sort of a Wednesday reading post
Jul. 2nd, 2014 09:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkitI finished Bitter Eden, which is a good novel and yet not the queer POW novel I wanted.
Tatamkhulu Afrika was himself a POW and I suspect a lot of autobiography in the novel, which makes me feel bad about criticizing it--though I'm not sure if my issues with the book are really criticisms so much as "this was a well-made omelette but I wanted pasta."
Bitter Eden's protagonist is Tom Smith (who hides the fact that his full name is the more posh and "sissy" Thomas Aloysius Smythe), a South African soldier captured at the fall of Tobruk in 1942. He soon reluctantly and platonically pairs off with Douglas, a gentle, somewhat feminine man who, while emphatically denying he's gay (he's married with two children) persistently courts Tom's friendship and refuses to be put off by Tom's attempts at rejection. Douglas nurses Tom through the brutal journey to an Italian POW camp and their friendship seems to be becoming solid and real. But then Tom meets Danny, who is better looking and more masculine than Douglas, and who behaves towards Tom with a weird mixture of seductiveness and crude, sometimes violent homophobia. They meet when Danny plops himself down naked in the sun beside the dozing Tom and then informs him that "nobody gets to touch me down there . . . only my wife."
Tom is fascinated. Although he spends more or less the entire book in denial of his sexuality, this is his reaction to the first sight of Danny:
Tom and Danny grow closer and closer, despite Danny's periodic rejections if Tom does something Danny perceives as queer or feminine. A couple of times they have the kind of sex where it's possible to deny that it was actually sex at all. And then comes the liberation of the POW camps, and a choice to be made.
It's not spoiling anything to say that it was clear from the start that the novel wasn't going to end with happily ever after. There's a frame narrative set fifty years after the war in which Tom, married and living in South Africa, receives a letter and a parcel from Danny in England--or rather Danny's lawyer, because Danny has just died. But despite that knowledge it's still grindingly painful to see Danny and Tom miss their chance to be something real and honest with each other. And they miss that chance over and over again.
It's also painful to see the ruinous homophobia in both Tom and Danny, which leads them to denial and self-hatred as well as to loathing, aggression, and sometimes violence towards any man they see as queer. Danny is the more aggressively homophobic and he insists that Tom behave the same way, which is one of the reasons I don't like Danny very much, but in the end it's also Danny who takes some steps towards changing. Their homophobia is clearly shaped by misogyny: what Danny hates most in a man is femininity, but he also steers Tom into a "woman's" role in their relationship, because neither of them seems able to imagine a relationship between two men that's not heteronormative in structure.
It's tempting to dismiss this as "Well, that was the times," but the novel has several gay characters who aren't self-hating or in denial; there's an openly gay subculture centered around the camp theater, which Tom is both afraid of and drawn to and which Danny detests and tries to keep Tom away from. In addition there are barely-concealed sexual relationships between men who aren't part of the gay subculture--a couple of times it's stated or implied that most POWs are at least occasionally having sex with other men, and what's keeping Tom and Danny in a torment of unacknowledged desire is their own emotional problems.
Bitter Eden is pretty relentlessly grim not only in its emotional arc, but also in its details: hunger, anxiety, negligent and sometimes deliberate cruelty, outbreaks of violence both from guards and between prisoners, dirt, bedbugs, lice, heat and cold, bad smells, boredom, joylessness. In this environment it's not surprising that emotions get out of control, but, again, we see that a lot of other POWs seem to handle things better than Tom and Danny.
Stylistically, the book can be a bit heavy going. Afrika was primarily a poet, and his prose can be dense; he also sometimes shifts time frames with very little indication. I have a decent amount of background knowledge about POW camps which helped me orientate myself in the narrative; even so I sometimes got lost for a few paragraphs, and without it the book might have been a real struggle.
I do recommend reading Bitter Eden if you're at all interested in the Second World War or issues of queer history, but . . . well, when I first found it at the library, my immediate and ridiculous reaction was "Oh, no, someone's written the POW novel that I wanted to write someday!" But Bitter Eden isn't that novel at all. The queer POW story in which the characters don't make themselves miserable through their own self-destructive homophobia, in which finding one's own queerness can be liberating and love between men can be healing and good, still has yet to be written.
Tatamkhulu Afrika was himself a POW and I suspect a lot of autobiography in the novel, which makes me feel bad about criticizing it--though I'm not sure if my issues with the book are really criticisms so much as "this was a well-made omelette but I wanted pasta."
Bitter Eden's protagonist is Tom Smith (who hides the fact that his full name is the more posh and "sissy" Thomas Aloysius Smythe), a South African soldier captured at the fall of Tobruk in 1942. He soon reluctantly and platonically pairs off with Douglas, a gentle, somewhat feminine man who, while emphatically denying he's gay (he's married with two children) persistently courts Tom's friendship and refuses to be put off by Tom's attempts at rejection. Douglas nurses Tom through the brutal journey to an Italian POW camp and their friendship seems to be becoming solid and real. But then Tom meets Danny, who is better looking and more masculine than Douglas, and who behaves towards Tom with a weird mixture of seductiveness and crude, sometimes violent homophobia. They meet when Danny plops himself down naked in the sun beside the dozing Tom and then informs him that "nobody gets to touch me down there . . . only my wife."
