By total coincidence, Maggie and I both read Born to Be Gay + The Bronze and the Wine back-to-back—just in opposite order. I read Born in a single September sitting, and then, disappointed, remembered Randall Ivey calling Bronze “one of [Victor’s] most accomplished works of fiction in terms of characterization and plot structure” in The Misplaced Heritage (204). Anti-spoiler as I am, I’d held off on actually reading the rest of his review before jumping in. What followed was… a book I disliked even more than Born.
Suffice it to say, Ivey and I are simply not in agreement on The Bronze and the Wine. I went back to his analysis before editing this post and realized I’d written multiple things that directly contradicted his claims. I fear you’ll have to read Bronze yourself to decide which of us got it right! But I do encourage anyone curious on the subject to go check Ivey out for a second opinion on the novel (from Misplaced Heritage pages 204 to 206).
I will concede that The Bronze and the Wine is a more competently constructed book than Born to Be Gay. Although it was published only three months after Born, that meant a world of difference in pulp timelines. Victor had already written/published five more books between the two!
The Bronze and the Wine follows the story of newly-and-sexually-incompatibly-wed high school English teacher Glen and troubled teen hustler Jerry, a student of Glen’s upon whom he finds himself developing an unhealthy fixation.
It wasn’t Victor’s first stab at darkly-toned writing (see our previous posts on AC-DC Lover and “Broken Record”), but I think it was one of his first novels to experiment with the psychological approach I associate more with his later books. In other words, we spend a lot of time inside the mind of a spiraling man, and most of the torment Glen experiences is self-inflicted.
The previous few pulps we covered all have a pretty common sort of three-act structure: intro to Lenny’s traumatic backstory, his ruthless pursuit of Gloria and Nick, everything falling apart; Mike’s intro to Glen and sex work, his romantic interlude with Glen and struggle with the desire to continue hustling, the moral bankruptcy of prostitution ruining his life after their breakup. There’s a rather linear structure to them and they don’t tend to linger in any one place for very long.
Bronze does an uncharacteristic amount of lingering. It’s character-centric, there’s no string of sexual conquests, and it’s not throwing a million plot developments at you at once. In this sense, perhaps its structure resembles a more literary work than most pulps. Does that inherently make it better, though…? Better is in the eye of the beholder, but I think there’s something to be respected about what it means to be at the top of your game in working traditional pulp structures.
To me, however, the most valuable part of pairing Bronze with Born to Be Gay specifically is what it prompts us to consider while sitting inside Glen’s mind for 150 pages.
Firstly, here’s where I drop my routine reminder of my pulp mission to bridge the gap between dismissing uncomfortable works wholesale and relying on simple “of its time” rationales. Particularly because I find both routes run the risk of missing out on genuinely interesting questions about how and why those troubling elements ended up there.
So, as promised, let’s take a moment to retrace our steps to Born to Be Gay and Terry’s sleazy French teacher. Bruce Tucker is, at kindest, presented as a pitiable figure. But sympathetic is certainly a stretch. The fact that he is taking advantage of Terry as an authority figure is pretty clear in Victor’s portrayal of the relationship. Typical to his works, the narrative is subject to the protagonist’s heavily biased perspective. The distance between Bruce’s obvious manipulations and Terry’s initial rose-colored perception of Bruce’s intentions is one of the first major signals in the novel that Terry’s understanding of his surroundings is deeply warped by naivety.
So what to do with Glen and Jerry?
Unlike Bruce, Glen is not a maligned side character. He is our POV protagonist, and his attraction to Jerry is a tortured one that he struggles to name or understand for most of the book.
Perhaps the best-aged element of Victor’s writing in general is the fact that it’s very much a trademark of his style not to dictate how his readers are meant to feel about his characters. Though it may seem strange to anyone who came to Victor through the C.A.M.P. series and its iconic leading man, I’ve found his approach to hooking readers is generally more about creating characters you want to stick around to watch unravel than characters you feel compelled to root for. That’s one of the first things that drew me to his work.
What complicates Bronze for me most, then, is its ending—spoilers to follow.
After a story defined by Glen’s guilt and confusion, followed by Jerry’s panic and misery at learning that, just like every other adult in his life, the one adult he trusts views him as a sexual object, the novel ends with Jerry throwing himself into Glen’s arms and declaring his requited love.
