Quatrefoil by James Barr

James Fugate wrote Quatrefoil, under the pseudonym James Barr, in 1950. It’s not a great novel. It’s not a bad read, but I wouldn’t have read it and I wouldn’t recommend it, either, save for the historical interest that this is a novel featuring a couple of gay characters from a time when to be homosexual was anything but gay.

The main character, Phillip Devereaux, is 23. The year is 1946. Phillip is nearing completion of a stint as a naval officer. He was stationed in the Pacific during the war. Now he’s facing a court-martial for insubordination, based on the way he dealt with an incompetent superior. The book opens with Phillip disembarking his ship in Oregon planning to take a bus up to the Navy base in Seattle to face his court-martial. There are no seats on the bus so he accepts a ride from a stranger instead.

That stranger is Tim Danelaw. Tim is also a naval officer, about 10 years older than Phillip. They become friends, more than friends, and Tim helps Phillip navigate his legal trouble, as well as other complications in Phillip’s life back home in Oklahoma.

It would be wrong to call Phillip and Tim’s meeting as a “meet-cute” because the book isn’t a rom-com, or a romance at all. Although the two men do eventually love each other, or say they do, their relationship is so repressed, by their personalities, by the Navy, by 1946, that feelings of romance are entirely absent.

Phillip regards homosexuality as a mental illness or a moral failing, as anyone would at the time. It’s a vice that good men can slip into if they aren’t careful. Homosexuality is a danger, to his naval career, to his social standing back home, to his career, his future, everything. He isn’t a fairy. He’s taken pains to remove any effeminacy from his character. But he seems closed off to his entire sexuality. He never speaks of any physical attraction to men and he has one sexual encounter with a woman during the course of the novel. She’s the aggressor and her motivations are not pure. He recounts stories of having been the object of a few sexual episodes with men, which he rebuffed and disturbed him. He’s sure any homosexuality he does feel can be put-down, and must be put-down, by strong self will.

So the novel comes from a place where sex isn’t liberating, where love isn’t spoken, where emotion and passion are denied, and relationships are calculated, reasoned out, debated and planned. It’s very cold. Phillip is self-involved, ambitious, plotting, physically attractive but otherwise not: kind of a jerk. Phillip and Tim never look at each other with desire. The one sex scene between them happens discretely in the blank space after the end of chapter 16 before the beginning of chapter 17. They decide it’s a mistake and can never happen again. Later they share a bed, without sex, and a scene in a quiet cabin, on bear skin rugs before a fire, but again, no sex. Jeez.

The characters talk a lot. Every problem needs to be analyzed, but a lot of the talk is eliptical. It reads much as an old-fashioned novel of manners where the characters are separated from happiness by layers of social code that are foreign to us now. It’s not until page 319 that Phillip has a conversation (with his sister, Fanchon) where he talks more-or-less openly about what’s going on and what he ought to do about it.

Meanwhile there’s a lot of story. Phillip is the scion of a wealthy family in Oklahoma. He’s being primed to take over the family bank, the town named for his grandfather, and maybe the governor’s office eventually. He’s engaged to a girl, not for love but for business and social reasons. Tim’s married, too, though his wife is preparing to file for divorce in a few months. Phillip’s rich. Tim is rich. They are both cultured, well-read. They speak foreign languages. Phillip plays the piano and rides horses. Tim paints. Both of them can pilot a plane. It’s a lot.

Eventually it all gets worked out. Phillip’s court-martial is dropped, through Tim’s intervention, before the mid-way point of the novel. Phillip is extracted from his engagement without any loss to his social standing. It turns out Phillip’s admired grandfather was also gay (discretely, without precluding his marriage to a woman, and children, and position). Tim gets his divorce. They both keep their secret. Tim and Phillip decide they can give it a go, but their declaration feels like a business arrangement, sealed with a handshake, not the beginning of a grand love.

In 1950 this novel was felt to be an advance over the homosexual literature of the time. The men are not degenerates. Neither goes insane or commits suicide at the end. The relationship is mutual, adult, and positive for both of them and their future lives. But Phillip and Tim’s world has also, now, been left far behind. The central problem separating them no longer exists. Being gay would mostly cease to be seen as a sickness or a sin just a couple of decades after the events of this novel. A couple of decades after that homosexuality would cease to be a barrier to a career in the military or practically anywhere. Today it’s not a barrier to marriage or a family, or to happiness, future, or passionate, fulfilling, love.

I happened to be reading this on the same day that the Senate was interviewing Pete Buttigieg for the Secretary of Transportation cabinet position, his husband, Chasten, sitting at his side. If only Phillip Devereaux, (he’d be 97 today) had been alive to see that.

BTW. I have no idea why this book is called Quatrefoil. A quatrefoil is a design with four petals, like you might see in architectural details. Let me know if you can explain the significance.