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Norman's Letter
Winner of the Thomas R. Coward Memorial Award in Fiction. By the author of Inside Daisy Clover.
Unknown Binding
About the author
Gavin Lambert
46 books25 followersGavin Lambert was a British-born screenwriter, novelist and biographer who lived for part of his life in Hollywood. His writing was mainly fiction and nonfiction about the film industry.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 26, 2024
This review is now complete - July 2024.
Although this is going to be a demolition job on this novel I wanted, in fairness, to draw attention to the high regard many have of Gavin Lambert's other novels and would draw attention to an article that appeared in The Nation as recently as March 16, 2023: https://www.thenation.com/article/cul....
"...Sir Norman Lightwood, born into...(that) Bizarre stratum, the English upper class of the 1930s. A few hours before his birth, a mysterious, and never identified Object landed from the sky on the lawn of the family mansion - a portent, Sir Norman comes to feel, of many surprises and riddles in his life to follow. Circumstances prove him all to right.
"Sir Norman's notorious wealth and the equally notorious uncertainty of his parenthood; his brief and disastrous marriage to the scheming Lily; his literary ambitions that lead to impersonation of a non-existent Egyptian poetess; his Nazi (not to mention lesbian sister); the less spectacular but equally drastic aberrations of his mother, Lady D. - all these make him the perfect victim for every blackmailer in the western hemisphere. What with further misadventures - with Scotty the photographic model in New York, through the jungles and waterfronts of Latin America, with artist- astrologer and guru in the American south-west - Sir Norman's path can only lead him to extravagant and increasingly dangerous absurdity." From the publisher's blurb on the jacket of my 1966 hardback edition from Hamish Hamilton.
I quote this in full, more-or-less, because I think it important to realise how novels like this were marketed in 1966. What the blurb is not saying, or may be saying in the convoluted code of those pre Stonewall days, was that this is a novel about a fruit, fairy, fag (to use a word like gay or even queer would be absurd) who heads off to Morocco on the eve of his wedding and is happily buggered by a Moroccan man (to whom the never dispatched letter is written) then gets married and immediately abandons his wife resulting in scandalous headlines in the newspapers; flees to America and picks up Scotty (of whom more later) on the transatlantic crossing and lives with him briefly in Manhattan. Scotty returns to his wife, Sir Norman travels through Latin America (whether he has a sex life during this period I can't say, the levels of opaque obfuscation is to much for me to penetrate). He sets up his own Xanadu, a la Kubla Khan, in the Arizona desert sands, goes quietly mad and retires from the world into one of those immensely luxurious, medical cum convalescent establishments that are available only to the truly wealthy. He is rescued by his mother who takes him away to Veracruz in Mexico and tells him, not for the first time, that he is queer and should just go off and be himself and goes so far as to point in the direction of a street with all the Querelle of Brest activities that he might desire or require. Norman follows her advice, and directions, and expires of a heart attack (Norman like all good fags in the 1930s was a neurasthenic with a weak heart) after a night of sado masochistic pleasure.
Norman's mother, Lady D., is the most, to today's reader, sensible and sympathetic character in the novel and, if the message of the novel was Lady D.'s to be who you, live your life honestly and be happy, it would be a pioneering work of sympathetic gay literature. Unfortunately Lady D. is presented as an irresponsible, self indulgent monster who has, through her immoral message of tolerance, doomed her son.
That Norman's Letter is written by a talented writer who was a significant player in 'gay' Hollywood and the friend of Isherwood (on the back cover of the novel is a charming pencil portrait by Don Bachardy) and Paul Bowles makes this book more offensive. That it was published in 1966 the year The New York Times published the indescribably, offensively, homophobic 'Homosexual Drama and its Disguises' by Stanley Kaufman (outside of Julius Streicher's Der Sturmer there is no parallel to Kaufman's piece) and a review on James Purdy's Eustace Chisholm and his works' by Wilfrid Sheed who panned the book calling it “a form of charade or peep show […] homosexual fiction which announces itself not by subject matter but by tone.” Rather than excuse the annodyne insipidness of a novel that kow-tows to all the worst, obscene shibboleths of the era one has to denounce Lambert for his shameless pusillanimity. In the long history of evil there is nothing worse than being an enabler.
