The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered (26 page)

What develops from there is Mike’s attraction for Dan’s pretty cousin Rosalia and the problems that causes. Dan is a little young to understand his own sexual feelings, but for him nothing could be more profound than a handsome, older male friend who makes him feel positive about himself and gives him the vision of a bigger, freer world. With his use of lyrical prose and sensitive wordplay, Wescott takes the reader to the edge of forbidden territory for a mainstream writer of that time — sensual feelings, a wet dream, masturbation, and intercourse. And for Dan there isn’t jealousy but a feeling of freedom, as when he sees Mike kissing his cousin: “The boy’s heart stopped for a beat. A pang shot through him. Following it, there surged a tumultuous happiness. He was no longer shut out; life had opened and let him in.”

However, the dreamy, triangular love of the three young people in summer could not last in a culture of sexual repression. Rosalia’s mother would never approve of Mike courting her daughter. Uncle Jule, still inspired by the lost Hannah, had a talk with Mike, and told him his relationship with his daughter would cause problems — but he would support him. But that was enough to scare off Mike. Dan was shocked one day when his uncle said that his farmhand had given notice.

Days later, when they met at night to say goodbye, Mike told Dan that his leaving was the best thing for Rosalia. Dan suspected, and others had rumored, that Rosalia would meet him later in Milwaukee and they’d marry. Mike also knew Dan loved him, and threw his arm around him. “Don’t cry, Dannie. I’ll see you again. We’ll meet somewhere.” Mike did his best to cheer up the boy, but Dan’s tears returned. Finally: “In their short, brusque kiss there was an implication of something like despair.”

Rosalia, meanwhile, was devastated, and not just in the healthy, first-love, broken-hearted way that Dan was. The girl was totally consumed by her mother’s fierce, unforgiving brand of Christianity. She not only thought that Mike had left her, she imagined that he had left her pregnant. Her behavior became strange, and she disappeared. The rumors of the young couple eloping surfaced, and the parents were upset but at least believed that their daughter was safe.

The last third of the novel, “Dan Alone,” has autobiographical material drawn from Wescott’s problems with his father. Dan’s self-education and his determination to leave finally bring him to the emotional day when he leaves his parent’s farm for the life that awaits him. But before that, the tragedy plays out. In early spring, a neighbor comes to tell Jule and Dan that he has found Rosalia’s body in the marshlands, in the bad part of the swamp where it was dangerous to walk. Jule swore them to secrecy; Rosalia’s mother must never know. They set out to the swamp and buried her in a rise of ground under a tree. The father’s face turned grey. “He sank upon a great protuberant root, and covered his face with his hands.”

The tragedy and the lessons end on a hopeful note, with Dan boarding a train for Madison, the great liberal city of the Midwest — just as it is a century later. More than the story, the genius of the book is in its poetic language, its interwoven battle of humanism versus puritanism, and in the omnipresent force of nature. In more ways than can be described in a short essay, nature itself is at the core of the farmers’ lives: “The April spring being an illusion of light, the setting sun left the farms clasped in a hand of darkness and wet ominous air.”
The Apple of the Eye
was a remarkable first novel — by a 23-year-old.

What followed was early fame. While writing his second novel in France, Wescott was well paid for some short stories. An agent got Harper & Brothers to buy the rights to
The Apple of the Eye
along with the next novel. In 1926, new editions of
The Apple
were released by Harper and the British publisher Butterworth. In 1927,
The Grandmothers
was nothing less than the great American novel — in a chronicle-style format that became a model for writers. The ($10,000) Harper Prize-winning novel went through 26 printings in six months, and saw many future editions. Readers today can easily recognize half a dozen gay characters. A book of short stories,
Goodbye, Wisconsin
(1928), followed.

