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And I'll never be as strong as my mother
I have wanted to write about Helen Eustis' The Horizontal Man (1946) since I read it in the four-novel collection Women Crime Writers of the 1940s (2015) at the end of last year. It is beautifully written and intensely frustrating. As I am awake on an hour's sleep and waiting with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rushthatspeaks for the cleaners to arrive sometime this afternoon, I might as well use this time to complain. [edit] The cleaners arrived before I finished writing. But they were here for some time, so I kept at it. The house looks great.
I am not surprised that The Horizontal Man won its author an Edgar Award for Best First Novel in 1947. It's an ambitiously plotted, stylistically striking murder mystery set at the fictional women's college of Hollymount, a mordant case of write-what-you-know influenced by Eustis' experiences as a student and then a faculty wife at Smith College; she began it during the breakup of her marriage and would later claim dryly that "she wrote it because she knew so many people in college she would like to murder." When the dazzlingly brilliant, devastatingly romantic—male—star of the English department turns up bludgeoned, the Hollymount campus becomes a vortex of feverish speculation, especially after a high-strung misfit—female—student blurts out a confession and then collapses, confined to the college infirmary while a psychiatrist is called in to evaluate the authenticity of her guilt, the off-campus police push for an arrest, and the local news has a field day. The style is acute, vivid, and ironic, the author's eye on her characters almost always a little satirical. I have never actually seen anything like the initial structure, which assembles its cast of characters in a contagious round-robin, shifting perspective each chapter to someone with a link, however oblique or temporary, to the actions of the previous section. One point of view is held in reserve until late in the novel when it comes satisfyingly off the wall, exploding an assumption heretofore taken as accepted fact; another turns out to be a red herring in that it never becomes accessible to the reader despite the apparent literary inevitability that it should be the final reveal. The last word belongs to a peripheral stranger. The very first belongs to the murder victim. The effect is intimate and deliberately disorienting, so that the reader's understanding of Hollymount as a community spirals out from the death at its center, pulling in outsiders like the reporter and the psychiatrist alongside insiders like the housemother, the college president, and the professors; it catches the reader up in the whirl of gossip and only later bothers to distinguish how much of the barrage of information with which we were hit from the violent start was signal and how much was noise. The setting is an instantly recognizable rural New England, especially if read at the right time of year: "The winter sun was nearing the horizon, salmon colored among violet clouds, promising snow . . . The white frame houses took on a luminousness in the evening light, standing on their dead drab lawns among the skeletons of trees." I quite like several of the characters, including the romantic heroine and the psychiatrist.1
I don't even want to say that the denouement is where The Horizontal Man falls apart, because it's carefully foreshadowed, as psychologically underpinned as the author could make it, and above all thematically consistent with the novel's exploration of gender as assigned, performed, and interpreted in the environment of a women's college just after WWII. All of that said, it has two major strikes against it: in the years since the novel's publication, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) happened, and in the years since Psycho, audiences have recognized the problems with a murder mystery whose shocking twist solution is the secret female persona of a mentally unstable, mother-dominated man.
I mean, in that sense there really isn't very much to say about it. It just sits there on the page looking Freudian and transphobic. I was surprised that the trope existed so early, but not very happy to see it. In context, I can see exactly how it happened. As may be inferred from the title, The Horizontal Man is very much concerned with gender. It plays with the roles of its time; it pokes at them to see if they tick; it takes them apart. The most stereotypically, negatively "feminine" character in the novel is a former confidant of the murder victim—a disorganized, emotional member of the junior faculty, gossipy and fanciful, prone to ill-founded leaps of non-logic and in a desperate state of longing to be married. Leonard Marks is also a straight cis man with a massive nerd-jock chip on his shoulder into which is tangled his half-terrified crush on the woman whom campus rumor accounted the latest lover of the wild Irish ladykiller, the erstwhile Kevin Boyle. Among the students, the most central character after the girl who confesses is a senior whose amateur sleuthing becomes invaluable to the plot. We meet her first from the unflattering perspective of the reporter from the Messenger—"a young tweedy-looking man with a crew cut and horn-rimmed glasses"—who sets his sights on her much more conventionally attractive, much more conventionally female-presenting dorm-mate:
One of them was quite a tomato—what is referred to as a long-stemmed American beauty. This was going to be what you call mixing business with pleasure. The other was on the dumpy side, with a frowsy feather cut and horn-rimmed glasses like the young man's own. She was wearing dungarees and a sweatshirt; the first had on a pale-pink sweater and skirt—good enough to eat. The reporter sat regarding them out of the corner of his eye as he sipped his beer, thinking about the best approach. Casing the joint, you might say. The pink one was not so bright—she was the one to work on. The fat cookie looked like an intellectual.