I can't resist pointing out that 'Divorce in Naples' by William Faulkner was published in 1931; 'Momma', from his novel 'The Gallery', by John Horne Burns in 1947; 'Pages from Cold Point' by Paul Bowles in 1950; 'Two on a Party' by Tennessee Williams in 1954; 'Pages from an Abandoned Journal' by Gore Vidal in 1956; 'Jurge Dulrumple' by John O'Hara in 1962; and 'The Beautiful Room is Empty' by Edmund White in 1966. The days when the tawdry tripe that Lambert foisted on the public with Norman's Letter had long passed. Yet as an adolescent and teenager growing up in the 1970s and attempting to understand who I was it was not any of aforementioned stories or novels that I would find on library shelves or those of my parents or their friends but novels like Lambert's without a trace of honesty or hope. Novels like his not only condemned the faggot, pansy, fairy, queer to die young and alone he condemned them to live a life alone without hope, without even any fun. Compared to the joyless bric a brac stuffed life of Lambert's Sir Norman the rackety squalor of Williams' 'Two on a Party' is like a breath of fresh air.
Sometimes you need to return to novels like this to understand what that first generation of post Stonewall writers were struggling against and the vast monolith of evasive crap that pretended to speak for and about gays but didn't.
I would like to conclude by returning to the figure of 'Scotty' who, according to many is a roman a clef of Denham Fouts, the famous? notorious? 'Best Kept Boy in The World' (see my review of the book of the same name by Arthur T. Vanderbilt. Indeed Wikipedia describes Norman's Letter in its entirety as a roman a clef on the life of Denham Fouts. It isn't, if it is a roman a clef of anyone, it is Edward James the Surrealist and his brief marriage to Tilly Losch. It is possible that 'Scotty' could be based on Denham Fouts but then the character is of such wafer thin characterisation that he could be anyone, and if it is a roman a clef of Fouts then it fails to match the brilliance of Gore Vidal, who knew Fouts, in his 'Pages from an Abandoned Journal'. I only mention this because it was the completely spurious relation to Denham Fouts which encouraged me to seek out Norman's Letter.
To be strictly accurate the edition I own and read is not listed on Goodreads so I have chosen another at random.
Although this is going to be a demolition job on this novel I wanted, in fairness, to draw attention to the high regard many have of Gavin Lambert's other novels and would draw attention to an article that appeared in The Nation as recently as March 16, 2023: https://www.thenation.com/article/cul....
"...Sir Norman Lightwood, born into...(that) Bizarre stratum, the English upper class of the 1930s. A few hours before his birth, a mysterious, and never identified Object landed from the sky on the lawn of the family mansion - a portent, Sir Norman comes to feel, of many surprises and riddles in his life to follow. Circumstances prove him all to right.
"Sir Norman's notorious wealth and the equally notorious uncertainty of his parenthood; his brief and disastrous marriage to the scheming Lily; his literary ambitions that lead to impersonation of a non-existent Egyptian poetess; his Nazi (not to mention lesbian sister); the less spectacular but equally drastic aberrations of his mother, Lady D. - all these make him the perfect victim for every blackmailer in the western hemisphere. What with further misadventures - with Scotty the photographic model in New York, through the jungles and waterfronts of Latin America, with artist- astrologer and guru in the American south-west - Sir Norman's path can only lead him to extravagant and increasingly dangerous absurdity." From the publisher's blurb on the jacket of my 1966 hardback edition from Hamish Hamilton.
I quote this in full, more-or-less, because I think it important to realise how novels like this were marketed in 1966. What the blurb is not saying, or may be saying in the convoluted code of those pre Stonewall days, was that this is a novel about a fruit, fairy, fag (to use a word like gay or even queer would be absurd) who heads off to Morocco on the eve of his wedding and is happily buggered by a Moroccan man (to whom the never dispatched letter is written) then gets married and immediately abandons his wife resulting in scandalous headlines in the newspapers; flees to America and picks up Scotty (of whom more later) on the transatlantic crossing and lives with him briefly in Manhattan. Scotty returns to his wife, Sir Norman travels through Latin America (whether he has a sex life during this period I can't say, the levels of opaque obfuscation is to much for me to penetrate). He sets up his own Xanadu, a la Kubla Khan, in the Arizona desert sands, goes quietly mad and retires from the world into one of those immensely luxurious, medical cum convalescent establishments that are available only to the truly wealthy. He is rescued by his mother who takes him away to Veracruz in Mexico and tells him, not for the first time, that he is queer and should just go off and be himself and goes so far as to point in the direction of a street with all the Querelle of Brest activities that he might desire or require. Norman follows her advice, and directions, and expires of a heart attack (Norman like all good fags in the 1930s was a neurasthenic with a weak heart) after a night of sado masochistic pleasure.
