Book Review: The Mourning After
May. 3rd, 2022 09:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerJohn Ibson’s The Mourning After: Loss and Longing among Midcentury American Men is not the book that I expected it to be and also not great at being the book that it actually is.
I expected it to be a book about the abrupt shift in the understanding of masculinity and male intimacy in America following World War II. During the war, servicemen were encouraged to form powerful bonds with their fellow soldiers. The armed forces actually distributed a pamphlet called “My Buddy Book,” in which you were encouraged to record your buddy’s name, home address, height, weight, hair and eye color, favorite sports, hobbies, etc. (I am absolutely using this in a novel if I get a chance.) After the war, society basically decided that this whole “buddy” thing was very gay, which left a lot of soldiers unable to share or even internally acknowledge their profound grief over the loss of their buddies, because having such deep emotions about another man was suddenly suspect.
And it is about that… kind of… around the edges. But of his five chapters, Ibson devotes two to John Horne Burns (gay novelist, mostly forgotten today, perhaps because his treatment of homosexuality in his books ranges from ambivalent to hostile) and one to Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar. (I really ought to read Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar at some point, but in the one thing I read by him, a book introduction, he came across as completely insufferable, like a gay Clifton Fadiman.)
Then Ibson focuses his coda on John Knowles’ A Separate Peace, ending his discussion of that novel (and his book!) with the comment, “He places his characters in the closet, joined them in there, and shut the door.”
Wow! Wow! Look, I enjoy the queer reading of A Separate Peace as much as the next person, but it’s eminently possible to read it as a story of an intense and troubled friendship. Sometimes people write about friendship because friendship is what they want to write about! Sometimes an intense friendship is, in fact, a friendship, and the participants aren’t banging and don’t want to bang!
I felt that in his heart Ibson was only interested in buddies who were actually lovers, and the book would have been stronger if he had admitted that and tightened his focus ever so slightly. (Most of his material is about that anyway, so it wouldn’t require THAT much work.) Or, perhaps, if he had admitted outright, “I think American culture was wrong to judge these men harshly for it, but you know what, I agree with the postwar cultural assumption all intense emotional attachments between men MUST be sexual! The US Army in World War II was the Theban Band! How do you like them apples?”
He never does say this outright, but the implicit belief animates many of his analyses - like his reading of A Separate Peace. The book only makes sense to him if you read Gene and Phineas’s relationship as a romance.
And to add insult to injury, he has this horrible tendency to write pages and pages of minutia. For instance, he quotes from every single contemporary review of almost every book that he discusses. It would probably be possible to do this in a way that is both interesting and instructive, but here it's just an endless list with a light sprinkling of shallow analysis.
There is some interesting stuff in here: I enjoyed the chapter about photos of men, which notes the persistence of affectionate buddy photos through World War II, and their total disappearance just a few years later during the Korean War. But I came here for the buddies and it turns out that Ibson is not, in fact, interested in buddies at all.
I expected it to be a book about the abrupt shift in the understanding of masculinity and male intimacy in America following World War II. During the war, servicemen were encouraged to form powerful bonds with their fellow soldiers. The armed forces actually distributed a pamphlet called “My Buddy Book,” in which you were encouraged to record your buddy’s name, home address, height, weight, hair and eye color, favorite sports, hobbies, etc. (I am absolutely using this in a novel if I get a chance.) After the war, society basically decided that this whole “buddy” thing was very gay, which left a lot of soldiers unable to share or even internally acknowledge their profound grief over the loss of their buddies, because having such deep emotions about another man was suddenly suspect.
And it is about that… kind of… around the edges. But of his five chapters, Ibson devotes two to John Horne Burns (gay novelist, mostly forgotten today, perhaps because his treatment of homosexuality in his books ranges from ambivalent to hostile) and one to Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar. (I really ought to read Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar at some point, but in the one thing I read by him, a book introduction, he came across as completely insufferable, like a gay Clifton Fadiman.)
Then Ibson focuses his coda on John Knowles’ A Separate Peace, ending his discussion of that novel (and his book!) with the comment, “He places his characters in the closet, joined them in there, and shut the door.”
Wow! Wow! Look, I enjoy the queer reading of A Separate Peace as much as the next person, but it’s eminently possible to read it as a story of an intense and troubled friendship. Sometimes people write about friendship because friendship is what they want to write about! Sometimes an intense friendship is, in fact, a friendship, and the participants aren’t banging and don’t want to bang!
I felt that in his heart Ibson was only interested in buddies who were actually lovers, and the book would have been stronger if he had admitted that and tightened his focus ever so slightly. (Most of his material is about that anyway, so it wouldn’t require THAT much work.) Or, perhaps, if he had admitted outright, “I think American culture was wrong to judge these men harshly for it, but you know what, I agree with the postwar cultural assumption all intense emotional attachments between men MUST be sexual! The US Army in World War II was the Theban Band! How do you like them apples?”
He never does say this outright, but the implicit belief animates many of his analyses - like his reading of A Separate Peace. The book only makes sense to him if you read Gene and Phineas’s relationship as a romance.