After less successful nonfiction works, and then a fallow period in America, Wescott wrote
A Visit to Priapus
(drafted 1938), a very explicit long story about a gay writer who visits an extremely well-endowed artist in Maine. Unpublished in his lifetime, it was printed as a chapbook in 1995 and then in the 2004 anthology,
The New Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories
. The importance of
Priapus
is that it gave Wescott the “voice” for what would be nothing less than one of the great short novels in English,
The Pilgrim Hawk
(1940). Praised by everyone from Christopher Isherwood to Susan Sontag, this little masterpiece is the dry champagne peak of Wescott’s career. Like
The Grandmothers
, it was reprinted many times, including foreign translations, and is part of the Dell anthology,
Six Great Modern Short Novels
. And in 1945, his World War II novel
Apartment in Athens
was a Book of the Month Club bestseller, and was also republished in foreign editions.

The literary reviews and essays and the gorgeous personal essays of Wescott’s late career are worth remembering. His lover Monroe Wheeler was a world-traveling curator and innovative director of publications for the Museum of Modern Art. Together, they hosted a salon at their Manhattan apartment for a Who’s Who of writers, artists and celebrities. They also had a country home called Haymeadows at the western New Jersey farm of Wescott’s accomplished brother and wealthy sister-in-law.

It was a great life, complete with a succession of younger lovers. Richard Hall once mocked that life in a short story in his
Fidelities
collection. But years later Hall told a mutual friend, John Gilgun, that the story was inspired by his brief glimpse, as a young writer, of a Wheeler/Wescott social event — and he respected others’ perspectives. The fact is that Wescott spent four decades at the American Academy of Arts and Letters getting grants and awards for many young writers — and neglected older ones.

While rereading
The Apple of the Eye
, I didn’t want to handle my Dial Press first edition and used the 1926 Harper book and a 1935 Grosset and Dunlap edition. It’s annoying when readers make notes and underscores in a book, but in my 1926 copy, someone with small, sharp-pencil script, “Leonard Amater, 1927,” wrote a number of perceptive remarks. Among them, he wrote at the start of Part Two: “The following four chapters are equal to anything in American literature. I think it reaches a higher level than Crane, to whom Wescott has been compared.” At the chapter “Around the Dead,” he commented on the fine-line sensitivity of Wescott’s lyrical skills: “This is a magnificent chapter. There is poetry in it as there is realism, and understanding of peoples’ hearts.”

Over the last decade, Wescott’s other three novels (especially
The Pilgrim Hawk
) have appeared in new English and foreign editions — German, French, Italian, Greek, Spanish and Portuguese.
The Grandmothers
and
The Pilgrim Hawk
are masterworks, and
Apartment in Athens
holds up as one of the best World War II novels.
The Apple of the Eye
doesn’t rank with them, but it should be reprinted for two reasons: It’s a classic regional novel of the Midwest, and it’s the first novel of a notable author. That doesn’t require a big mainstream release, but it’s enough reason for it to be in print.

I’ve been slowly putting together a last volume of Wescott journals, and recently I found a few of Glenway’s late comments on his first novel. He called it “one of the crossroads of my entire life.” And he wrote to editor Robert Phelps, “I spent an hour reading
The Apple of the Eye
— I don’t suppose I have done so for twenty years…I felt proud of the descriptive passages, like mediaeval illuminations or Eastern enamel.”

Grove Press, 1987

Victor Bumbalo

“You would never listen to me and now look what happened!” Mama fainted dead away. “The next thing I knew, I woke up with my leg gone.” So begins George Whitmore’s stunning novel,
Nebraska
. The time is 1956. It is summer, and Craig, age 12, is on the “sleeping porch” recovering from the accident that took his leg. He lives with this mother, who works supporting her family at “Monkey Wards,” and his two teenage sisters. A while back, Craig’s alcoholic dad left Lincoln and took a job in St. Louis for “good money.” He wasn’t missed — he sent money. Then one day he returns and announces that he wants to be free. He leaves, and no more money ever arrives. Most of the family pretends he’s dead. But he isn’t.

Craig’s mama, referring to her son’s accident, comments, “We’re going to be paying off the bills for the rest of our lives. . . . Now I guess we won’t have to buy that bike.”

Craig spends the summer watching TV and doing puzzles books. And then everything in this household changes. Craig’s Uncle Wayne, recently discharged from the Navy, comes home.

