J.A. Wainwright

The Publisher Says: Two unrelated, aspiring writers, born on the same day in the same year to parents with the same first names, grow up together and eventually gain national prominence as authors. As the years pass, the complex sexual identities of Miller Sark and Hal Pierce undermine their intense private relationship, inflicting damage that cannot be undone by the distinction of their fiction and poetry. Inspired by the lives and works of American literary giants Ernest Hemingway and Hart Crane, This Cleaving and This Burning reveals the passion and purpose behind masks of public reputation and creative expression.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The bones of this story are based on Hemingway and Hart Crane, a sadly now-forgotten poet popular in the 1920s for his exaggeratedly obscurantist poetry. He was much on the model of T.S. Eliot, though far more, um, impressionistic in his vocabulary and stylistic affectations. For all that, he had a spark of some beautiful thing, a light that shone from his lines (as oddly heard as they were:

The willows carried a slow sound,
A sarabande the wind mowed on the mead.
I could never remember
That seething, steady leveling of the marshes
Till age had brought me to the sea.

These lines are from "Repose of Rivers" which is from his seminal collection White Buildings. Modern Queer Theory proponents like Thomas Yingling and Tim Dean have pushed back against heteronormative readings of Crane's poetry, arguing that his gayness was central to his sense of himself, and his sense of being a social pariah for his queerness was central to his poet's identity.

Any road, the friendship between Hemingway (a hugely overpraised writer in my never-remotely humble opinion) and Crane is not factual; it's factual that, had it happened, this is the way it would've ended given Hemingway's known homophobia.

The thing that drew me ever deeper into this read was the beautiful creative world these two inhabited, the joyous freedom of childhood and adolescence spent with light supervision allowing them to muse and think and just *be*. The way the words knit and tat and crochet the strands of character and story together was magical. There's really very little said, apart from a seriously climactic scene, about their natural world...and even that scene is far more about Hal's thoughts and feelings. The characters, based on real men, are themselves and not merely mouthpieces for a plot full of contrivances. It hews as closely to the known life-events of the men as it's possible to do within the confines of writing one's own story.

While the ending was a saddening thing to read, it was factual in its results and outlines. What I'd recommend to readers is that they come to this tale of the valences of long-term friendships, especially same-gender ones, with a spirit of discovery. The novel is about the transformative nature of Love in its many, many, bizarre and unhappy and joyful forms. The love between men-friends is one of the toughest to show in fiction unless one resorts to sports as a central metaphor. In the case of Miller and Hal, the center of their long and loving friendship is Miller's appreciation of the adornments of Hal's poetical imagination and Hal's appreciation of Miller's grounded, practical masculinity. The tragedy of an ending is always there in the rapture of a beginning, isn't it.

It's actually a bit of a surprise to me how much I ended up enjoying this read. I don't generally like tragic endings to queer stories but this one's both factual and handled with a real sensitivity to the story that's led up to it. The characters, always forefronted in Author Wainwright's hands, are very clearly heading into inevitability. Their hidden selves and their public presentations of self collide and fragment on the rocks of Love. It has happened forever; it will happen myriad times again. It's a testament to that reality's careful construction in This Cleaving and This Burning that it failed for once to trigger my knee-jerk hostility to this kind of ending.

I'll say this for Author Wainwright. Decades of writing, both poetry and novels, has led him into a beautiful green pasture of story that only he could inhabit with the lightness and rightness of touch to sell my resistant soul on such a painful, sad to read, finale for two fascinating characters.… (lisätietoja)

