Managing the ‘discipline, that really mad level of self-control’.[1] Gay Fictional Autobiography and social change in Adam Mars-Jones (2020) Box Hill: A Story of Low Self-Esteem London, Fitzcarroldo Editions.
A fictional autobiography is a novel in which a fictional persona tells part of their life-story ending at the moment the novel is written. For this reason alone, it is self-evidently about how that person whose life is told achieves a somewhat more settled perspective on judging the course of their own life. That is true of great novels of fictional autobiography such as David Copperfield and Jane Eyre.
This genre of novel allows not only distance from other characters but also oneself in all the stages of self-development. It will, of course be clear that one of those characters tracked and judged are earlier versions of the narrator, who sees themselves sometimes from an ethical as well as temporal distance. In both the Dickens and Bronte novels, it also validates the ‘I’ who forms the dominant point of view and witness of the novel’s narration of events. But it also establishes the moral as well as aesthetic value of the way ‘I’ who tells the story has been developed by a controlling narrator. This narrator selects the events, settings and characters and the order of their appearance. The writing itself manages how these elements are to be evaluated.
The ethical framework in Mars-Jones short novel is decidedly one set by socio-psychological concepts. Literary journalists have a rather sniffy approach to such concepts. Thus, although subtitled as a ‘story of low self-esteem’, Anthony Cummins, reviewing the novel in The Guardian, says:
While the flyleaf subtitle, “a story of low self-esteem”, invites us to read Colin’s word against the grain as a study of false consciousness, the novel’s almost wicked subtlety lies in our dawning sense that to read it this way only strips him of exactly the agency we’d be seeking to defend. “Ray was good to me – he was,” Colin tells us. Rarely was so much said in a dash.
Maybe Cummins’ point may has evaded me but it appears that he sets Colin’s dawning sense of personal agency against the novel’s stated description as a story illustrating merely his ‘low self-esteem’. But I think the ‘wicked subtlety’ of the novel is not experienced as an irony but as a story in which Colin both illustrates but also sets into ironic context his former lack of agency in relation to Ray as a ‘lover’. There is no doubt that Colin sees through Ray as lover and man just as the narrator, David, in David Copperfield sees through Steerforth. Cummins then may show that Colin does mature (even only in the way he uses a qualifying dash in a sentence that queries Ray’s ‘goodness’) and is granted dignity despite the low self-esteem shared with the reader.
But the mistake Cummins makes is the story as about Colin’s, or at least only Colin’s, low self-esteem. It loses the fact that Colin is an ‘unreliable narrator’ in some respects who charts his own self-constructed dignity from acts of developing consciousness. That dignity lies in having work that is his own and about which he cares independently – that of a tube-train driver. It lies in having his own house and a normative, if not very close relationship to another.
However, this novel is for me about the ways in which marginal identities, such as those of gay men at the time of the novel, responded to the low self-esteem we had often little choice but to introject, even if only in part, from the disdain with which we were treated in public circumstances. And the real icon of low self-esteem in this novel is not Colin, although (as I have said) we do see him gain more limited self-control and agency as Cummins suggests, but the ultra-masculine Ray who fails to survive in order to develop a more modern alienated self-consciousness.
The novel takes social psychological concepts seriously, even in its most comic moments. Let’s look, for instance at how it deals with a cognate concept of ‘self-esteem’, namely that of self-control.[2] Colin, almost as a side issue, tells the story of changes in national attitudes which characterises as decline in ‘self-control’. He illustrates this from Ray’s characteristic of apparent unconcern for Colin that can be so easily read as projecting the attitude that Colin lacks any value to him. A feeling Colin then introjects of course. But his explanation and elaboration of this in terms of how attitudes in social history change is interesting. He uses the example of Whitehall Horse Guards.
Being ignored has always stirred me up somehow. I feel unworthy, naturally, but I’m also tuned up by it, as if a change was suddenly going to come over this handsome blank of a face that won’t look at me, … As if a man is only a man if he takes no notice of me.
… … (paragraphs on the relative slackness of pose and projected attitude of modern Whitehall Guardsmen).
… a change has taken place. And it’s not particularly that I’m affected by the changes in me, now that I’m looking at a soldier who’s half my age and not twice as old as me. The Horse Guards used to look as if they were stone, and now they’re only fibreglass. … ,it’s just that the whole ritual begins to look silly, now that the soldiers can’t manage the discipline, that really mad level of self-control. Better to scrap it.
It’s a change of attitude. ….
