A Mother’s Sense: Questioning the Notion of Platonic Masculine Love

Maria Bell

It is a seemingly innocuous moment. The three teenagers have returned late, and Sally has gone off to sleep in a separate room, as is expected of a girlfriend. Spud invites Lymie to sleep with him, as his friend has many times before. Then his mother speaks: “‘I think Lymie had better go to his own home tonight,’ Mrs. Latham said” (225). It is a simple request, spoken with no malice. But that decision carries with it an understanding, an implication, deep and momentous. Whether conscious of it or not, Mrs. Latham is shifting the way a boyhood friendship like Spud and Lymie’s has always been viewed. The norm-shattering realization William Maxwell addresses here in The Folded Leaf is also illustrated by Fritz Peters in Finistère, through Matthew’s mother’s naiveté and subsequent reaction to the true sexual nature of his relationship with Michel. As Leslie Fiedler details in his essay, “Come back to the Raft Ag’in Huck Honey!”, the American narrative through the 1940’s had always cast same-sex male bonds as unflinchingly platonic. Fiedler writes, “The existence of overt homosexuality threatens to compromise an essential aspect of American sentimental life… a kind of passionless passion, at once gross and delicate, homoerotic in the boy’s sense, possessing an innocence above suspicion” (143). And yet, in the moment that Mrs. Latham speaks, Lymie’s and Spud’s relationship has, subtly but unquestionably, entered a realm no longer above public suspicion. What is significant in these two novels is that these young men’s intimate relationships begin, one tacitly, the other overtly, to question and fracture the myth of a pure masculine love in which those around them— and the authors’ readership— have always believed.

In order for Maxwell and Peters to depict the shift in these relationships from innocent to insidious in the public consciousness, they first must illustrate how the men’s love for each other privately crosses the line from something stamped with “childlike ignorance” as Fiedler describes it, into a sexual passion. In The Folded Leaf, Maxwell invokes an approach understated enough that most readers of the 1940s simply absorbed his descriptions into their notion of innocent boyish love. Yet for those less invested in the myth, Maxwell plants clues that there is something distinctly sensual in the dynamic between Spud and Lymie. One of the clearest instances of crossing the boundary into the sensual occurs when Spud attempts to take Lymie’s clothes off so he’ll take a nap. Lymie fights him, resisting Spud’s attempts until they are in a fierce wrestling match. All of sudden, Lymie’s gives in and lies still. Maxwell writes, “…Something had burst inside him, something more important than any organ, and there was a flowing which was like blood…. there it was all the same, an underground river that went on and on and was bound to keep on like that for years probably, never stopping, never once running dry” (102). It is easy to skip over this metaphorical image without registering its gravity. But within it lies a vivid sensuality, and the implication that a dramatic shift has taken place. If there ever had been a truly innocent boy-love between Spud and Lymie, it is transformed in this moment, at least on Lymie’s part. In this underground river runs Lymie’s hidden sexual passion for Spud. What should not be ignored either, is the fleeting mention farther up the page: “The noise they made, banging against the furniture, climbing up on the bed and down again, drew Mrs. Latham, who stood in the doorway for a while, trying to make them stop” (102). Neither boy notices her and she is not mentioned again in the passage, but Mrs. Latham bears witness to this intimate turning point.

Peters also describes the shift from platonic to sexual in Matthew and Michel’s connection, but he does so far more explicitly than Maxwell. This moment in Finistère comes after Michel rescues Matthew from drowning in the Seine and is sitting next to him as he recovers in bed. For the first two and half pages the most stubborn of readers can still fairly easily believe that this is simply an affectionate scene of a teacher comforting his suffering student. There still lingers the chance that this really is just an example of innocent “passionless passion.” But then the feeling alters irrevocably: “Perhaps it was at that moment – because there is an exact moment when things begin – that his stomach seemed to turn upon itself, converting the sympathy and tenderness inside of him into a harder and firmer core, a wad of feeling and sensation that he recognized as desire” (142). Innocent, platonic boy-love is gone. In its place is genuine emotional and sexual desire. Peters continues to address this difference throughout the story, but never is the crossing of that line demarcated so clearly as in that passage. From that moment on, the readers are aware that Matthew and Michel are defying the national myth of masculine love. But it takes a long time for this reality to be grasped by the other characters in the story, most of all by Matthew’s mother.

