Book Reviews

Book Blurb

A literary cause célèbre when first published in 1948, Gore Vidal’s now-classic The City and the Pillar stands as a landmark novel of the gay experience.

Jim, a handsome, all-American athlete, has always been shy around girls. But when he and his best friend, Bob, partake in “awful kid stuff,” the experience forms Jim’s ideal of spiritual completion. Defying his parents’ expectations, Jim strikes out on his own, hoping to find Bob and rekindle their amorous friendship.

Along the way he struggles with what he feels is his unique bond with Bob and with his persistent attraction to other men. Upon finally encountering Bob years later, the force of his hopes for a life together leads to a devastating climax. The first novel of its kind to appear on the American literary landscape, The City and the Pillar remains a forthright and uncompromising portrayal of sexual relationships between men.

 

Book Review

‘The City and the Pillar’ is a classic of gay literature. The novel was written in 1946 (!) and published two years later, in 1948 (!!), instantly becoming a bestseller, despite its central theme being considered very provocative at the time. In my review, I will discuss the version the author revised himself in 1965 (the word "Revised" was then added to the English title but subsequently removed). At the time of its publication, as I have already mentioned, the book caused a literary scandal. Since then, it has been celebrated, and rightly so, as one of the forerunners of gay literature, one of those groundbreaking novels that give rise to a whole becoming-aware process and find the words to describe a hitherto-hidden experience; it does so openly, without moralizing or judging. For indeed, what strikes you from the outset is the modernity, the audacity, the empathy with which the author tackles his subject. Before the 70s, it was rare to speak of it in so explicit and unprejudiced terms. No euphemism, no metaphor, no pretty circumlocution drapes its veil of modesty over the homosexual experience with which the book begins, give or take a few pages (I should add that a first chapter precedes this episode; it introduces a thread that serves as a parenthesis for the entire plot).

 

So, the story. It starts out in the late 1930s, deep in Maryland or West Virginia, if my memory serves me right, on an unremarkable spring day. Jim Willard and his best friend Bob Ford stroll out of their high school and decide to spend the afternoon and night in an abandoned cabin by the Potomac River, as they often do. They fish, they grill, they eat, they talk about the future and their dreams, they swim, they dry off by the river… and an innocent little teenage scuffle leads to the melting-together of two passionate and willing bodies. This night of lovemaking will mark Jim forever. He’ll never be able to forget it, and his friend Bob, from whom he will be separated shortly afterwards, will become a true obsession of his over the years.

 

We follow Jim's disjointed, almost chaotic journey, which takes us from the merchant marine through post-war Hollywood, the sweltering Caribbean heat, and improbable friendships and relationships, all the way to New York and its literary circles of the late 1940s, which the young hero visits as a tennis instructor (thus concluding the storyline with which the novel began). Wherever fate takes him, whatever he does, and no matter with whom he shares his life, Jim is constantly searching for the phantom that Bob has become; he ceaselessly tries to fill the void left by his absence. Ultimately, it won't be the real Bob, the flesh-and-blood person he once knew, but a ghost, an ideal, placed on a memorial altar as the only savior capable of bringing him the happiness he seeks so desperately, yet at the same time almost nonchalantly and detachedly… The ending, therefore, hits all the harder, as I hadn't anticipated it at all (the original ending, the 1948 one, is said to be even more shocking).

 

I must have stumbled upon this book by chance, perhaps while reading another novel or a review. The reason I bought it in 2020 and immediately put it aside escapes me. But this year I decided to finally tackle my TBR (to-be-read) pile and, to do so, I inventoried the contents of my Kindle. I (re)discovered I had many novels on my device, including this one. I opened it without knowing anything about the author, his style, or the plot. All I knew was that I was going to read a classic novel. That’s why I expected an old-fashioned, ponderous, even dry book—I was preparing myself, in a way, to wrestle with a recalcitrant text. Having just finished the first volume of a Heinrich Mann novel (Henry IV, in German, which had turned out to be very tedious), I didn't have much hope of getting any kind of "treat" here.

 

Big mistake! I don't know why, but I was blown away. In just two afternoons, I had finished this book, with a little gasp of shock because, as mentioned earlier, the ending turned out to be quite something, if I may say so. I'm still trying to figure out why I loved this novel so much. First, Vidal's style, maybe… Direct, modern, unadorned, without baroque flourishes, yet still refined, sometimes even spirited, and occasionally opening onto moments of great poetry. More than once, I felt that Vidal possessed a true gift (one that every author would kill to have): the ability to compose a short sentence, with just the right number of words, and to create, through it, a setting, a situation, to evoke a scent, for example, or to make a ripple in a swimming pool shimmer just as it would; in short, to breathe life into a scene or a character. Everything flows smoothly, everything seems simple, everything is coherent: the plot, the characters, the scenes, the pacing, the points of view. Most of the time, we follow the story through Jim's eyes (who tells it in the third person). But that doesn't preclude a few digressions from the author, a couple of excursions into the souls of this or that character, sometimes even a secondary one. In literature, we call that an omniscient narrator, who positions himself above the fray of ordinary protagonists. To pull off this feat of not saying too much and not leaving too much out, one must be a truly gifted writer, and Vidal certainly is.

 

Now, a quick word of warning. I skimmed the reviews on Goodreads, and some opinions surprised me. I fear that some readers might expect to find a sappy little romance. One of those copy-and-paste stories that include the stylistic exercises demanded by the trope (hot scenes, plot twists two-thirds in, etc.). This novel is not of that ilk. It is the coming-of-age story of a young gay man, certainly, but it is much more than that—it is an unparalleled evocation of an era, of certain social circles, of certain fictional characters who nonetheless strike the reader with their truthfulness. Other reviewers have sharply criticized the novel for being misogynistic and homophobic. Don't misunderstand me—these are two things that disgust me and that I cannot abide. And it is true that I found traces of them, sometimes blatant examples, in this book. But I would refrain from putting Vidal on trial for this. Because that would be anachronistic. In a novel written in 1946, I would find misogyny and homophobia just about everywhere, if the author's aim was indeed to depict the real life around him. Even the protagonist and his lovers, moreover, express their contempt for gay people at times. Internalized homophobia still exists today, so imagine what it was like in the 1930s and 40s! The scandal of this book lay precisely in the fact that the hero was a hero; a real man, a manly man, but a manly gay man, who didn’t hide who he was, who didn’t ask for forgiveness for his existence, who didn’t consider himself baser than others.

 

So, yes, I think some of the criticism was unjustified. But never mind—I sincerely loved this book, undoubtedly one of the best I've laid hands on recently. Reading it was like watching a film about that pivotal era between the Great Depression and the joyful post-war period. Besides the protagonist's homosexuality, other themes are brilliantly explored: the carefree days of youngsters, their fears and hopes, their disappointments, their discoveries, their anxieties, and their moments of profound boredom, too. Even though I didn't necessarily like Jim (especially towards the end), I loved the way his story was presented to me, almost like a jewel in its velvet case. The book captivated me with Gore Vidal's enchanting prose, which I'm eager to experience again in another of his works. After I've finished reading the (many, many) remaining books on my TBR pile, of course.

 

 

 

DISCLAIMER: Books reviewed on this site were usually provided at no cost by the author. This book has been purchased by the reviewer.

 

Additional Information

Format	ebook, print and audio
Length	Novel, 229 pages
Heat Level
Publication Date	15-October-2019
Price	$8.99 ebook, $9.95 paperback, $14.88 audio book
Buy Link	https://www.amazon.com/City-Pillar-Novel-Vintage-International-ebook/dp/B07F5X95WD