Mars-Jones (2020: 106)
You have to read that long analogy in its full length because it constantly slips between making statements about social attitudes in general, his own values, masculinity, or Ray in particular. It’s a guarded piece that, whilst proposing possible interpretations of it by its audience, keeps simultaneously denying them. As it qualifies what is meant, it also confuses it. Hence, my proposed reading too is problematic but that is part of that reading. The status of what is said is continually undermined of any possible authority and that too seems part of what I think is happening here. The Guards Men, and perhaps Ray too, are used to illustrate what the values are that Colin attaches to a certain concept of masculinity. A concept that denies the value of the demonstrative love or affection that it is its function to provoke in the lover of hard (boxwood hard) masculinity.
The ‘change of attitude’ here then is one I’d locate in the history of queer love – the love of the gay man for a ‘real man’, that love object which evokes only its own masculinity, and hence contempt for gay men, as its essence. It addresses the notion that being a gay man is a kind of tragic paradox in which the ‘homosexual’ takes on in its a love-object a supposedly innate quality of masculinity. In doing so, this love-object must sees the one in love with it as something innately of less value than itself. To be ‘a conventional man is to live as if the sexist construction of women constituted as innately inferior or the feminine, or very ‘unreal’ man were true. To pursue this one could look at examples in queer literary and art history.[3]
Instead, since I think this novel is addressed to its community in large, I’m going to cite contemporary psychological research which shows that, despite the queer movement’s insistence on diversity, attitudes that valorise a peculiarly normative view of ideal masculinity have persisted even into the twenty-first century for self and other in some gay male relationships. Sánchez and his colleagues studied these attitudes in a sample of 547 self-identified gay men in the USA in 2009.[4] Interestingly this work addresses a whole literature of gay masculinist ideology in the USA in relation to ‘self-control’ including appearance of self-sustained power, rigidity, status and limitation of emotions and ‘affectionate behaviour’ with other men, citing dating requirements too in gay male magazines for ‘masculine men’, ‘jocks’, ‘butch’ and the ‘straight-acting’.[5] Even in 2009, the authors of the study conclude that pressures to equate self-esteem with ‘traditional masculine ideology’ lead to ‘a strong discomfort with effeminate gay men’.
It is by hypothesising this particular cluster of social attitudes that this novel examines how Colin’s attitudes are formed, maintained but also eventually changed. They can change however only by acknowledging that masculine lovers are perhaps mythic objects harking to past fantasy. When inadequate copies (not stone but fibreglass) of those men, it is like the Horse Guard ritual better ‘to scrap it.’ I wonder if this means that, just as Steerforth must die for David Copperfield to achieve his ideal, so must Ray.
And in dying, he will remain mythical:
… the son of a great family. He lived his life in defiance of his station, but he couldn’t stop the suffocating world from taking him back … to the great tomb of his ancestors. …
Mars-Jones (2020: 119)
At this moment of the novel set on Box Hill Ray is absorbed into the box trees that introduced him to Colin. Box is a notoriously dense wood and that is important to Mars-Jones’ theme. Let’s rest a moment to see Box Hill before quoting the author’s description of the latter:
The box tree is described in the novel’s opening as, like the yew, the only tree to be able to survive Box Hill’s steepness. Everything is ‘dense’ about the box, even the camels who are the only animal ‘stupid’ enough to eat its leaves. They are used ‘for mazes because the foliage is so dense’. It’s a poem ‘you can’t quite get the sense out of’. Therein as we concentrate on detail you find this: ‘The leaves of the box are ovate, entire, smooth, thick, coriaceous and dark green’. [6]
First seen in the third paragraph on the first page of the novel, this sentence is replicated when Colin visits Box Hill with his mother sometime after Ray’s accidental death, although this time with added explication of some of its terms:
The leaves of the box are ovate, entire, smooth, thick, coriaceous and dark green, ovate meaning egg-shaped. Entire meaning undivided. Coriaceous meaning leather-like. I looked that one up. Leaves that look or feel like leather.
ibid: 118f.
I find it amusing, if rather suspiciously elitist, that one of the words untranslated here is ‘thick’ but like ‘dense’ it plays as much a part in this iconic sentence as it does in the final scenario in which Colin fails to find with any certainty the ‘actual tree that Ray had been leaning against’ when Colin ‘was worshipping (Ray’s) cock’, as he sees another camp-follower of the Leathers Bike Club, Kevin, doing at another point.[7] I think the box leaves are iconic of Ray, not least in their faux-leather casing. Ray appears undivided and only allows anything out of his coriaceous exterior when he opens a go-around zip in his leather one-piece. It is a fine piece of self-repetition showing that Colin has achieved a distance from Ray’s effect on him by the end, which had in fact enabled him to narrate the story in the first place. Watching Ray offer oral sex to Kevin, Ray is all authority and unemotional grace: ‘It was like Prince Philip opening a hospital annexe’.[8]
Colin is innately conservative as a thinker and a lover. He adores hierarchies, Horse Guards parades and is ‘pre-occupied with the past’, as his widowed Mum becomes.[9] But both are survivors and this is the real lesson of Box Hill. I take that to be something like: Fantasise as much as you like about a ‘real man’ as long as you know that this is a cognition that, as much as it may have lived and worked in the past for some men who love men but be prepared to ‘scrap it’ and put up with, or even love, Simon, or his like, and trips to Polesden Lacey. And admire your own role as Brainac. This is why I think, we see Colin throughout reading and ‘passionate about education’, especially in history.[10] History is a story of what survives the exciting passages of major events.
