Steve_Bamlett_blog

‘Something that had had its back to me had turned, as if preparing to howl in rage or despair’. (p.324) Philip Hensher’s (2020) A Small Revolution in Germany London, 4^th Estate. And the ‘gay novel’.

CONTAINS SPOILERS?

Perhaps my title is the spoiler, for on the last short printed page of this novel there it is: my opening quotation. The narrator, Spike, is travelling in Germany on a bus with his life-long male partner (the issue of what to call him is discussed in the novel) the Chilean Joaquin. Joaquin’s father had been ‘disappeared’ in Chile by the fascist military. The guys are both ‘old Trotskyites’ but with different genesis – Spike had started ff by pretending to have read more, than its most famous aphorism of history ‘repeated as farce’, than he had of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon not lost a father to fascism.

The story of Trotskyites lost in illusion about the Russian Revolution and the genesis of the Eastern Communist bloc is in part is the joke of the epigram (one of two – the other is from Saramago’s The Stone Raft) wherein Lenin complains:

‘… the German revolution is growing, but not in the way we would like it.’  

Lenin’s Political Report of the Central Committee … 6-8 March 1918 cited as epigram

It’s clear that the nature of revolutions may never be as Lenin would ‘like it’ and that the kind of changes in history which occur are not what any of us may always expect nor desire. So, on the last page the smallest of revolutions occurs – a turning around of something that had its back to us,. It’s a thing full of impotent ‘rage or despair’, It is only one such example of what a ‘small revolution’ might be. Obscurely sensed by Spike as he watches the forest from a bus, he has a kind of hallucinatory vision of the past in the process of being changed and seen differently. That it is a moment of powerless pain for the now well-aged Spike is not what we old men may have wanted to have achieved by now in our lost pasts, is true. It does not mean that we should not negotiate with that past and its expectations.

This novel is full of political turncoats. The most iconic is James Frinton who turns from passive Trotskyite youth to a Home Secretary aiming to be Prime Minister. His past contains elements including letters recording minor evolutionary tactics like painting slogans on walls that must be kept silent if ambition is to be served. An unknown possibility of his past life-narrative as revolved in Spike’s mind is how far he would have gone to ‘silence’ the past – would it extend to virtual murder and theft of the verbal evidence of it?

the dead are worse the aged, as I have been told. Once they begin to speak, they will not be silenced.

Hensher (2020:323)

Spike and Joaquin (one of the finest gay couples in the novels I’ve read) ponder the fact that James Frinton had only changed in the way that all the other band of youthful comrades (the Sparticists) had also ‘changed’.

Frinton’s metamorphosis had started by becoming, even at Oxford University, a Tory. But this is significantly paralleled, for me (since I think this is a novel of gay history) by the career of Percy Ogden. Ogden is gay but we are not told that until the second part of the novel – and then only in a hint of a guess from Joaquin at first. It is possible even that Ogden had not faced up to this in himself. Nevertheless, we are not surprised when he rapes Spike in a comrade’s trip to the German Democratic Republic (GDR).

But most important for my argument is that Ogden then becomes an icon of revolutions in the telling of gay history from which Spike and Joaquin distance themselves. When Ogden ‘comes out’ to the Press as a left leaning (but leaning only as far as Blair) gay journalist, he also considers himself a leader of ‘queer politics’ (ibid:237).

I think Hensher here shows his hand in disassociating himself from that kind of queer politics represented by Ogden. Hensher loves the love between Spike and Joaquin. It is portrayed very warmly. But that love in older age is also not presented as a very rooted thing in this novel – being a thing of trans-European flitting almost. Domestic life is unconfronted after they leave the squats of the 1970s and we can’t see clearly how they make their living, sufficient to support foreign travel. In a sense it is a relationship in my eyes as socially unreal as that of Maurice and the gamekeeper in Forster’s Maurice.

This is where I want to start my case in discussing Hensher’s latest novel as a gay novel. In a sense, it is far from that. It reminds us that it is in the tradition of Brideshead Revisited (‘Brideshead Reunited’ as Joaquin calls it) or the novels of Iris Murdoch or A.S. Byatt, in which gay characters play central roles. But it feels more politically charged than that for me.

The odious rapist, Ogden, has a politics that is made both unreal, fantastical and despised; not least because of the narrator’s dismissive point that only being trapped in a remote German village with nothing else to do would cause you to read Ogden’s journalism. Hence as well as being committed to what are presented as fashionable left, ecological and anti-Brexit causes, he wants to represent the gay community in a bid for solidarity that includes transsexuality. It is the formation of such ahistorical bloc that makes him ‘other’ to the honest sexuality of Spike and Joaquin. In his article Ogden transforms his time in GDR cells, following Spike’s rape, into promotion of a common community with Blairite New Labour. This is how his article is reported by Spike:

That made him think admiration of Mr Tony Blair was the principle ‘we must’ adhere to, en masse. I never gave him a moment’s thought. It wasn’t important whether that columnists’ we succeeded in including me or not.

