1960s Gay Pulp Fiction: The Misplaced Heritage

Shepherds Redressed: Richard Amory’s Song of the Loon and the Reinvigoration of the Spanish Pastoral Novel

– 212 – Shepherds Redressed Richard Amory’s Song of the Loon and the Reinvigoration of the Spanish Pastoral Novel Beth M. Bouloukos When I first read Song of the Loon, I couldn’t help but think how amused Juan Goytisolo, Spain’s most famous gay novelist of the twentieth century (and the greatest living Spanish novelist, gay or straight, according to Carlos Fuentes), would have been with Richard Amory’s novel had he read it when it came out in 1966. Amory conceived of Loon as a gay American version of famous sixteenth-century Spanish pastoral novels. One of Goytisolo’s books, Count Julian (1970), also looks to past literary genres, first defacing Francoist nationalism and religious icons, then reclaiming history. Of course, Loon could never have been accessible in Spain in the 1960s or early 1970s because of state censorship; Goytisolo himself had long been self-exiled by this point, and his own books were not available in his homeland until after Franco’s death. Why was Amory drawn to the pastoral rather than to updates of the fairy tale or of medieval romances of chivalry, as so many of his contemporaries in Spain were?1 To answer the question, it is helpful to look at the evolution Shepherds Redressed – 213 of the pastoral and the way it eventually reached early modern Spain. The tradition began in the third century BCE with the Greek bucolic poets and continued into the first century BCE with the most famous examples of the genre, Virgil’s eclogues. Virgil and, before him, the Hellenistic Greek poet Theocritus developed “the device . . . of referring to topical subjects, and contemporary characters, under pastoral cover.”2 (Amory adopted this convention when he incorporated the popular and timely 1960s theme of free love into his updated pastoral.) Throughout the first two centuries CE there were several notable pastoral poems and romances in both Latin and Greek, arguably the most important of which is Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe, and then there was a long lull in the production of works in this tradition until the twelfth century. From this point up until the late fifteenth and early to mid-sixteenth century, when Spain (and Portugal, to some extent) took over the genre, Italy dominated its use and development (from 1160 until about 1500), with Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Lorenzo de’ Medici being the most famous figures producing pastorals of one type of another. But it was another Italian writer, Jacopo Sannazaro—the author of Arcadia, written 1480–1496, with the first complete edition published in 1501—who probably had the most substantial influence on the two great early-modern Spanish writers of pastoral novels, Jorge de Montemayor and Gaspar Gil Polo. There were three printings of the Spanish translation of Sannazaro’s Arcadia, in 1547, 1549, and 1578.3 Because of the fervor with which the Spanish reading public consumed Arcadia, Montemayor published La Diana in 1559. It made the pastoral the most popular type of fiction in Spain. La Diana tells the story of one Sireno, who becomes distressed on learning of the marriage of his beloved Diana. He goes to the wise Felicia looking for help, and she gives him a magic potion, which has the effect of turning his love for Diana into indifference . Diana herself is unhappily married and remains so at the end of the romance. The plot, however, is merely an excuse for extended discussions about the nature of love. One can imagine that people in sixteenth-century Spain liked it and the rash of pastoral novels that it inspired for the same reason that popular culture became obsessed with Sex in the City in the late 1990s and early 2000s: Who can resist an idealized landscape 214 – Beth M. Bouloukos with plenty of leisure time to discuss love, beauty, desire, and the inevitable heartbreak and joy that ensue when these elements are combined? Montemayor promised a sequel that was never delivered. Instead, the story was continued by other writers, most notably Gaspar Gil Polo. In his Diana Enamorada (1564), Diana meets a shepherdess, Alcida, who offers to cure her unhappy state of mind.4 Diana prefers the pain of love to being cured of it. Diana’s husband appears and falls in love with Alcida, who is engaged to another shepherd. These lovers too call upon Felicia. But Gil Polo’s wise woman offers no magic potions; rather the complications...