Norman's mother, Lady D., is the most, to today's reader, sensible and sympathetic character in the novel and, if the message of the novel was Lady D.'s to be who you, live your life honestly and be happy, it would be a pioneering work of sympathetic gay literature. Unfortunately Lady D. is presented as an irresponsible, self indulgent monster who has, through her immoral message of tolerance, doomed her son.
That Norman's Letter is written by a talented writer who was a significant player in 'gay' Hollywood and the friend of Isherwood (on the back cover of the novel is a charming pencil portrait by Don Bachardy) and Paul Bowles makes this book more offensive. That it was published in 1966 the year The New York Times published the indescribably, offensively, homophobic 'Homosexual Drama and its Disguises' by Stanley Kaufman (outside of Julius Streicher's Der Sturmer there is no parallel to Kaufman's piece) and a review on James Purdy's Eustace Chisholm and his works' by Wilfrid Sheed who panned the book calling it “a form of charade or peep show […] homosexual fiction which announces itself not by subject matter but by tone.” Rather than excuse the annodyne insipidness of a novel that kow-tows to all the worst, obscene shibboleths of the era one has to denounce Lambert for his shameless pusillanimity. In the long history of evil there is nothing worse than being an enabler.
I can't resist pointing out that 'Divorce in Naples' by William Faulkner was published in 1931; 'Momma', from his novel 'The Gallery', by John Horne Burns in 1947; 'Pages from Cold Point' by Paul Bowles in 1950; 'Two on a Party' by Tennessee Williams in 1954; 'Pages from an Abandoned Journal' by Gore Vidal in 1956; 'Jurge Dulrumple' by John O'Hara in 1962; and 'The Beautiful Room is Empty' by Edmund White in 1966. The days when the tawdry tripe that Lambert foisted on the public with Norman's Letter had long passed. Yet as an adolescent and teenager growing up in the 1970s and attempting to understand who I was it was not any of aforementioned stories or novels that I would find on library shelves or those of my parents or their friends but novels like Lambert's without a trace of honesty or hope. Novels like his not only condemned the faggot, pansy, fairy, queer to die young and alone he condemned them to live a life alone without hope, without even any fun. Compared to the joyless bric a brac stuffed life of Lambert's Sir Norman the rackety squalor of Williams' 'Two on a Party' is like a breath of fresh air.
Sometimes you need to return to novels like this to understand what that first generation of post Stonewall writers were struggling against and the vast monolith of evasive crap that pretended to speak for and about gays but didn't.
I would like to conclude by returning to the figure of 'Scotty' who, according to many is a roman a clef of Denham Fouts, the famous? notorious? 'Best Kept Boy in The World' (see my review of the book of the same name by Arthur T. Vanderbilt. Indeed Wikipedia describes Norman's Letter in its entirety as a roman a clef on the life of Denham Fouts. It isn't, if it is a roman a clef of anyone, it is Edward James the Surrealist and his brief marriage to Tilly Losch. It is possible that 'Scotty' could be based on Denham Fouts but then the character is of such wafer thin characterisation that he could be anyone, and if it is a roman a clef of Fouts then it fails to match the brilliance of Gore Vidal, who knew Fouts, in his 'Pages from an Abandoned Journal'. I only mention this because it was the completely spurious relation to Denham Fouts which encouraged me to seek out Norman's Letter.
To be strictly accurate the edition I own and read is not listed on Goodreads so I have chosen another at random.
June 27, 2021
This was a very odd book. The first 212 pages were very interesting. And the last 20 pages were very dark.
All along I knew young Sir Norman was a momma's boy and a latent homosexual. (Early in the story, he'd had an unexpected and completely anonymous one-night stand with a local while visiting Casablanca. And that one encounter had a profound effect on the rest of Norman's life. )
No real problems there until his Narcissistic mother, Lady Dorothea, coerced him into marrying a trashy, vulgar, bleached-blonde actress named Lily Vail whom she'd discovered and introduced to Norman [perhaps in an attempt to "cure" him of his sexual orientation].
