Book Review: Jeb and Dash
Dec. 24th, 2020 07:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerJeb and Dash: A Diary of Gay Life, 1918-1945 is a fascinating book, full of wonderful detail not only about gay life but life in general in Washington D.C. during that time period, as well as the Jeb Alexander’s opinions of books he read and movies and theatrical productions he saw.
It’s also pretty depressing, less from the reasons you might expect (the Great Depression; World War II; societal homophobia), but because the central relationship is basically an unrequited one. Jeb falls for Dash when they are both at college, although they are scarcely even friends at the time; they reunite by accident years later when Dash gets a government job, and for a couple of years they are lovers, but the relationship is stormy and eventually they break up for good.
Part of the problem is Dash’s discomfort with his own homosexuality: the first time Dash tries to break up with him, Jeb cries,“Where did you get this insane notion that our love is ‘unnatural’?” and muses later in his diary, “The greatest love that I have ever known and I am asked to pretend that it doesn’t exist and at the same time am assured that, at least in the form of deep feeling and friendship, it is returned.”
(So far, so Maurice.)
But the final break seems to have come about because Jeb, even in his own accounting, sounds like a terrible boyfriend. Loads of jealous scenes of the “Where were you last night?” variety. “I can’t see anybody, even a second time, without your being suspicious,” Dash complains; he grows so sick of it that at one point he responds to Jeb’s inquiries “in a frustrating, sing-song manner, ‘Not going to tell you - Not going to tell you - ” They are both, at this point, nearly thirty.
In between suspecting Dash of sexual intimacy with every man he speaks to twice, Jeb also sees Dash as an ideal of purity and wholesomeness: “I had so wanted to keep him away from that crowd…” he laments, after hearing that Dash went to a queer party, “with their petty intrigues and affairs, their sexual obsessions and idle gossip. All that queer stuff - it makes me sick to think of it. I want to keep him sweet and wholesome, simple and unspoiled; it would make him happier and me, too.”
(This is the Charioteer part of the book.)
Upon reflection, I think “I want to keep him PURE” is in fact just a prettified, spiritualized expression of jealousy - a way of making it sound like it’s for Dash’s benefit although, as Jeb lets slip at the end, it’s really for Jeb’s. If Dash is kept sweet and wholesome and away from the queer scene, he wouldn’t have much chance to cheat on Jeb, after all.
So in a way it’s almost a relief when they break up, except Jeb is so intensely lonely afterward. He never gets another steady boyfriend, although he does have a fairly wide circle of queer friends who always seem to be dropping by each other’s places on a whim, going out to eat or to the theater together, and generally hanging out so much as to aggravate the jealousy of anyone reading at the tail end of socially distanced 2020.
The other part I found quite sad was Jeb’s writer’s block. He writes often about his yearning to write fiction, and in fact writes in his diary so voluminously it eventually fills fifty volumes (!), but as far as I can tell he never even starts work on a novel. The only story that he mentions finishing and publishing is entitled “In a Rut,” which seems almost too fitting.
Various notes:
1. Lafayette Park was apparently THE gay cruising ground in Washington, D.C. from the 1920s-40s. Jeb’s frenemy Randall (Jeb’s first lover, who will later succeed Jeb in Dash’s affections) gives Jeb tips on how to cruise successfully: “‘I’ve been observing your methods. You sit waiting for someone to start something. Well, you can sit a while. Then if nothing happens, make a tour of the park. Find one that appeals to you. Then you sit down with him... Keep moving,’ he intoned, ‘Or you won’t find one.’”
But Jeb is too shy to follow his advice.
2. In general, Jeb uses “queer” as a synonym for “homosexual” (he also uses the word inversion in this context - Havelock Ellis’s term - and has a copy of Ellis’s book Sexual Inversion); “gay” is still used in the old sense of cheerful or happy, although I know that in other circles it had already taken on the meaning of “homosexual.” Not sure when that came into more general usage.
3. While Jeb is in college he has a relationship with a pair of twins, by which I mean that they appear to be dating him more or less interchangeably. “I still can’t identify them in what could be called personal circumstances,” Jeb notes, rather plaintively. “My sense of lacking a real relationship is accentuated when the curtains are drawn, the room darkened, by not having the most basic information - the identity of the boy in my arms. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ they say, and they seem to mean it.” (46)
He seems to have fallen out of touch with the twins after college, which is understandable in a way, but I’m fascinated to know what their later lives were like.
It’s also pretty depressing, less from the reasons you might expect (the Great Depression; World War II; societal homophobia), but because the central relationship is basically an unrequited one. Jeb falls for Dash when they are both at college, although they are scarcely even friends at the time; they reunite by accident years later when Dash gets a government job, and for a couple of years they are lovers, but the relationship is stormy and eventually they break up for good.
Part of the problem is Dash’s discomfort with his own homosexuality: the first time Dash tries to break up with him, Jeb cries,“Where did you get this insane notion that our love is ‘unnatural’?” and muses later in his diary, “The greatest love that I have ever known and I am asked to pretend that it doesn’t exist and at the same time am assured that, at least in the form of deep feeling and friendship, it is returned.”
(So far, so Maurice.)
