Friends

I read other things after the dark academia! Though honestly the second book took me two weeks and I finished it up just yesterday; let us forgive this slight accounting error and treat it as June. In July I’m planning to try Emily Tesh’s The Incandescent and one of my bookstore backlog items, but as always, we’ll see what turns up. Hope you’re staying cool and enjoying some fresh produce. My red currant bush was so productive in its first fruiting year and I’m delighted.

Cakes and Ale, W. Somerset Maugham

Maugham’s Wikipedia page contains an involved discussion of his literary mediocrity, detailing criticisms of his output both contemporary and retrospective. Particular attention goes towards his supposed lack of brilliance and beauty, despite the clever correctness of his prose and storytelling. I would have understood that, perhaps agreed with it, until I reached the final chapter of Cakes and Ale.

This is a classic sort of navel-gazing novel in which an author writes a fictionalized sketch of things known from life. Willie Ashenden (not the spy novel protagonist; Maugham reuses his name here) narrates in the first person as he navigates a present-day friend’s attempt to write a post-mortem biography of a dead Great Author. The friend, Alroy Kear, knew the Great Author, Edward Driffield, later in Driffield’s life. He wants Ashenden’s youthful recollections of the author before he was great, when they were acquaintances in the same small village. Ashenden reminisces about his life and knowledge of Driffield.

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Lord Dismiss Us, Michael Campbell

Terence P. Carleton is a senior prefect at the Weatherhill School starting his final summer term. He’s already sat his exams and will be headed to Oxford in autumn. A new Head of school, Crabtree, and his wife and teen daughter are beginning at Weatherhill following the prior Head’s death. Existing masters, like the old Dr. Rowland and young Cambridge scholar Eric Ashley, must adjust to the new Head’s regime; a wide cast of secondary characters includes the school reverend Cyril Starr and a pretty, new boy named Nicky Allen.

This 1960s portrait of British public schools was written to be contemporary and critical, for the discerning adult reader. It’s blurbed by Christopher Isherwood. Campbell set out to write a fictional treatise on homosexuality in schools, and he covers his subject to an amazing extent. Crabtree wants to root out this “muck” and will extract blood by the end of term. Dr. Rowland is the repressed older teacher; he initially turns a blind eye towards sex and romance among the boys, but is swayed towards Crabtree. Ashley is the wild young instructor still reeling from his own boyhood romance, driven to ever-more instability by the eradication crusade. Reverend Cyril Starr might not desire fleshly things, but he does collect a stable of his favorite type of boy. And the boys, well—Carleton falls for Allen and is absurd in his ascetic attempt to keep that love pure, i.e. nonsexual. Most other named boys in the book are fucking someone. The ones who aren’t become arms of Crabtree’s crusade. It’s a messy, homosocial, homosexual world in which women and girls are foreigners or enemeis, but the greatest enemy of all remains the patriarchal definition of acceptable masculinity.

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And for regshoe, this exchange:

Ashley: ‘Do you know E. M. Forster’s “The Longest Journey”?’
Carleton: ‘Yes, it’s very difficult.’
Ashley: ‘It’s the most interesting of them all.”