A Gay Sacred Fount: The Reader as Detective

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Sacred Fount is detective story without crime and without detective. detective, indeed, is reader. Leon Edel, Introduction to Sacred Fount (1995 edition [15]) [Sherlock Holmes:] When you have eliminated impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be truth. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle I: 163 It was bound to come, sooner or later, reading Sacred Fount as text homosexual love. I try here to show how reader response to this puzzling book can be based on some elements intended by James to reveal yet conceal unexpected gender partner sought Gilbert Long by narrator. Reading Sacred Fount can be maddening task, especially so if read it in light nameless narrator's ridiculous obsession (Sacred 1953 ed. 89). Based upon his articulate axiom (107) that, in an emotional relationship, one partner grows at expense other (crystallized by Mrs. Brissenden's apparent thriving upon wastage her husband Guy, Poor Briss) he erects his working hypothesis (95): the thing we're looking ought logically to be person, opposite giving us maximum sense depletion his benefit (38). Thus, stupid Long's improvement from bore to marvel must be matched by his correspondingly depleted woman lover (81). narrator is convinced by painter Ford Obert that by psychologic signs alone, rather than by method the detective and keyhole (66), We shall find right woman, our friend's mystic Egeria (37). As Mrs. Briss puts it, There had so, by your theory, to be woman -- (300), she snatches at phrase in his proposition, of opposite sex (38), to divert narrator from truth, that it is not woman to be sought for, but man, and that man is her husband, Guy Brissenden. This is speculative attempt to read novel which James, in his letter to Mrs. Humphry Ward, called a consistent joke (his italics) filled with nothing but screens (cf. Sacred 38), displaying the perfection red herring (146), even boasting red herrings (James's italics, cf. 87), if not more, and yet consistent with its own little law composition (Letters IV: 186). main point is that when narrator believes that what we are looking ought logically to be . . . opposite sex, he falls into basic logical fallacy through his naivete and through fault mind for which vision life is an obsession (23). I propose that lover to be sought is same and that Sacred Fount is homoerotic, homosexual, novel. point this demonstration is to show that gender within words proposition formed by narrating character is key to puzzle Sacred Fount seems to be. word concealment is magic word itself, and to understand its importance in Sacred Fount one must know that year before James began to write novel he had written an important essay called The Present Literary Situation in France 1899. In it he complained about overriding taste French fin de siecle writers adultery and concealed attachments that constituted it. There are others, after all, than those eternal triangle husband, wife and lover, or that variation this to which are too much condemned as an only alternative mistress, first and second, or second and third, third and fourth lovers. What continue to have, most part, is paraphernalia concealment, drama alarm and exposure; in which, with prodigious ingenuity, all changes have been (Essays 120, my italics). Especially had those changes been rung by Paul Bourget, whose twenty-nine novels and thirty-four collections short stories and nouvelles containing over two hundred tales were sent regularly to James (whom Bourget idolized) over years, tales which James had to read since his friendship with French writer, although wearying, was very close (Tintner Cosmopolitan). …