We Too Are Drifting

by Gale Wilhelm, Sheila Liming (Introduction)

We Too Are Drifting is a landmark in American literature, the first mainstream novel that dealt with lesbian relationships in a straightforward, unapologetic manner. Written in spare, precise prose, it relates sculptor Jan Morale’s affair with the married Madeline and her love for Victoria, a younger woman torn between her attraction to Jan and her promise to marry the man approved by her family.

We Too Are Drifting has been cherished by generations of readers looking for an account of lesbian love that is free of any suggestion of judgment or prurience. Gale Wilhelm takes her characters and their desires at face value, conveying deep emotions with unusual intensity. Out of print for almost forty years, We Too Are Drifting is now available again, along with four never-before collected short stories.

Genres: LGBT, Fiction, Queer, Lesbian, Classics, Queer Lit, Lesbian Fiction

145 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1935

About the author

Gale Wilhelm was an American writer most noted for two books that featured lesbian themes written in the 1930s: We Too Are Drifting and Torchlight to Valhalla.

Wilhelm published several short stories in 1934 and 1935, her first appearing in Literary America. Her work also appeared in Colliers and the Yale Review.

Reviews

[Ari]

Why did I never come across this in my early angsty 'I'm a dyke and probably the whole world will end now' phase (which, thankfully, I grew out of in my early 20s. The angst, not the orientation) Modernist, minimalist, stream-of-consciousness, wonderful. Beautiful and of course tragic, Wilhelm writes in the 1930s (!!) of a butch-femme romance set in San Francisco. It doesn't end well (what writing from this period does, really, especially where us poor lesbians are concerned--yes, I'm looking at you Radclyffe Hall), but oh what a ride we get to go on in the mean time. Less IS more, in this case.

[Grace Burns]

« And she has absorbed the great truth of modern psychology- that « normal » is an abstraction, that there is no such thing as a normal person »

« She went outside and tried to walk her restlessness into submission but it was no good »

« She had looked at her face only twice, once indifferently, and then once almost blindly »

« It’s so much more than a word, Madeline, all the words in the world can’t tell about it »

« Thé cut on her hand throbbed. It was a second hand beating »

« She kissed Victoria gently but with no feeling of gentleness. Damp earth has a bitter taste. »

« It’s not awful, she said smiling, it’s lovely. Lovely rain on the windows, lovely raindrops on your face, lovely Victoria breathless over nothing »

« In a moment I’m going to turn on the light and we’ll be two people in a room looking at each other and wondering why on earth they were afraid of the dark. »

« It would be a simple thing to confuse the names on the tip of your tongue and say one when you meant the other. »

[Ellie]

Startling with its brutal honestly, this classic piece of literature has been forgotten for almost 100 years, or perhaps conveniently left in a locked drawer when one considers the themes of homosexuality and the context in which Wilhelm wrote this novel. Nonetheless, the strength of the emotions Wilhelm’s characters carry is refreshing and she does not shy away from one’s innermost thoughts.

-

I do think Wilhelm should be more well known, or at least her first couple of works which focus on homosexual relationships between two women before she started writing about heterosexual ones. I think the afterward by Wilkinson brings up some thought provoking points as to why Wilhelm may have made this change before stopping publishing all together.

Would recommend

[Mely]

Modernist novel/la about a butch sculptor, the woman she despises and is in lust with, and the pretty young thing she falls in love with. The problem with modernism is that it's so deliberately minimalist and allusive that if you don't get the allusions, you are completely lost. Even without the footnotes, the Victorians are easier to follow; they are so fond of exposition. So this has some lovely stream-of-consciousness writing and a few conversations that make no sense whatsoever to me.

[Jesse S.]

Hooks you into the characters. The style is a bit maddening (dialog is not in quotation marks, some of the sentences are somewhat run-on), but the development of the characters is such that you want to read more. I originally checked this out of the library strictly for the purpose of correcting its catalog data (I volunteer for a library), but grabbed it off the table in an idle moment, and got hooked. First lesbian novel I ever read! I'd recommend it for the character studies alone.

[Jes]

Bad-tempered 1930s lesbians are my jam, and this was fascinating. Wilhelm's prose style is very strange - deceptively simple but also so vivid and so densely layered. Sort of a cross between a Renault romance and HD's HERmione, with a weird something or other of its own.

[Nicolas Chinardet]

"Poor little leaves, we too are drifting, someday it will be autumn." (p178)

This is supposed to be an unjustly discarded gem of (middlebrow) modernist literature, particularly within the lesbian cannon. The quote on the cover of my 1946 (The book was first published in 1935) claims that it is "better than The Well of Loneliness" (1928). It is certainly much more explicit than Hall's magnum opus (though that isn't too difficult a feat, considering how restrained Well is) and marginally less bleak in its view of same-sex relationships.

The book is loaded with obscure layers of symbolism, as attested by the recurrence of the colour white, or the inordinate focus on the hands of the characters, for example. The significance given by Wilhelm to those symbol is however far from obvious and rather passed me by.

