From Tall Sails to Spy Tales

Sacchi Green

When it comes to reading fiction, I’ve been an anglophile pretty much all my life. My mother read The Secret Garden and other British classics to me, and once I could read books by myself I devoured stories about English children, especially historical ones, then moved on to Sherlock Homes and Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer and my mother’s favorite cozy mystery writer, Patricia Wentworth. Later—well, let’s not bother about Fanny Hill or The Pearl, but Lady Chatterley’s Lover is beautifully written. In any case, my recent reading (or listening, to be precise—I’ve been on the road a good deal lately, which means books on CDs) has been particularly anglo-centric.

 Considering the current state of the world, I might be better off switching my literary allegiance to France or Canada or even Germany rather than the UK or The USA (I do have fond memories of Anne of Green Gables in Canada and still reread some of Colette in translation from time to time,) but I also lean toward historical fiction, especially when I’d just as soon forget the world’s current state.

In any case, my recent reading has been entirely British, Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin  series of adventures in the British Navy of the early 19th century during the Napoleonic Wars, and John Le Carré’s Cold War memoir The Pigeon Tunnel.

I’ve read the O’Brian books several times before. They’re a kind of comfort reading for me in that the world and characters are presented in such vivid detail that it feels like I’m right there with them, but without their risk of seasickness or drowning or cannonballs. Every now and then I marvel that this is also the world and time of Jane Austen, with a few glimpses of the society she knew and wrote about, but in general a very different, wider portrayal of that world. A more masculine viewpoint, too, but no less nuanced and complex than Austen’s, though a fair bit less literary. A movie made a few years ago, Master and Commander, combining the title of the first book in the series with events from two of the others, does get some of the general flavor and spirit of the whole, even though the characters aren’t treated in as much depth. All in all both books and movie are good distractions from our all-too-real contemporary world.  

The Pigeon Tunnel deals with a more recent period, post-WWII up to fairly recently, and doesn’t feel all that much in the past to someone my age, but most of it is by now history-book material. Le Carré (who now freely admits to his real name of David Cornwell) is best known for his novels about the British Intelligence service, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, with a long list of other successful novels. He did serve for a fairly brief time and in a fairly minor way (at least as he tells it) as a spy of sorts, enough, apparently, to make his novels feel authentic, and enough to make some of his old associates very angry indeed when at times his books make the Service look bad, although they don’t seem to think he gets things wrong, exactly. He doesn’t seem to have been accused of revealing sensitive Service codes, etc, either, unlike writers such as Graham Greene whose Our Man in Havana and others did bring forth threats of prosecution for treason. Le Carré says of his own The Spy Who Came in from the Cold that a senior Intelligence officer described it as “the only bloody double-agent operation that ever worked.”

Le Carré’s life as a novelist has been much longer and more successful than his days as a spy, and he reflects on the question of whether Intelligence services might well be grateful when their “literary defectors” like himself and Graham Greene take to novel writing instead of spying. Writing fiction causes less harm than other trouble they might have caused, he says, and remarks (tongue in cheek—or maybe not) that the spy services might wish that Edward Snowden had “done the novel instead.”

I haven’t finished the book yet. I find the snippets of stories mildly interesting, but what has really impressed me most is what he says about writing and memory, a subject that we’ve talked about here, and one that’s been debated a great deal when memoirs are discussed.
   
In his introduction he says, “These are true stories told from memory—to which you are entitled to ask, what is truth, and what is memory to a creative writer in what we may delicately call the evening of his life? To the lawyer, truth is facts unadorned. Whether such facts are ever findable is another matter. To the creative writer, fact is raw material, not his taskmaster but his instrument, and his job is to make it sing. Real truth lies, if anywhere, not in facts but in nuance.” Later he adds,
“Was there ever such a thing as pure memory? I doubt it. Even when we convince ourselves that we’re being dispassionate, sticking to the bald facts with no self-serving decorations or omissions, pure memory remains as elusive as a bar of wet soap. Or it does for me, after a lifetime of blending experience with imagination.”

He does say often enough that a particular detail may not have been exactly as he remembers, so he doesn’t claim that everything is the exact truth. He’s been a journalist as well as a novelist, interviewing world leaders, following a photojournalist into battle in Vietnam, but not, he says, keeping diaries or making many on-the-spot notes, so at times he relies on the articles he wrote at the time to refresh his memory. He also reveals a fact that many of us know as writers, which is that when he has jotted down notes while “under fire,” so to speak, he’s done it not as himself, but as the characters he hoped to write fiction about. Who among us hasn’t thought “what a great scene this could make,” while something intense is happening to or close to us?

 While the O’Brian books are entertaining distractions from the present, LeCarré’s memoir is all too close to reality. He says that the title of this book, “The Pigeon Tunnel,” comes from something he saw as a boy when his father took him along on one of his frequent trips to a casino in Europe. Next to the casino was a sporting club, where pigeons were raised on the roof, trapped, released into underground tunnels that opened out on the seashore, and shot at by sportsmen. Those who survived did what pigeons do—they flew back to the rooftop where they’d been raised, were trapped again, then sent back to the tunnels. Who better than a Cold War spy turned novelist to recognize history, doomed to repeat itself?

Maybe I should re-read something like Anne of Green Gables next, for distraction.

