A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Earlier this summer, the first floor of my favorite university library closed for renovation. “Will they purge my beloved higgledy-piggledy children’s section?” I wailed. “And what if I need a book from the section while it’s closed?”

Reader, I am happy to share that they have not purged the children’s section, and moreover I found a Secret Passage into the section so I could sneak in while it is closed. (Actually I think my Secret Passage is a totally legitimate access point, but shhhh, we’ll just say I was in grave danger of Library Jail at every moment.)

The Secret Passage story is in fact a bit more exciting than the book I used it to get, Katherine Milhous’s Through These Arches: The Story of Independence Hall. You may know Milhous from The Egg Tree, one of the great picture book loves of my youth, and incidentally a Caldecott award winner. Through These Arches sadly doesn’t allow her pictures nearly as much space to shine, as there’s a lot more text, but it is interesting to get this glimpse of early Philadelphia. Although the book brings the story up to the then-present 1960s, the meat of it is really from the 1680s to 1800 or so. Lots of interesting facts about polymath Charles Willson Peale, the Leonardo da Vinci of the early republic (artist! scientist! excavator of a mammoth skeleton!) and his similarly talented family.

Intrigued by sovay’s and troisoiseaux’s reviews, I also read Ellis Peter’s Black is the Colour of My True-Love’s Heart, a murder mystery that takes place at a weekend folk music class at the gothic manor of Follymead. My only criticism is that I wanted more folk music, but this is perhaps an unfair demand to make of a murder mystery, and it is a cracking good murder mystery. I stayed up late to finish it because I just had to know what happened.

The mystery is a standalone, but I got a feeling that we were stepping into an ongoing story with the detective and his family, and later on I looked it up and indeed we are! This book is part of a series of about a dozen mysteries.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve begun Jane Eyre! I’m not planning to post about it as I go along (although now that I’ve started…), but I was intrigued to discover that the Jane as a fairy comparisons started much earlier than I remembered. When she’s shut in the shadowy Red Room, Jane sees herself in the looking glass, and “the strange little figure there gazing at me, with a white face and arms specking the gloom, and glittering eyes of fear moving where all else was still, had the effect of a real spirit: I thought it like one of the tiny phantoms, half fairy, half imp, Bessie’s evening stories represented as coming out of lone, ferny dells in moors, and appearing before the eyes of belated travellers.’

What I Plan to Read Next

Should I continue my Katherine Milhous journey with Lovina, A Story of the Pennsylvania Country?

As with so many of my books, The Sleeping Soldier grew from an observation in George Chauncey’s Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. Chauncey notes that when historians discuss passionate male friendship in 19th century America, they often “mistake the fact that men who passionately and physically expressed their love for other men were considered normal for their having been considered heterosexual, as if it were not the very inconsistency of their emotional lives with contemporary models of heterosexuality that made them seem curious to historians in the first place.”

What would happen, I wondered, if a normal nineteenth century man found himself in the twentieth century, and discovered that behavior that had been acceptable and even celebrated in his own time had come to be seen as homosexual, and therefore aberrant?

E. Anthony Rotundo’s “Romantic Friendship: Male Intimacy and Middle-Class Youth in the Northern United States, 1800-1900” provided an invaluable description of nineteenth-century romantic friendship, with its kissing and cuddling and passionate declarations of love. Jonathan Ned Katz’s Love Stories: Sex Between Men before Homosexuality defined the outer boundaries of acceptable romantic friendship (basically, you’re fine as long as there are no genitals involved), and shows how those boundaries contracted as the concept of homosexuality began to spread in America in the 1880s and 1890s.

John Ibson’s Picturing Men: A Century of Male Relationships in Everyday American Photography provides a pictorial account of the same process. In the 1860s, Civil War soldiers cheerfully got their photographs taken holding hands or snuggling with their friends. By the 1960s, snapshots show straight men standing rigidly upright, with a carefully defined margin of space between them. The popularization of the idea of homosexuality had not, as many sexologists hoped, led to increased tolerance. Instead, it made many previously acceptable practices morally suspect, resulting in far more stringent boundaries on appropriate male behavior.

