Bertram Cope's Year Book

First published in 1919, Bertram Cope's Year was released to a deafening silence. Neither critics nor readers reacted with shock to its matter-of-fact depiction of a gay couple and their domestic ménage--perhaps because few of them knew what the book was about. Henry Blake Fuller was nothing if not a subtle writer. Held in high esteem by his contemporaries, he nevertheless faded from public view soon after Bertram Cope's Year's chilly reception. The critical reevaluation of Fuller's work began only in 1970, when Edmund Wilson wrote in the New Yorker that Fuller was America's premier novelist of the early 20th century, ranking him above both Stephen Crane and William Dean Howells. Now, for the first time since 1919, what Wilson called Fuller's best novel has been restored to print. The novel's eponymous narrator is a young college instructor newly arrived in the university town of Churchton--a fictional stand-in for Evanston, Illinois, home of Northwestern University. Most unexpectedly, Cope finds himself besieged with admirers, including an older, clearly gay man and a widow whose house is full of eligible female boarders with artistic pretensions. ("Amy plays. Hortense paints. Carolyn is a poet.") Cope, however, can think of nothing but his friend Arthur Lemoyne. Although the nature of their relationship is never made explicit, for the initiated, Fuller's novel is full of clues. Once Lemoyne has moved in with Cope, for instance, elderly Joseph Foster notices him "always hanging over the other man's chair; always finding a reason to put his hand on his shoulder...." It makes Foster think of "a young married couple at a Saratoga hotel" who "made their partiality too public," causing a lady to complain that "they brought the manners of the bed-chamber into the drawing-room." Cope and Lemoyne make for a happy couple, their domestic tranquility only interrupted by Lemoyne's penchant for amateur theatrics. Performing in an all-male musical comedy, Lemoyne's female impersonation is a little too convincing for Churchton's sensibilities, and when he makes a pass at a straight actor, he is hounded from both his studies and his job. "A thing may be done too thoroughly," as the widow Phillips remarks. Still, the incident is played as satire rather than tragedy, and refreshingly, same-sex love itself never registers as tortured or doomed. Instead, Bertram Cope's concerns are as practical as possible: why married couples have so much stuff, where to get it, the excellence of Arthur Lemoyne's coffee and toast. In this sense, Bertram Cope's Year is the most modern gay novel imaginable: its concern is not to make a case for the love that dare not speak its name, or even to speak its name at all. Instead, it contemplates how--in a world given over to the many rituals of heterosexual love--a thoroughly average gay couple can make themselves a home and a place in society. In this, the greatest flaw of Bertram Cope's Year is also its greatest strength. Ambivalent, charming, emotionally inert, in the annals of gay literature Bertram Cope is exceptional for his very ordinariness.Read More