The reader is left to understand that Jerry has finally realized Glen’s feelings for him extend past the carnal, that “‘[Glen isn’t] just hot to get [his] body,’” and that “‘with [Glen, sex] wouldn’t be dirty, like it was with the others’” (Chapter 12). The novel ends on the romantic exchange:
“I know a lot about making love,” Jerry said finally, as though in conclusion. “But I don’t know much about…” he hesitated on the word “… love.”
Glen grinned despite himself, half in amusement, half in giddy happiness. “I don’t know much about making love,” he said softly. (The Bronze and the Wine, Chapter 12)
It’s pretty straightforward that the way the scene is relayed makes a romantic reading the obvious one, but the catalyst for Jerry’s declaration doesn’t exactly scream “romance.” The penultimate chapter sees Glen physically assault Jerry after learning he has sex with men for money, an intensely disturbing sequence I’ll spare us from block-quoting.
The power imbalance between them here isn’t all that subtle: “Glen was fighting with the strength of a madman, just as Jerry’s grief was robbing him of his.”
He stops himself before what he seemingly deems the unforgivable stage of a sexual assault, but the damage is thorough: nonconsensual touching aside, we watch as Glen’s verbal abuse devastates Jerry, whom Glen ultimately leaves staring after him as he speeds off, abandoning Jerry to a grim fate at home with a mother who sells his body for extra income.
The book then transitions immediately to its final chapter, where we first see Glen lose his job as the result of a vindictive neighbor reporting his relationship with Jerry, followed by a swift transition to its final scene, where Jerry appears on his doorstep, overwhelmed with emotion as he apologizes and then makes the above declarations.
Essentially, that final scene is jarring regardless of your predisposition towards teacher/student romances.
The novel could have easily set up a simple savior narrative. Supportive teacher learns of abuse favorite student suffers at home, offers helping hand and open home, love blossoms. The romanticization could have been thorough and complete.
Instead, we see a recurring consciousness of harm and the inherent inequality in their relationship, between the portrayal of Jerry’s sense of fear and betrayal over Glen’s feelings, and Glen’s journey from grappling with a deep sense of shame over desire for a teenage student to his growing sense of violent entitlement to Jerry’s body and attention.
That entitlement reveals itself to Glen in his violent outburst, but it would seem that after that, though he regrets the violence, he accepts that entitlement as a basic part of his reality. Upon learning that Jerry denied any inappropriate relationship between them when questioned by the school, Glen feels “a sense of pleasure, almost pride,” as it indicated that “whatever Jerry’s feelings might be, he had not been willing to betray him.” Its relevance as an act of self preservation, or the strain such a conversation would have placed on Jerry, seems to be of little concern to him.
And, once Jerry arrives at his door, although he feels compelled to reply to Jerry’s apology with “‘You’re sorry? I’m the one who should be…’,” he cuts himself off before the s-word ever leaves his mouth, all too eager to shed his sense of guilt and accept this new version of events.
Most curious of all is the fact that the book occasionally does offer scenes from Jerry’s perspective, but the audience is offered no insight into his experiences between the previous chapter and that final scene besides what we see filtered through Glen.
Literally all we know about his circumstances after the assault is that the desperately depressing math of his life still comes out to Glen being the safest adult in his life, and between their fight and Jerry being taken in for questioning about the nature of their relationship, he can be sure that that lifeline is slipping away for good… because Jerry had rejected his advances.
This isn’t to argue that Bronze was actually a piece of sharp social commentary. Much, if not most, of the text suggests otherwise—including Victor’s clear attempt to increase the story’s palatability with the 21st century revision being placed in a junior college. What is true is that Victor’s works present us with a considerably broad spectrum of approaches to this all-too-common pulp subject, which I think makes it worth deconstructing.
I also don’t want to make it seem like my disappointment with the novel is purely based on moralizing grounds. I think character work is one of Victor’s greatest strengths as a writer, and I don’t think Bronze delivers on that front with Glen or Jerry despite being a character-heavy pulp. It was early enough in his career that I don’t think it’s a particularly notable weakness—the man had only been publishing consistently for a handful of months and was writing a book or two a week.