Uncle Wayne is like a movie star. “A postcard from Uncle Wayne was a holy relic.” He brings the marvel of the outside world to this struggling, working-class family and especially the boy who’s confined to bed.

Uncle Wayne opens Craig’s life to the birth of those millions of feelings that commence with our adolescence. It is that extraordinary, restless, summer of youth. A summer filled with yearnings, fears, loneliness and sudden erections.

Uncle Wayne is a wonder to his nephew. The boy develops a crush on his uncle that is beyond sexual. It’s the crush that awakens Craig to life.

Uncle Wayne tells his family that he is not going to be in Nebraska for long. He’s waiting for his great Navy buddy, known as the Chief, to send for him. They are going to go into business together, opening a garage in California. The Chief seems as magical to Craig as California. The friendship between these two men seems ideal, uncorrupted and trusting; the stuff that dreams are made of. The kind of dreams that lodge themselves in a 12-year-old boy and will haunt him for the rest of his life.

Uncle Wayne talks to the Chief monthly, but the summons to California never seems to come. His “wait” extends as the dream of California fades. He takes a job on line at Chicks, the local factory, and starts drinking heavily. This is a different Uncle Wayne, and a door seems to be closing on Craig’s imagined escape from his claustrophobic life.

One night, Craig’s friend Wesley sleeps over. Wesley tells Craig about being in the Scouts. He asks to feel Craig’s stump and Craig lets him. Craig asks Wesley if he could feel Wesley’s prick. He tries to convince Wesley that everybody does it. Boy Scouts do it. He fibs and tells his friend that his Uncle Wayne told him that they even do it in the Navy. After all, they have to get rid of their “jizz.”

Sometime later Uncle Wayne is arrested with seven other men for “lewd and lascivious behavior at the municipal bus depot.” Uncle Wayne pleads guilty. His service record is revealed. Wesley’s father comes forward, and Uncle Wayne is gone.

1957. Craig’s crazed dad appears . . . now sober, but with newfound religious fervor running rampant through his veins. He kidnaps his son and takes him on a horrific journey through a Nebraska blizzard. He believes he is saving his son from Uncle Wayne and Craig’s mother. He is going to take his son to Denver for a new life together. His vision of the perfect boy’s life for the perfect boy filled with erector sets, Lincoln Logs, Monopoly and Chinese Checkers.

One night they stop in a cheap, cold cabin. That night Craig tries to escape. His father finds him and the nightmare continues. Reality slips away in the snow. Both are raving when they arrive in Denver.

The last section of the novel takes place in 1969. Craig is now 25. His life is as broken as the lives of the Chief and Uncle Wayne. Craig sets out for California to find them. Will there be redemption, forgiveness? And if there is, what action can cause it to occur? The action Craig takes is brave, loving and totally unexpected.

What a pleasure to go back to this gem of a novel. Its language is direct, spare and poetic. Sentences and dialogue will haunt the reader, as will off-hand observations.

“When I was in the hospital, I heard the nurses say about a little girl who died …'They opened up that little tyke and found such a tumor there she must have been in terrible pain all her life. But you see she didn’t never know it. She must of thought This is life.’”

Within the first two pages, most of the characters, the tone and setting are thoroughly in place. No time is wasted.

George was one of my dearest friends. We had known each other since our days at Bennington College. I have to refer to him as “George.” To call him Whitmore may seem more respectful, but for me it’s too off-putting. It distances him further from my memory. And the further that distance, the more of me that dies.

George was sophisticated, political, urbane, and preferred female novelists. He was a pacifist. In lieu of military service during the Vietnam War he worked at Planned Parenthood in New York. But this novel reveals the secret cowboy in him. This is an intimate work. Not biographical, but depicting a world that George was very familiar with. There is never a moment of condescension in his view of this working-class family. George was born in Denver, Colorado, but parts of his family came from Nebraska and were indeed cowboys. As I was reading
Nebraska
, I wondered what George would have thought of Cormac McCarthy’s
All the Pretty Horses
and what McCarthy would think of
Nebraska
. Both their young men share a similar dark and lonely vision.