And that makes for the real ambivalence that allows Colin to show that his induction into non-oral penetrative sex was actually ‘rape’.
…I suppose he wanted me a bit confused, to make me stumble as he used his strength to get me where I was meant to be.
…The body I had experienced as decisiveness and strength I now suffered as weigh and invasion.
…. a few paragraphs …
Of course there’s an unromantic part of me that still can’t accept how different he was teaching me to suck cock, and that’s the part that whispers in my ear: If you had a set of teeth up your arse, he’d be gentle there too.
ibid: 38f. Mars-Jones’ italics.
Colin actually learns to more than to be fair to Ray’s memory but it is a fairness that is more than relieved also that such acts of ‘possession’ of a strong man of a weaker aren’t necessary to love, or even sex if not consenting. Hence Ray represents a whole set of binaries as gay men we are better without or with which we play consensually: dominant, submissive and perhaps even butch and femme. Ray’s term for it, in the same passage, is: “Decisive biker seeks vague pillion”. [11]
Fictional autobiography in Dickens and Bronte involves the death, or maiming, of the overpowering active male ideal for different reasons. In gay fictional autobiography, Ray must die for similar reasons. His allure is historically passing. His charms now seen as less ambivalent and more dangerous. But not only dangerous to the Colins or Simons of life: dangerous to Ray himself. On his death, his mother burns every sign of his life and changes the lock to his flat so that Colin never knows what he does in the day when he is not in leather. The lowest self-esteem in this novel is Ray’s.
Ray covers his body either with black leather in the day he is available to others and not at work, or pretending to work, or black sheets at night.[12] Selected bits of this body get released by careful use of a greased zip, like ‘rare fruit’ or a ‘sculpture in a gallery window’.[13]His body in the novel seems as unknown to him as to anyone else who experiences it orally or anally. Colin is blindfolded when they have sex first ensuring the narrator cannot describe that body.
The only moment when we see it is done when Colin sees Ray’s ‘midsection’ compared to his own. Whilst Ray sleeps, he is able to ‘stroke it, softly’.[14] This is a Ray that Colin, but not Ray, can experience, even if thinking about how he’d like to be like Ray, and in this victory of softness over hardness is the beauty of Colin’s achievement of a gay male survivor and a narrator of a life worth recording as a gay fictional autobiography. Whilst Ray’s life can be seen as beautiful and ‘smooth’ like the box leaf. He makes things live, even if in subservience. But we have to want to be more than a bike that is now outdated because no-one needs to do kick-starts anymore, and anyway only a rare few kicked so brutally well.
You could hardly even call it a kick. The engine roared into throaty life. If everyone could kick-start a bike as smoothly as Ray, electric start would never have caught on.
ibid: 25
The victor here is the very ‘history’ that Colin reads and ray does not. Ray’s gave life to men and bikes using bodily violence and skill. He’s now redundant, especially for men who want life and self-conscious embodiment. Even Ray would have loved this – wouldn’t he?
Steve
[1] Mars-Jones (2020: 106).
[2] Self-control might be defined as effortful restraint for the purpose of a longer-term goal or ideal.
However, some recent psychological thought has said: ‘When self-control feels effortful and restraining, it fails to work. … “Our prototypical model of self-control is angel on one side and devil on the other, and they battle it out,” Fujita says. “We tend to think of people with strong willpower as people who are able to fight this battle effectively. Actually, the people who are really good at self-control never have these battles in the first place.” To put it more simply: The people who said they excel at self-control were hardly using it at all.’ See: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2016/11/3/13486940/self-control-psychology-myth
[3] Such as E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, Duncan Grant and David ‘Bunny’ Garnett, to name but a few.
[4] Sánchez, F.J., Greenberg, S.T., Liu, W.M. & Vilain, E. (2009) ‘Reported Effects of Masculine Ideals on Gay Men’ in Psychology of Men and Masculinity 10(1) 73-87 doi: 10.1037/a0013513 Available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2902177/
[6] ibid: 7
[7] ibid: 70
[8] ibid.
[9] ibid: 115
[10] ibid: 37
[11] ibid: 67
[12] ibid: 40
[13] ibid:12
[14] ibid: 40
Steve_Bamlett_blog 