Exploring this century of changes required a massive research job. For Russell’s boyhood in the 1840s and 50s, I relied heavily on William Dean Howells’s childhood memoir A Boy’s Town. His novels offer invaluable (and often quite funny) explorations of nineteenth century life and mores. The Shadow of a Dream and Mrs. Farrell both include fascinating depictions of passionate male friendships, one begun during college and the other during the Civil War. (The titular Mrs. Farrell even observes of the friendship, “It’s quite like a love-affair.”)

One could spend a lifetime reading Civil War histories without beginning to read all that has been published about the war. John D. Billing’s memoir Hardtack and Coffee and
Bell Irvin Wiley’s history The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union are stuffed with fascinating information about the everyday life of Union soldiers. Bruce Catton’s Centennial History of the Civil War was the premier Civil War history in the 1960s, an immensely readable political and military history that tends toward the then-prevailing view that hotheaded abolitionists and secessionists were equally culpable in bringing about a tragic and unnecessary war.

Caleb’s Civil War professor is ahead of his time in his view that the Civil War was a just war against slavery - or else very much behind it: this was the view of many Northern abolitionists during and after the war. Many of the Civil Rights measures passed in the 1960s were reiterations or elaborations of laws first passed during Reconstruction, which recalcitrant white Southerners rolled back through a combination of politics and violence after Union troops left the South in 1877. (Charles W. Chesnutt’s 1901 novel The Marrow of Tradition provides a harrowing local view of how this process played out on the ground.)

Frederic W. Loring’s 1871 Two College Friends shows less literary skill than Chesnutt’s or Howells’ work, but makes up for it in sheer enthusiasm. Loring’s two college friends join the Union Army, repeatedly save each other from death, and address to each other panegyrics like “O my darling, my darling, my darling! please hear me. The only one I have ever loved at all, the only one who has ever loved me.”

These contemporary sources were also invaluable in helping me capture the cadences of Russell’s voice, as was Louisa May Alcott’s work, especially Little Women. Many grammatical rules that were codified later in the nineteenth century were still not set as of the 1860s, like the prohibitions on saying “ain’t” or “he don’t.” (“She don’t deserve to be forgiven,” cries Jo, after Amy burns Jo’s irreplaceable manuscript.) Russell’s attitude toward women’s changing roles in society echoes Alcott’s, while his stance toward Dan and Lacy’s romance was suggested by the characters’ easy acceptance of Annabel and Fun See’s engagement in Rose in Bloom.

(Lacy’s family history was inspired by Buwei Yang Chao’s delightful Autobiography of a Chinese Woman, which was translated into English by Chao’s husband Yuen Ren Chao (who also translated Alice in Wonderland into Chinese). Sometimes husband and wife bicker affectionately in the footnotes.)

Caroll Smith-Rosenberg’s Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America is an excellent resource about women’s nineteenth romantic friendships, and the changing social roles of women from the nineteenth into the twentieth centuries. Laura Shapiro’s Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America continues that story into the mid-twentieth century, while also offering tantalizing tidbits about mid-century food.

Hazel’s opinion column parodying anti-suffrage arguments is drawn largely from Marie Jenney Howe's satirical An Anti-Suffrage Monologue, as quoted in Judith Schwartz’s Radical Feminists in Heterodoxy: Greenwich Village 1912-1940. And yes, I did saddle Caleb with a research project about early twentieth-century college girls partly just to get in a little information about girls’ romantic friendships, which remained socially acceptable a few decades longer than romantic friendships between boys. See, for instance, Annie Fellows Johnston’s 1918 book for girls Georgina’s Service Stars, a book for girls in which Georgina mentions matter-of-factly that a younger girl has a crush on her, and gets a pretty severe case herself on an older girl named Esther: “She is so wonderful that it is a privilege just to be in the same town with her. Merely to feel when I wake in the morning that I may see her some time during the day makes life so rich, so full, so beautiful! How I long to be like her in every way!”

Like Russell, I’ve never cared for Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass as a literary production, but it is undeniably an excellent source of information about 19th century understandings of passionate male relationships. In the mid-nineteenth century he published lines like my dear friend my lover was on his way coming, O then I was happy, and the general reading public accepted this without demure until the 1890s.

In the nineteenth century, “lover” had a platonic as well as a romantic meaning. It was most often used to describe a young man who was in love with a girl, whether or not she returned the feeling, but it was also perfectly acceptable for a lonely Jo March in Little Women to sigh to her mother, “Mothers are the best lovers in the world; but I don’t mind whispering to Marmee that I’d like to try all kinds.”

