GLR November-December 2023

of the narrative. He is never ironic or critical of the mother. He allows her to win our sympathy. She loves her son. Mrs. Ein stein probably had a similar problem—how do you raise a ge nius? You know he’s not like the other boys, but you also know that the difference is a double-edged sword. Worse, he has needs and desires that you can’t begin to understand. How can you pro tect your child from forces beyond your comprehension? You keep him close in the world you know. Then World War II arrives, and Charles is in sufficiently good health to be drafted. He will not join the Army—because of what it did to his father—so he joins the Navy. Luckily, Mama doesn’t have to worry about an empty nest. The blitz cre ates a seemingly endless stream of women and children who need safe places in the country. At first she takes in women, but as each of them shows or seems to show an attachment to Charles when he’s home on leave, she finds to her dismay their shortcomings, and off they go. In the end, Mrs. Cawley makes a home for two young brothers—no worries there—and shows them the motherly devotion she gave to her own son. It is in the Navy that Charles acts on his sexual desires, at least according to Gale, based on his study of the letters. The problem occurs when Charles tries to integrate these naval love affairs into civilian life. One of his lovers marries after the war and wants nothing to do with Charles. The second is far more complicated. Charles believes that he died when his ship was sunk. When the man shows up on his mother’s doorstep, Charles has to deal with the fact that his beloved not only is alive but also wants to pick up the relationship where it ended.

Charles, as we have learned often in the novel, does not deal well with surprises. It is in this nearly final scene of the novel, the point where Charles must choose between his mother and the man he loves, that Patrick Gale imagines the most breathtaking narrative so lution—breathtaking in its simplicity and its rightness. Aspoiler alert is in order here . Charles pleads with his mother to stay in the room while he adjusts to the twin surprises of his lover’s survival and arrival in the house. (Causley’s poems are filled with ghosts’ unwanted appearances.) But mother won’t stay. She has a wonderful excuse for leaving: you boys have so much to catch up on; I’ll just be in the way. It’s the polite thing to do. But she correctly guesses that without her presence, their con versation—which is left to the imagination, because it goes on behind closed doors—will move to an emotional intimacy that Charles will reject if it’s sprung upon him. And so the lover who has tracked down Charles in his remote town in Cornwall is al lowed to leave without dinner. It is a harsh statement about both Causley and his mother, and their enabling and disabling rela tionship, a harsh but unspoken judgment left for the reader. For in this quiet novel—and Gale’s fiction grows quieter and quieter, so even a bomb blast is muffled—Gale refuses to judge his characters. I sense that this is from a genuine gen erosity of spirit, a desire to allow the characters time to develop on their own. Quietly we learn that to become a mother’s boy re quires the cooperation of both the mother and the boy, and it may lead, as in the case of Charles Causley, to some of the finest poems of his generation.

Who’s Afraid of John Ashbery?

P OET JOHN ASHBERY (1927 2017) is described by Jess Cotton in Critical Lives as “at once noto rious and celebrated” owing to the perceived difficulty of his work. Cotton’s short but thorough explication of Ashbery’s life and work does a fine job of placing him both as a 20th-century poet and as a leading

the past forty years. As the author notes: “[for] a young queer child growing up in a traditional all-American family, evasive ness was a means of survival.” Cotton explains that Ashbery was semi out at Harvard and became more relaxed about his sexuality during time spent in France in the late 1950s. During this pe

A LAN C ONTRERAS

JOHN ASHBERY (Cri ti cal Lives) by JessCo tt on Reak ti on Books. 210 pages, $22.

figure among gay writers. The book is part of a series published in Great Britain that includes scores of biographies focused on the writer’s work, including well-known gay writers such as Jean Genet, Allen Ginsberg, Yukio Mishima, Marcel Proust, Susan Sontag, and Tennessee Williams. Ashbery came of age as a writer in the 1950s and ’60s, a time when LGBT people, while beginning to push back, were still smothered under McCarthyite social oppressions. Cotton notes that this may have been a factor in Ashbery’s tendency to use language that was layered with hints and innuendoes rather than to wave his burgeoning sexuality in the open. In this re spect he resembled James Merrill, who, like Ashbery, is known as a poet of ornate surfaces rather than the kind of intensely in timate sharing that has characterized much of English poetry in Alan Contreras is a writer and higher education consultant who lives in Eugene, Oregon. 36

riod, his writing style began to take the “hunter-gatherer” shape that it would later retain, featuring all manner of bits and images of life that made up what he saw as an authentic representation of culture and daily life. He rarely met an object, name, or idea that he couldn’t fit into a poem. Unlike Hart Crane, whose style sometimes looks similar but whose ornate waterfalls are mostly fancy words, Ashbery’s glitter tends to be from physical objects and, unlike Merrill’s, feels more discovered than constructed. The result became an œuvre of shimmering images rushing at, into, and past the reader. He was not the only poetic collector in his era, as Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Gregory Corso were exploring a kind of found poetics, and Robert Dun can’s partner Jess was a collagist in the traditional sense. But Ashbery became the beacon for this approach. Still, Ashbery wasn’t just a poetic bowerbird gathering col orful objects for display. No one could say that a line like “I’ll brush your bangs/ a little, you’ll lean against my hip for comfort”

TheG & LR