The New Life (5+*)

A recent New York Times round up--the 25 most influential works of postwar queer literature--pissed me off because it didn't include two authors whose works certainly shaped my life (John Rechy and Andrew Holleran).  I'm pretty sure Tom Crewe would have failed to make the cut, too, even though his absorbing and complex historical novel broadens the scope of LGBTQ+ writing well beyond the "me me me" perspective that characterizes much of it.

Set shortly before the trial of Oscar Wilde, The New Life imagines the marriages of two men with different expressions of sexuality that Victorian society has forced them to repress.  Crewe alternates between their perspectives as they collaborate on an academic work positing that "sexual inversion" should no longer be criminalized.  Simply put, if we worship the Greeks for their intellect, why can't we agree that their tolerance for homosexuality is equally worth emulating?

Easier said than done, of course, especially after Wilde frightens the horses with his arrest and the press sensationalizes the accusations against him that he denies.  Their book loses any credibility in the sanctimonious, hypocritical maelstrom that ensues, leaving both gay Jonathan and kinky Henry--both based on actual people but fleshed out in exhilarating, maddening and completely sympathetic ways--with no other option than to "live in the future we hope to make," the manifesto of a movement called the "New Life."

As one minor character explains it:

"There are lots of words now, ones we needn't be ashamed of. Invert, Uranian, Urning, homosexual. ‘The intermediate sex is my phrase.’ Our role in the New Life will depend on the blend within us – the body of a man and the soul of a woman, or the body of a woman and a soul of a man. We are a kinder race, unconcerned with propagating ourselves. We see differently."

Crewe explores the impact of their decision to write and publish the book on their wives, lovers and friends, too, including a lesbian couple, and how class, as much as sexuality, informs their behavior.  This wide focus greatly complicates his theme but makes it more relevant to society at large.  At the same time Crewe doesn't shy away from describing gay sex almost pornographically--I can't remember ever reading a more arousing opening scene in a respectable novel--before justifying his explicitness through Jonathan's desire to make his wife understand what makes him tick:

His desire, almost physical, to speak of what he and Frank had done, were doing. He worried that his experiences would not be fully legible until then, even to himself. He wished to make them permanent, whole, to give them a place in the world. Every day, memories tugged fiercely for release. Words, details, salivated on his tongue. He imagined sitting Catherine down and forcing her to listen to it all come drooling out. There was a part of him that resented her, for tolerating Frank’s presence in the house, even as he delighted in it. He sometimes feared she did not truly understand what it was she tolerated. He wanted her to know. He wanted to be sure that she knew.

When Catherine learns that Jonathan plans to publish the book--which includes his own anonymous "case description"--she doesn't hold back either even though she has been well aware of his proclivities for some time.  Their exchange captures the collateral damage a repressed sexual orientation can wreak on a marriage better than anything I've ever read:

“Why must  you do any of this? [Catherine] cried.  “God knows I have not prevented you from gaining your pleasure.”

“The  law is unjust.”  He raised his voice in turn.  “The morality is unjust.  It cannot continue.  It is too late for myself and Wilde—though my life was spoiled long before his.  Other lives can still be saved.”

“You seem to be quite happy in your spoiled life.”

“I am as happy as I am able.  But you are not.  It is your life too I am thinking of.”

She raised her eyebrows.  “Is it?  I have not noticed.”

“I know how badly I have wronged you.”  He stepped towards her.  “Through no will of my own, Catherine.  No animosity.  It has been the fault of my nature.  You know how I fought it.  You will  see, in the book, for how many others it has been the same.”

“I have been reading through your book.  It has been like breathing a bag of soot.  I am”—her voice broke—"filthy from it.  I found your history.  Case Eighteen.  You are recognizable to me.  I have read all about you misery, your loneliness.  Thank you, for waking me this morning and pressing this record of your adulteries into our bed.  As if, when I wake, I am not sufficiently reminded.”

“I could not fine a way—“

“Yes, this is much easier, much.  You cannot tell me you intend to proclaim yourself a sodomite”—she spoke the words as if it were glass and she was cracking it between her teeth—“by publishing this book, so you publish it without telling me. You cannot tell me, truly, about yourself – so you write it all down in your book, for me to read. And both ways, what you cannot tell me, you show me as you show the world. The only thing that separates me from anyone else, any person in the street – my only compensation for being your wife these 25 years – is that I have not had to handover money from my humiliation, but I have obtained it gratuit.”

“It is not humiliation,” he said.  He studied her expression fearfully.  “No one who reads this book in good faith could imagine thot the wife of a man constituted as I am—"

“They would not think of her at all,” she snapped.  “she does not come into it. I know how you felt as a child. Your longings. Your photograph that you fidgeted over, until your father bid you stop. I am sorry for you. Do you know what I wanted as a girl?  A husband who loved me. A man in a blue necktie, with polished shoes. You say you were lonely”—her voice broke again; the tears in her eyes brokenly reflected the window—“I was lonely,” she went on, “and I was not free to go into the streets, to go with soldiers to their dirty lodgings. I was not free to bring strange men to this house. I was not free to install in it a man of another class, 20 years younger. Not free to share a bed with him—not free to send him out with my silly daughter for the afternoon. But it s you have been lonely. It says so in your book.”

He came closer, close enough to touch.  He looked at her, the dark hair behind her ears framing a white forehead, tortured with lines.  “You are right,” he said.  “It is unjust.  I should not have married you—I know it.  We should both have been free to pursue our happiness.  We were not.  We are both victims.  It is what the book is for.  It is for you as much as for me.”

Oddly, Jonathan's speech to a group of progressives who support the publication of his and Henry's book (if not its subject) on free speech grounds reminds me of the cri de coeur that America Fererra delivers in Barbie.  Even now, more than a century after Wilde's conviction, living in the future we hope to make still remains a challenge.