Originally published in The New York Times, 3/7/23
Review of In Memoriam, by Alice Winn
The counterintuitive truth about “the love that dare not speak its name” — a late-19th-century term of art for love between men — is that, precluding the name “homosexuality,” it was allowed to be quite loud: It was sung, written, versified and moaned about everywhere, from retellings of classical myths to the dormitories of the most prestigious boarding schools. In fact, “Two Loves,” the Lord Alfred Douglas poem the phrase comes from, was published in 1894 in the Oxford student lit mag.
This simultaneous ubiquity and unspeakability is the thrumming pulse under Alice Winn’s glorious, addictive debut, “In Memoriam.” As Winn puts it, while describing the activities of the most popular boy at Preshute College, where the novel begins: “He could do as he pleased. Not that anyone would ever have said so explicitly — what boys did together in the dark was only acceptable if obscure.” Not silent, not hidden, but obscure: shadowed, unclear and difficult to grasp, but known and permitted.
Set in World War I, “In Memoriam” follows two upper-class schoolboys — Henry Gaunt and Sidney Ellwood — as their limerent, expressed-but-unnamed love drives them to increasingly stupid heights, like volunteering for the war even though neither is yet of age to enlist. Gaunt, the quiet hulk, joins first, after he’s publicly tarred as a coward by jingoistic young women who don’t believe he’s a teenager; Ellwood, the popular aesthete and class poet, follows soon after, supposedly in search of glory, but really in pursuit of Gaunt. They are children, as of yet unready to meet the demands of a relationship or a war, but they embrace the latter to deny the former.
In the trenches, boyhood crushes and childish rivalries are transformed into pointless braveries and deadly squabbles, love and hate wielded like bayonets in the hands of jumped-up children. It’s estimated that a quarter-million boys under the age of 18 joined the British Army in World War I. Even as the war pounds them into the shapes of men, Winn never lets us forget their youth. When one of their schoolmates learns that a boy has died on a pointless mission he dreamed up as a punishment after a petty fight, he asks, “You aren’t playing a prank … to give me a scare?” War may be the perfect metaphor for teenage emotions, but teenage emotions have little place on actual battlefields.
At the front, as at boarding school, love between men is expected. “In the hypermasculine atmosphere of war, they were not overly concerned with manliness,” Winn tells us, as her soldiers sprawl across one another out of love, desire, fear and the need for comfort. One of the unintended side effects of the conceptualization of homosexuality as an identity in this time period is that all expressions of homosociality were subsumed within it. From this point forward, all displays of same-sex affection would have to contend with the degraded image of the homosexual; no more could the casual holding of hands or the declaration of great love be celebrated without a sotto voce whispering of “no homo.” In the effort to cordon off the homosexual from the heterosexual (an impossible task), straight men chopped through their hearts, and we have been dealing with the toxic wreckage ever since.
It is this war, as much as that “Great” one, that “In Memoriam” explores. Winn shows us parents, siblings, friends and enemies all trying to reckon with the unspeakable, referencing gay desires only through allusions to poetry or meaningful (yet ultimately unfathomable) silences. When something is placed beyond language — when we cannot say “gay” or use a person’s proper pronouns — we cut off not only our tongues, but our hands and hearts and minds as well, leaving us unequipped to deal with the world as it is, rather than as we were taught it should be, hoped it could be or feared it would always be. The love that Ellwood and Gaunt cannot discuss becomes a festering silence in their families, pitting son against mother and brother against sister — even as they try to signal their approval.
Although “In Memoriam” clocks in at nearly 400 pages, Winn’s prose is percussive, driving the story forward with a mix of Edwardian masculine sentimentality and the improbable plotting of a period romance. Our lovers are driven apart and reunited again and again, often by their own hands. The book is cut into the shape of a thousand cliffhangers, and although once or twice it strains credulity, I couldn’t put it down. It is, like all coming-of-age tales, a story of deep longing. Before Ellwood and Gaunt go on an impossible mission, Winn writes that Ellwood “seized Gaunt’s waist (Gaunt bit his tongue as Ellwood’s hands split his wounds), he tugged him close, and even though Hayes was due to return at any moment, Gaunt didn’t care; he would die, he knew he would, and Ellwood was looking at him as if he was the world.” Look at that wild sentence, profligate with punctuation; its explosive beginning (“seized,” “bit,” “split”); its rapid-fire, comma-studded middle; and its long and languorous end. It’s “In Memoriam” itself, in miniature. Winn’s exquisite pacing lives in her syntax as much as her plot, giving vim and vigor to every line.
It feels appropriate that in a book so concerned with language, poetry is threaded throughout. The novel’s title is taken from a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson, “In Memoriam A.H.H.,” which was written after the death of a man he loved. We’re all familiar with the couplet “’Tis better to have loved and lost/Than never to have loved at all,” but a more fitting epigraph for Winn’s novel comes earlier in Tennyson’s poem: “Still onward winds the dreary way;/I with it; for I long to prove/No lapse of moons can canker Love,/Whatever fickle tongues may say.”