The Mourning After: Loss and Longing among Midcentury American Men

by John Ibson

On the battlefields of World War II, with their fellow soldiers as the only shield between life and death, a generation of American men found themselves connecting with each other in new and profound ways. Back home after the war, however, these intimacies faced both scorn and vicious homophobia. The Mourning After makes sense of this cruel irony, telling the story of the unmeasured toll exacted upon generations of male friendships. John Ibson draws evidence from the contrasting views of male closeness depicted in WWII-era fiction by Gore Vidal and John Horne Burns, as well as from such wide-ranging sources as psychiatry texts, child development books, the memoirs of veterans’ children, and a slew of vernacular snapshots of happy male couples. In this sweeping reinterpretation of the postwar years, Ibson argues that a prolonged mourning for tenderness lost lay at the core of midcentury American masculinity, leaving far too many men with an unspoken ache that continued long after the fighting stopped, forever damaging their relationships with their wives, their children, and each other.

Genres: Nonfiction, History

272 pages, Paperback

Published November 1, 2018

Reviews

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

The second of Ibson's (now) trilogy on this topic. Extremely well written and fascinating in it's review of the masculinity milieu in which I, as a boomer, came of age. Explains a lots of what I had to contend with as I entered adulthood. Much of the book hinges on what seem to be Ibson's great interest in authors John Hoyne Burns, Gore Vidal, and John Knowles and what their lives and their works have to say about his premise and announced focus, the changing allowance and performance of intimacy among men, whether erotically motivated or not. As a result I think the books strays from a more general approach to this examination and gets focused on gay intimacy and societal quashing of the expression of that. Notwithstanding, it never flags in its capacity to hold the reader. The insights into the many-times-examined Vidal is fascinating, Burns was a revelation, and a new look at much that I did not know (and is not known) about Knowles' A SEPARATE PEACE was welcome. Who didn't have to read THAT in high school??? Headed for a reread of THAT now.