GLR March-April 2026

ous illness during their brief time as castaways, and an attempt to blackmail Philip over his dead father’s criminal past before the elder youth successfully confronts the villain and turns him over topolice. Like White Cockades , Left to Them selves ends with the central pair re maining lifelong companions, and Prime-Stevenson confirms this reading in The Intersexes , where he summarizes the novel and its conclusion as “a ro mantic story in which a youth in his lat ter teens is irresistibly attracted to a much younger lad and becomes, con amore , responsible for the latter’s per sonal safety, in a series of unexpected events that throw them together—for life.” Philip and Gerald refrain from any action more intimate than clasping hands and embracing passionately, but their romantic feelings and committed

published poetry about the beauty of male youths. In addition to his friend ships with Wilde’s associates, he met Philip Gillespie Bainbrigge through a mutual friend while Bainbrigge was at Cambridge, and the two became lovers. Bainbrigge was killed at the Battle of Épehy in September 1918, but he wrote a play while an undergraduate at Cam bridge titled Achilles in Scyros , which he dedicated to Scott Moncrieff. It was published posthumously in 1927 by Cayme Press, known for its Uranian publications. Bainbrigge’s dedicatory verse about Scott Moncrieff refers to “Eros boy-like” whose nude form re veals “his toy (like/ Some curious peach) that nestles warm between/ His dainty rosy thighs.” Seven years before Scott Moncrieff’s own death, Francis Edwin Murray, who had published major volumes of Uranian verse by

Edward Stanley Mercer. C. K. Scott Moncrieff , ca. 1915.

companionship seem clear. Both of his boy books anticipate later gay YA literature by depicting adolescent youths who come to realize their same-sex desires and must confront hostile forces while doing so. § A NOTHER TALE FOR A TEEN AUDIENCE preceded I’ll Get There in depicting a sexual encounter between two boys. C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s 1908 short story “Evensong and Morwe Song” presents a remarkable case for its reference to an obvious sex ual act in a story for and about two adolescent schoolboys. Scott Moncrieff, born in Stirlingshire, Scotland, in 1889, is best known now for producing the first English translation of Mar cel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu as Remembrance of Things Past (1922–1930). As a youth, he attended an elite Eng lish boarding school for boys, Winchester College, where he co founded and edited a literary magazine for students titled The New Field . According to his biographer Jean Findlay, Scott Moncrieff discovered his homosexuality as a youth and devel oped passionate crushes on several schoolfellows, to whom he dedicated love poetry. Findlay describes how Scott Moncrieff had read and been inspired by Uranian writers such as Laurence Housman and by his encounters with friends of Oscar Wilde such as Robbie Ross and Ross’ private secretary Christopher Sclater Millard. Pub lished in The New Field while Scott Moncrieff was in his final year at Winchester, “Evensong and Morwe Song” features a sexual relationship between two boys, and the fallout from the ensuing scandal may have doomed the otherwise accomplished scholar’s admission to Oxford. Instead he studied law and Eng lish literature at the University of Edinburgh, received a com mission, fought in the Great War, and may have had a romantic relationship with celebrated war poet Wilfred Owen. He later embarked on a career as a literary translator but died from can cer at age forty in 1930. Scott Moncrieff came into the orbit of a loosely affiliated group of late-19th- and early 20th-century gay men who mostly

writers such as John Gambril Nicholson, re-published “Even song and Morwe Song” as a pamphlet for private circulation. The title of Scott Moncrieff’s story comes from the General Prologue of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales : “If even-song and morwe-song accord,/ Let see now who shall tell the first tale.” Set at the fictional school of Gainsborough in the 1880s, the story opens with two schoolboys in a field. Maurice kneels in front of Carruthers, clearly an allusion to the former having just performed fellatio on the latter. “And if we are found out?” asked Maurice. He was still on his knees in the thicket, and, as he looked up to where his com panion stood in an awkward fumbling attitude, his face seemed even more than usually pale and meagre in the grey broken light. It was with rather forced nonchalance that Carruthers an swered, “O, the sack, I suppose”—and he stopped aghast as the other’s expression. Carruthers avoids detection, graduates, and matriculates to Ox ford, later taking holy orders and becoming headmaster at a less prestigious boys’ school. Maurice, however, acquires a reputa tion for his encounters and indeed finds himself expelled, later writing to Carruthers to blame him for his corruption and curs ing him because his shame will mean that his own sons will be forced to attend the kind of lesser school they had scorned as boys. Years later, Carruthers, now a headmaster himself, must decide what to do about two boys caught in a sexual encounter, and Scott Moncrieff emphasizes the adult Carruthers’s hypocrisy as he excoriates the boys: “His weighty arguments (mainly bor rowed from the boys’ housemaster), his ears deaf to excuse or contradiction, his flaying sarcasm and his pessimistic prophe cies drew great salt tears from the younger boy’s eyes.” He allows the penitent youth to return to his house but de cides on the harshest penalty of expulsion for the older youth, Hilary. Only when looking up his address to write to his father does he realize the disgraced boy is the son of Maurice, with whom he himself had engaged in a tryst. He attempts to recall Hilary, presumably to express his change of heart about the ex

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