Ralf Webb is a poet whose debut collection Rotten Days in Late Summer (2021) should really have been garlanded with awards. The book was direct, thoughtful, intelligent and delightfully unpretentious, a book all about love and loss – quite something for work of any kind, never mind a debut collection of poems.
Webb’s first work of non-fiction, Strange Relations, about the lives and work of four mid-20th-century American writers, is similarly remarkable. There are, of course, poets who also happen to be scholars, but true poet-scholars, whose creative and critical concerns intimately connect, are rare indeed: Webb is slowly and carefully establishing an interesting niche for himself among rather distinguished company. He’s a writer who can give expression to crisis and confusion, but who can also offer careful analysis and critique of the causes and consequences of our human pain.
Strange Relations describes the various ways in which Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers, John Cheever and James Baldwin shared “a joint, particular fascination with the idea that sexual identity is fluid, that desire is amorphous, indiscriminate, and resists neat categorisation”. Tennessee Williams, according to Webb, depicted a world of “sexual power, infantile masculinity and poisoned male relations” in order to open up the possibility of “other, stranger, models of masculinity”. McCullers, meanwhile, explored the idea that gender and sexuality are “unfixed, free-floating signifiers”, Cheever “tried to conjure a more expansive conception of masculine identity, one capacious or fluid enough to permit and even celebrate his queerness”, while for Baldwin, “deciphering what it meant to be a man – which necessitated examining how the forces of class, race and sexuality worked to construct his own masculinity – was nothing less than a matter of survival.”
To some readers this might all sound rather like the higher blather and too much like Webb frantically straining to get all of his evidence to fit his argument, but Strange Relations is in fact a thoroughly reasonable and entertaining book, with Webb pulling back from full-blown academese into convincing and moving portraits of the authors as they seek to “make visible those hinterlands of desire which lie between and outside the supposed sexual binary”.
How exactly does he do this? First, by means of the deft vignette: think, say Peter Ackroyd in his early, brilliant creative biography mode. Describing the poet Walt Whitman, for example, Webb writes, “In the dimly lit living room of a modest, two-storey timber-framed house, an enormous grey-bearded man lolls on his rocking chair, a wolfskin draped over the back. Dusk falls. Dry kindling crackles in the fireplace, like joints clicking.” And, hey presto, you suddenly care about dear old Walt Whitman again.
Second, Webb provides clear, determined, detailed readings of one or two central works by the writers under discussion. At times, he perhaps verges on the CliffsNotes style of breezy summary (“Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a play about masculinity in crisis”) but the sheer confidence and energy of the assessments and pronouncements is refreshing. In the opening pages of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, for example, McCullers has, apparently, “set about dethroning the supremacy of heterosexual love”. Has she? Well, maybe. It’s certainly worth considering.
And finally, he’s read enough and considered enough to provide plenty of relevant context: he’s read all of the necessary biographies, and he’s visited the archives and has read lots of unpublished papers, so the whole seems rather more comprehensive than mere lit crit, and indeed more than the sum of its parts. “Cheever’s sense of legitimate masculinity isn’t only under threat from his queerness. In tandem with his inner crisis of desire is a very tangible crisis of cash. The Cheevers, living beyond their means on the Upper East Side, have never been so poor. The rent is late, the bills are overdue and dinners are proletarian: canned tongue and eggs.” So, that’s the Cheevers situated.
In its conclusion the book perhaps swells to grandiloquence, with a call for “the creation of more equitable, more beautiful societies and modes of living”, which require that “the diktats of misogyny and homophobia” be “eradicated; male relations transformed; and our broken masculinity repaired and remade”. It seems like an impossible dream. But as Webb so clearly demonstrates, strange things do happen.
Ian Sansom’s books include Reading Room: A Year of Literary Curiosities. Strange Relations: Masculinity, Sexuality and Art in Mid-Century America is published by Sceptre at £20. To order your copy for £16.99 call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
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