This image will serve as my introduction to the American novel from 1945 that I just discovered.
I let you read the fine text:
"Lymie and he were always the first to get into the dormitory. In the bed they shook the ice against one the other, shivering like little dogs, until the heat of their bodies was beginning to penetrate the flannel pajamas and their big gowns wool. Lymie slept on the right side and Spud curled against him, fists in the pit of his kidneys. After five minutes while the bed was warm and Spud asleep. Lymie slept slower usual. He lay there, relaxed and drowsy, conscious of the cold outside the blankets and heat that came from Spud, Spud and the smell of which was not a smell of sweat or body failed, which resembled the smell of anyone. Then he walked right foot until the plant should come into contact with the bare toes of Spud, and bearing on this reality, he rushed fearlessly into the darkness, where it was more about sharing. "
sheet folded , William Maxwell, published in 1945 in the United States and translated and published in France in 1948.
This beautiful book, almost unknown in France, says the few years between late adolescence and early adulthood 3 young Americans in the 1930s. Lymie, the "skinny ", chest plate, Spud, the young American athlete in athletic body and Sally, the girl around which binds all the emotional conflicts and, I think, between these three erotic beings. Lymie loves and admires Supd. He wants to live a symbiotic friendship with Spud and exclusive, which represents everything to which he aspires secretly. Spud attaches to Lymie that serves and admire. Perhaps it is a bit envious of his talent? Sally crystallizes their relationship, through an intermediary. Spud loves him, but he believes Lymie love her too. In reality, Lymie found in her mother's comforting that he lost with the death of his mother. Perhaps as he seeks his friendship because it serves as a link with Spud. By loving his own way was also a way for him to love again Spud. The misunderstanding is installed. Spud is jealous. Right loosens, but adolescence ends.
For the modern reader, the relationship between Spud and Lymie friendship can only be a homosexual. Should we follow the translator, Maurice Edgar Condreau when he says in the preface, aware of this ambiguity: "The drama is played ente Lymie, Sally and Spud is not peculiar to the University of Illinois. C 'is a drama of all places and all times, the plight of unskilled young people to unlock the secrets of their hearts. No doubt some readers will find that they are Lymie Spud and a strange innocence. They most surely will doubt yet the innocence their relationships and will be tempted to see in Leaf folded presentation of a case of homosexuality. They are wrong. At no time of intimacy the two friends suspect that their attachment might have sources whose only thought would fill them with horror. They are in love with the simplicity of boys and mysteries of the subconscious never worried, and when, in the dorm frozen, they sleep, with the full knowledge of all their comrades in arms of one other is no more evil than the child who, at night, insisted to sleep with the teddy bear object of his adoration. Today, with the extension Freudianism, increasing freedom of writings and conversations, the boldness of barracks jokes exchanged Atlantic to the Pacific during the war, such candor would be highly unlikely, but at the time unfolds the beautiful love story What Leaf folded (and to a small town in the Midwest) formidable taboos had not softened the severity of their prohibitions. It was therefore necessary for the tragedy that had the ring of truth, it was shown us as the players had played. However, in their eyes, it could be no question of sexual abnormality, although doubtless they knew its existence without ever glimpse the possibility that they might one day be the victims. "
Nevertheless, I am inclined to follow. The history of relations of friendship between men has already shown that in times not so old, could live a friendship between men, not without affection, without which one can speak of homosexuality. Perhaps it is our inordinate taste for exclusive classifications that we impossible to think of friendship between men otherwise than as a form of homosexuality more or less conscious, since it takes an exclusive and almost physical.
In a fundamental essay on the literary history of homosexuality in the American novel: As a brother, a lover , published in 1976, Georges Michel Sarotte this novel class in the category The " particular friendships " teenagers, calling it" Friendship disorder in American Reality: the report accepted. " (Pp. 48-49). He is in the direct lineage of the works of Herman Melville, especially Pierre and ambiguities.
very personal way, this novel the fascination of "a thin, flat-chested boy" for a boy to the body that expresses the fullness and beauty could not leave me indifferent.
Description of structure
William Maxwell
Leaf folded (The Folded Leaf)
translated from English by Maurice Edgar Coindreau
Paris, Gallimard, 1948 , in-8, XIX- [3] -230 - [4] pp.
I thank the site "Another Country", which we provides images of which I have not had trouble finding one that seems perfectly illustrate this message.
