| | What I'm reading *
I've always read. While growing up, reading was a refuge when I found life too unpleasant or stressful. Consequently I've bought a lot of books over time as well.
Now that I'm no longer in the rich corporate phase of my life I've rediscovered the library. Dayton's library may be maligned by some but is still a great resource. One type of book I like to read is gay fiction and I was surprised to see a lot of it in the Dayton library's catalog. Plus you can even ask them to buy particular titles, and they will!
Below you can see the five most recent books either that I'm reading or that I've acquired. You can search my books, or you can see all my books. Also my classes page has links back to this page for the books for each class.
|
ISBN: 038505419X
| 2007-07-01 | 038505419X | Advise and Consent | Drury, Allen | | | | Advise and Consent I heard of in a review of Fellow Travelers, and so, having just read the latter, I was intrigued enough also to read the former. The books share similarities, both being heavily about Washington politics and the 1950s fear that the twin evils of Communism and homosexuality would destroy America, but, as is natural for two books whose writing is separated by almost 50 years, they are different as well. Fellow Travelers I could not put down, caught up in the story and wanting to know what happens next; Advise and Consent I almost stopped reading because its first section ("Bob Munson's book"), the introduction to Washington wheeling and dealing, just bored me. Knowing part of what would happen later in the book, I plodded forward, and, luckily, sometime in the second section ("Seab Cooley's book") and throughout the third part ("Brigham Anderson's book") I was as caught up by the story as I'd been in Fellow Travelers. A word of warning, however, is that the final parts of the book ("Orrin Knox's book" and following) include page after page which, had I been Drury's editor, I would have urged him just to drop.
Advise and Consent's primary focus is the machinations surrounding the confirmation of a proposed Secretary of State, Bob Leffingwell, unlike Fellow Travelers's focus on witch hunts for Communists and homosexuals. During his confirmation hearings, Leffingwell is accused by a witness of having been part of a Communist cell back in his college days. He denies it, but is he lying? The good upstanding senior Senator from Utah, Brigham Anderson, finds out that he is, but being an honorable man, Anderson gives the President a chance to withdraw the nomination, a bad call on Anderson's part since the President in turns comes across some dirty laundry from Anderson's past and uses it to destroy him.
What was the dirty laundry on Anderson? Apparently the good Mormon, now married with a child, had a homosexual love affair in Honolulu after having served his country in WWII. Advise and Consent, written in the 50s, cannot mention directly, however, the love that dare not speak its name. The Senator who is the President's henchman doesn't accuse Anderson of being a homosexual (the word never even appears in the book), saying instead only that Anderson is "morally unfit." The photo that tipped Anderson's opponents off to his gay love affair is not anything lewd, in one Senator's words, "innocent-appearing," although it bears a gaydar-alerting inscription.
Although Anderson meets the fate that befalls many pre-Stonewall homosexuals in American literature (it can't be too much of a spoiler to reveal he kills himself rather than let disgrace befall him and his family), I was surprised by the amount of sympathy Anderson's senatorial friends showed him, both before and after his suicide. Knowing the allegations against him and that, in Anderson's words, "they may be" true, his friends still vow to support him, and after his death they want to avenge his honor. I was also surprised by Drury's seemingly sympathetic view of homosexuality. In one passage, he has Anderson reflecting on his life and thinking that "he was a good father, a good [...] husband, a good servant, a good Senator, and a good man; and central to all this, in a way he understood thoroughly in his own nature, was the episode in Honolulu." Perhaps not such a radical message only ten years before Stonewall, but not one I expected to find in a book published in 1959.
Read what I thought about Otto Preminger's 1962 film version of this book. | |
| |