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RARE & SECONDHAND GAY RARE & SECONDHAND
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Fiction of Gay Interest
Plot / Content: Rating: G "the story of a man called Emmanuel Ghelens; he came of a well-to-do Flemish family, but his parents had no great affection for the sensitive and highly-strung child and he was forced more and more to fall back on himself. Soon he discovered the volcano that smouldered within him; from then on he was fated to struggle with his homosexual desires. Ghelens did not take the easier way - he fought back with everything he could, his life was to be dedicated to a long and self-destructive inner conflict for which death would be the only final remedy. In this book his problem and his secrets are laid bare: the unfolding of Ghelens' story is a most compelling performance. (from the jacket) Background / Biography: Maxence Van der Meersch was a French Flemish writer, who was born on 4 May 1907 in Roubaix, and died on 14 January 1951 in Le Touquet, where he had gone to be treated for tuberculosis. continued on Wikipedia According to the jacket, Mask of Flesh was written while he was at the height of his powers, but publication was delayed until after his death. Reviews: As a work of literature, Mask of Flesh has already been lost to history; as a glimpse into a narrow slice of our past - entrepreneurial Belgium and France between the two world wars - it provides insights that might otherwise be forgotten. In breathless words of self-pity and mortification the narrator takes us through his sad life, as he flees both from and to his homosexual desires. A self-described monster who falls early into evil ways, Emmanuel Ghelens spends his life in various towns between Ostend and Paris seducing and ruining susceptible young men. When he has one chance of happiness with a young North African who falls in love with him, Fate intervenes to keep them apart. When he falls in love with a woman he eventually abandons her, knowing he can never provide the sexual fulfilment that she is due. First published in 1958, Mask of Flesh almost certainly reflects a widespread view of homosexuality at the time, but van der Meersch's novel is excessively morbid when compared with the works of his contemporaries. Cocteau, Coccioli and Peyrefitte, for example, acknowledged that their gay protagonists lived beyond the moral pale but those writers often allowed their characters some mental stability and a modicum of happiness. It is debatable whether the author himself was gay - Wikipedia refers to his wife as the only love of his life - but the overwhelming disgust at same-sex activity that he expresses suggests that he was often beset by the demon of homosexual desire. Other points of interest include the suggestion that one of Ghelens' sisters is lesbian, although she appears only in passing and there is no indication as to whether her life turned out to be happy or miserable. Students of Belgium's history will note the mirror of today's linguistic tensions: the Ghelens family are embarrassed when forced to speak their native Flemish with strangers and even among themselves speak only French - the language in which this book was originally written. Martin Foreman Arbery Books also sells secondhand and rare non-gay fiction and non-fiction. Click here for our full list. |
"Shall I ever dare to write it? What will be the reaction of the person who reads these lines? Disgust? A smile? I am so fully aware of the ignominy of my vice that I shall never have the courage to write its name. I can only commit my story to paper on one condition that I constantly avoid all preceision, all detail, lest the tragedy became base or farcical. 'The worst of our situation,' one of my fellow slaves once said to me, 'is that it is a dead end, that it is completely fruitless. It leads us nowhere. There is no possible explanation for us, no valid metaphysic. We must take it for granted that there are failures in life. Misfits. Flops. Siamese twins. People born without heads . . . And people like us.'" opening paragraphs Secondhand booksellers |
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