But the final break seems to have come about because Jeb, even in his own accounting, sounds like a terrible boyfriend. Loads of jealous scenes of the “Where were you last night?” variety. “I can’t see anybody, even a second time, without your being suspicious,” Dash complains; he grows so sick of it that at one point he responds to Jeb’s inquiries “in a frustrating, sing-song manner, ‘Not going to tell you - Not going to tell you - ” They are both, at this point, nearly thirty.
In between suspecting Dash of sexual intimacy with every man he speaks to twice, Jeb also sees Dash as an ideal of purity and wholesomeness: “I had so wanted to keep him away from that crowd…” he laments, after hearing that Dash went to a queer party, “with their petty intrigues and affairs, their sexual obsessions and idle gossip. All that queer stuff - it makes me sick to think of it. I want to keep him sweet and wholesome, simple and unspoiled; it would make him happier and me, too.”
(This is the Charioteer part of the book.)
Upon reflection, I think “I want to keep him PURE” is in fact just a prettified, spiritualized expression of jealousy - a way of making it sound like it’s for Dash’s benefit although, as Jeb lets slip at the end, it’s really for Jeb’s. If Dash is kept sweet and wholesome and away from the queer scene, he wouldn’t have much chance to cheat on Jeb, after all.
So in a way it’s almost a relief when they break up, except Jeb is so intensely lonely afterward. He never gets another steady boyfriend, although he does have a fairly wide circle of queer friends who always seem to be dropping by each other’s places on a whim, going out to eat or to the theater together, and generally hanging out so much as to aggravate the jealousy of anyone reading at the tail end of socially distanced 2020.
The other part I found quite sad was Jeb’s writer’s block. He writes often about his yearning to write fiction, and in fact writes in his diary so voluminously it eventually fills fifty volumes (!), but as far as I can tell he never even starts work on a novel. The only story that he mentions finishing and publishing is entitled “In a Rut,” which seems almost too fitting.
Various notes:
1. Lafayette Park was apparently THE gay cruising ground in Washington, D.C. from the 1920s-40s. Jeb’s frenemy Randall (Jeb’s first lover, who will later succeed Jeb in Dash’s affections) gives Jeb tips on how to cruise successfully: “‘I’ve been observing your methods. You sit waiting for someone to start something. Well, you can sit a while. Then if nothing happens, make a tour of the park. Find one that appeals to you. Then you sit down with him... Keep moving,’ he intoned, ‘Or you won’t find one.’”
But Jeb is too shy to follow his advice.
2. In general, Jeb uses “queer” as a synonym for “homosexual” (he also uses the word inversion in this context - Havelock Ellis’s term - and has a copy of Ellis’s book Sexual Inversion); “gay” is still used in the old sense of cheerful or happy, although I know that in other circles it had already taken on the meaning of “homosexual.” Not sure when that came into more general usage.
3. While Jeb is in college he has a relationship with a pair of twins, by which I mean that they appear to be dating him more or less interchangeably. “I still can’t identify them in what could be called personal circumstances,” Jeb notes, rather plaintively. “My sense of lacking a real relationship is accentuated when the curtains are drawn, the room darkened, by not having the most basic information - the identity of the boy in my arms. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ they say, and they seem to mean it.” (46)
He seems to have fallen out of touch with the twins after college, which is understandable in a way, but I’m fascinated to know what their later lives were like.
no subject
Date: 2020-12-24 01:33 pm (UTC)Lafayette Park was apparently THE gay cruising ground in Washington, D.C. from the 1920s-40s
Lafayette Square in front of the White House?? (In an interesting coincidence, one of the statutes there is of Baron Von Steuben, who "some 21st century publications ... have embraced as 'a gay man', 'openly gay', or as 'the gay man who saved the American Revolution.'" [x])
no subject
Date: 2020-12-24 05:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-24 02:15 pm (UTC)And that advice about meeting people--so true, and yet, as with Jeb, so hard for people to act on.
no subject
Date: 2020-12-24 05:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-24 05:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-24 02:55 pm (UTC)Does he know it? Or does he just report his own behavior accurately enough that the reader figures it out?
I am also curious about the twins, because that is a fascinating approach to sharing a partner, and I would love to know how Dash got on later in life. I really hope the answer is "much more comfortably with himself and with boyfriends who were less jealously idealizing."
no subject
Date: 2020-12-24 05:26 pm (UTC)I do wonder if Dash's whole "It's not you, it's just the crushing weight of societal homophobia" break-up attempt was as much a reaction to Jeb's suffocating jealousy as Dash's actual feelings about homosexuality. Like, maybe it was that jealousy that made him feel the relationship was unnatural, and he blamed the fact that they were both men because that's what society told him to blame - or maybe he said "We have to break up because homophobia!" because that seemed like it might hurt Jeb less than "We have to break up because I can't stand one more jealous scene!"
no subject
Date: 2020-12-24 05:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-24 05:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-24 08:00 pm (UTC)Though maybe they had Jeb's number and were carefully distancing.
no subject
Date: 2021-01-06 12:56 am (UTC)GROSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
While Jeb is in college he has a relationship with a pair of twins, by which I mean that they appear to be dating him more or less interchangeably. “I still can’t identify them in what could be called personal circumstances,” Jeb notes, rather plaintively. “My sense of lacking a real relationship is accentuated when the curtains are drawn, the room darkened, by not having the most basic information - the identity of the boy in my arms. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ they say, and they seem to mean it.”
!!!