Back in the Day

by Jean Roberta



What are the chances? In March 2016, the prolific Sarah Schulman got a big novel published. In October 2016, the slightly-less prolific but also well-known novelist and science writer Lucy Jane Bledsoe will have a work of historical fiction published, based on the life of her aunt, after whom she was named. Both books are set in the 1950s, and both are at least partly set in Greenwich Village when it was really “bohemian.” Both authors are major lesbian writers who were born in the postwar America they describe, and both writers discuss their personal connections to their subject-matter. I was lucky enough to get review copies of both books from The Gay & Lesbian Review.

The Cosmopolitans (New York: the Feminist Press)



This thick paperback by Sarah Schulman is loosely based on a nineteenth-century French novel, Cousin Bette by Honore de Balzac, and it occupies the same social space as James Baldwin’s Another Country (1962), which broke new ground by showing black and white, gay and straight characters interacting as approximate equals. Schulman’s two major characters, Bette and Earl, are social outsiders who live in exile from their original families and who have little in common aside from being tenants in the same building. Bette was disowned by her family in the 1920s after being jilted by a dishonest lover, and Earl, as a man-loving actor and a “Negro” from the South, can’t find a safe space anywhere. Their friendship (“for life,” as Bette points out to an interloper) is a type of relationship rarely seen in current fiction, now that “community” no longer refers to physical space. The purity of this bond shines against the grit of working-class urban life.

Despite the grit, the late-fifties arrival of television advertising, in the form of an ad-woman who dresses like Jayne Mansfield and speaks in snappy one-liners, introduces a note of social satire. Bette is dazzled but not fooled by this character, who inspires her to manipulate new circumstances to secure what she wants, which is simply the return of her friendship with Earl. To get him back in her life, Bette must arrange the breakup of his disastrous affair with a naïve young wannabe actress from Bette’s well-heeled family who can’t understand why Earl “loses” sexual interest in her, or why he would be desperate enough to regard her as a social life-raft.

As the author explains in an afterword on style, this novel was influenced by the “kitchen-sink” realism of the 1950s, yet the dialogue sometimes suggests vintage Hollywood and grand opera. (Schulman has explained that this novel was originally conceived as a play, and it has an “intermission.”) Characters express their emotional truth with startling eloquence, much as the author does in her non-fiction on moral issues. The reader is reminded that art, “realistic” or otherwise, is usually better-organized than life, which is why both fiction and advertising can hold our attention.

A Thin Bright Line (Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press)



This novel takes place in some of the same territory, but its realist style has a harder edge. This is a fictional reconstruction of the last decade in the life of the author’s lesbian aunt, for whom she was named: Lucybelle Bledsoe from small-town Arkansas. In a lengthy postscript, the author outlines her methods of discovering as much evidence as she could about a remarkable science editor and possible novelist (although her novel was never found) who died in a house fire at age forty-three, in 1966.

The possibility that the original Lucy Bledsoe was murdered is troubling and not completely beyond reason, considering contemporary government policy regarding “homosexuals” (not to mention women with access to classified information) as security risks in the “Cold War” of the United States vs. the Soviet Union. However, the author Lucy Bledsoe has chosen to accept the official verdict, that the fire was an accident, and that the only smokescreen might have come from a smoldering cigarette. This approach allows her to focus on her aunt’s life rather than her death. It seems likely that the original Lucy Bledsoe would prefer to be remembered that way.

The result is a tightly-plotted, suspenseful novel which would be absorbing even if all the characters were completely fictional. This is the stuff of the lesbian paperbacks of yesteryear, complete with coded conversations, blackmail, and love that is all the sweeter because it comes with such a high price. There are convincing cameo appearances by actual writers of the time, including Valerie Taylor and Lorraine Hansberry, and references to Lucy’s idols: fiction-writer Willa Cather and science-writer Rachel Carson.

The story is told in a no-nonsense third-person voice, but Lucy’s personality comes through in her words and her actions. She appears thin and pale, straightforward and logical, with diverse skills: she earned a Masters Degree in Literature from Columbia University, dropped out of a Ph.D. program, and spent much of her working life editing reports by geologists and other scientists.

As an independent person and a closeted member of an outlawed community, the original Lucy Bledsoe has no qualms about spending time in Chicago with an appealing black ("colored," "negro") woman who runs her own taxi company (thanks to her training as a mechanic during the War) and who loves to take photos. However, when Lucy shows up at a bar in Stella’s neighborhood, looking for her, the presence of a white woman attracts a degree of attention that makes Stella uncomfortable. Police harassment is a fact of life that makes it necessary for Stella to pay regular bribes just to stay in business.

Aside from de facto segregation, does Stella have any other reason for running hot-and-cold with Lucy? Well, yes, and to make things more complicated, there is a spy in Lucy’s workplace who gets paid to report on her. Fun times.

The thin bright line of the title is a glow on the horizon which promises future discoveries about the nature of the earth, as well as a future in which lesbians like her niece could live openly, without fear. The semi-transparent brilliance of ice is a kind of motif in this novel, in which Lucy’s work on a project in the Arctic foreshadows the author’s repeated trips to Antarctica, and her use of that continent as a setting for fiction.

In both novels, a dazzlingly clear light is shone into dark corners. Queer life in the pre-Stonewall era has rarely been presented this movingly or well.