The cookie's name is Kate Innes; she is the novel's romantic heroine. She is used to being mistaken for a lesbian because of her short hair and her jeans and her secondhand polo coat and tennis shoes, although she's unconcernedly straight. The reporter who writes her off at first glance will fall head over heels in love with her as he discovers to his discomfiture and eventual delight that what actually turns him on is intelligence. She drinks his beer when he tries to order her coffee because of her weight; they trade screwball-style banter on a stakeout. "Listen, baby, chivalry is dead as an old T. S. Eliot geranium as far as I'm concerned, and if we get sent up for housebreaking, we'll split the sentence evenly, believe me."–"Your judgment is fair but your time discrimination is poor. Where's la Cramm?" Then they make out under a coffee table and elope at the end of the novel. Their glasses slide down their noses the exact same way. It's adorable. Meanwhile, the more we learn about murdered Boyle, the more his reputation as a cocksman extraordinaire begins to look like a lot of wishful thinking on everyone's part. He told some wild stories to his colleagues and his students thought he was the dreamiest, most sensitive man alive; that doesn't mean he knew how to make a move. Deep-voiced, heavily built, middle-aged Freda Cramm, former charity student turned happily divorced professor, is the scandalous Casanova of Hollymount and very content with her life. She is a little sorry not to have successfully seduced Kevin Boyle (he panicked, made an awkward exit, and got himself murdered the next week), but takes it philosophically: "Considering herself as a historical phenomenon, she thought she could stand as a successful example of a woman of the Freudian era."
Equally importantly, the reserved, respected, secretly hysterical George Hungerford is not the only mentally unstable, mother-dominated character in view. Immediately following the murder, the narrative shifts to the perspective of Molly Morrison, the antisocial freshman whose painful imprinting on Boyle leads her to feel responsible for his death—if only she had confessed her love to him on the last evening of his life, she feels, he would have turned away from his fatal assignation and still been alive today. "I killed him . . . I killed him because I had no courage." Her emotionally abusive mother has taken out her resentment of her artistically talented but commercially unsuccessful husband on their daughter to the point where Molly is functionally incapable of forming relationships, healthy or otherwise; she is self-hating, passively suicidal, certain that even innocuous social gestures are the prelude to deliberate, targeted cruelty and humiliation. Whatever else about this novel's psychology I look askance at, Molly's PTSD and depression are entirely convincing:
"I don't want to go out. I don't want to walk . . . I want to be very still. I don't want to move myself. When I move, it's like dragging a great stone. I don't want to look at a lot of things. I don't want to look down streets. I want to look at small areas, like my hands, or a page of paper. You know where I like it best? I like it in corridors, when there's nobody there. A corridor is nowhere. It's just a between place. Nothing can happen to you there."
We see a letter from her mother later in the novel and it is a doozy, exactly as cold and self-centered and manipulative as we have been led to expect from Julian's sessions with Molly. So it is not as though the one trans character in the novel is the only one with a bad family history; it is not as though the rest of the cast all divide neatly into the conventional gender roles of the time. The narrative gives a severe side-eye to Kate's ditzy dorm-mate who thinks that one of her teachers must be a "regular sort of queer" because "she has such a deep voice, and she goes around in pants all the time," but assures an unconvinced Kate that she's all right because she's "full busted." Even the not exactly imaginative, publicity-concerned college president agrees that "most men have some womanly characteristics, just as most women have some manly ones. What's the harm?" A binary way of thinking about it, but not too shabby for 1946. But we wend our way toward the explanation:
"He rejected the female elements in his nature so violently that they actually regrouped themselves into a second personality—that's the only way I can think of to describe it . . . In his waking state—or in the role of George Hungerford—he is unable to remember any of the history that obviously gives rise to the second personality—Eloise. But in the guise of Eloise, he tells a perfectly connected story about how as a small child his mother called him by the name of the sister who died in infancy, dressed him in girl's clothes, and encouraged him to assume female characteristics altogether . . . Yet outside the home, the atmosphere in which he lived was so rigidly conventional that he knew he stood in terrible danger not only from his schoolmates, but other adults, and, in a strange way, even his mother. She couldn't have given him a better background for psychosis if she'd known what she was about . . . [W]hen it came time to cut off his curls and take him out of Lord Fauntleroy suits, even his mother recognized that he must become a boy. So that then she began to rebuke him for behaving in the way that she had encouraged."
