I haven’t read ‘Pendennis’ but you’ve intrigued me, WTRI, you’ve intrigued me. As has Major Pendennis – I’m not down with the dyed side-whiskers – although is that actually a silver hair in my moustache, and why are my eyebrows living the life of Dennis Healey alongside their own; but, being of a certain age, the role model he offers, the cut of his jib, the nomenclature of his rank, all finds its home and interest in me. These superficial (not that there is anything I would want to decry in surface and its attributes – actually: are they superficial at all? I think not) aspects aside, there is also the rather touching contemplation of the looking back at one’s youth and the sifting of what to keep, what to lose. Of course, it is an easier task for a man to do while being admired by younger men, and being supremely self-confident, with social currency and savoir-faire. Your work has an uncanny habit of bringing themes that resonate with what I am trying to write about in The Tarnished Gloriole, and there is much in your short resumé of the universality of a man’s experience (young or middle-aged, gay or straight) Pendennis that resonates with what I aim to do through Julius and the other men I write about (certainly, taking the Thackeray and Fielding uncritical and non-punitive view of sexuality). Your point about options here is not lost on me: I own that I can swagger in and just do it, without any filter almost, because I am a man writing about men.
Or is it that we seek the themes we want to wherever we read, wherever we look? So, it isn’t really an uncanny habit in your work; it’s more that your work is so cleverly and insightfully put together that the preliminary stages of looking and reading are more or less dispensed with and one reads and joins your arguments at the same frequency as one’s own internal work and thinking.
And isn’t street geography and nomenclature a powerful force on memory? How well I know that corner of Chepstow Road and Westbourne Grove, albeit from a later period during which much gentrification, hedge-funded Designers Guild-work, and four-by—fours to take Saskia and Archie on the private school runs and off to the beach house in Rock and the weekend house in the Cotswolds, had carved its own privileged place alongside the still extant living memories of the period and people Selvon is writing about.
And I know that objectifying casualness: ‘pussy’ ‘a piece of skin’; but in its gay iteration: the Muscle Mary, the Leather Daddy (a position in the Venn diagram of gay life to which one only inhabits when one achieves Major Pendennis’s age and level of confident worldliness) – although, here, there are aspects of objectification that which in their conscious relinquishing of the self to a type, or even a version of a caricature, have a specifically gay meaning, one which doesn’t share some of the negative and destructive aspects one can see in the straight iteration that Selvon references.
And…Peter Rabbit and every man’s relationship with his mother and his own drives as a boy; well, Potter mines that eternal seam incisively, along with aspects of masculinity that we hope Peter might avoid, or at least understand: the vengeful Mr McGregor and his father’s fatally foolish adventuring.
There is a real relief in saying goodbye to those Peter Rabbit years and greeting one’s Major Pendennis era; it was hard work, man, fun…but hard work, as Thackeray et al recognized.
PS dig your Eliot erudition. It, and Selvon’s allusions, raise the ever-involving relationship between literary inspiration and originality, one’s own writing voice and the stories one wants to write and the interplay with one’s eyes and mind and imagination as both reader and writer.
Loved the Dennis Healey eyebrows (putative, of course)… The Major is wonderful! A terrible old snob, yes, but - even allowing for his limitations - completely understands how the world works: no wonder the younger men seek him out.
More importantly, thanks so much for such a wonderfully rich and interesting response - replete with ideas (and expanding my education - the whole Muscle Mary/Leather Daddy axis: fascinating)!
I find all comments interesting: but it's particularly enjoyable when you - and other commenters such as @laura thompson @jodi {fiftybeautifulthings} @Maria Haka Flokos @Cristina Carmona Aliaga and Alan Horn - draw out nuance and meaning, adding another layer of interest. The interactive pleasures of Substack…
Hey WTRI, I think we can only comment well if we dig the original piece.
And, glad to be of some help to your queer education. It occurs to me that there is a neat scene in Mark Cherry’s classic (and very gay) TV series Desperate Housewives which could be seen as a further elaboration of the mother/son dynamic you bring out in your discussion of Peter Rabbit: the uptight WASP Bree, on discovering items from her gay son’s porn stache (frankly, men doing what men do as per your point), expresses condemnation and disapproval at his choice of one particular title: Leather Daddies.
