Landmark gay novel and a fun comedy of mannersHenry Blake Fuller (1857-1929) was a Chicago author known for regional realist novels like The Cliff-Dwellers. Fuller was also gay, which in itself is not so remarkable, but he has left his stamp on history with what some literary critics have called the first gay novel in American literature: Bertram Cope’s Year, published in 1919 (although at least two other books can vie for that title: Bayard Taylor’s Joseph and His Friend [1870] and Xavier Mayne’s Imre: A Memorandum [1906]). In recent years, Fuller has been posthumously recognized for his achievements by induction into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame and the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame.
What’s amazing about Bertram Cope’s Year is how Fuller was able to cleverly write a realist novel about a gay man’s life and same-sex relationships without ever overtly mentioning either. The prudish world of American literature in 1919 would not have stood for explicit descriptions of physical affection or even verbal expressions of romantic love between two men, so Fuller does not include any, yet he gets his story told nonetheless. I suppose it is possible that some quite clueless reader of a century ago might read this as a story of platonic relationships, but one would have to be truly naive indeed to miss what Fuller implies between the lines.
Bertram Cope is a young teacher pursuing a PhD. He works as an adjunct instructor at a university in the town of Churchton, which is likely meant to be a lakeside suburb of Chicago, though that’s never overtly specified. Cope realizes he must work the college-town social scene if he wishes to advance his academic career, so he befriends local society hostess Medora Phillips and makes further connections with those who frequent her salon. Like many a handsome young man, Cope unwittingly draws the attention of straight young women who, unaware of his sexual orientation, try to snare him for a husband. Cope is also pursued by Basil Randolph, a 50-year-old businessman who enjoys the company of college men. Meanwhile, Cope carries on a long distance relationship with his boyfriend in Wisconsin, whom he hopes to persuade to relocate to Churchton. All of these relationships complicate the mild-mannered Cope’s life as he tries to live discreetly as a gay man while keeping up the appearance of a heterosexual bachelor.
Bertram Cope’s Year is not a comedy in the laugh-out-loud sense but it is a comedy of manners that satirizes social conventions. Fuller maintains a wry and dry humor throughout. Most of the characters in the novel end up looking foolish, and not simply because of the way they fall all over Cope. Fuller lampoons the very society that Cope is trying to fit into, with its constricting code of etiquette, annoying obligations, and matrimonial negotiations. Cope himself comes across a bit ridiculous as he reluctantly and bemusedly navigates this social landscape of dull cocktail parties, unwanted heart-to-heart confabs, and obligatory country outings.
Bertram Cope’s Year may not actually be the first gay novel in American literature, but it is nevertheless a groundbreaking and genre-founding work. Beyond its historical importance, however, it is quite an entertaining read with an enjoyably ironic sense of humor. This novel of manners calls to mind the earlier satirical melodramas of Honoré de Balzac or Anthony Trollope, but Fuller updates the genre for the modern era by pioneering a more inclusive representation of American society. This lesser-known work from a century ago is a pleasantly surprising gem.
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Social climbers in young Chicago
Chicago novelist, poet, and playwright Henry Blake Fuller (1857-1929) may not be a household name among today’s readers, but he is still well-respected by scholars of American literary naturalism. Though Fuller was not the first to write a novel set in Chicago, he may have been the first successful author to actually have been born in Chicago, where he lived his entire life.
Fuller’s novel The Cliff-Dwellers, published in 1893, depicts the Windy City at a time when it was just starting to come into its own as a metropolis. Though Easterners still looked down on the city as a dirty Western backwater town of factories and slaughterhouses, Chicago was beginning to build an economic, cultural, and social environment to rival its cosmopolitan counterparts on the Atlantic Coast. One of the distinctive aspects of Chicago at the time was its rapid explosion of skyscrapers. The Cliff-Dwellers centers on one such eighteen-story high-rise dubbed The Clifton, a swanky downtown office building housing various enterprises in banking, real estate, insurance, and manufacturing. George Ogden, a Bostonian, arrives in Chicago armed with letters of introduction that secure him a banking job within the Clifton. After reaching out to a small social circle of fellow emigrants from Massachusetts, Ogden soon becomes acquainted with some of the most prominent families in Chicago high society.
Besides Ogden, the ensemble cast includes several other men who work in the Clifton building, as well as their families. The novel not only follows their work lives but also their home lives in various Chicago neighborhoods. Other novels have focused on the residents of a particular building, but usually the edifice in question is a residential one—Honoré de Balzac’s Père Goriot and Emile Zola’s Pot-Bouille come to mind. The Cliff-Dwellers may be the earliest book to revolve around an office building, using the skyscraper as a microcosm of modern urban life. As a naturalist, Fuller writes about how the conditions and conventions of modern urban society affect, control, and sometimes even enslave his characters. As in Zola’s Pot-Bouille, everyone in The Cliff-Dwellers is struggling to reach a higher rung in the ladder of social status and are willing to use questionable means to do so, whether unethical business practices, outright crime, spending beyond one’s means, or engaging in marriages of convenience. Unlike most naturalist writers, however, Fuller totally ignores the laboring and servant classes, resulting in a myopic novel about social conditions that really only applies to the relatively well-off.
The Cliff-Dwellers proved a surprisingly difficult novel to read. Though the book is written in roughly high school-level vocabulary, Fuller employs many century-old idioms and slang into his prose. What’s worse, Fuller has a way of writing dialogue that makes it very difficult to tell who is speaking and whom is being spoken about. He uses way too many pronouns and not enough antecedents. Some passages required reading two or three times to figure out what was going on. Fuller’s ambiguous phrasing even led me to believe that one character was dead, only to discover her speaking a few pages later.
Some regard The Cliff-Dwellers as one of the greatest of Chicago novels, but it doesn’t measure up to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle or Frank Norris’s The Pit. Nevertheless, this is still a noteworthy work of regional realism. Besides being one of Chicago’s pioneering men of letters, Fuller’s other claim to fame is that he wrote the first American novel about homosexuality, Bertram Cope’s Year, published in 1919.
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