golden age (hint: the title is a clue), and that the longings he rouses in the young man are about throwing off the corrupting influences of civilization and getting back to Nature. There is much, much, much yammering on about Nature, all of which is skippable in the interests of the real story. Cursory internet research has not told me whether Blackwood himself was gay, but having read this and some of his short fiction . . . well, I know what my guess would be.
Walpole, who was gay and untroubled about it, is a much more congenial writer whose concise ironies remind me a bit (literary sacrilege ahead!) of Forster. I haven't tried his mainstream fiction, but some of his weird fiction (specifically the short story "The Tarn," which is in the VanderMeer anthology, and the novel The Killer and the Slain) does interesting stuff with paranoid-Gothic themes of doubling, emotional persecution that may just be in the mind of the "victim," and intense bonds in which love is indistinguishable from hatred. Both "The Tarn" and TKatS focus on men who kill the men they love/hate and then discover that escaping the relationship is not so simple. "The Tarn" is better, I think, because its homoeroticism is less disguised (there's a lot of tacked-on heterosexuality in TKatS), and it doesn't moralize or insist, as TKatS does in its last few pages, on a Christian interpretation. But there's an enormous amount of fun to be had with the queer coding of TKatS, especially the first section, and especially the ways its protagonist persistently misrecognizes desire as revulsion. The way Walpole uses his 1930s setting (the novel was published in 1941) and brings his Gothic tropes into the context of the spread of fascism and the early days of the Second World War also interests me a lot; YMMV on this.
There's another kind of queer coding in Walpole's other short genre fiction: he likes to write about unexpected, unrecognized but nevertheless powerful kinds of love. My favorite so far is "The Whistle," from the 1935 collection All Soul's Night, in which a middle-class couple adopt an Alsatian dog and give it to their handsome young chauffeur to care for. The chauffeur and the dog form a close bond which also creates an unspoken but profound affection between the chauffeur and the husband, to the dismay of their respective wives. In other stories Walpole can be overly sentimental about these convention-defying loves (the one about a house's devotion to a young wife verges on twee and is only saved by a great last sentence; the one about the old man and the [female] saint in a painting who come to love each other is twee but rather affecting anyway), but "The Whistle" has a Forsterian coolness that works well.
In non-fiction, I'm enjoying David Kynaston's enormous tomes of social history Austerity Britain, 1945-1951 and Family Britain, 1951-1957. They're anecdotal as hell and organized by no recognizable principle, but wonderful for someone who, say, is trying to write Colditz fanfic set just after the end of the war.
Blackwood is difficult to read, because he will never use one word when twenty will do; an amazon.com reviewer describes his novel The Centaur as a great short story stretched out to 200+ pages, and for once that's actually a fair summary. But The Centaur is so heavily and fascinatingly queer-coded that I had to keep reading, although I skipped over a lot of woo hoo nonsense about Nature. The basic premise is: young man travelling by ship to the Mediterranean meets older man and his young son, is fascinated by the strong and commanding older man, feels repressed longings emerge, wants to be around the older man constantly and be guided by him, watches older man sleep, is warned by a well-meaning doctor that this is an unhealthy attachment which he should resist, but decides that it's damn well not unhealthy and he's going to pursue it whatever the world may think. All very obvious, even though Blackwood tells us that this attraction is because the older man isn't quite human but a throwback to a primitive golden age (hint: the title is a clue), and that the longings he rouses in the young man are about throwing off the corrupting influences of civilization and getting back to Nature. There is much, much, much yammering on about Nature, all of which is skippable in the interests of the real story. Cursory internet research has not told me whether Blackwood himself was gay, but having read this and some of his short fiction . . . well, I know what my guess would be.
Walpole, who was gay and untroubled about it, is a much more congenial writer whose concise ironies remind me a bit (literary sacrilege ahead!) of Forster. I haven't tried his mainstream fiction, but some of his weird fiction (specifically the short story "The Tarn," which is in the VanderMeer anthology, and the novel The Killer and the Slain) does interesting stuff with paranoid-Gothic themes of doubling, emotional persecution that may just be in the mind of the "victim," and intense bonds in which love is indistinguishable from hatred. Both "The Tarn" and TKatS focus on men who kill the men they love/hate and then discover that escaping the relationship is not so simple. "The Tarn" is better, I think, because its homoeroticism is less disguised (there's a lot of tacked-on heterosexuality in TKatS), and it doesn't moralize or insist, as TKatS does in its last few pages, on a Christian interpretation. But there's an enormous amount of fun to be had with the queer coding of TKatS, especially the first section, and especially the ways its protagonist persistently misrecognizes desire as revulsion. The way Walpole uses his 1930s setting (the novel was published in 1941) and brings his Gothic tropes into the context of the spread of fascism and the early days of the Second World War also interests me a lot; YMMV on this.
There's another kind of queer coding in Walpole's other short genre fiction: he likes to write about unexpected, unrecognized but nevertheless powerful kinds of love. My favorite so far is "The Whistle," from the 1935 collection All Soul's Night, in which a middle-class couple adopt an Alsatian dog and give it to their handsome young chauffeur to care for. The chauffeur and the dog form a close bond which also creates an unspoken but profound affection between the chauffeur and the husband, to the dismay of their respective wives. In other stories Walpole can be overly sentimental about these convention-defying loves (the one about a house's devotion to a young wife verges on twee and is only saved by a great last sentence; the one about the old man and the [female] saint in a painting who come to love each other is twee but rather affecting anyway), but "The Whistle" has a Forsterian coolness that works well.
In non-fiction, I'm enjoying David Kynaston's enormous tomes of social history Austerity Britain, 1945-1951 and Family Britain, 1951-1957. They're anecdotal as hell and organized by no recognizable principle, but wonderful for someone who, say, is trying to write Colditz fanfic set just after the end of the war.
