I’m surprised I liked this book, since I thought A Separate Peace was a disappointment. Published in the 1940s, the strong homosexual sub-text is downplayed and often ambiguous. It’s about 19-year-old schoolboys in 1920s small-town America – two university students, Lymie (cerebral and sensitive) and Spud (athletic and hot tempered), who knew each other in high school and went on to develop an obsessively close bond, a relationship so strong they didn’t know how to deal with it. Their friendship was so intense that neither quite understood it or could articulate what it meant.
If you decide to tackle this one, be forewarned that the story doesn’t sweep you up until about halfway through, though the rewards for the reader’s patience include some overwhelmingly poignant moments. When Lymie sends a note to his former roommate, Spud, who has moved out to join a fraternity, in which he states that he aches for the way their friendship used to be, Spud’s response is all action and no words; Spud simply lets himself back into his old room and crawls into bed with Lymie without saying a word, nesting his chin into Lymie’s neck. Lymie’s response is euphoric. “It was something he had imagined so many times that he couldn’t believe it. He was lifted on a great wave of unbelieving happiness. Lymie wished that it were possible to die with this fullness in his heart; all that he had ever wanted, he had now. All that was lost had come back to him...Lymie turned and lay on his back so that Spud’s arm would go farther around him.”
The Folded Leaf is available in Kindle format.
William Keepers Maxwell, Jr. (1908-2000) was fiction editor for The New Yorker from 1936-1975 and wrote novels, short stories, essays and book reviews. Many parts of The Folded Leaf are autobiographical in relation to the character Lymie Peters.
A quote from William Maxwell: “If you turn the imagination loose like a hunting dog, it will often return with the bird in its mouth.”
Indeed. Now back to the men and boys.
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