Bertram Cope's Year

Bertram Cope's Year
by Henry Blake Fuller

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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.

From Publishers Weekly
After New York publishing houses rejected the manuscript, probably on the grounds of its homosexual subtext, Fuller self-published this novel in 1919 to a devastating silence broken mainly by negative reviews. Although Edmund Wilson would later call it one of the best novels of its time, it has not been republished until now. The bittersweet core of the narrative, discreetly implied, is the homosexuality of its hero, Edmund Cope, a young professor who arrives at the Evanston, Ill.-based town of Churchton and is taken in by a society of genteel Midwestern eccentrics, including a widowed socialite, an aging bachelor who dreams of surrounding himself with entertaining young men and three young women who scheme for Cope's attention. Meanwhile, the self-centered, oblivious Cope writes letters to his absent friend, Arthur Lemoyne, and finally encourages Lemoyne to join him in Churchton. With a prose style as correct and detached as his protagonist, Fuller describes a series of seriocomic misunderstandings, including Cope's accidental marriage engagement, and flamboyant Lemoyne's banishment from the university after making a public romantic gesture toward a male cast member in a college drama. An amusing entertainment in its own right, this novel is also an important discovery for the gay literary canon, particularly (as essayist Andrew Solomon points out in his afterword) for its rare portrayal of day-to-day gay domestic life.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Near the end of a fairly distinguished writing career, Fuller tried to publish this novel in 1919. No one would touch it because it was about an ordinary homosexual man in an ordinary homosexual relationship. Dangerous stuff back then. So Fuller published it himself, to his peril; he lost his money and his friends. The tale chronicles a year in the life of Bertram Cope, a junior faculty member working on an advanced degree while teaching English at a university (read Northwestern) in Churchton (read Evanston). During the year, Cope moves his lover, Arthur, from back home to his side. The work deftly reveals the anguish of the closeted life, where a gay man has, in essence, a double existenceAone at home and one for his public and work life. Such a life makes acquaintances believe Cope to be cold and distant, while his lover finds him less than fully committed. Of more interest is the toll on Cope. He can never let go, never fully be himself, never fully realize himself. The novel feels dated because of the time period and the realist writer's attention to detail and the social milieu; however, it is of value simply because it was written at all. Recommended for academic libraries.ARoger W. Durbin, Univ. of Akron, OH
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The New York Times Book Review, Joel Conarroe
...[an] eminently readable work that is finally distinguished not so much by any prescient psychological probings as by its beautifully evoked period atmosphere, its sly humor and its picturesque diction.

The Washington Post Book World, Jameson Currier
Fuller's detached and stylized prose perfectly complements Cope's ambivalence, and the author successfully threads this quality into other characters and events.... [T]he book is a welcome and stylish exploration of an ordinary gay man's life in the early part of this century.

Peter Terzian, Time Out, May 21-28, 1998
The novel is noteworthy as a lost fragment of American literary history and as an example of the often doomed attempts of early-twentieth-century writers to address gay themes in a nonsensational manner. In the 1970s, Edmund Wilson called the book "perhaps Fuller's best." and it remains a testament to a courageous writer whose work has been unfairly overlooked.

Celia McGee with Book Buzz for KCRW, 2/25/98
The American publishing world's biggest annual event, The American Booksellers Association convention, now renamed BookExpo, will be held again in Chicago in May. This pioneering novel by a native son will be republished the same month. In the midst of all the publicity and hype that will surround the likes of author-slash-celebrities George Stephenapoulos, Anna Quindlen, Peter Jennings, Stephen Jay Gould and Tom Wolfe, I hope a spotlight will fall on Chaicago's Henry Blake Fuller and Turtle Point's reintroduction of Bertram Cope.

Feminist Book Store News, Spring 1998
Fuller, a contemporary of Henry James, published this bold and delicate nover, with much about gay love to it, in 1919: it was mostly ignored, despite praise from Carl Van Vechten and Edmund Wilson. Besides being a masterpiece of American realism, it's also a fascinating look at gay life and manners from another era.

Chicago Magazine, May 1998
An amusing entertainment in its own right, this novel is also an important discovery for the gay literary canon, particularly (as essayist Andrew Solomon points out in his afterword) for its rare portrayal of day-to-day gay domestic life.

The year 1919 was cruel to Henry Blake Fuller, the turn-of-the century Chicago novelist. He craved approval from the literary establishment, and had written eight well-regarded books. But his ninth novel, Bertram Cope's Year, was rejected that year by his New York publishers because of its gay theme. The sarcastic, sensitive author went on to publish the book himself; one critic later called it "the first truly modern gay novel in American literature." But the public turned a blind eye. Fuller destroyed his original manuscript and didn't write another novel for ten years.

This month, New York-based Turtle Point Press republishes Bertram. A pivotal figure in the Chicago literary renaissance, Fuller lampooned the city's commercialism in several novels, among them The Cliff-Dwellers (1893). In Bertram Cope's Year, set just after the Civil War, a young, gay English instructor uneasily enters drawing room society in an elm-lined university town, modeled on Evanston. Fuller wrote of his own struggle with homosexuality in an unpublished diary, Allisonian Classical Academy, about his boarding school days in Wisconsin (he died in 1929).

In a 1970 New Yorker article, critic Edmund Wilson worte, "The little known Bertram Cope's Year is Fuller's very best work." With its re-release, perhaps 1998 is Fuller's year, at last.

Book Description
The third girl--if you want to hear any more about them--seems to be a secretary. Think of having the run of a house where a social secretary is required! I'm sure she sends out the invitations and keeps the engagement- book. Besides all that, she writes poetry--she is the minstrel of the court. She does verses about her chatelaine--is quite the mistress of self- respecting adulation. She would know the difference between Herrick and Cowper!

Download Description
The third girl--if you want to hear any more about them--seems to be a secretary. Think of having the run of a house where a social secretary is required! I'm sure she sends out the invitations and keeps the engagement- book. Besides all that, she writes poetry--she is the minstrel of the court. She does verses about her chatelaine--is quite the mistress of self- respecting adulation. She would know the difference between Herrick and Cowper!

From the Back Cover
In 1919, when he was sixty-two, Henry Blake Fuller published Bertram Cope's Year. This audacious book with several homosexual characters revolves around a young English instructor in a middle western university town patterned on Evanston, Illinois. Rejected by every New York publisher, Fuller self-published and the book received scant notice or unintelligent reviews. Discouraged, Fuller burned the original manuscript. It took ten years before he ventured to publish another novel. James Huneker, Fuller's contemporary, loved Bertram Cope's Year. He read it three times and wrote to Fuller, "Its portraiture and psychological strokes fill me with envy and joy...you are implacable. Stendhal of the lake!" Fifty years later, critic Edmund Wilson, in a New Yorker article on Henry Blake Fuller entitled "The Art of Making It Flat", called Bertram Cope's Year Fuller's best book. He wrote, "It has a philosophic theme...which raises it well above the fiction of social surfaces of the school of William Dean Howells." The Turtle Point Press edition is the first republication of Bertram Cope's Year since 1919.

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