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RARE & SECONDHAND GAY RARE & SECONDHAND
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Fiction of Gay Interest
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Plot / Content: Rating: G Despised and Rejected is unusual in that it is an early work dealing with gay men and (to a lesser extent) lesbians, which does not end in the death of one or both same-sex partners. On the other hand, the author makes it clear that gay men in early twentieth-century Britain confronted considerable psychological and social obstacles and their personal happiness was by no means guaranteed. Gay men who resisted the national hysteria to take up arms and fight against the Germans in what would later be known as the First World War, had even greater challenges to overcome. The plot focuses on Dennis Blackwood, a sensitive young musician who is aware of his "difference" from other men his age but resolved to ignore or overcome it. On holiday early in 1914, his mother introduces him to Antoinette de Courcy, a young woman of French heritage, whose emotional life has hitherto focused on passions for older women. Shortly afterwords, Dennis meets and falls for Alan Rutherford, the virile young son of a factory-owner. Unable to express his love for Alan, and recognising a kindred spirit in Antoinette, Dennis turns his attentions towards her, leading her to fall in love with him. Then war breaks out, the young couple's pacifism brings them into contact with other conscienscious objectors and Alan comes back into Dennis' life . . . The first half of Despised and Rejected focuses on Dennis' and Antoinette's perceptions of themselves, each other and those around them, with Dennis having greater insights into his own emotional drives than Antoinette into her own. In the second half of the novel, this theme becomes subservient both to the principle of conscientious objection (which is explored thoroughly and with strong arguments presented for and against) and to radical ideas such as women's rights, socialism and Irish independence, which are only briefly touched on. Almost paradoxically, this change is liberating for Dennis. Pre-war, Dennis suffered mentally as a gay man unable to express his own emotions and sexuality; now, he is increasingly able to accept himself as a gay man, but he faces considerably mental and physical torture as a conscientious objector. Compared with many later novels, therefore, where the hero either dies or is condemned to a life of misery, Despised and Rejected offers gay men considerable hope. The lives of lesbians, however, as represented by Antoinette, appear to rest in limbo. Background / Biography: "A T Fitzroy" was the pseudonym of Rose Allatini, who was born on 23 January 1890 in Vienna and died in the UK around 1980. She was the author of almost forty novels under her own name and other pseudonyms, particularly Eunice Buckley. Her writing covered a number of topics, including romance, Jewish identity and Theosophy (a mystical semi-cult popular in the early twentieth century). Allatini married composer Cyril Scott in 1921; they had two children, but separated in the 1940s. She lived the last four decades of her life with Melanie Mills, another writer. Despised and Rejected was published on 22 May 1918, in the fourth (and last) year of the First World War. The list of books printed at the end suggests that C W Daniel Ltd, the publishers, specialised in novels that were considered radical and / or socialist. Several referred to the suffragette movement at a time when women had not yet secured the vote. It is uncertain how many copies of Despised and Rejected were printed, distributed and sold in the five months following publication. On 10 October, one month before the end of the war, the novel was prosecuted under the Defence of the Realm Act as "likely to prejudice the recruiting, training, and discipline of persons in his Majesty's Forces." The trial took place a few months after an earlier court case involving Noel Pemberton Billing, a member of parliament who, in a manner that would have echoes forty years later in the McCarthy accusations in the United States, had claimed that 47,000 British subjects were being blackmailed for their sexual preferences into undermining the British war effort. Sued by Maud Allan for alleging that she was a lesbian (in a magazine article entitled The Cult of the Clitoris), Pemberton Billing repeated his claims. Although he provided no evidence, the idea that sexual inverts were undermining the British cause appeared to be vindicated when Allan lost her case. This linking of homosexuality with conscientious objection in the public mind ensured that Despised and Rejected had few defenders when it came to trial. The magistrate, Alderman Sir Charles Wakefield, claimed that Despised and Rejected was an "immoral, unhealthy and most pernicious book, written to attract a certain class of reader for the personal profit of the publishers." In the left-wing New Statesman 'Solomon Eagle' (J C Squire) distinguished between moral perversion and conscientious objection, suggesting that the first should be subject to prosecution, but the latter was a matter of free speech . . . Unsurprisingly, the novel was banned and unsold copies were ordered to be destroyed. However, it seems that Allatini was not personally affected by the case. The war came to an end in November 1918 and the horrors of trench warfare ensured that pacifism continued as a strong strand in British political and social thought in the 1920s and the 1930s, until the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939 drew the country back into conflict. However, despite increasing discussion around same-sex issues, there would have been little enthusiasm for attempting to republish the book during that time. After the end of the Second World War, another novel banned for its treatment of same-sex behaviour - The Well of Loneliness (1928) - came out in 1949 to little protest. Despised and Rejected remained out of print until 1988, when it was reissued by the London-based Gay Men's Press. The facts given above come from secondary sources (the internet), not primary sources (documents such as letters, court records etc). They appear reliable but have not been confirmed and should not be quoted without this caveat. The webpages consulted include, among others, Orlando, Brighton Our Story and extracts from Gay Wachman's Lesbian empire: radical crosswriting in the Twenties. The interpretation of the facts, conjectures and opinions are those of Martin Foreman. Reviews: Arbery Books also sells secondhand and rare non-gay fiction and non-fiction. Click here for our full list. |
"Alan glanced up with a quick flush of pleasure. 'You've liked meeting me, then . . . Ah, but you can't have liked it half as much as I've liked meeting you. Think of it - after all this time and among these people, suddenly to come across another human being from the world I've almost forgotten.' Dennis said half-aloud: 'Consider the even greater wonder of meeting someone from a world that one didn't know really existed - that one had scarcely dared to dream into existence.' Alan cried eagerly: 'Then you'll stop on here for a bit, won't you? Give a poor, starving wretch a chance! I want to hear you talk about London with the London voice; I want to be able to talk about ideas instead of machinery; and I want to hear your music - do you play the piano? I haven't got one . . . but I believe there's one up at the Sunday-school. You will stop, won't you?'" p105 (ellipsis in original) |
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