"Dynamite Scrupulously Packed": A Revaluation of Henry Blake Fuller’s Bertram Cope’s Year

The essay proposes a reinterpretation and revaluation of Henry Blake Fuller’s 1919 novel Bertram Cope’s Year and argues that it deserves permanent currency within the canon of gay fiction. My reinterpretation and revaluation of it is based on the premise that readings of it over the past 50 years (since Edmund Wilson’s 1970 essay on Henry Blake Fuller’s fiction in the New Yorker) have failed to understand its representation of homo-sexuality. Criticism of the novel has been based on post-Stonewall assumptions of what a 'gay novel’ should be and what cultural work is should perform. The post-Stonewall paradigm of the gay novel is that it is a coming-of-age story, a Bildungsroman, focused on a protagonist who, through a process of self-discovery, arrives at an acceptance and affirmation of his sexual identity. The prototype is Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story, with E. M. Forster’s Maurice a precursor. To appreciate Bertram Cope’s Year, we must, I argue, abandon post-Stonewall presuppositions of what we should expect from a gay novel. Bertram Cope’s Year is not a coming-of-age novel. Rather it is a comic novel formed from Fuller’s successful fusion and subversion of the romantic comedy, the comedy of manners, and the campus novel. Bertram Cope is a comic hero who ultimately triumphs over the efforts of a college town, presided over the matchmaking socialite Medora Phillips, to marry him to one of the three young ladies in her circle. He is rescued from this unwanted marriage by his boyfriend, who arrives to save him from the unwanted marriage. Fuller successfully exploits the conventions of the comic novel to tell a story that anticipates one of the aspirations of the gay liberation movement half a century later. As such, it deserves permanent currency.

S.N. Behrman, Comedy, and the Extermination of the Jews: Broadway, Christmas Eve, 1934

S.N. Behrman’s Rain from Heaven premiered on Broadway on Christmas Eve, 1934. In the play, Hugo Willens, a refugee from Nazi Germany, describes a pamphlet he had written in Germany that led to his exile: the satirical pamphlet narrates the extermination of all the Jews but one. Tracking Behrman’s wide reading, which he recorded in his diaries, shows that anticipation of genocide was widely shared by writers in the public sphere to which he belonged. Behrman intended the story of the last Jew as a joke, as some of his audience understood, but it was a joke with political force. The fictional comic pamphlet was part of a larger project of remaking the comedy of manners for the purposes of anti-Nazi resistance.

Introduction

This chapter gives an introductory overview of the book, with biographical information about Pieter Langendijk, his literary career, and the times in which he lived. It explores the influence of French neo-classical dramatic theory in the Netherlands (the comedy of manners and the theatrical unities of time, place, and action) and the example of the French playwright Molière.

3. ‘Pleasant’

‘Pleasant’ examines the plays contained in George Bernard Shaw’s 1898 volume Plays Pleasant, namely Arms and the Man (1893–4), Candida (1894), The Man of Destiny (1895), and You Never Can Tell (1895–6), and concludes with the zenith of Shaw’s ‘pleasant’ comedy, Pygmalion (1912). In them, Shaw turned tropes drawn from romantic and sentimental comedy, the comedy of manners, and farce against one another, challenging the audience’s assumptions and expectations. Frequently making characters who adhere to conventional values and beliefs buffoonish, Shaw uses humour to reclaim the theatre as an arena dedicated to the dissection of the status quo.

Comic Forms

Why does comedy take the form of satire, slapstick, parody, burlesque, or comedy of manners? Chapter 2 examines the bewildering profusion of comic genres and sub-genres: how they have evolved, where and when they thrive, how they distinguish themselves from or merge with one another. It shows what the word’s great repertoire of comic movie genres and subgenres owes to earlier traditions of Greek theatre, satirical Roman verse, Italian commedia dell’arte, French stage farce, Sanskrit parodies, the Kyogen skits of Japan, and the English novel. Each cinematic form has developed its own set of traits and serves a distinctive purpose. Some forms, like “crisis slapstick,” push old genres in new directions that are still testing the limits of humor and acceptable behavior.