The Breaking of Bumbo - Andrew Sinclair

 Andrew Sinclair may well be my new literary obsession.   In The Breaking of Bumbo (1959) a coming-of-age story meets the roman a clef.   Young Bumbo Bailey passes from Eton to National Service in the Guards.   He is a hopeless soldier, a good officer and an amiable chap.   Posted to Wellington Barracks in the Mall, Bumbo does Public Duties at the Tower and Palace and on Horseguards Parade, and in his spare time becomes embroiled in London Society both High and extremely Low.   It all takes place against the backdrop of the Suez Crisis about which Bumbo has scuples, which lead to his breaking.

It is all done with tremendous brio.   Sinclair has an experimental style which still reads fresh and lively more than sixty years on.   The training sector is laugh out loud hilarious.   The mood then becomes gradually darker.   Despite the light surface there are considerable depths here and I was surprised at how long it took me to read such a short novel.   Yet I absolutely adored it.   I'm off now to track down more of Sinclair's work.

The City and the Pillar - Gore Vidal

 The City and the Pillar is both a roman a clef and perhaps the first American homosexual novel, certainly the first one to break through from underground genre to mainstream.  Considering it came out in 1948, when the author was only 22, I find Vidal surprisingly frank and yet mature enough to know that his readers know perfectly well what he is talking about.

It is not in any sense a novel for gay readers only.  Jim Willard is another ordinary middle class youth in Virginia, living with his parents and siblings, who happens to be good at tennis and not much else.  His best friend is Bob Ford (great choice of name, by the way), who dreams of running off to sea.  Immediately before Bob makes his escape, the boys spend a night out in the woods where one thing leads to another.  Bob becomes Jim's epitome of manhood and love - but Bob is away at sea.  Ultimately Jim follows, without much direction but always in search of Bob.  He joins the merchant marine too but after an embarrassing foursome in Alaska he jumps ship and ends up teaching tennis in Hollywood and living with the clandestinely gay movie star Ronald Shaw.  Then he travels with the failed novelist and scriptwriter Paul Sullivan, who introduces Jim to a older woman, Maria Verlaine, the sort of woman he can love but not physically, which is what she wants and needs from him.

Then comes the war.  Jim enlists but never makes it overseas.  He falls ill and is discharged with rheumatoid arthritis, the result of an infection that nearly killed him.  He naturally re-evaluates his life.  He gets in touch with all the people he has let down and spends the rest of the book catching up and resolving issues as far as he can.  Finally he makes it home to Virginia, and faces up to the last remaining issue,,,

I've previously read only Vidal's vast historical series Narrative of Empire, written at the other end of his distinguished career.  The City and the Pillar is slight by comparison, yet it is deeply felt and extraordinarily vivid.  It captures the fragmentation of lives torn between public and private.  It celebrates the lonely ones who search for their dream, be it Shaw's desire to be a proper stage actor, Sullivan's ache for success as well as reputation, or Maria and Jim's simple search for the one who will love them back.  It is enlivened by comic moments - the gay set clinging to one another because nobody else wants them, camping it up and gossiping cattily.

It's a tremendous achievement by a great writer.

The Devil in the Flesh - Raymond Radiguet

The ultimate, the original enfant terrible and muse to Jean Cocteau, Raymond Radiguet published this roman a clef when he was still a teenager.  His hero in the book (unnamed) is fifteen years old when he seduces nineteen-year-old Marthe.  Marthe is engaged to a soldier on the Front (this is the last year or so of World War I), and the protagonist lets the marriage go ahead.  But as soon as Jacques is back on the front line our 'hero' is spending his nights and much of his days at the marital home.  Marthe loves him dearly.  He is too young for such considerations.  For him, it is all about the coup, the exercise of control over a lesser being.  The book came out in 1923, around the time Radiguet turned twenty.  It was a scandal and a sensation.  Of course everyone assumed it was autobiographical, which it may well have been; of course Radiguet did nothing to clear up the matter.  The outcry was not so much the seduction as the implication that the wives of France's heroes might not have been entirely faithful during their long absence.

Radiguet wrote a play and one more novel - Count Orgel's Ball, which is much harder to get hold of. He was still only twenty when he died in December 1923.  Cocteau was inconsolable - for a while.  Nina Hamnett (see below), who knew them both from Bohemian nights at the Boeuf sur le toit, attended the funeral.

The book remains extraordinarily powerful.  The translation in the Penguin Classic version, by A M Sheridan Smith, is extremely readable.

Confessions of a Mask - Yukio Mishima

Confessions of a Mask is Mishima's first major novel, published when he was only 24.  It is a roman a clef, heavily autobiographical, about a young man coming of age in the dying days of the Second World War.  It is different and daring in that it is about the hero's burgeoning homosexuality, which he hides behind a 'mask' of normality by courting a young woman he tries hard to convince himself that he loves.  I hadn't realised before that 'Yukio Mishima' is itself a mask, a pen-name adopted to shield his respectable and strait-laced family.  Nothing Mishima writes is ever likely to be bad.  He is, to my mind, one of the finest writers of the Twentieth Century, the great 'lost' Nobel Laureate.  But personally, he is repellent - moreover, he knows it.  Here there are passages in which you very nearly hate him, yet he saves the situation because you cannot possibly feel more repelled by Mishima than Mishima himself does.  Knowing what he ultimately did makes the frequent references to suicide in this young man's text all the more ominous.  Confessions of a Mask is a masterpiece, no question, but it's not a comfortable one.

The Catcher in the Rye - J D Salinger

The Catcher in the Rye is one of those books everybody should read at least once in their life. After all it is the book that J D Salinger wrote just once in his long life. OK, I have left it late - ironically about the same length of time that Salinger lived after starting to publish (serialized) his only novel, all 192 pages of it.

It is a roman a clef, a coming-of-age story, and quite possibly the ultimate of its kind. It's set over a few winter days between Holden Caulfield being expelled from his fancy private school and facing up to his parents back in New York. We don't witness the climactic moment, of course, but Salinger takes us to the verge, when Holden seems to admit to himself that he can't strike out on his own, that he hasn't got what it takes to stand on his own two feet. We have gathered, by that point, that he is writing his confessional from some sort of sanatorium in California.


Inbetween we have a frantic hothouse week in New York. Holden spends the last of his generous allowance on hotels, bars, night clubs. He is trying to break through into adulthood - he believes he looks much older than his eighteen years because he has a patch of grey hair, but his elders inevitably see his true childishness.


Reading The Catcher is like spending time in the company of the world's sulkiest, most self-centered teenager, which is what set the literary world on fire when the novel came out in 1951. You resent the guy, deplore his blather, even hate him - but if you are male and were ever a teenager, you know you dislike him because he is you.


Salinger's single masterpiece probably defines the term tour de force. I'm glad I finally read it. I'm equally glad I won't feel the need to do so again.