GLR November-December 2022

ESSAY

The Curious Case of Gordon Merrick A NDREW H OLLERAN

T HE FIRST CHAPTER of The Lord Won’t Mind , which you can read on Amazon if you’ve never read a Gordon Merrick novel, does not waste time getting to the heart of the matter. Within five or six pages, the two main characters, Charley and Peter, are having graphically de scribed sex. It’s Peter’s first time. He gets the classic line, “I don’t care if it hurts,” followed by the usual reassurances from his endowed partner that bigger is better. Both characters are young, handsome, and connected to what we now call privi lege: Charley has been to Princeton, Peter is on his way there, unless he goes to West Point instead. After sex they tootle around town in a little car that Charley’s rich grandmother has given him. You could just scream at how fortunate they are— unless, that is, you’re a fan of what is called the romance novel, and then everyone is just exactly as they should be: rich, beau tiful, hung. As for the mansion in New Jersey, the rich grandmother, the little car—the creator of this fantasy knew whereof he wrote. Gordon Merrick was born into a prominent Philadelphia family George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s famous Broadway hit The Man Who Came to Dinner (after an audition with Hart that ap parently included a casting couch). But bored with having to re peat the same lines night after night, Merrick left the cast just before the play was made into the movie with Bette Davis, something that might very well have sent him on another ca reer path altogether. But he wanted to write. A friendship with Glenway Wescott led to his meeting writers like Christopher Isherwood and W. H. Auden—until he left his job with The New York Post to work for the OSS (the predecessor of the CIA) as a spy in occupied France. His first novel, The Strumpet Wind , was based on his ex periences as a spy working for the OSS in occupied France during World War II. The Strumpet Wind came out at about the same time as Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar and John Horne Burns’ The Gallery . Reviewed in The New York Times , Merrick was on his way as a “serious novelist.” But Andrew Holleran is the author of the new novel The Kingdom of Sand (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). whose ancestors had served as trustees for the University of Pennsylvania. But after growing up on the Main Line in a house with a butler, he broke with family tradition by going to Princeton. He was not only well born but movie-star handsome. At Princeton, he got such rave reviews for his perform ances in student plays that he dropped out of college and moved to New York to pursue a career on the stage, where he got a part in

his next books did not fare as well. His publisher, William Morrow, declined his second novel, The Demon Noon , which came out in France instead. Nor did Morrow want The Val lency Affair . (Neither of these is a gay novel, though there are gay subplots.) In 1958, Morrow did publish The Hot Season , but it was a flop, at which point Merrick moved to the Greek island of Hydra, and spent the next ten years as the doyen of a society of writers, alcoholics, and expatriates who bought and fixed up homes on the then unspoiled island. But after a decade in Hydra, all Merrick had to show for himself was four unpublished novels and some short stories. So he decided to write about the subject he had treated only glancingly in his previous books: homosexuality. Merrick was an anomaly among homosexuals. He disliked gay bars and neighborhoods—Midtown is where Merrick set tled when he moved to New York, because he didn’t want to live with all the “fairies” in Greenwich Village. He found San Francisco provincial and uninteresting. Yet when he lived briefly in California, he was several years into his second long term partnership with another man, Charles Hulse, a profes ment, a shared home—what we would call gay marriage today. And that was the story he started to tell in a trilogy whose first volume was The Lord Won’t Mind . After The Lord Won’t Mind was turned down by William Morrow because of its subject matter, the manuscript was ac quired by Bernard Geis, who’d published Valley of the Dolls . Merrick’s novel came out in 1970. Like Valley of the Dolls , it was a bestseller, remaining on the New York Times list for six teen weeks. A few years after that, Geis’ publishing house folded, and Merrick was shunted off to his paperback pub lisher, Avon Books. After that, his novels were always paper backs—a huge distinction, since paperbacks were not reviewed in The Times . The cover of The Lord Won’t Mind , and later novels, was the work of the artist Victor Gadino. whose work—beautiful young men on the campus of Princeton, or in the south of France, or the Greek islands—not only pictured places where Merrick had lived but advertised the books’ view of gay life. The novels were inseparable from their covers, so much so that people felt that there was no reason to actually read the sional dancer he’d met in Paris at the Folies Bergère. Before that he’d lived for ten years with a very handsome Air Force pilot that he met at the funeral of another pilot with whom he’d previously fallen in love. Mer rick seems to have wanted to live life not as a “fairy” but as a man who—you’ve heard the phrase—happened to like sex with men. However, in his case it was much more than sex: it was romance, partnership, commit

The Lord Won’t Mind is basically the story of two men in a relationship who deal with classic gay issues: shame, homophobia, the temptation of the closet.

November–December 2022

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