In J.A. Wainwright’s dazzling novel, This Cleaving and This Burning, two American writers, not related to one another but born on the same day in 1899, form an intimate and exclusive childhood bond that endures for their entire lives, until it is shattered when the two are forced to reckon with questions of sexual identity and suppressed desire. Best friends Miller Sark and Hal Pierce grow up in rural Michigan. Miller is a natural leader who exudes confidence and doesn’t shy away from adventure or acts of reckless bravery. Hal is less sure of himself, brooding and sensitive, willing to be led and often confused about what he wants from life. Their relationship is shaped and strengthened by mutual trust and their many adventures together, and one day on a fishing expedition that takes them into a remote section of forest near the Canadian border, they barely escape perishing in a forest fire, saved by quick thinking on Hal’s part. Hal and Miller emerge from their youth with serious literary aspirations, convinced that their talent is real and inspired by each other to make names for themselves with their writing. Seeking a specific kind of experience to fuel his fiction, Miller enlists in the armed forces and fights against the Germans in France, taking part in the Battle of Belleau Wood in June 1918. Against his domineering mother’s wishes, Hal moves to New York. There he lives with relatives for a time before finding carpentry work and independent accommodations, but eventually takes the drastic and distressing step of breaking with his mother altogether to free himself from her meddling and disapproval. Miller is decorated for his heroism in battle, and, after recovering from his injuries, relocates to St. Louis, where he lands a job as a journalist and sets to work on his war novel. Hal, emotionally reticent, ambivalent about his sexuality, continues working on a long poem encompassing the entire history of the United States and discovers solace and companionship in New York’s vibrant homosexual community. Awards, accolades and national recognition follow for Miller, while Hal toils in near obscurity, though he does receive occasional grants and prizes, and his work is regarded highly in New York literary circles. Inevitably, life takes a toll on Miller and Hal. Both find love and both suffer catastrophic losses. But they remain loyal to each other, bound by mutual respect and affection, until one day it all comes crashing down. J.A. Wainwright’s novel is a moving, brilliantly written and often gripping portrait of two vividly imagined literary figures living and working in the early decades of the previous century. The story, enlivened by period detail, draws on the careers of Ernest Hemingway and Hart Crane, but though it makes use of the historical record and refers to many individuals who were alive at the time, it does not precisely mirror those authors’ experiences. In the story Wainwright conjures, Miller and Hal are two sides of a coin, representing the rational and intuitive aspects of the creative impulse. The two are inextricably linked by everything they’ve shared, buttressing one another but also clashing. The rift, when it comes, is devastating, because whether they realize it or not, they depend on each other for their very existence. The story of their love turns tragic, but their dedication to their art, their willingness to sacrifice, and their relentless drive to realize their goals ultimately make the story uplifting.… (lisätietoja)

The Grace of Our Affections is both an intrepid exploration of one family’s history and a purely speculative re-imagining of how that history might have played out. Faced with a faded family photograph that his mother gave to him many years earlier, the author is driven by an urgent sense of duty to give voices to ancestors that, once he dies, will be completely obscured by the mists of time. The portrait, taken in Yorkshire in the early 1890s, shows a family, formally attired and stiffly posed in typical Victorian fashion: a Methodist minister, his wife—Thomas and Elizabeth Larsen—and their seven children ranging in age from ten to early twenties. Taking as a starting point the photo and an exceedingly sparse historical record, the author builds a fictional account around the lives of the family members, granting each of them an individual voice and, in separate first-person sections, letting them narrate their own stories and describe their interests, their dreams and secret desires. The resulting novel is a triumph of the imagination. In supple, nuanced prose that brilliantly evokes the tonalities of Victorian speech and thought, J.A. Wainwright writes convincingly from multiple perspectives and fleshes out the Larsen family’s story with a richly drawn locale in the Orkney Islands, abundant period detail, and a great many engaging secondary characters and gripping dramatic situations. In Wainwright’s imagined account, the Larsen family faces significant upheaval and even danger as the children come of age and assert independence of both thought and deed, begin questioning the moral authority of the church, discover intellectual and vocational passions, and, in one case, defy their parents’ authority outright by following their heart down an unconventional path. The Larsen family story as envisioned by the author from a single photograph and a few official documents, is dramatic, poignant and packed with action and suspense. In this enjoyable if densely written historical novel—his fifth work of fiction and 15th book overall—J.A. Wainwright’s storytelling gifts are on vivid and memorable display.… (lisätietoja)