Or, as Florence Morse Kingsley wrote in 1907 in Those Queer Browns (and I cannot emphasize enough that these Browns are queer because they’re socialists): “As for William, he could never have been so wise, so tender, so lovable, so altogether delightful and worshipful, had it not been for his long guardianship of [his sister] Agatha. He has been father, mother, brother and lover to her.”

Conversely, the word "friend" conveyed fervent emotional intensity. Louisa May Alcott, among many others, used it to describe Jesus, “the Friend who welcomes every child with a love stronger than that of any father, tenderer than that of any mother." And it was by no means exclusively attached to platonic relationships: during the Civil War, soldiers often began letters to their wives with the salutation “Esteemed Friend.”

The past is another country; they speak a different language there. Their words may look the same as ours, but they are full of different meanings, and the feelings of the heart are as difficult to translate as poetry. Therefore, let them speak for themselves. Listen to Alfred Dodd’s apostrophe to Anthony Halsey: “Dear, dearest Anthony! Thou art mine own friend. My most beloved of all! To see thee again! What rapture it would be, thou sweet, lovely, dear, beloved, beautiful, adored Anthony!”

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

As generally happens when I’ve got just a few books left before I finish a decade of the Newbery honor books, it’s all Newbery all the time up in here. This week I finished three, starting with a special trip to the Indiana State Library to read Katherine Shippen’s Men, Microscopes, and Living Things. (Sadly the book-reading part of the library is not in the beautiful old building with the dark wood panel walls and the murals and the stained glass, but after I finished reading I took a stroll through the library to admire.) The book is a history of the science of biology, starting with Aristotle and Pliny, with beautiful pen-and-ink illustrations by Anthony Ravielli.

I also read Clara Ingram Judson’s Abraham Lincoln: Friend of the People, a biography of Abraham Lincoln. (The early decades of the Newbery are heavy on Abraham Lincoln and George Washington.) Very much struck by this letter, which Lincoln wrote in the 1830s or 40s announcing his bid for re-election to the state legislature: “I go for all sharing the privileges of government, who assist in bearing its burthens. Consequently I go for admitting all whites to the right of suffrage, who pay taxes or bear arms (by no means excluding females).”

Just a little surprised to see the inclusion of women! (Albeit only tax-paying white women.)

And finally, Mary & Conrad Buff’s Magic Maize, which like Dorothy Rhoads’ The Corn Grows Ripe is about a modern-day Mayan boy who is planting corn with his family. Was there a big upsurge of interest in the Maya in 1950s America? Maybe some new archaeological discoveries? (One of the side characters in this book is an American archaeologist, who makes the happy ending possible when he pays big bucks for a jade earplug that our hero found while planting some experimental corn kernels.) I realize two books is not a trend, but it’s still weird that it happened twice.

Two 1950s Newbery Honors left to go!

What I’m Reading Now

Still trucking in Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns. We’ve reached the North now, and are discovering that while the North is better than the South, it still falls far short of a Promised Land.

What I Plan to Read Next

Letters from Watson has inspired Letters from Bunny, a readthrough of all the Raffles stories! It doesn’t start till March 2024, which is good because it won’t overlap with Letters from Watson, but also bad because it’s so long to wait…

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Margo Jefferson’s Negroland is a memoir, mostly focused on her childhood among the Black middle class in 1950s and 60s Chicago (Jefferson was born in 1947), and the way that the Black Power movement and the feminist movement collided with the exhortations of her childhood to be always well-turned-out and courteous and to rise above racism by her manners and her excellence (which must be obvious without ever seeming show-offy).

Fascinating. Beautifully written, lots of lively and unexpected anecdotes. There’s one scene where a teenaged Jefferson is reading James Baldwin, really vibing, she’s always loved literature but here at last she feels like an insider - and then she’s reading Baldwin’s essay about Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in which he derides the book by comparing it to Little Women, one of young Jefferson’s very favorites. Not an insider here, either.

(Of special interest to some of you: there’s a longer discussion of Little Women near the end of the book, specifically focused on identity-formation as mediated through Little Women characters.)

Also Worrals Investigates. This is the final book in the Worrals series, but I’m glad I didn’t read it last, as it’s not one of the stronger books. The mystery is a bit silly and the pacing slack.

