Bertram Cope's Year - Softcover

Fuller, Henry Blake

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1885983263 ISBN 13: 9781885983268

Publisher: Turtle Point Press, 2000

Synopsis

“Entertaining . . . eminently readable, distinguished by beautifully evoked period atmosphere and sly humor.”—The New York Times

America’s first gay novel, published in 1919.

About this title

Review:

First published in 1919, Bertram Cope's Year was released to a deafening silence. Neither critics nor readers reacted with shock to its matter-of-fact depiction of a gay couple and their domestic ménage--perhaps because few of them knew what the book was about. Henry Blake Fuller was nothing if not a subtle writer. Held in high esteem by his contemporaries, he nevertheless faded from public view soon after Bertram Cope's Year's chilly reception. The critical reevaluation of Fuller's work began only in 1970, when Edmund Wilson wrote in the New Yorker that Fuller was America's premier novelist of the early 20th century, ranking him above both Stephen Crane and William Dean Howells. Now, for the first time since 1919, what Wilson called Fuller's best novel has been restored to print.

The novel's eponymous narrator is a young college instructor newly arrived in the university town of Churchton--a fictional stand-in for Evanston, Illinois, home of Northwestern University. Most unexpectedly, Cope finds himself besieged with admirers, including an older, clearly gay man and a widow whose house is full of eligible female boarders with artistic pretensions. ("Amy plays. Hortense paints. Carolyn is a poet.") Cope, however, can think of nothing but his friend Arthur Lemoyne. Although the nature of their relationship is never made explicit, for the initiated, Fuller's novel is full of clues. Once Lemoyne has moved in with Cope, for instance, elderly Joseph Foster notices him "always hanging over the other man's chair; always finding a reason to put his hand on his shoulder...." It makes Foster think of "a young married couple at a Saratoga hotel" who "made their partiality too public," causing a lady to complain that "they brought the manners of the bed-chamber into the drawing-room."

Cope and Lemoyne make for a happy couple, their domestic tranquility only interrupted by Lemoyne's penchant for amateur theatrics. Performing in an all-male musical comedy, Lemoyne's female impersonation is a little too convincing for Churchton's sensibilities, and when he makes a pass at a straight actor, he is hounded from both his studies and his job. "A thing may be done too thoroughly," as the widow Phillips remarks. Still, the incident is played as satire rather than tragedy, and refreshingly, same-sex love itself never registers as tortured or doomed. Instead, Bertram Cope's concerns are as practical as possible: why married couples have so much stuff, where to get it, the excellence of Arthur Lemoyne's coffee and toast. In this sense, Bertram Cope's Year is the most modern gay novel imaginable: its concern is not to make a case for the love that dare not speak its name, or even to speak its name at all. Instead, it contemplates how--in a world given over to the many rituals of heterosexual love--a thoroughly average gay couple can make themselves a home and a place in society. In this, the greatest flaw of Bertram Cope's Year is also its greatest strength. Ambivalent, charming, emotionally inert, in the annals of gay literature Bertram Cope is exceptional for his very ordinariness.

From the Back Cover:

In 1919, when he was sixty-two, Henry Blake Fuller published Bertram Cope's Year. This audacious book with several homosexual characters revolves around a young English instructor in a middle western university town patterned on Evanston, Illinois. Rejected by every New York publisher, Fuller self-published and the book received scant notice or unintelligent reviews. Discouraged, Fuller burned the original manuscript. It took ten years before he ventured to publish another novel. James Huneker, Fuller's contemporary, loved Bertram Cope's Year. He read it three times and wrote to Fuller, "Its portraiture and psychological strokes fill me with envy and joy...you are implacable. Stendhal of the lake!" Fifty years later, critic Edmund Wilson, in a New Yorker article on Henry Blake Fuller entitled "The Art of Making It Flat", called Bertram Cope's Year Fuller's best book. He wrote, "It has a philosophic theme...which raises it well above the fiction of social surfaces of the school of William Dean Howells." The Turtle Point Press edition is the first republication of Bertram Cope's Year since 1919.

About this edition

• Publisher: Turtle Point Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1885983263
• ISBN 13: 9781885983268
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320