But I see my job here as one big effort to devote the time to compiling complex readings of things that were never intended to be all that complex, and that’s the fun of it!
At the end of the day, I see Bronze as most significant for where it stands in the history of Victor’s psychological & character-focused pulps, and I look forward to coming back to those once we head into 1967 and 1968.
I’ll leave us with an excerpt from the earlier parts of the penultimate chapter, which explores some of what I’ve discussed in the context of one of the novel’s other defining quirks among Victor’s books: that it suggests Glen is not actually gay, just infatuated with Jerry specifically. Read that however you like, but I think it’s worth keeping in mind.
The school loomed up before them. As Glen steered the car into the parking lot, he was painfully aware that, however innocent he might be able to keep the relationship between himself and Jerry, to others it would be something else. And, in fact, would their impression be so far from wrong after all? If worst came to worst, could he honestly deny that he was physically attracted to Jerry? Could he conceal what was unquestionably in his heart, the desire that was raging nearly out of control within him?
Seeing Jerry again was the final shock. However much he might have been able to calm himself, to convince himself of the folly of his desires, he knew, from the first moment he glanced up to catch sight of that familiar smile, that he was doomed. It would never be possible for him to see Jerry, to be near the boy, without imagining…
He left the class studying, abandoning his schedule for the day and hurried to the administrative office. It was not difficult to fake illness; he looked, after all, hollow and faded. A hurried apology was offered to Mrs. Devraux, and although her smile might have been a trifle malicious, she was most gracious in insisting that she could take a taxi home after school. At last he was gone, escaping from the school building like a man pursued by demons.
What could he do? Quit the school? It seemed impossible that he could endure the sort of torture he was suffering now until the end of the term, only three weeks away after all. Yet to leave so near the end of the term would be a definite black mark on his record, a point that would be questioned by any other school at which he tried to find a position.
Should he talk to Jerry? What could he say—that he was queer, that he wanted—needed—sexual companionship with him? The thought of the probable reaction to that only increased his frustration.
He drove for what seemed hours, circling aimlessly about the city. Once he found himself passing Jerry’s street. Frantically he crushed his foot down on the gas pedal, racing madly by the corner as though terrified of its nearness.
Tired at last from the tension in his shoulders, he stopped for a traffic light, glancing about to determine where he was—a vulgar, unappealing neighborhood, near the train station. To his left was a small theater, shabby and furtive in its appearance, wearily advertising its matinee of old, Grade B movies. He had to occupy himself, he thought wearily, find some way of getting his mind off his problems. With a sense of determination, he pulled the car into a parking lot and hurried down the street to the theater.
The film was already in progress. Glen paused inside the curtained doorway, glancing about for a seat, then impulsively turned and made his way back across the lobby, to the door marked MEN.
The smell of stale waste and God only knew what else threatened him with nausea, and he stood swaying inside the door for a moment before making his way to the trough-like fixture along one wall.
The door opened and closed behind him and he was vaguely aware of a figure standing beside him at the trough. Glen’s eyes took in the multitude of scribbled writing and crude drawings that decorated the wall before him, the vague expressions, and pointed questions.
Instinct told him that something peculiar was taking place. He glanced down, almost finished with his purpose for being here, and he was suddenly aware of the fact that the man beside him wasn’t doing anything, only standing there, holding himself. In the next instant, he realized that the man was staring at him.
Full realization came finally, making Glen blush scarlet. He stood as though frozen to the spot, long after he had finished his business, and slowly, painfully, he raised his eyes.
Go, a voice within him was screaming at him, leave now, get away before it’s too late. But there was another voice behind the din, making itself louder and stronger all the while. He knew, finally, as his eyes met the ones seeking them, that he had to find out the truth about himself, and this was the only way he would ever be able to do it.
[…]
He wasn’t queer. Whatever his impotence with women, it was not a result of this. He had been fully as impotent with the man beside him, and he saw now what had not been clear to him in the past. With him it would never be a matter of sex or type, but of love—not the brotherly affection he had felt for Ann, but genuine love, such as he felt… he caught himself before the name Jerry took shape in his mind. That would never be. If it meant that he should forever be incapable of sexual expression with anyone else, at least he would not drag Jerry down into the sort of degradation it would mean for them.