However, fans of Worrals and Frecks (and Worrals/Frecks) will be delighted ( spoilers )

Finally, my Newbery book this week is Mari Sandoz’s The Horsecatcher, about a Cheyenne boy in the 1830s who decides to be a horsecatcher rather than a warrior. Really enjoyed this one! I don’t know enough about the Cheyenne to know if it’s accurate, but it feels cohesive and immersive. Also, unlike most of the other 1950s Newbery books with Indian themes, this one is not about white/Indian culture clash, but firmly planted in the Cheyenne setting. There are white people in the picture, but over there somewhere, useful purveyors of calico and gunpowder but not yet encroaching in a way that has had much impact on the traditional Cheyenne worldview.

What I’m Reading Now

Inspired by Negroland, I’m finally tackling Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, which is about the Great Migration of African-Americans from the Jim Crow South to the North and West from 1915-1970. Right now I’m still in the pre-migration Jim Crow South section and you will be shocked to hear that it’s a real bummer.

What I Plan to Read Next

I am trying to plan ahead a bit less, actually. Follow where the whim leads me!

Sadly I will not be finishing the Newbery Honor books of the 1960s by the end of 2022, because SOMEBODY (one of the school libraries attached to my library system) sat on The Gammage Cup for a month and I still don’t have it. But I remind myself that it is about the journey, not the destination, this project is a meander up the garden path and not a race, etc. etc., the point is to read books and ponder the development of children’s literature in the United States and perhaps find a few new authors I like.

On that note, I will start this raft of reviewlets with Mary Stolz’s other Newbery Honor book, The Noonday Friends, a contemporary novel about a girl whose home duties mean that she can mostly hang out with her best friend only at the school lunch hour. As such it is less about friendship than I hoped from the title (I basically hope all friendship books will be The Changeling), but I enjoyed the family dynamics and the New York City setting. (You can tell how much the city has changed in the last few decades: the heroine's father comments that owning an apartment building in Greenwich Village wouldn't necessarily make the owner rich.)

Also, shoutout to Stolz for writing a book where the main character’s father had what sounds like a heart attack a few years ago but does NOT die over the course of the story. In fact, he doesn’t even get close to dying! No dramatic scenes where he clutches his chest and collapses.

Mary Hays Weik’s The Jazz Man is a short book illustrated by Weik’s daughter Ann Grifalconi’s dramatic woodcuts. The woodcuts are the best part; the story, about a young boy in Harlem who is transported from his depressing life by the stylings of a jazz quartet across the alley, is forgettable.

Eloise Jarvis McGraw’s The Golden Goblet suffered from “unfortunately, I know the title of this book, and the character doesn’t.” In between the title, the cover of the book which depicts Ranofer finding the golden goblet stashed in a chest, and the fact that I have read books before, ( Spoilers, but I bet you’ve guessed based on the information I’ve just shared )

I don’t mind knowing where a book is going, but I do mind figuring out every revelation ages before the main character does. Maybe if I had read the book at the target age I would have found it less predictable? But I did read Mara, Daughter of the Nile at the target age and didn’t much like it either, so maybe I just don’t get on with McGraw’s ancient Egypt books. It’s too bad, because I SO loved her book The Moorchild, and none of her others have hit the spot the same way.

Edwin Tunis’s Frontier Living is about daily life on the American frontier - not just the Wild West (we don’t get to the Wild West till the last twenty pages or so, in fact) but the Appalachians, Spanish California, etc., all copiously illustrated with intricate pen-and-ink drawings like David Macaulay’s Cathedral. I love books about daily life in the past, so I quite enjoyed this, although Tunis is not as interested in my pet subject “What did people eat?” as I would have preferred.

Only the first and third books of Gerald W. Johnson’s 1959 trilogy about American history, A History for Peter, won the Newbery Honor, but it seemed silly for me to skip directly from the American Revolution to Woodrow Wilson, especially given that the middle volume is most useful for Sleeping Beauty reasons, offering a sixties-eye-view of the Civil War and aftermath.

Johnson propounds the then-current view that Reconstruction failed because Congress was too harsh on the South. The pendulum has since swung in the opposite direction, to the view that Congress was too lenient, and if Congress had hit on a Goldilocks level of just-right sternness, they could have convinced Southern whites to go, “You know what, let’s give racial equality a try!” (Maybe if that just-right sternness involved decades of military occupation.)