On the surface of things, Spud and Lymie’s relationship really does remain quite innocent. One quick kiss is the closest they get to overt sexual contact. It might seem then, that Maxwell’s story does not do much after all to critique this notion of strictly platonic homosocial love. And yet, by keeping the relationship physically platonic, the story can be seen to do more to question this societal conviction. Whether or not his readers pick up on it, Maxwell illustrates that homosexual love is actually so strong, so real, that it can exist even in the absence of sexual contact. The narrator observes that if Spud and Lymie had joined a frat together, their fraternity brothers would have noted their closeness and sought quickly to split them up, but this is one of the only indications that perhaps there is something threatening to society about the friendship. The clearest moment, however, comes when Spud’s mother sends Lymie home. It’s impossible to know for sure how explicitly she suspects the truth, but it’s significant enough that at some level she knows something. It is powerful because neither Lymie nor Spud have openly acknowledged their feelings even to themselves. And yet still, Mrs. Latham senses there is something unorthodox in their connection. Lymie is the only other one who really felt the danger in it, way back when the boys first became friends. He was afraid to come back with Spud to his house, feeling that on some level it was wrong. At the time, Mrs. Latham welcomed him and dispelled his anxiety. Now after Mrs. Latham sends him home, he recalls that worry: “…He remembered the feeling he had had the first afternoon he came home with Spud. It was a kind of premonition, he realized. Everything that he thought would happen then was happening now. He had been wrong only about the time” (225). This again, is a subtle acknowledgment on Maxwell’s part that Spud and Lymie’s friendship is more insidious to society’s conception of proper homosocial bonds than it appears. The bittersweet irony of this monumental scene is that even as Mrs. Latham begins to grasp this fact, the vast majority of Maxwell’s readers at the time did not. The notion of pure masculine love held too strong a grip.

Maxwell shows the significance of Spud and Lymie’s bond through the fact that Spud’s mother picks up on its true nature despite it never becoming overtly sexual. Peters illustrates this same deep defiance of societal norms by instead having Matthew’s mother hold onto her denial until she has no other choice. While Mrs. Latham is the first to sense the unusual nature of her son’s homosocial bond, Catherine is the last. Catherine is aware of Matthew’s affection for Michel right from the beginning, but dismisses it, as everyone does, as “a schoolboy crush on the man, which, probably, was all to the good” (174). She is ascribing to Fiedler’s notion of a wholesome “passionless passion.” Finally, it becomes so apparent that every other character knows the two men are a couple. But even when Matthew begins to confess the truth to his mother, she is still deeply committed to the myth of an innocent, sexless bond: “‘I do know what you mean. You mean because he’s a man and you’re a man, don’t you? …That happens to almost everyone, Matthew. It isn’t wrong’” (317). When she is forced to acknowledge it at last, her comforting assurance that the love her son feels is natural and acceptable turns into fierce denunciation: “‘Matthew. Are you trying to tell me that you… That you and Michel have been…. That you’ve had sexual…’ and then her voice stopped finally has if it had struck a stone wall. ‘But that you and Michel… it’s unthinkable, it’s horrible!’” (319). In this moment, the belief that a homosocial bond can never be anything other than wholesome and innocent is broken. The extreme horror Catherine expresses shows how deeply rooted and vital that conviction had been.

The endings of both The Folded Leaf and Finistère reflect the myth of masculine love’s powerful sway in society. Both Lymie and Matthew attempt suicide, but Lymie lives while Matthew dies. Both boys feel trapped by the stifling weight of this expectation that homosocial bonds must be platonic. As Lymie rationalizes it, “I don’t want to go on living in a world where the truth has no power to make itself be believed” (227). He cannot get through to Spud because Spud as much as everyone else is mired in this belief in a boy’s passionless passion, and as Mrs. Latham makes it clear by sending him home, the truth is insidious. In Matthew’s case, the truth eventually does have the power to make itself believed, but that is his downfall. He destroys the delusion that his bond with Michel is innocent, but society is not ready to give up the myth of masculine love. Because there is no room left for the myth to continue as it applies to Matthew, there is in a sense, no room left for Matthew in society. For Lymie, it’s different. He never explicitly confesses his true feelings for Spud, so when he attempts suicide, the people around him are able to construct a narrative around it that fits into their belief in an innocent boy-love. Lymie leaves room for society’s myth to continue, so there is still space for Lymie in the world. The two passages with Spud and Matthew’s mothers reflect this same reality. Matthew’s mother seals her son’s fate when she finally has to let go of the lie to which she’s been clinging. Spud’s mother never has to completely let go of the myth, because when doubt sets in, she takes a subtle step to prevent it. When Mrs Latham softly states, “‘I think Lymie had better go to his own home tonight,’” she is acknowledging the shakiness of this belief in the impossibility of homosexual love, but also allowing it to prevail. With Lymie separated from Spud, there can be no hard proof with which to shatter the myth.

Maxwell’s novel was published in 1945, and Peters’ in 1948. Within the next two decades, appreciation for “innocent” boyhood romances had been replaced with hostility toward shows of male to male affection as a consequence of a new awareness of homosexuality. The idea that replaced the boyish love notion, that male same sex affection indicated a despicable and unnatural character flaw, was yet another of society’s myths, one today’s world hasn’t fully shaken.

Works Cited:

Peters, Fritz. Finistère. Vancouver, B.C.: Arsenal Pulp, 2007. Print.

Maxwell, William. The Folded Leaf. London: Vintage, 2012. Print.

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