... having been breathed out

This week I made quite a bit of progress on The Air You Breathe by Frances de Pontes Peebles, with which I'm now about halfway done (it's long, but reads quickly). I'm still very much enjoying it: the Lapa (Rio de Janeiro) setting is vivid, the sections with older!Dores take the edge off of younger!Dores's teen angst, and the dynamic between Dores and Graça convincingly lives in that codependent-best-friends, yes-we're-lovers-but-only-when-Graça-says-so space that is relatably 17 years old. Predictably I am also very drawn to the relationship between Dores and Vinicius, their guitarist and artistic collaborator, with whom she goes on to have a long, complex relationship and whom she ends up marrying many years after Graça's young death. Thus far I'm impressed with how Peebles is navigating the attachment between a young woman who is primarily erotically invested in other women, but who is also passionately invested, with all of herself, in the making of music, and a man with whom she connects musically on a generative level. Can't think why that would be of personal interest. Ahem. Oh! As befits a story about the samba scene in Lapa in the 1930s, this book also features a character based on João Francisco dos Santos, aka Madame Satã, which is a fun queer-historical cameo although I don't know enough about Santos to know how close the parallel is, and from what I can gather the historical figure was actually in prison during the mid-30s, when the early section of this novel takes place.

In other news: with research assistance from oulfis—who, just saying, is a great friend to have if you happen to be writing a historical novel set in Canada—I got my hands on a couple articles and a book by Linda J. Quiney: most notably This Small Army of Women: Canadian Volunteer Nurses and the First World War, and "Borrowed Halos: Canadian Teachers as Voluntary Aid Detachment Nurses during the Great War" (Historical Studies in Education 15,1 (2003)). The VAD program trained emergency nursing aids and ambulance assistants, much to the resistance and consternation of the professional nursing community, which was just starting to make headway on gaining respectability as a licensed, skilled profession. As casualty numbers got out of hand, though, even the nurses had to admit that the VAD women (and some men) filled an undeniable need. The Canadian VAD started out the war with a strong preference for candidates who were young, well-educated, middle-class, and of "British heritage" (by this they meant "white, Church of England, Anglo-Saxon"), although 'round about 1916 they did come to the belated realization that, as they were currently fighting a war IN FRANCE, and as it happened they had a whole demographic of francophone people right there in their own country, they might want to compromise their bigotry far enough to, like, get their training manuals translated into French, and extend the olive branch to French-speaking Canadians. Or whatever.

Anyway, Quiney's book isn't particularly excerptible or gripping on its own merits, but it's very useful for my purposes: it goes through the nitty-gritty mechanics of what the training course was like—how many weeks, what the time commitment was, what the curricula looked like, how useful that curricula usually proved on the wards; whether VAD trainees who went abroad usually got hospital training before they went; how the mechanism of securing placement abroad worked; what sorts of tasks VADs were usually given once they were placed; how VAD detachments were structured; comparative statistics for VAD participation from various provinces, how the dynamics evolved between the VADs and the professional nursing establishment, and so on. It's helping me flesh out the details of how my characters came together pre-novel. I also think it squares well with my plans in terms of—the mostly-unsuccessful plot my characters hatch should be a deliberate subversion of the VAD system (for one thing most of them don't fall into all the desired demographic categories, and for another thing they're not trying to go to England or France), but it should also be historically possible. And based on Quiney, I think both things are true. So cool!

I also read a few pages of my old favorite (sort of? Is is a "favorite" if you find a book and its author endlessly fascinating, even if a lot of that fascination comes from qualities that are also horrifying?) The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith, because greywash and I are doing a reading-and-viewing project on adaptations, and TPoS/Carol is the first pairing we're tackling. Way back when we still lived in our first LA apartment (so 2015, yikes), I was working on a project that would have interwoven the Price of Salt timeline with a timeline of the section of Highsmith's biography leading up to the publication of the novel; I'm super tempted to dig that out again and take a look at it as I revisit. We'll see what ends up happening!

So. The Price of Salt (1952). First lesbian pulp with a “happy ending,” meaning in this case that neither of the female protagonists died, went mad, or decided they liked men after all (or, incidentally, chose to elope and cut themselves off from all the other people they love). To many readers—very much including me—the understated ending of Highsmith’s novel feels “more realistic” than either a typical romance-novel Happy Ever After, or the overblown, censorship-enforced, soap-operatic tragedy of pulps like Spring Fire.

( INTERESTINGLY (suicide cw): )

[Note from 2019: I still await, and am tempted to write myself, the Norma Desmond/Carol Aird fanfic. A Yuletide possibility, perhaps.]

[Highsmith’s] second, pseudonymous work, The Price of Salt (1952), was so marked by her secret obsessions that writing it felt like a birthing. “Oh god,” she enthused, “how this story emerges from my own bones!” In it, she mixed images reminiscent of Grimm’s fairy tales and Lolita (three years before Nabokov published his masterpiece) with a luminous halo of incest and a little light pedophilia to bring to an eager and (mildly) misled public the novel they read as the first popular narrative of successful lesbian love. The Price of Salt sold hundreds of thousands of copies and made Patricia Highsmith uneasy all her life.

—Joan Schenkar, The Talented Miss Highsmith