The books are America Is Born, America Grows Up, and America Moves Forward, and they start with Columbus and go right up through the Korean War. I’ve read about various parts of this history at various times, but history is so protean that you almost always pick up interesting new tidbits, especially about things like Spanish explorers that you haven’t studied since elementary school. (This is probably incorrect, but my recollection is that we covered those explorers in at least three grades, and they got more boring every time.) A few interesting facts:

- Johnson notes that the Spanish explorers were probably not more wicked than the English ones. American history books just tend to portray Spanish explorers in an especially dim light because they draw on accounts written by the English, who were intensely anti-Spanish. (This was the era of the Spanish Armada, after all.)

- During the Constitutional Convention, the representatives of small states were genuinely concerned that the large states might invade their territory and gobble them up, partly because of the entire history of the European continent and also because there had been armed clashes between the colonies before. The eventual solution was equal representation for every state in the Senate. As with many highly effective solutions, this one worked so well that the original problem it was intended to solve now seems mildly comical (what? Like New York is going to invade Connecticut?), while we are left with the unintended consequence that sparsely populated states punch far above their weight in the Senate.

- Speaking of unintended consequences: the fact that every permanent member of the UN Security Council has a veto over action was originally intended as a sop to the US Senate, to ensure that the Senate allowed the US to join the UN, as they had not joined the League of Nations. If the US has a veto, went the reasoning, then the US can’t be forced into action against its will! Unfortunately, and although this was clearly unintentional one would think it must have been very foreseeable indeed, this has the side-effect of making it almost impossible for the UN to act.

My dad retains his borrowing privileges at the Purdue Library, so naturally that was my next stop in my quest for obscure Newbery Honor books. Upon arrival, I discovered that they have moved their children’s section, and it now resides in a dimly lit second-floor annex tucked behind the bound periodical stacks. It would be a tremendously atmospheric setting for a Possession-style movie about literary detective work…

Anyway: the fruits of my plunder!

Mary & Conrad Buff’s Big Tree, a short book about the long, long life of a redwood tree. I loved the conceit of this book, the point of view of the tree standing sentinel over the centuries, but for obvious reasons (the book is from the 1940s) the natural history is out of date - very much of the “predators are BAD” mindset. To be honest I think the Newbery committee should eschew giving awards to science books: their information will inevitably become outdated like this.

Genevieve Foster’s George Washington, one of THREE (!) George Washington books to win the Newbery Honor. (One of the others, George Washington’s World, was also written by Genevieve Foster.) A short and snappy biography with rather lovely illustrations in a style reminiscent of Katherine Milhous’s The Egg Tree.

Anna Gertrude Hall’s Nansen. Before I read this book, I had only the vaguest idea that Nansen was an arctic explorer, but it turns out that he was so much more than that! One of those nineteenth century dynamos who apparently doesn’t need to sleep, Nansen led an expedition across Greenland, revolutionized oceanography with his groundbreaking theories about polar currents, designed a ship to withstand polar pack ice to follow those currents and prove those theories, attempted to reach the North Pole only to be defeated by the terrain and spend nine months basically hibernating in a tiny hut lit only by seal blubber, with nothing to eat but bear stew and bear steaks…

(Unsurprisingly, he was quite depressed for a few years after this adventure, not that it slowed him down one jot.)

He also wrote a steady stream of books about his adventures and his scientific theories, became a leading voice in Norway’s separation from Sweden, and headed a diplomatic mission around Europe to ensure that this separation didn’t blossom into all-out war. During World War I he used his diplomatic experience to help maintain Norway’s neutral stance; after the war he headed a commission to resettle refugees and exhorted the League of Nations to send aid to starving peasants in Russia.

This time, his efforts failed: the League refused to send famine relief. Many of the member nations would have watched every peasant in Russia starve rather than aid the Bolsheviks in any way.

(This book was published in 1940 and there is something deeply poignant in the author’s wistfulness for the League project. It had definitively failed at that point, but you feel that she empathizes deeply with Nansen’s yearning that it could work, that we might stop war.)