I haven’t read ‘Pendennis’ but you’ve intrigued me, WTRI, you’ve intrigued me. As has Major Pendennis – I’m not down with the dyed side-whiskers – although is that actually a silver hair in my moustache, and why are my eyebrows living the life of Dennis Healey alongside their own; but, being of a certain age, the role model he offers, the cut of his jib, the nomenclature of his rank, all finds its home and interest in me. These superficial (not that there is anything I would want to decry in surface and its attributes – actually: are they superficial at all? I think not) aspects aside, there is also the rather touching contemplation of the looking back at one’s youth and the sifting of what to keep, what to lose. Of course, it is an easier task for a man to do while being admired by younger men, and being supremely self-confident, with social currency and savoir-faire. Your work has an uncanny habit of bringing themes that resonate with what I am trying to write about in The Tarnished Gloriole, and there is much in your short resumé of the universality of a man’s experience (young or middle-aged, gay or straight) Pendennis that resonates with what I aim to do through Julius and the other men I write about (certainly, taking the Thackeray and Fielding uncritical and non-punitive view of sexuality). Your point about options here is not lost on me: I own that I can swagger in and just do it, without any filter almost, because I am a man writing about men.
Or is it that we seek the themes we want to wherever we read, wherever we look? So, it isn’t really an uncanny habit in your work; it’s more that your work is so cleverly and insightfully put together that the preliminary stages of looking and reading are more or less dispensed with and one reads and joins your arguments at the same frequency as one’s own internal work and thinking.
And isn’t street geography and nomenclature a powerful force on memory? How well I know that corner of Chepstow Road and Westbourne Grove, albeit from a later period during which much gentrification, hedge-funded Designers Guild-work, and four-by—fours to take Saskia and Archie on the private school runs and off to the beach house in Rock and the weekend house in the Cotswolds, had carved its own privileged place alongside the still extant living memories of the period and people Selvon is writing about.
And I know that objectifying casualness: ‘pussy’ ‘a piece of skin’; but in its gay iteration: the Muscle Mary, the Leather Daddy (a position in the Venn diagram of gay life to which one only inhabits when one achieves Major Pendennis’s age and level of confident worldliness) – although, here, there are aspects of objectification that which in their conscious relinquishing of the self to a type, or even a version of a caricature, have a specifically gay meaning, one which doesn’t share some of the negative and destructive aspects one can see in the straight iteration that Selvon references.
And…Peter Rabbit and every man’s relationship with his mother and his own drives as a boy; well, Potter mines that eternal seam incisively, along with aspects of masculinity that we hope Peter might avoid, or at least understand: the vengeful Mr McGregor and his father’s fatally foolish adventuring.
There is a real relief in saying goodbye to those Peter Rabbit years and greeting one’s Major Pendennis era; it was hard work, man, fun…but hard work, as Thackeray et al recognized.
PS dig your Eliot erudition. It, and Selvon’s allusions, raise the ever-involving relationship between literary inspiration and originality, one’s own writing voice and the stories one wants to write and the interplay with one’s eyes and mind and imagination as both reader and writer.
Loved the Dennis Healey eyebrows (putative, of course)… The Major is wonderful! A terrible old snob, yes, but - even allowing for his limitations - completely understands how the world works: no wonder the younger men seek him out.
More importantly, thanks so much for such a wonderfully rich and interesting response - replete with ideas (and expanding my education - the whole Muscle Mary/Leather Daddy axis: fascinating)!
I find all comments interesting: but it's particularly enjoyable when you - and other commenters such as @laura thompson @jodi {fiftybeautifulthings} @Maria Haka Flokos @Cristina Carmona Aliaga and Alan Horn - draw out nuance and meaning, adding another layer of interest. The interactive pleasures of Substack…
Hey WTRI, I think we can only comment well if we dig the original piece.
And, glad to be of some help to your queer education. It occurs to me that there is a neat scene in Mark Cherry’s classic (and very gay) TV series Desperate Housewives which could be seen as a further elaboration of the mother/son dynamic you bring out in your discussion of Peter Rabbit: the uptight WASP Bree, on discovering items from her gay son’s porn stache (frankly, men doing what men do as per your point), expresses condemnation and disapproval at his choice of one particular title: Leather Daddies.