A symbol easier to decipher perhaps is the statue of a hermaphrodite, that Jan Morale, the androgynous main character, is asked by her straight male friend, who seems attracted to her, to model for. Although an unpleasant character (none of the characters are pleasant in the book to be frank), she is also unapologetic about who she is; an identity she has created for herself, even if that seems to lead her to loneliness and away from happiness.

The style of writing is what I would call Biblical; not for the awesomeness of its scale but for the repetitive and circular nature of its syntax, its odd sentence structures, and its lack of a true sense of place. The effect is that of a spotlight in a vast empty space. Quite claustrophobic. The lack of dialogue punctuation is thankfully not as off-putting as could be expected.

We Too Are Drifting is meant to be about love. One relationship comes to an end as another tentatively begins; others tremble, inchoate, in the background. However, and probably because of the syntactic and stylistic points made above, the book is bereft of sentiments and warmth; its heart ripped out. It is a cold and unengaging story, as emotionally wooden as its main character is accused of being by another.

It isn't without merit. Although aimed at mainstream, the book is as unapologetic as its protagonist, unlike many other early queer books. Same-sex desire is not questioned but is rather accepted and taken as a fait accompli, even if that doesn't remove certain social pressures. For all that I think I still prefer The Well of Loneliness.

[Reed Cole]

the character Jan broke me a bit. good short novela (?). i likes the additional stories and the historical context to Gale. fun labor day weekend park read.

[Juniperus]

At first I didn't like this because it's pretty hard to understand starting in medias res, namedropping characters without introducing them, glamorous words from the 30s that I've never heard of like kelsomine and alpargatas and brush agent and lorgnette... But once I understood the writing wasn't bad it was just trying to be modernist I ended up really enjoying this. I really came to appreciate Gale's use of language, it's minimalist and feels sloppy but under the hood is very carefully calculated and crafted, I don't know how else she draws such beauty from such simple phrases. I found it very romantic (if a little melodramatic)! And an interesting portrait of a time period that I knew little about. The book isn't about being gay, it's just a story that happens to gay characters. I appreciated this, because modern queer literature so often devolves into polemics-- I don't even think this book had the word "gay" or "lesbian" in it! On that note, the book doesn't end with a heterosexual cop out, like most lez pulps do.I mean it's not your stock 'happy ending' but it does affirm the characters' homosexuality (or in one case bisexuality) without the usual moralizing.

[Tricia]

One of those fascinating little shreds of insight into what life was like for people in the margins at a different time in history. The writing style was aggravating and difficult to assimilate to, with no punctuation whatever marking dialogue and a general disregard for most punctuation. That, added to the obnoxious habit of repetition, made it difficult for me to get into it, but thankfully, it’s a short book and it didn’t take all that long to get to the interesting bits that allowed me to forget about the shortcomings of the old style. I definitely appreciated the stark emotions, many of them ugly and all of them familiar, as I did the unexpectedly tacit acceptance of homosexuality most of the characters displayed. The artistic professions held by Jan and Kletkin were also of particular interest. I enjoyed the skill with which Jan’s appealingly masculine manner was expressed, because it was never really acknowledged directly, but boy, did you get the picture. I think a lot of it had to do with the distance she held her emotions at and the coldness she met Madeline with set against the staid fervency she experienced when she laid eyes on Victoria for the first time. It was all very familiar, but the way she expressed everything outwardly as compared to her inner turmoil felt distinctly masculine, which was a rather masterful approach to a fussy subject. Overall, I’m pleasantly surprised by the content of this book, though I’m not quite sure how to feel about the plot, such as it is, and where the story leaves off. It’s a choice.
I found a copy of this book for sale at a used bookstore in the LGBTQ section and was intrigued by the obvious age of the manuscript coupled with the hilariously judgey, sensational, dated commentary printed on the cover (“The Story of a Lesbian” declared along the top banner of the front cover; “A revelation of the ways lesbians regard their own affairs” in quotations on the back), but it was more than I was willing to spend on a questionable book like that, which may easily be terrible, so I took it out of the library instead. I’m glad I did—it was enlightening. Definitely worth the read.

[Erin]

This is a work very much of its time. And as such, a rather cold and unfeeling and empirical matter-of-fact modernist portrayal of lesbian romantic behaviour which is as without an authorial voice or perspective or sensibility as it can possibly make itself. Its characters are mostly unlikable. And in particular, it's main character is largely devoid of redeeming qualities. Though, again, the work has little to say about this from an expository standpoint, and seems to feel nothing one way or another with respect to it, in the fashion of its modernist period. So as historically important as its time would seem to make it, my aversion to its stark, cold, barren modernist approach makes it impossible for me to rate it highly. This and Radclyffe Hall's Well of Loneliness certainly serve up a double dose, within their era, of butches treating femmes like disposable trash.

[gabbie]

"I'm going to turn on the light and we'll be two people in a room looking at each other and wondering why on earth they were afraid of the dark."

it's not everyday that you find an author's writing style that speaks to you like a language you forgot you could understand.

"Poor little leaves, we too are drifting. Someday it will be autumn."