Nansen worked with the American relief committee instead, only to be partially stymied by the catastrophic damage to Russia’s railroad system, which meant that the donated food often couldn’t make it to the starving people. But he never gave up, and basically worked himself to death at the age of 68.

An absolute powerhouse of a man. I probably never would have encountered him without the Newbery project as impetus, and I’m so glad to have made his acquaintance.

What I’ve Finished Reading

Emily Henry’s Book Lovers, which I really liked while I was reading it: for years I have yearned for a book about an uptight career woman who finds someone who loves her in all her uptight glory, and this book really delivers on that front. But after waiting a few days to write the review, I find I’ve forgotten the names of all the characters except the lead’s sister Libby? Puzzling.

I suppose that I often have this experience with, for instance, Mary Stewart books too, and there is something to be said for reading books that you enjoy even if they are not books that stick in your mind forever and ever.

I really liked this quote: “Maybe love shouldn’t be built on a foundation of compromises, but maybe it can’t exist without them either.”

I also finished Kim Todd’s Sensational: The Hidden History of America’s “Girl Stunt Reporters,” a fun and fascinating read that profiles a number of female reporters from the 1880s and 1890s: Nellie Bly, Elizabeth Jordan (of Tales of the City Room fame), Ida B. Wells. (I don’t think Wells is technically a stunt reporter but sometimes one must stretch one’s ostensible topic to include interesting people.) Todd suggests that Nellie Bly and her colleagues were the origin of the “girl reporter” character type - a direct line to characters like Lois Lane.

Naturally I just had to follow up by reading Nellie Bly’s Ten Days in a Mad-House, which is about Bly’s undercover investigation of the conditions at the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island in New York City. An interesting (deeply depressing) source about conditions in American asylums in the 1880s, as well as general attitudes toward mental illness and the medical understanding (or lack thereof). Bly notes that once she got to the asylum she dropped her “mad” act as once, but none of the doctors or nurses ever even entertained the idea that she might be sane.

And I’ve continued my John McPhee journey with The Crofter and the Laird, his most famous and easily accessible book - so easily accessible, in fact, that I found it on my parents’ bookshelves! This is a fascinating look at life on the island of Colonsay in the Hebrides in the late 1960s, with lots of interesting tidbits about the history and folklore of the island.

What I’m Reading Now

Bruce Catton’s Terrible Swift Sword. In 1861, the U.S. Navy conquered two forts and a whole bunch of harbors in North Carolina - so much more than they expected to conquer that they were quite at a loss to follow it up by marching on Savannah, even though the Confederates had almost no forces to oppose such a march.

One thing I’ve learned from reading these military histories is that “unexpectedly huge victory” can be almost as disorienting as “catastrophic defeat.” Have a contingency plan just in case you succeed beyond your wildest dreams!

I’ve also begun T. H. White’s The Goshawk. The library only has this on audiobook so I approached it with trepidation, but actually the reader (Simon Vance) seems wonderfully in tune with the rhythms of White’s prose.

What I Plan to Read Next

In Sensational, Todd mentions that former girl stunt reporter Caroline Lockhart later (in 1912) wrote a book called Lady Doc, which involves lesbians and abortion and happens to be on Gutenberg so of course I HAVE to read it.

After my generally negative response to John Ibson’s The Mourning After: Loss and Longing among Midcentury American Men, I am baffled to report that his earlier book Picturing Men: A Century of Male Relationships in Everyday American Photography... is actually good?

Picturing Men is a collection of photographs (both studio portraits and snapshots) of men together between 1850 and 1950, either in pairs or larger groupings. The photographs show that up through the 1910s, many men felt perfectly comfortable displaying physical affection in front of the camera: slinging their arms around each other, lying on top of each other, sitting on each other’s laps, kissing each other’s cheeks.

Ibson notes that many of these photos are now sold as “gay interest,” and in a way that’s accurate - they certainly are of “gay interest” today! - but, he points out, when these photos were taken there was nothing queer about this behavior in any sense of the word. Going to a professional photographer’s studio to get a professional photograph taken where you sit in your friend’s lap was 100% normal, masculine behavior, a common, fun activity that lots of men took part in. They often got the photos printed as postcards and sent them to other friends to show off what a good time they were having.

