1960s Gay Pulp Fiction: The Misplaced Heritage

“A Life Entirely without Fear”: Hindus, Homos, and Gay Pulp Fiction in Christopher Isherwood’s A Meeting by the River

– 229 – “A Life Entirely without Fear” Hindus, Homos, and Gay Pulp in Christopher Isherwood’s A Meeting by the River Jaime Harker Early in Christopher Isherwood’s 1967 novel, A Meeting by the River, Patrick, on his way to India to persuade his brother Oliver not to become a monk, receives a special gift from his lover, Tom, in Los Angeles: That coverless and obviously much thumbed-through paperback novel you suddenly pulled out of your pocket and gave me at the airport—wow (as you would say)!! You know, you might at least have warned me what it was about! I suppose I should have guessed, from your wicked grin. Anyhow, I didn’t. After we’d taken off, I opened it in all innocence at the first chapter and almost immediately found myself in that sizzling love scene between the character called Lance and that younger boy. Did you think that a hard-boiled publisher couldn’t be shocked? I began blushing, yes actually! And then I suspected that my neighbor was reading it too, out of the corner of his eye. So I put the book away for private consumption later—behind a locked door!1 The appearance of a dirty book in a novel that has been understood as Isherwood’s most religious is surprising. Two years before, Isherwood’s 230 – Jaime Harker biography of the founder of his branch of Hinduism, Ramakrishna and His Disciples, publicly proclaimed his religious identity just as interest in Eastern religions was peaking. Though Hinduism marks all of Isherwood’s American novels, A Meeting by the River was his most Hindu fictional experiment, incorporating setting (India), terminology, and rituals. The novel ’s “much thumbed-through paperback,” however, connects Isherwood’s Hinduism to his deep investment in Cold War queer print culture. There was a new iteration of queer pulp by the mid-1960s, one that Isherwood followed with interest: gay pulp published by straight erotica firms and marketed as both sex- and gay-positive. Gay pulp, though seemingly out of place, is essential to the plot and the structure of A Meeting by the River. Isherwood had long been interested in erotic literature. Private obscene documents circulated in his English circle for years, including pornographic poems by W. H. Auden. Isherwood’s novel The Last of Mr. Norris (1935) features a Swiss-family-Robinson idyll of young boys that one character, Baron Pregnitz, reads obsessively, much to the narrator’s delight; Arthur Norris’s carefully protected collection of masochistic masterpieces includes one written by himself. A dirty book figures in the “Mr. Lancaster” section of the final version of Down There on a Visit (1962); an early draft of the same novel includes an “artiste” who manages a pornography reading room: Peter’s eyes got used to the gloom as he walked along the desks, glancing at the books and their titles. There were David Copperfield Confidential, Moby’s Dick, Inside Madame Bovary. By the time he reached Wuthering Heights and How He Got Up There, Peter knew pretty much what to expect. Like the other volumes, it was a mimeographed typescript. He switched on his lamp and opened it at random: “You ready for it, Cathy honey?” “You bet your life I’m ready for it, Heathcliff sugar.” “I’m going to give it to you, Cathy.” “Okay, Heathcliff, you go ahead and give it to me. Let’s see you give it to me. Just you quit your bragging and give it me right now—or else I’ll get to start thinking you don’t have it, Big Boy, maybe not any more than Edgar Linton does.” “I’ll show you if I have it, Cathy. I’ll show you right this minute. Lookit, Cathy, lookit, lookit, lookit!” (Here a reader had scribbled on the margin of the page: “Dialogue most unconvincing and psychology poor. The author obviously knows nothing about the English upper middle class.”)2 “A Life Entirely without Fear” – 231 Isherwood’s comic send-up of battered and dog-eared typescripts, existing parasitically on high culture, clearly sets up dirty books as slumming. Their mock-literary titles, invoking Dickens, Melville, Flaubert, and Bronte, and the literary criticism at the end of the hilariously bad sex scene become the basis for Isherwood’s campy tone, even as the details suggest direct knowledge. Typescripts such as these had been bubbling under the surface of...