Harlan Greene's novel Why We Never Danced the Charleston was first published in 1984 with a very apposite art-deco cover by Mel Odom of a dark-haired man pressing a gardenia against his nose ("sniffing" it is inadequate) with longer fingers. His eyes are shut and he is partially eclipsing a humungous full moon. Rarely has a cover illustration so well encapsulated the atmosphere of a book, so, of course, it has been dropped from the current edition, replaced by a crude dominance and submission woodcut shown here.

The book is about love between young men and malice among the moonstruck Charlestonians of the 1920s. The book is a tightly compressed elegiac story of a tragic love affair. The French would call it a récit (André Gide's Pastoral Symphony is a prototypical exemplar of the genre.)

The aged narrator recalls his youth. Although more affluent than many of the "best" Charleston families, his family was marginal because it came from Savannah rather than being rooted in Charleston before South Carolina's secession. As a child, the narrator was taken by his black "Dah" to visit an even more marginalized age mate, Ned Grimke, a clubfoot from an old family, but one that had included abolitionists and others who acknowledged mulatto progeny.

Ned is (and remains) an innocent rather than a rebel. For a time in early adolescence he services the narrator, who recalls, "We were youngsters, our parents were adults; we had no idea we would ever grow up--we were different species." The narrator becomes afraid of being associated with the moonstruck Ned and by the time he attains adulthood has an overwhelming sense of being damned.

The following passage provides one of the clearest statement of the mindset of many of those in the days before any gay visibility:

"We felt more than guilty. We felt doomed, and were; we were so ignorant back then we didn't even know there was a 'we." Each of us who grew up that way thought he was the only one of his kind in Charleston.
"For years I truly believed that the devil had chosen me for a reason of his own and made a separate little hell just for me...I had no words to explain those desires that made me explore other boys' bodies."

He hears whispers about a rich old "queer" with a mansion on High Battery. "No one worth their social salt would set foot in his house, I was told. Sometimes, however, I longed to. I longed to see what sort of pleasure I could snatch from him before the jaws of hell opened up to claim me."

To put it mildly, this is not "gay pride." It is what the affirmations of a stigmatized (even demonized) self seek to supplant (analogously to "Black is beautiful"). Later, the narrator learns a word for aberrations such as himself (and that he is far from being the only homophile around). The word is "queer" and he "knew that since [he] was queer, the only thing that awaited was [sic.] suicide, loneliness, or disease." This remains what many Christianists want to be the only allowable representation of homosexuals.

The narrator discovers a queer bar on Peacock Alley. He is startled to find that the Adonis of his Charleston generation Hirsch Hess frequents it. Hirsch is a double outsider because he is Jewish (despite the long history of Jews in Charleston, home of the first Reformed synagogue). Under the arrogance that beauty breeds, Hirsch has an even keener sense of being damned, wishing that his parents had not escaped a pogrom: had they been slaughtered, he would not have been born. Since he was, he seems to have a penchant for the grotesque--or at least the maimed, like Ned. Hirsch "was pulled, not like a moth, but more like a martyr, to the flame

Both the narrator and Hirsch Hess work in a folkloric museum run by Miss Wragg, who has a salon of socially prominent artistes (mostly homosexual). Hirsch takes money from those who want to worship him, but also has a cashless affair with the narrator.

The narrator expects to resume their affair after being sick for some weeks and is deeply anguished that Hirsch Hess has dropped him. The narrator is incensed that Hirsch takes up Ned and very deliberately poisons the relationship with lies that convince Hirsch that Ned is a slut. The viciousness with which unhappy queens sought to undercut others' relationships is all too true. The common metaphor is a bucket of crabs pulling down any one that is making an escape, a well-known exemplar is James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room.

The narrator recalls his not being able to abide seeing Hirsch happy with Ned and the way his resentment at least catalyzed the tragic love story that became a local legend (like the one in Pai Hsien-Yung's Crystal Boys, though there is more solidarity among the damned in that).

Aside from showing what life before gay pride was like, the book is germane to "gay pride month" in that the ultimate tragedy is the inability of Hirsch to break loose from convention(al self-hatred) to the self-acceptance (however suicidal it is in the climate of the South of the 1920s) of Ned. The lives (and loves) of the characters are, in the final analysis, not directly destroyed by direct social repression but by internalizing the negative social conception of homosexuals.

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Greene's prose is not dreamlike in the sense of fuzzy, but in that of Jim Grimsley's Dream Boy or Joseph Olshan's Night Swimmer, as well as being very evocative of place and of social distinctions.

I reread this book after visiting Charleston for the first time last month. I know what the traditional cruising ground of the Battery looks like now, as well as the harbor, and the antebellum houses and gardens.

Author Harlan Greene is the son of Holocaust survivors and was at the time of the publication of his first novel archivist for the South Carolina Historical Society. I think that I have read his second novel What the Dead Remember (a great title), but have forgotten pretty much everything about it and have not read his recent (2005) The German Officer's Boy. Why We Never Dances won the Lambda Literary Award as best gay fiction of 1984, a time in which the AIDS pandemic was seized upon by the likes of the unreverend Jerry Falwell to encourage a return to gay self-hatred represented in Greene's novel. Greene has authored or coauthored a number of books on Charleston social history including Renaissance in Charleston: Art and Life in the Carolina Low Country, 1900-1940, Mr. Skylark: John Bennett and the Charleston Renaissance, and Charleston: City of Memory.

I don't know what Charleston Battery Park is like at night now, but I trust that Greene's familiarity with the history of queer Charleston is as good as the geography in the book that I feel I have verified on site. He
(About the title: though the prototypical "Roaring '20s" dance came from Charleston and took the name of the city, such dancing was anathema in the insular Charleston high society. A couple of impeccable lineage who dared to do the Charleston at a society ball were expelled from the ball and from polite society. As for the denizens of the Peacock Alley Bar, "Though we may have been damned, we were not daring, so never danced the Charleston.")

This is my (first) contribution to Jps246's 2007 Gay Pride Writeoff.

© 2007, Stephen O. Murray




Recommended: Yes