Review of Henry Blake Fuller's "Bertram Cope's Year"

[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure, as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

There are two kinds of forgotten writer. One is vaguely remembered when perusing a book shelf or in passing conversation. Hamlin Garland – didn’t he write about farmers? Or maybe William Dean Howells – didn’t he used to be considered one of America’s greatest writers? This is a precarious and perhaps the most painful of literary deaths, being half-remembered and half-forgotten. Perhaps more graceful is the obsolescence of the completely and utterly forgotten. These include George Washington Cable, Zitkala-Sa, or, alas, the subject of this review, Henry Flake Fuller and his novel “Bertram Cope’s Year.” 

To be quite frank, we need not mourn the cultural loss of every writer who ever set pen to paper and, judging solely from my reading of “Bertram Cope’s Year,” the only novel I’ve read by him, Fuller is one of those writers. My Triangle Classics edition has a very generous introduction full of biographical and literary material written by Edmund Wilson and originally published in the New Yorker in 1970, which hails him as an important American writer of the early twentieth century. Wilson has been known to tend toward the effusive in his praise.

The novel tells the story of Bertram Cope, fresh from undergraduate school, who has decided that pursing a Master’s degree might further his career prospects. He soon falls under the heavy-handed charms of the grande dame of local literary society, Medora Phillips and the three young ingénues, including a poet and a composer, whom she supports with her independent wealth. Somehow, magically – by his ravishing good looks, his innocence newness to the place? – all of these women are attracted to him, inviting him to endless teas and evening soirees. There’s even an older man named Basil Randolph who frequents these get-togethers looking for young men from the university to “mentor,” and is frustrated by Bertram’s constant passive-aggressive rebuffs.

At home, however, Bertram writes to his friend Arthur Lemoyne, telling him how much he misses him and wants to see him. Eventually, Arthur discusses moving to live with Bertram in order to see if he can get a role in the local musical productions at the university. Locals are a little surprised when Arthur is cast in the role of a woman in the musical, but they naively don’t read much into it. The novel ends with Bertram graduating with his degree and going back home without Arthur, who made an overt pass at one of the male members of the musical cast. 

This is a novel of manners, particularly highly stylized because the subject matter demands a cloak of ambiguity. Fuller never mentions the word the word “homosexual,” and the entire book is completely devoid of sexual behavior of any kind beyond a little heterosexual flirtation here and there. The ambiguity seemed a little too much for even some of its more literary readership. The American Library Association’s publication Booklist described it “a story of superficial social university life in a suburb of Chicago, with live enough people and a sense of humor hovering near the surface." “New Outlook” said that “the study of this weak but agreeable man is subtle but far from exciting." The cluelessness of these reactions and their lack of ability to interpret social situations is a credit to Flake’s subtlety, even a century later when what we sometimes identify as “gay fiction” is anything but subtle or stylized. 

This novel struck me very much as Radclyffe Hall’s “Well of Loneliness” or Virgilio Pinera’s “Le carne de Rene” did – full of historical interest, but ultimately failing short of being the timeless LGBT fiction they’re often vaunted to be. The manneristic writing, roughly contemporary with the later novels of Henry James, hasn’t aged nearly as well. The criticism of small, bourgeois minds is nothing new and isn’t handled particularly deftly. However, as a “gay novel,” it stands out as more than just a bizarre curio of literary history. It is, probably accurately, called the first gay novel published in the United States, in 1919. This alone should earn it some attention, even if Bertram and his worldly sprezzatura don’t brashly shove more contemporary expectations in our face.