(And of course this means that guys who WERE boyfriends could get snuggly professional photographs taken too. Ibson has one photograph from 1920 of two guys leaning together so their heads touch, prominently sporting pansies in their buttonholes, and I think the slang term pansy was already common at that point, so it’s hard not to feel that this is a wink-wink nudge-nudge… although, again, we just can’t know.)

But over the 1910s and 1920s, these photographs transformed. Men got fewer and fewer studio portraits taken together. (It’s worth noting that snapshots had been around and inexpensive for at least twenty years at this point; this change is not merely the result of changing technology.) They also began to put more space between themselves in snapshots.

There’s a particularly fascinating chapter about the metamorphosis in team sports photographs. Before the 1910s, these photos tended to have an aesthetic that you might call “puppy pile”: sometimes the team members are literally lying on top of each other, or all crowded together with their arms around each other. Over the 1910s and 20s, the pictures literally “straighten up,” till the team members are standing in rows keeping their hands to themselves, as teams generally do in official photographs today.

During World War II, there was a brief resurgence of affectionate studio portraits of men - army buddies hugging each other etc. But more or less immediately after the war, the lid clamped down hard and did not lift again. I know I mentioned this in my review of The Mourning After, but again, I just can’t get over the cruelty of the cultural switcheroo from “Invest super hard in your relationship with your buddies! Here is an official government issued Buddy Book with a special page for My Favorite Buddy!” to “Why would any normal heterosexual man ever have strong feelings about another man or want to touch another man EVER, ew.”

During the Korean War, a mere five years later, there were scarcely any studio portraits of buddies. Even the snapshots often show the same stiffness that had become common in pictures of civilian men. And there were also simply fewer pictures of men together. This entire business of taking pictures with other men had begun to seem just a little gay.

By the Vietnam War, the idea of men displaying physical affection was so alien to American soldiers that they were appalled to see South Vietnamese soldiers going for walks with their buddies hand-in-hand. The Americans thought that the South Vietnamese army was riddled with homosexuals, and it contributed significantly to their belief that ARVN wasn’t much of a fighting force.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Susan Coolidge’s A Guernsey Lily; or, How the Feud Was Healed. The subtitle suggests a feud-forward story, but in fact it is 90% about the Wreford family traveling to the Channel Isles (for Mama’s health, you know!) with a little wisp of a feud that shows up about halfway through, about which Coolidge cares so little that she can’t even be bothered to marry the eldest daughter of one feuding family to the eldest son of the other.

Honestly Coolidge is 100% correct: I am down to read a travelog to the Channel Isles at any time. Bring on the ever-blooming flowers and the tidal cave alive with anemones! Also delighted by the fact that on Guernsey, the Wrefords rent their home from Mrs. Kempton (wife of a sailor constantly away on long voyages to South America) and her friend Elizabeth, who met in service, bought the house together for the purpose of renting it out, and as far as I can tell live there together as the landladies.

I also finished E. Anthony Rotundo’s American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era, which I must confess I bought mainly because it includes his article “Romantic Friendship: Male Intimacy and Middle-Class Youth in the Northern United States, 1800-1900” more or less unaltered. Sometimes you just want to read about early- to mid-nineteenth century youths sleeping in their BFF’s arms after a long intense chat about their feelings, you know?

(It’s always kind of weird reading straight men’s writings about this because you can kind of feel them vibrating with longing that never actually makes it on the page because there is no way to say “if only my BFF and I could snuggle and talk about our feelings” that will not sound gay to a modern audience.)

And I finished James Herriot’s All Things Bright and Beautiful, a lovely and soothing read as all James Herriot books are. I especially enjoy the dog and cat stories, possibly because I am familiar with dogs and cats but have never had the opportunity to become personally acquainted with a cow.

What I’m Reading Now

Bruce Catton’s A Stillness at Appomattox. Our boys in blue are marching into the Wilderness and the pages are thick with the promise of the horrible slaughter to come!

What I Plan to Read Next

In the afterword to The Friendly Young Ladies, Mary Renault scorned Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness as an excessively glum picture of lesbian life and recommended Compton Mackenzie’s Extraordinary Women instead, and after some resistance (is it really WISE to read a book recommended in The Friendly Young Ladies) I have succumbed and ordered Extraordinary Women through interlibrary loan.

(I really ought to read The Well of Loneliness at some point but everything I read about it suggests that it is indeed lugubrious, and ugh.)