All of which looks very much like the sort of overdetermined Freudian trauma that occurs strictly in slasher flicks, complete with convenient blackouts in later life whenever the suppressed personality assumes control. The thing is, it's surprisingly close to the real-life history of a friend of a friend of my family whom I met more than once as a child—who last I heard was doing just fine with their bigender identity and prone to neither dissociative amnesia nor sudden impulses to murder. And therein I think lies The Horizontal Man's problem. I really do not think Eustis was trying to invent a pernicious stereotype, or even arrive at it accidentally, but the conflation of transgender identity with multiple identity with psychosis producing brutal, irrational, sex-incited violence just doesn't play in Peoria or anywhere else. It's one thing to carry the novel's theme of gender as something essentially mutable and socially contingent into the characterization of a figure whom we have heretofore been encouraged to see strictly in very fixed terms. It's another to make them—however sympathetically—the crazy killer. Even the psychiatrist seems to know he's handwaving:
"I'm trying to make something clear to you that isn't clear to me at all—I'm making very tenuous connections seem strong, and I'm reading in interpretations which may be quite incorrect. I'm taking bits of other cases of multiple personality and grafting on to this one, simply because if I couldn't make some sort of sense of the business there'd be nothing for it but to say the man was possessed of a devil."
I look at that last sentence and think that perhaps the character is right and he should have been in a supernatural novel, a ghost story perhaps. The subtext might still have been problematic, but at least the text itself wouldn't bite anyone so badly. As it is, I am honestly not sure I can recommend it to anyone who isn't willing to get stung by the last ten pages out of two hundred. Rush proffered the alternative suggestion that I recommend the novel to readers who are willing to cut out the last ten pages "and replace them with a cheese sandwich." Personally it annoys me because there is otherwise a dearth of good mysteries set at women's colleges and I like so many other aspects of the story, but that one just blows the whole thing up. I would love to know if Robert Bloch ever read this novel.
I am off to make dinner withgaudior. Maybe I should just embrace the metaphor and make grilled cheese. [edit] Rush came home and we ate the metaphor.
1. His name is Julian Forstmann and he resents the expectation that he can magically divine the secrets of the human heart by his profession, like a great detective in a crime novel: "The girl is undoubtedly neurotic from what has been said of her, but so are most of the people you know; I can probably tell you whether or not she is psychotic, but that still won't prove her a murderess. As for the Rorschach test, there isn't nearly enough statistical material to support its absolute validity." He gets stuck with explaining the mystery at the end and resents that, too. I really feel for him.
rushthatspeaks for the cleaners to arrive sometime this afternoon, I might as well use this time to complain. [edit] The cleaners arrived before I finished writing. But they were here for some time, so I kept at it. The house looks great.I am not surprised that The Horizontal Man won its author an Edgar Award for Best First Novel in 1947. It's an ambitiously plotted, stylistically striking murder mystery set at the fictional women's college of Hollymount, a mordant case of write-what-you-know influenced by Eustis' experiences as a student and then a faculty wife at Smith College; she began it during the breakup of her marriage and would later claim dryly that "she wrote it because she knew so many people in college she would like to murder." When the dazzlingly brilliant, devastatingly romantic—male—star of the English department turns up bludgeoned, the Hollymount campus becomes a vortex of feverish speculation, especially after a high-strung misfit—female—student blurts out a confession and then collapses, confined to the college infirmary while a psychiatrist is called in to evaluate the authenticity of her guilt, the off-campus police push for an arrest, and the local news has a field day. The style is acute, vivid, and ironic, the author's eye on her characters almost always a little satirical. I have never actually seen anything like the initial structure, which assembles its cast of characters in a contagious round-robin, shifting perspective each chapter to someone with a link, however oblique or temporary, to the actions of the previous section. One point of view is held in reserve until late in the novel when it comes satisfyingly off the wall, exploding an assumption heretofore taken as accepted fact; another turns out to be a red herring in that it never becomes accessible to the reader despite the apparent literary inevitability that it should be the final reveal. The last word belongs to a peripheral stranger. The very first belongs to the murder victim. The effect is intimate and deliberately disorienting, so that the reader's understanding of Hollymount as a community spirals out from the death at its center, pulling in outsiders like the reporter and the psychiatrist alongside insiders like the housemother, the college president, and the professors; it catches the reader up in the whirl of gossip and only later bothers to distinguish how much of the barrage of information with which we were hit from the violent start was signal and how much was noise. The setting is an instantly recognizable rural New England, especially if read at the right time of year: "The winter sun was nearing the horizon, salmon colored among violet clouds, promising snow . . . The white frame houses took on a luminousness in the evening light, standing on their dead drab lawns among the skeletons of trees." I quite like several of the characters, including the romantic heroine and the psychiatrist.1
I don't even want to say that the denouement is where The Horizontal Man falls apart, because it's carefully foreshadowed, as psychologically underpinned as the author could make it, and above all thematically consistent with the novel's exploration of gender as assigned, performed, and interpreted in the environment of a women's college just after WWII. All of that said, it has two major strikes against it: in the years since the novel's publication, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) happened, and in the years since Psycho, audiences have recognized the problems with a murder mystery whose shocking twist solution is the secret female persona of a mentally unstable, mother-dominated man.