And to add insult to injury, he has this horrible tendency to write pages and pages of minutia. For instance, he quotes from every single contemporary review of almost every book that he discusses. It would probably be possible to do this in a way that is both interesting and instructive, but here it's just an endless list with a light sprinkling of shallow analysis.
There is some interesting stuff in here: I enjoyed the chapter about photos of men, which notes the persistence of affectionate buddy photos through World War II, and their total disappearance just a few years later during the Korean War. But I came here for the buddies and it turns out that Ibson is not, in fact, interested in buddies at all.
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Date: 2022-05-04 02:37 am (UTC)It's true and you should say it!
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Date: 2022-05-04 03:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-05-04 06:27 pm (UTC)I agree. Society right now is not great about the depth and validity of non-sexual friendships! It is a thing that bugs me very much.
Is the disappearance of buddy photos from the Korean War as closely tied in time to the mid-century lavender scare as it sounds to me?
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Date: 2022-05-04 07:16 pm (UTC)Ibson actually has one buddy photo from the Korean War, and it basically encapsulates the tragedy of male relationships of the whole era. The World War II photos are full of easy affection, while the Korean War photo features two guys awkwardly shaking hands like they a couple of rival magnates who just sealed a business deal. But they liked each other a lot to get the photo in the first place, given that by that time it was no longer common or encouraged.
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Date: 2022-05-04 08:54 pm (UTC)Good for them! No matter how awkward. Maybe there are some decent civilian candids at barbecues or whatever.
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Date: 2022-05-04 09:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-05-04 09:14 pm (UTC)This book's ratio of intriguing data to decent analysis really sounds obnoxious.
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Date: 2022-05-04 09:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-05-10 03:11 pm (UTC)But there's definitely the occasional fannish 'there is no heterosexual explanation for this!' where 'this' is like, being really upset that you were tricked into shoving your best friend off a moving train??? And I'm just like "do none of you like your friends?????"
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Date: 2022-05-11 03:29 pm (UTC)YES there is a certain variety of shipping explanation that seems to hinge on the idea that the ONLY time people care about each other even slightly is when they're in love, and if they had to push a friend off a moving train they would be not even slightly bothered! they'd just bounce back like a rubber ball! And it's like, wow, what does the word "friend" even mean to you if it does not include "I would be upset about pushing this person off a moving train"?
Not only do I think that most people would find it upsetting to push a friend off a train, I believe that most of us would be upset if we got tricked into pushing a perfect stranger off a train. It's just an upsetting thing to happen.
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Date: 2022-05-12 12:54 pm (UTC)lolololol true
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Date: 2022-05-04 09:20 am (UTC)This is incredible, good grief. And those poor soldiers afterwards... But yeah this book sounds very frustrating!
The City and the Pillar is very readable (until you get to the tragic ending lol).
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Date: 2022-05-04 03:43 pm (UTC)Apparently Vidal did a revision in the 1960s where Jim doesn't murder Bob... but instead rapes him. This really feels like a fuck-you to his sad readers who just wanted Jim and Bob to be happy.
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Date: 2022-05-04 02:01 pm (UTC)The first thing I ever encountered by Gore Vidal was Myra Breckenridge (because of the movie I think) and I never wanted to read anything by him ever again.
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Date: 2022-05-04 03:37 pm (UTC)What did Gore Vidal do in Myra Breckenridge? Do I want to know?
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Date: 2022-05-04 04:20 pm (UTC)With the caveat I read MB maybe sometime in the mid-eighties, I found it to be a deeply repulsive book about a trans woman.
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Date: 2022-05-04 04:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-05-04 06:57 pm (UTC)Gore Vidal was invaluable as a script doctor on the 1959 Ben-Hur and the 1968 debate with William F. Buckley Jr. where Buckley lost his temper and homophobically threatened Vidal for backing him into a corner he couldn't intellectually defend is fascinating because it looks now like a direct line to our current politics. I tried one or more of his novels and bounced so comprehensively that I can't even remember which ones, except I don't think Myra Breckinridge because I feel like I would have remembered a badly handled trans angle. He is, however, responsible for one of the best entries I have ever heard in that game where you build sentences out of the names of authors combined with the titles of their work: Two Sisters Gore Vidal. (My other favorite is The Man Who Melted Jack Dann.)
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Date: 2022-05-04 02:10 pm (UTC)Sometimes an intense friendship is, in fact, a friendship RIGHT?! Why do people have to be reductionist? Isn't there room for more than one idea in the world? So much discussion seems to be along the lines of "It all boils down to...." But not all things boil down to some other thing! And sometimes things can have powerful points of similarity and still be different--or at least, shall we say, can also have points of difference! A domestic dog may be more like a wolf than it is like a shark, and a dog and a shark may be more like each other than they are like a volcano, and all those things may be more like each other than they are like electromagnetic radiation but like... they all have points of difference! And you might want to talk about dogs without having to say that they're interchangeable with wolves.
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Date: 2022-05-04 03:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-05-04 03:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-05-10 03:11 pm (UTC)