Sublime

Along the way, he described how things used to be. “You know, the guys there were so beautiful—they’ve lost that wounded look that fags all had 10 years ago.”

Fritz Peters’ Finistère, as well as many of the fine books from the 1950s and even the early 1960s – James Barr’s Quatrefoil (1950), Russell Thacher’s The Tender Age (1954), James Yaffe’s Nothing But the Night (1957) – might fall into this category. This is all rather odd, since if there is one thing we can see in many of Amory’s writings about lit

But he seemed to me to have either a strange reserve or a strange simplicity; to be fundamentally unfurnished with ‘ideas’. He had no beliefs nor hopes nor fears, – nothing but senses, appetites, and serenely luxurious tastes. As I watched him strolling about looking at his finger-nails, I often wondered whether he had anything that could properly

Less knows so well the pleasures of youth—danger, excitement, losing oneself in a dark club with a pill, a shot, a stranger’s mouth—and, with Robert and his friends, the pleasures of age—comfort and ease, beauty and taste, old friends and old stories and wine, whiskey, sunsets over the water. His entire life, he has alternated between the two.

Thomas Hal Phillips’ The Bitterweed Path (1949) looked at a complicated erotic relationship between a father and son and a third man; Paul Goodman’s Parents Day (1951) examined the relationship of a married man with a student at a private school; Gerald Tesch’s Never the Same Again (1956) was a sympathetic account of an affair between a thirteen-ye

Tom Wolfe.”