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Book Review: Two College Friends
May. 22nd, 2021 10:45 amIn Love Stories: Sex Between Men Before Homosexuality, Jonathan Ned Katz mentions Frederic W. Loring’s 1871 opus Two College Friends, which of course I had to track down. This book is an absolute delight, although it must be understood that delight is not an assessment of its literary quality (middling) but simply a reaction to the fact that this appears to be Loring’s published self-insert fic.
Specifically, Loring casts himself as Ned, an orphaned Harvard student with no one in the world to love except his friend Tom - who seems to be based on Loring’s friend William Chamberlin, to whom the book is dedicated.
Tom is gorgeous. The book kicks off with an interplay about a photo, which Ned thinks is some beautiful girl whom Tom has fallen in love with, BUT IN FACT is a photo of Tom in his recent theatrical role as shepherd girl. Tom has been carrying it around because he means to give it to Ned as a present. (“What a mistake nature made about your sex, Tom!” a professor friend comments, when he sees what a “dear little peasant girl” Tom makes. It should be noted that it’s not uncommon for nineteenth-century commentators to say that so-and-so is as pretty as a girl, or would make a pretty girl, and it doesn’t seem to have the negative connotations that it would have in the twentieth century.) In fact, he’s so good-looking that Stonewall Jackson himself comments on it when the two boys are captured.
(I have seen a picture of William Chamberlin and I must say I don’t see it, but maybe the photo just didn’t do him any favors.)
Almost as soon as the photo interplay is finished, the Civil War kicks off and the boys join up. (Loring and Chamberlin were too young to fight, but of course you want to give your self-insert expies the most dramatic possible milieu.) Next occurs possibly my favorite part of the book, when they quarrel just a few days before a battle, and stop speaking to each other, until Tom shoots a man who is just about to shoot Ned:
Then Ned gets sick, and Tom gives up his leave to nurse Ned back to health. “It makes me want to die for him,” Ned muses fervently. “Nothing else that I can do seems sufficient. When this war is over, I suppose Tom will marry and forget me. I never will go near his wife—I shall hate her. Now, that is a very silly thing for a lieutenant-colonel to write. I don’t care, it is true.”
Fortunately for Ned, he soon gets his chance! Right after Ned recovers, he and Tom are taken captive by Stonewall Jackson… just as Tom begins to show symptoms of the self-same disease from which he nursed Ned! Obviously Tom will not survive captivity, so although Ned has given Stonewall Jackson his parole that he won’t escape (this book is also REALLY into Stonewall Jackson), he manages to sneak the ailing Tom back to Union lines.
By this time Tom is delirious with fever and unconscious. “O my darling, my darling, my darling! please hear me,” Ned begs him. “If you knew how I love you, how I have loved you in all my jealous, morbid moods, in all my exacting selfishness,—O Tom! my darling, my darling! can’t you say one word, one little word before we part…?”
But Tom, lost in his fevered sleep, can’t speak. Ned “once more kissed the flushed face of his friend,” and then goes back to Stonewall Jackson’s camp to pay the penalty for breaking his parole, which is of course death by firing squad, because of COURSE if you are a nineteenth-century man writing a self-insert fic, your own self-insert has to die the most dramatic possible death - a death that he could have avoided had he not such punctilious notions of HONOR.
Stonewall Jackson is deeply impressed by Ned’s return, just in case you were wondering, and really sorry that he has to have him shot. But, as Ned says, “having sinned, I accepted the penalty.”
Ostensibly, Ned’s sin is breaking parole. Katz suggests that there may also be an unconscious atonement here for the sin of loving Tom maybe a little too much. This is definitely a subtext that jumps out to the modern reader, but it’s hard to say if that’s not an anachronistic reading. Certainly we are meant to think, with Stonewall Jackson, that Ned’s death is the tragic waste of a noble young life, and to consider it a just and fitting tribute when, post-war, Tom and his wife Nettie name their firstborn after Ned.
Specifically, Loring casts himself as Ned, an orphaned Harvard student with no one in the world to love except his friend Tom - who seems to be based on Loring’s friend William Chamberlin, to whom the book is dedicated.
Tom is gorgeous. The book kicks off with an interplay about a photo, which Ned thinks is some beautiful girl whom Tom has fallen in love with, BUT IN FACT is a photo of Tom in his recent theatrical role as shepherd girl. Tom has been carrying it around because he means to give it to Ned as a present. (“What a mistake nature made about your sex, Tom!” a professor friend comments, when he sees what a “dear little peasant girl” Tom makes. It should be noted that it’s not uncommon for nineteenth-century commentators to say that so-and-so is as pretty as a girl, or would make a pretty girl, and it doesn’t seem to have the negative connotations that it would have in the twentieth century.) In fact, he’s so good-looking that Stonewall Jackson himself comments on it when the two boys are captured.
(I have seen a picture of William Chamberlin and I must say I don’t see it, but maybe the photo just didn’t do him any favors.)
Almost as soon as the photo interplay is finished, the Civil War kicks off and the boys join up. (Loring and Chamberlin were too young to fight, but of course you want to give your self-insert expies the most dramatic possible milieu.) Next occurs possibly my favorite part of the book, when they quarrel just a few days before a battle, and stop speaking to each other, until Tom shoots a man who is just about to shoot Ned:
“Tom,” said I, with some feeling, “you have saved my life.”
“There!” said he, triumphantly, “you spoke first.”
Then Ned gets sick, and Tom gives up his leave to nurse Ned back to health. “It makes me want to die for him,” Ned muses fervently. “Nothing else that I can do seems sufficient. When this war is over, I suppose Tom will marry and forget me. I never will go near his wife—I shall hate her. Now, that is a very silly thing for a lieutenant-colonel to write. I don’t care, it is true.”
Fortunately for Ned, he soon gets his chance! Right after Ned recovers, he and Tom are taken captive by Stonewall Jackson… just as Tom begins to show symptoms of the self-same disease from which he nursed Ned! Obviously Tom will not survive captivity, so although Ned has given Stonewall Jackson his parole that he won’t escape (this book is also REALLY into Stonewall Jackson), he manages to sneak the ailing Tom back to Union lines.
By this time Tom is delirious with fever and unconscious. “O my darling, my darling, my darling! please hear me,” Ned begs him. “If you knew how I love you, how I have loved you in all my jealous, morbid moods, in all my exacting selfishness,—O Tom! my darling, my darling! can’t you say one word, one little word before we part…?”
But Tom, lost in his fevered sleep, can’t speak. Ned “once more kissed the flushed face of his friend,” and then goes back to Stonewall Jackson’s camp to pay the penalty for breaking his parole, which is of course death by firing squad, because of COURSE if you are a nineteenth-century man writing a self-insert fic, your own self-insert has to die the most dramatic possible death - a death that he could have avoided had he not such punctilious notions of HONOR.
Stonewall Jackson is deeply impressed by Ned’s return, just in case you were wondering, and really sorry that he has to have him shot. But, as Ned says, “having sinned, I accepted the penalty.”
Ostensibly, Ned’s sin is breaking parole. Katz suggests that there may also be an unconscious atonement here for the sin of loving Tom maybe a little too much. This is definitely a subtext that jumps out to the modern reader, but it’s hard to say if that’s not an anachronistic reading. Certainly we are meant to think, with Stonewall Jackson, that Ned’s death is the tragic waste of a noble young life, and to consider it a just and fitting tribute when, post-war, Tom and his wife Nettie name their firstborn after Ned.
