A concise study of Tennessee Williams, John Cheever, Carson McCullers and James Baldwin, and how their sexuality informed their work, veers between lecture-hall lit crit and novelistic immediacy
‘A sharp turn from the traditional dashing male lead to a “sexed” one’: Marlon Brando in the 1951 film of A Streetcar Named Desire.‘A sharp turn from the traditional dashing male lead to a “sexed” one’: Marlon Brando in the 1951 film of A Streetcar Named Desire.
rize-shortlisted poet Ralf Webb begins his compact study of same-sex desire in four 20th-century American authors with Tennessee Williams, who said he couldn’t write a play without a character he lusted after. In, he wrote one everyone else fell for, too, in the shape of antihero Stanley Kowalski – for the writer Gore Vidal, a sharp turn from the traditional dashing male lead to a “sexed” one, at least as embodied by a cap-sleeved Marlon Brando.
A growing contemporary interest in Freud, together with panic about communist subversives, added to the volatile swirl shaping ideas of sex at the time– lived and worked. Webb’s approach, more silky synthesis than scholarly spadework, mixes lecture-hall lit crit with the style of a jet-set spy thriller: “January 1889, Camden, New Jersey.
Webb, yo-yoing between both modes, is always more convincing when he remembers to let us come up for air. He’s clear-eyed about the pros and cons of describing his chosen writers as “bisexual” and “queer”, justifying his doing so as a way to catch how desire is “changeable” as “quicksilver”.
But it’s also that there’s an evergreen tang to the way Cheever approached writing fiction as a desperate husband in gin-pickled suburbia – see his story, about a couple ruined by fomo when their fancy new wireless broadcasts their neighbours’ private lives. His not-quite-realist output lends itself to livelier summary than sexual dynamics in Williams or the fiction of McCullers, whose 1940 southern gothic).
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