Norman didn't want to marry anyone but if it would make his mother happy he'd agree. Then a few days into the honeymoon while on the Orient Express, Lily filed for divorce on the grounds that Norman abandoned her in a foreign country. (Which is not at all what happened. Lily concocted an outrageous fiction in order to get her hands on a substantial portion of Norman's vast estate-- which he relinquished with evident pleasure.)
Afterwards, Sir Norman traveled the world trying to escape Lily Vail, Lady D., and his insane sister, Violet (who believed she was a high-ranking German officer during WWII).
All along the way people and circumstances take advantage of poor Norman. But he's no fool; he knows what's going on, but at least it's a human connection.
Norman was accustomed to abuse: his nanny abused him verbally; his criminally insane sister abused him physically; his peers abused him emotionally; his mother abused him psychologically.
Finally, at age thirty, Norman finds himself in New Mexico where he buys 1,000 acres of land and begins building his Alhambra. He wants to be alone and isolated so he can write his poetry. But even in the middle of his oasis, he's found and taken advantage of by a few local Navajo, one artist, 700 goats, and one self-appointed guru. Once again Norman seems to be okay with that.
Until Lady D.'s second husband, Maurice (Norman's real sire), perishes in a car accident while the two were living in Australia during WWII. Now Momma D., dressed head to toe in her Widow's Weeds, shows up in New Mexico and needs her boy once more.
She whisks him away from his new found life in the States and takes him to Mexico and this is where the book gets extremely dark.
Narcissistic Lady D. tells Norman that it's okay to be different and she wants to encourage his lifestyle by telling him that she's found some very interesting bars down near the docks and that he'll be very pleasantly surprised and might even find true love again.
Momma Narcissism at its finest.
All along I knew young Sir Norman was a momma's boy and a latent homosexual. (Early in the story, he'd had an unexpected and completely anonymous one-night stand with a local while visiting Casablanca. And that one encounter had a profound effect on the rest of Norman's life. )
No real problems there until his Narcissistic mother, Lady Dorothea, coerced him into marrying a trashy, vulgar, bleached-blonde actress named Lily Vail whom she'd discovered and introduced to Norman [perhaps in an attempt to "cure" him of his sexual orientation].
Norman didn't want to marry anyone but if it would make his mother happy he'd agree. Then a few days into the honeymoon while on the Orient Express, Lily filed for divorce on the grounds that Norman abandoned her in a foreign country. (Which is not at all what happened. Lily concocted an outrageous fiction in order to get her hands on a substantial portion of Norman's vast estate-- which he relinquished with evident pleasure.)
Afterwards, Sir Norman traveled the world trying to escape Lily Vail, Lady D., and his insane sister, Violet (who believed she was a high-ranking German officer during WWII).
All along the way people and circumstances take advantage of poor Norman. But he's no fool; he knows what's going on, but at least it's a human connection.
Norman was accustomed to abuse: his nanny abused him verbally; his criminally insane sister abused him physically; his peers abused him emotionally; his mother abused him psychologically.
Finally, at age thirty, Norman finds himself in New Mexico where he buys 1,000 acres of land and begins building his Alhambra. He wants to be alone and isolated so he can write his poetry. But even in the middle of his oasis, he's found and taken advantage of by a few local Navajo, one artist, 700 goats, and one self-appointed guru. Once again Norman seems to be okay with that.
Until Lady D.'s second husband, Maurice (Norman's real sire), perishes in a car accident while the two were living in Australia during WWII. Now Momma D., dressed head to toe in her Widow's Weeds, shows up in New Mexico and needs her boy once more.
She whisks him away from his new found life in the States and takes him to Mexico and this is where the book gets extremely dark.
Narcissistic Lady D. tells Norman that it's okay to be different and she wants to encourage his lifestyle by telling him that she's found some very interesting bars down near the docks and that he'll be very pleasantly surprised and might even find true love again.
Momma Narcissism at its finest.
December 29, 2023
This 1966 serio-comic novel could be considered a cult book. The story is almost a screwball comedy about Sir Norman Lightwood, a titled British aristocrat, trying to find his own place in the world, away from his mother, Lady D as well as fortune hunters bent on cheating him out of large portions of his fortune. The story is told in the form of a long diary letter to an Arab boy with whom he had a satisfying assignation. The authors prose is mid-century florid, echoing Evelyn Waugh and Patrick Dennis and is a pleasure to read. I highly recommend it for those folks who enjoy this type of writing.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews