The Damned Don't Cry - They Just Disappear

Harlan Greene

Description

A biography of an unconventional Southern writer who illuminated gay life in the South

In The Damned Don't Cry—They Just Disappear, literary historian and Lamba Award-winning novelist Harlan Greene has created a portrait of a nearly forgotten southern writer, unearthing information from archives, rare books, film libraries,and small-town newspapers. Greene brings Harry Hervey (1900-1951) to life and explicates his works to reveal him as a hardworking writer and master of many genres, bravely unwilling to conform to conventional values.

As Greene illustrates, Hervey's novels, short stories, nonfiction books, and film scripts contain complex mixtures of history and thinly disguised homoerotic situations and themes. They blend local color, naturalism, melodrama, and psychological and sexual truths that provide a view to the circles in which he moved. Living openly with his male lover in Savannah, Georgia, and Charleston, South Carolina, Hervey set novels in these cities that scandalized the locals and critics as well. He challenged the sexual mores of his day, sometimes subtly and at other times brazenly presenting texts that told one story to gay male readers, while still courting a mainstream audience. His novels and nonfiction may have been coded and thus escaped detection in their day, but twenty-first century readers can decipher them easily.

Greene also discusses Hervey's travel books and successful Hollywood scriptwriting, as well as his use of exotic elements from Asian cultures. The iconic film Shanghai Express, starring Marlene Dietrich, was based on one of his original stories. He also wrote some of the first travel books on Indochina, with descriptions of male and female prostitution and allusions to his own sexual adventures, which still make for sensational reading today.

Despite Hervey's output and his perseverance in presenting gay characters and themes as openly as he could, he has not been included in any survey of twentieth-century gay writers. Greene now rectifies this omission, providing the first book-length study of Hervey's life and work and the first scholarly attention to him in more than fifty years. It furthers our understanding of gay life in the South, as well as the impact of gay artists on popular culture in the first half of the twentieth century.

Sujets

• Gay Studies
• LGBTQ+ Studies
• Literary Criticism
• LGBTQ+
• Uninvited Guest
• Without Consent
• The Deserted House
• Superiority (short story)
• An Outcast of the Islands
• Droll
• God's Little Acre
• No Sex (In the Champagne Room)
• The Damned Don't Cry!
• Casual sex
• No Place
• The Quiet American
• Solitary confinement
• Ridicule (film)
• Screenplay
• Good Omens
• Non-fiction
• Roman non fictionnel
• Hedda Hopper
• Val Lewton
• Un Américain bien tranquille
• Ridicule

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 29 décembre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611178128
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Damned Don t Cry-They Just Disappear
The Damned Don t Cry-They Just Disappear
THE LIFE AND WORKS OF
HARRY HERVEY
Harlan Greene

THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA PRESS
2018 Harlan Greene
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/ .
ISBN 978-1-61117-811-1 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-61117-812-8 (ebook)
To Jonathan
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Prologue
1 Of Mosques and Main Street
2 Condemn Me Not
3 The Blue Road of Romance
4 Born to Revel
5 The Gay Sarong
6 Not Entirely Platonic
7 Cobra, Conga , and Charleston
8 Devil Dancer of the Middle Sex
9 Red Ending
10 The Mother of Inversion
11 The Hollywood Express
12 Passport to Hell
13 The Damned Don t Cry
14 The Benison of Work and a Little Beauty
15 Promised to Eternity
16 A Singular Elation
17 Aftermath
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ILLUSTRATIONS
Jane, or Jennie, Davis Hervey
Harry Clay Hervey Sr. and Jr.
Harry Hervey in fancy dress as a child
Cadet Harry Hervey, Georgia Military Academy
Harry Hervey, the young author, ca. 1921
Harry Hervey in costume
Harry Hervey in the gay sarong
Carleton Hildreth
Harry Hervey and Carleton Hildreth
Dust Jacket for The Damned Don t Cry
Harry Hervey, ca. 1950
Cover for She - Devil
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book has been made possible-and better-through the contributions, competence, and generosity of many individuals, archivists, and curators around the country. In Savannah, Lynette Stoudt and other members of the archival staff of the Georgia Historical Society were prompt, professional, and accommodating. Others in the city, including John Duncan, Robert T. Henderson, Arthur Morrison, Patti Parker, and Roger Smith, graciously shared their information and knowledge of Harry Hervey and made helpful connections. In Charleston at the College of Charleston s Addlestone Library s Special Collections, digital archivist Sam Stewart was of great help in digitizing photographs. In Baltimore, Michael Johnson of the Special Collections Department of the Enoch Pratt Free Library extended permission to quote from Henry Mencken s memorandum to Henry Allen Moe at the New York Public Library. ( Enoch Pratt Free Library, Maryland s State Library Resource Center. All Rights Reserved. Used with permission. Unauthorized reproductions or use prohibited.)
As for help from other scholars, I d like to thank Gene Waddell and Barbara Bellows for alerting me to information I would have missed. Kent Davis of DatAsia Press opened my eyes to many things. He not only reprinted two of Hervey s books, but in the process, while showing me the significance of Hervey s Southeast Asia perceptions and works, became a good friend. In many ways, this book would not have been possible without Susan Dick Hoffius, who, in her previous affiliation with the Georgia Historical Society, made possible the acquisition of the Harry Hervey and Carleton Hildreth materials now housed there. She and other friends and colleagues have been patient with me and tolerated my obsessions and my absences over these past many years that I pursued Harry Hervey. And to Jonathan David Applegate Ray, I render my appreciation, awe, admiration and love. Thank you all.
Prologue
I n the summer of 1951 in a townhouse in New York City, a man lay struggling for breath. As light filtered into the sickroom and muted traffic noise rose and fell like surf, people on the other side of the door listened to expiring gasps. Every now and then, the door opened and a hushed solemn visitor, coming to pay last respects, was allowed in.
Propped in bed, adventurer and author Harry Hervey, his owlish glasses on, could not speak but acknowledged his guest wanly. Sure the scene was melodramatic (he was a master of the genre after all), but he had been faced with death before. In China decades before, a young revolutionary had pointed a knife at him; and later, press reports had told of Hervey lying in the bottom of a fragile craft, delirious with jungle fever. Carleton Hildreth, his handsome young lover, had been with him then; and Hildreth, older but still handsome, was still at his side fretting.
I m fine, it s nothing , Hervey gestured dismissively between hard-won gasps. With another operation, he d be up again. A contraption attached to his telephone had allowed him to listen to conversations with his new agent. 1 His nearly dead film career was on the upswing now; and soon he d be, too.
Through sheer will, he had achieved the impossible before-acclaim for his books, a Broadway play, and Hollywood films. He had been hailed as an exotic adventurer and expert Orientalist; perhaps even more daringly, he had lived openly with Hildreth in hostile times and cities, staring down censors, social critics, and creditors who had tried to stop him. The glamorous life was to come to them again, for to everyone s wonder but his own, Hervey rallied.
Within a few days, he was out of bed, nonchalantly shopping with Hildreth and going out to see movies like Sunset Boulevard . Its star Gloria Swanson had never graced any of his films-Marlene Dietrich and Tallulah Bankhead had been his divas. 2 But he loved the story of Norma Desmond, the silent film actress who once had been big and was now poised for a comeback. He knew he was too. The world had certainly not seen the last of Harry Hervey.
1
Of Mosques and Main Street
T he first he had seen of the world was some fifty years before on November 5, 1900, in the town of Beaumont, Texas, a locale just visited by one of the worst hurricanes in American history. The sense of having missed something momentous haunted Harry Hervey throughout his youth, and he tried desperately to find it.
His family centered around grandfather Frank, nicknamed the General, not for his rank in the Civil War but for what he achieved afterward in the United Confederate Veterans. 1 If General Frank Hervey told stories of the war on porches on long summer afternoons as Confederate jessamine bloomed, his grandson Harry was not there, or if so, he was not paying attention. Other boys growing up in the South in the early 1900s might have thrust imaginary swords against Yankee enemies and curdled the air with the famous Rebel Yell, but not him. He has written nine books, and never so much as said boo to the Confederacy, a critic would wail in 1939, the year that saw the release of the iconic Confederate film, Gone with the Wind . 2
Instead, the dreamy boy was often found draped on davenports, behind cramped front desks, or hidden behind large potted palms in hotel lobbies, pouring over piles of books and yellowed geographic journal[s] containing pictures of far-off places and people. 3
His favorite photograph was of queerly dressed men who were quite astonishing. As he stared at the men in long flowing garments with turbans on their heads, with others who were nearly naked something latent woke in the boy; a longing flickered to life like a flame given oxygen. 4
In the photograph, the figures stood in front of a great causeway flung across a marshy stretch, tapering to the foot of tremendous stairways and monstrous cone-shaped towers, above the black jungle. The phallic tower was captivating; its hugeness, the utter newness, trapped and held him. And there were those dark, naked men moving among the galleries . Beneath the picture was a line that he read slowly. The Ancient Ruins of Angkor. When he became a man he would go there. He knew he would. He d be among jungles and strange, dark men. 5 Indeed in the future, he d write one of the earliest American books on Angkor Wat and claim credit for discovering Khymer ruins, which no white man had seen for centuries. And as for those strange dark men, well, he d only be able to hint at the adventures he had with them.
Wanderlust was a hallmark of the Herveys. The boy s great grandfather (General Frank s father) had run off to Mexico to fight in the 1840s only to die there and leave an orphaned family back in Columbus, Georgia. In the next generation, when Grandfather Frank took off for war, it was to New Orleans to enlist in the Confederate infantry, serving as a second sergeant in Company A, Tochman s Polish Brigade. Frank was eventually promoted to chief of artillery on the staff of Colonel John Baylor and was captured by the enemy to languish in a Union prison. 6
Frank Hervey settled down after the war, marrying Anna Bedell of Pensacola, Florida, in 1866. Anna s father (despite the name George Washington) was English, and the Bedells (sometimes spelled Bidell) as well as the Herveys took pride in being of English stock. 7 As an adult Harry Hervey would periodically claim descent from famous Englishmen. Coming from a line of sea-faring people including Lord Francis Hervey and Admiral Dewey, it was only natural he d become an adventurous traveler, he d brag. And later, when embarking on a story about Charles and John Wesley, founders of Methodism, Hervey would claim descent from their Holy Club associate and friend, James Hervey. Ancestor Hervey had written, of all things, a religious best seller, an irony not lost on the last of the gay mad Herveys, as he styled himself. His own best sellers (and those that went bust) were sex-filled, lurid, depraved, and shocking. 8
Grandfather Frank joined his father-in-law s hotel business and embarked on becoming a family man. Daughters came first-Minnie in 1871 and Ralphie