Ibid:238

It is clear that Hensher identifies a moment in history in which belief in trans rights was as necessary as that in the EU to create a communal and inclusive ‘we’ that was at the core of New Labour strategy. And Hensher, I believe through the medium of Spike and Joaquin’s validated male to male sexuality, distances himself and gay history from the inter-sectional and arid, as I think he sees it, in Ogden’s ‘queer politics’.

If I find this difficult it is because – subtracting the attraction to Blair’s hunger for an elite leadership – I could imagine saying and believe Ogden’s cited desire to drive:

… the disease of transphobia from queer politics, where it’s got no place at all, and never did.’    

Ibid:237

And here a chasm opens between my memories and those of Hensher. As someone with a lifetime in left and gay politics, but with no particularly leading role, like Spike in that respect. I was nearer to Mohammed’s working-class roots than the fragmenting bourgeois ones of Spike. In the 1970s, Trotskyists, as I remember knowing them to be called, were  less enamoured of state capitalism: the term many, especially in the IMG, used of the Soviet Union and would not have been surprised to find what Spike found when he visited the GDR.

I wondered throughout how real the witness is to left wing politics. Likewise in the 1970s, though some of us were often antagonistic to ‘drag’ (I remember shouting at Lily Savage in the Vauxhall Tavern, much to my shame and at the cost of also remembering being worsted in the confrontation) ‘radical drag’ was an important idea on the left and was never confused with but seen to support people who identified as trans or intersex. In the 1980s helping run a Gay Helpline, we had a night where trans callers could talk to someone who identified as trans. This was supported by youth workers, lesbians and gay men. What Hensher calls ‘queer politics’ with a trans element is older than he makes it.

Now Hensher is not trying to be a historian and his point, as in Carlyle’s The French Revolution, is that the history we live through and the history we record afterwards are distinct things that a good historian tries to bring together. A theme of this novel is an investigation of how we live lives in history, record them in contemporary documents like letters, and how we tell them, formally in print or in informal chat, in our life after-the-events. Hence it is a story of lives reunited – but sometimes in print and reader rather than face-to-face.  

The novel is a medium of revising the past and novelists must be given their head here. So are GDR government forms which are used to shape past, present and future in Section 2 of the novel. This is a clever novel about history. But I’m unconvinced that it is not over-committed to a view of gay history that is attempting to wrest the narrative away from radical non-binary sexual politics. This needn’t be seen as a modern aberration. In the second part of the BBC’s 10 Feb. 2020 The Shock of the Nude, Mary Beard ties the issues in non-binary radicalism to the questions asked in Greece (and Rome) of the notion of the Hermaphroditus in classical history. She could have included the comic male cross-dressing in Aristophanes’ female comedies.

That said, I found this novel totally engrossing – not least that it enabled me to reunite with my own life in leftish and queer politics. That led to tensions but, when you’re older (65), that ought to be the case and is psychologically and culturally healthy, I think.  I think I’ll always love the earthy animal sensuality of the mounting sexual attraction, described on the edge of repulsion, of 16-year-old Spike’s attraction to Joaquin even before he knows it. And then the unexpected kiss which in a moment is not unwelcome if both hard and sticky in its coming.

From his body came a physical smell, quite strong. It was a fleshy smell, Joaquin’s odour, the smell of an animal … – the smell of a warm human body at ease with itself – …I wanted to be in a room with that man.

Ibid:65

Joaquin’s kiss when it came, was a fact of inevitable nature, like a warm front predicted on the news bulletin and then experienced without surprise, … I had no idea, or not much, that it was in me to kiss a twenty-two-year old Chilean Spartacist until it was actually happening, and once it started. … (leading to) a more certain and individual sense that I was meant to be kissed like this, with the solid arms around my back and shoulders, the thick trunk f the tongue in my mouth, pushing back at my own tongue, the rough rub of Joaquin’s face against mine, … His odour was all around me.

Ibid:82 (my omissions in both passages)

I sense that this is political. For Hensher, gay identity is male bodies in sense and body interaction. It is about the expected in NATURE not a communality in politics. I don’t think I agree but it is a powerful position.

Steve

Since this was written, Hensher has (29th September) signed an open letter in support of JK Rowling’s campaign against trans rights and gender self-identification. It would seem that this novel is a much more ideological one in the domain of sexual politics than I had supposed, although antagonism to non-binary sexualities is deducible from it. In a far as it wishes to be thus ideological, I am certain it has less power both as a novel and an observation on life.