Tom is fascinated. Although he spends more or less the entire book in denial of his sexuality, this is his reaction to the first sight of Danny:
Covertly, I study him, slewing only my eyes. His hair is black, springy, tightly curled, capping his head like a Renaissance cherub's or an old Greek bust of a beautiful boy. Blessedly, though, his face is neither beautiful nor a boy's. The nose is pug, the chin a shade pushy, the lips yielding and mobile, yet wholly male, the brow low--which last, I have long since learned, has nothing to do with intelligence or the lack or it, is merely the reverse of high.Tom becomes obsessed with this new friendship, and half aware that he ought to give it a different name; Danny pressures Tom to end his friendship with Douglas, whom he insists is queer; and Douglas reacts with bitter jealousy that ultimately makes him crack up, to which Danny reacts with indifference and Tom with a mix of cruelty, guilt, and covert pity.
Lower down is the body of a man who works at it--the breasts at the apex before masculinity becomes womanishness, the nipples pert and clear, the hair in the armpits tufting and lush, as lush a body-hair flowing with the flat belly down into the generous crotch, the tautly powerful thighs.
Tom and Danny grow closer and closer, despite Danny's periodic rejections if Tom does something Danny perceives as queer or feminine. A couple of times they have the kind of sex where it's possible to deny that it was actually sex at all. And then comes the liberation of the POW camps, and a choice to be made.
It's not spoiling anything to say that it was clear from the start that the novel wasn't going to end with happily ever after. There's a frame narrative set fifty years after the war in which Tom, married and living in South Africa, receives a letter and a parcel from Danny in England--or rather Danny's lawyer, because Danny has just died. But despite that knowledge it's still grindingly painful to see Danny and Tom miss their chance to be something real and honest with each other. And they miss that chance over and over again.
It's also painful to see the ruinous homophobia in both Tom and Danny, which leads them to denial and self-hatred as well as to loathing, aggression, and sometimes violence towards any man they see as queer. Danny is the more aggressively homophobic and he insists that Tom behave the same way, which is one of the reasons I don't like Danny very much, but in the end it's also Danny who takes some steps towards changing. Their homophobia is clearly shaped by misogyny: what Danny hates most in a man is femininity, but he also steers Tom into a "woman's" role in their relationship, because neither of them seems able to imagine a relationship between two men that's not heteronormative in structure.
It's tempting to dismiss this as "Well, that was the times," but the novel has several gay characters who aren't self-hating or in denial; there's an openly gay subculture centered around the camp theater, which Tom is both afraid of and drawn to and which Danny detests and tries to keep Tom away from. In addition there are barely-concealed sexual relationships between men who aren't part of the gay subculture--a couple of times it's stated or implied that most POWs are at least occasionally having sex with other men, and what's keeping Tom and Danny in a torment of unacknowledged desire is their own emotional problems.
Bitter Eden is pretty relentlessly grim not only in its emotional arc, but also in its details: hunger, anxiety, negligent and sometimes deliberate cruelty, outbreaks of violence both from guards and between prisoners, dirt, bedbugs, lice, heat and cold, bad smells, boredom, joylessness. In this environment it's not surprising that emotions get out of control, but, again, we see that a lot of other POWs seem to handle things better than Tom and Danny.
Stylistically, the book can be a bit heavy going. Afrika was primarily a poet, and his prose can be dense; he also sometimes shifts time frames with very little indication. I have a decent amount of background knowledge about POW camps which helped me orientate myself in the narrative; even so I sometimes got lost for a few paragraphs, and without it the book might have been a real struggle.
I do recommend reading Bitter Eden if you're at all interested in the Second World War or issues of queer history, but . . . well, when I first found it at the library, my immediate and ridiculous reaction was "Oh, no, someone's written the POW novel that I wanted to write someday!" But Bitter Eden isn't that novel at all. The queer POW story in which the characters don't make themselves miserable through their own self-destructive homophobia, in which finding one's own queerness can be liberating and love between men can be healing and good, still has yet to be written.
spoilers in the comment
Date: 2014-07-13 11:35 am (UTC)The Amazon blurb as well as the quotes on the back make it sound like this great love story and I barely got the feeling that Tom liked Danny. I thought the connection with him and Douglas was more fleshed out. And the emphasis on male and female gender representation was tedious. The narrator introduces his wife as a "dainty trembling mouse" that moves her body in a way that is "unsettingly male".
What did you think about the sexual abuse Danny and Tom suffered as children? It was very apropos of nothing for me.
Re: spoilers in the comment
Date: 2014-07-15 04:03 am (UTC)Mostly I agree that the sexual abuse backstory was apropos of nothing--my guess is that it's an autobiographical detail that got included in the novel though it doesn't really serve the story. There is on interesting moment, during the almost-sex scene at the end, when Tom seems to feel that letting Danny fuck him will somehow overwrite the sexual abuse, at least in the sense of giving receptive anal sex a new, non-abusive context for him. I think it would be possible to make the argument that Tom's history of being abused is part of why he has so much difficulty accepting his own desire for other men, but I'm not sure if that's there in the novel or if I'm reading in.
Re: spoilers in the comment
Date: 2014-07-15 07:10 pm (UTC)I thought it was interesting that Tom doubted that Danny had been abused and was only telling him that to create some kind of connection between them. But other than it was a superficial detail that wasn't explored at all.
That was my biggest problem with the novel: that you only got the surface and never any introspection. I thought the eating habits off all the characters were described so well but do we find out how Tom's habits change? He was able to see other people but not himself and that's something I could deal with if it was a true (auto)biography but as a novel it's not satisfying.