I mean, in that sense there really isn't very much to say about it. It just sits there on the page looking Freudian and transphobic. I was surprised that the trope existed so early, but not very happy to see it. In context, I can see exactly how it happened. As may be inferred from the title, The Horizontal Man is very much concerned with gender. It plays with the roles of its time; it pokes at them to see if they tick; it takes them apart. The most stereotypically, negatively "feminine" character in the novel is a former confidant of the murder victim—a disorganized, emotional member of the junior faculty, gossipy and fanciful, prone to ill-founded leaps of non-logic and in a desperate state of longing to be married. Leonard Marks is also a straight cis man with a massive nerd-jock chip on his shoulder into which is tangled his half-terrified crush on the woman whom campus rumor accounted the latest lover of the wild Irish ladykiller, the erstwhile Kevin Boyle. Among the students, the most central character after the girl who confesses is a senior whose amateur sleuthing becomes invaluable to the plot. We meet her first from the unflattering perspective of the reporter from the Messenger—"a young tweedy-looking man with a crew cut and horn-rimmed glasses"—who sets his sights on her much more conventionally attractive, much more conventionally female-presenting dorm-mate:
One of them was quite a tomato—what is referred to as a long-stemmed American beauty. This was going to be what you call mixing business with pleasure. The other was on the dumpy side, with a frowsy feather cut and horn-rimmed glasses like the young man's own. She was wearing dungarees and a sweatshirt; the first had on a pale-pink sweater and skirt—good enough to eat. The reporter sat regarding them out of the corner of his eye as he sipped his beer, thinking about the best approach. Casing the joint, you might say. The pink one was not so bright—she was the one to work on. The fat cookie looked like an intellectual.
The cookie's name is Kate Innes; she is the novel's romantic heroine. She is used to being mistaken for a lesbian because of her short hair and her jeans and her secondhand polo coat and tennis shoes, although she's unconcernedly straight. The reporter who writes her off at first glance will fall head over heels in love with her as he discovers to his discomfiture and eventual delight that what actually turns him on is intelligence. She drinks his beer when he tries to order her coffee because of her weight; they trade screwball-style banter on a stakeout. "Listen, baby, chivalry is dead as an old T. S. Eliot geranium as far as I'm concerned, and if we get sent up for housebreaking, we'll split the sentence evenly, believe me."–"Your judgment is fair but your time discrimination is poor. Where's la Cramm?" Then they make out under a coffee table and elope at the end of the novel. Their glasses slide down their noses the exact same way. It's adorable. Meanwhile, the more we learn about murdered Boyle, the more his reputation as a cocksman extraordinaire begins to look like a lot of wishful thinking on everyone's part. He told some wild stories to his colleagues and his students thought he was the dreamiest, most sensitive man alive; that doesn't mean he knew how to make a move. Deep-voiced, heavily built, middle-aged Freda Cramm, former charity student turned happily divorced professor, is the scandalous Casanova of Hollymount and very content with her life. She is a little sorry not to have successfully seduced Kevin Boyle (he panicked, made an awkward exit, and got himself murdered the next week), but takes it philosophically: "Considering herself as a historical phenomenon, she thought she could stand as a successful example of a woman of the Freudian era."
Equally importantly, the reserved, respected, secretly hysterical George Hungerford is not the only mentally unstable, mother-dominated character in view. Immediately following the murder, the narrative shifts to the perspective of Molly Morrison, the antisocial freshman whose painful imprinting on Boyle leads her to feel responsible for his death—if only she had confessed her love to him on the last evening of his life, she feels, he would have turned away from his fatal assignation and still been alive today. "I killed him . . . I killed him because I had no courage." Her emotionally abusive mother has taken out her resentment of her artistically talented but commercially unsuccessful husband on their daughter to the point where Molly is functionally incapable of forming relationships, healthy or otherwise; she is self-hating, passively suicidal, certain that even innocuous social gestures are the prelude to deliberate, targeted cruelty and humiliation. Whatever else about this novel's psychology I look askance at, Molly's PTSD and depression are entirely convincing:
"I don't want to go out. I don't want to walk . . . I want to be very still. I don't want to move myself. When I move, it's like dragging a great stone. I don't want to look at a lot of things. I don't want to look down streets. I want to look at small areas, like my hands, or a page of paper. You know where I like it best? I like it in corridors, when there's nobody there. A corridor is nowhere. It's just a between place. Nothing can happen to you there."
We see a letter from her mother later in the novel and it is a doozy, exactly as cold and self-centered and manipulative as we have been led to expect from Julian's sessions with Molly. So it is not as though the one trans character in the novel is the only one with a bad family history; it is not as though the rest of the cast all divide neatly into the conventional gender roles of the time. The narrative gives a severe side-eye to Kate's ditzy dorm-mate who thinks that one of her teachers must be a "regular sort of queer" because "she has such a deep voice, and she goes around in pants all the time," but assures an unconvinced Kate that she's all right because she's "full busted." Even the not exactly imaginative, publicity-concerned college president agrees that "most men have some womanly characteristics, just as most women have some manly ones. What's the harm?" A binary way of thinking about it, but not too shabby for 1946. But we wend our way toward the explanation:
"He rejected the female elements in his nature so violently that they actually regrouped themselves into a second personality—that's the only way I can think of to describe it . . . In his waking state—or in the role of George Hungerford—he is unable to remember any of the history that obviously gives rise to the second personality—Eloise. But in the guise of Eloise, he tells a perfectly connected story about how as a small child his mother called him by the name of the sister who died in infancy, dressed him in girl's clothes, and encouraged him to assume female characteristics altogether . . . Yet outside the home, the atmosphere in which he lived was so rigidly conventional that he knew he stood in terrible danger not only from his schoolmates, but other adults, and, in a strange way, even his mother. She couldn't have given him a better background for psychosis if she'd known what she was about . . . [W]hen it came time to cut off his curls and take him out of Lord Fauntleroy suits, even his mother recognized that he must become a boy. So that then she began to rebuke him for behaving in the way that she had encouraged."
All of which looks very much like the sort of overdetermined Freudian trauma that occurs strictly in slasher flicks, complete with convenient blackouts in later life whenever the suppressed personality assumes control. The thing is, it's surprisingly close to the real-life history of a friend of a friend of my family whom I met more than once as a child—who last I heard was doing just fine with their bigender identity and prone to neither dissociative amnesia nor sudden impulses to murder. And therein I think lies The Horizontal Man's problem. I really do not think Eustis was trying to invent a pernicious stereotype, or even arrive at it accidentally, but the conflation of transgender identity with multiple identity with psychosis producing brutal, irrational, sex-incited violence just doesn't play in Peoria or anywhere else. It's one thing to carry the novel's theme of gender as something essentially mutable and socially contingent into the characterization of a figure whom we have heretofore been encouraged to see strictly in very fixed terms. It's another to make them—however sympathetically—the crazy killer. Even the psychiatrist seems to know he's handwaving:
"I'm trying to make something clear to you that isn't clear to me at all—I'm making very tenuous connections seem strong, and I'm reading in interpretations which may be quite incorrect. I'm taking bits of other cases of multiple personality and grafting on to this one, simply because if I couldn't make some sort of sense of the business there'd be nothing for it but to say the man was possessed of a devil."
I look at that last sentence and think that perhaps the character is right and he should have been in a supernatural novel, a ghost story perhaps. The subtext might still have been problematic, but at least the text itself wouldn't bite anyone so badly. As it is, I am honestly not sure I can recommend it to anyone who isn't willing to get stung by the last ten pages out of two hundred. Rush proffered the alternative suggestion that I recommend the novel to readers who are willing to cut out the last ten pages "and replace them with a cheese sandwich." Personally it annoys me because there is otherwise a dearth of good mysteries set at women's colleges and I like so many other aspects of the story, but that one just blows the whole thing up. I would love to know if Robert Bloch ever read this novel.
I am off to make dinner with
gaudior. Maybe I should just embrace the metaphor and make grilled cheese. [edit] Rush came home and we ate the metaphor.1. His name is Julian Forstmann and he resents the expectation that he can magically divine the secrets of the human heart by his profession, like a great detective in a crime novel: "The girl is undoubtedly neurotic from what has been said of her, but so are most of the people you know; I can probably tell you whether or not she is psychotic, but that still won't prove her a murderess. As for the Rorschach test, there isn't nearly enough statistical material to support its absolute validity." He gets stuck with explaining the mystery at the end and resents that, too. I really feel for him.