The Folded Leaf

I read this over the past few days. Don’t ask how I happened upon it, because I couldn’t tell you.

I will tell you that after I read it, I looked up the author and realized..wait. I’ve read him before. Thankfully, not this book – because that would be truly distressing – but another of his novels, called They Came Like Swallows – and once I looked it up, it all came back to me. I wrote a bit about it here.

Anyway, The Folded Leaf is quite a book. It’s an intense, involving and even tiring read, even though the book itself is not long.

It’s the story of a friendship between two boys – Lymie and Spud – in the 1920’s Midwest, from their high school years through early college. Maxwell writes evocatively and with emotional precision. The novel apparently began as a short story that another writer told Maxwell he should expand into a novel, and it does betray a bit of padding, but most of the padding is interesting enough so that I, at least, didn’t mind.

That said, “friendship” doesn’t quite capture what is going on.

Yearning and fighting. Yearning and fighting for and against each other in a process that Maxwell analogizes to traditional rites of initiation. This is all something a male must get through, he seems to be saying, and when he does, he can finally calm down, and just be.

And yes, the homosexual subtext runs strong here, and it’s difficult to describe it as “subtext” at times, except the characters themselves don’t seem to understand or acknowledge the nature of what is between them. I’m not saying that the nature of binds them is what we today would call homosexual, but it certainly attraction and seeking deep fulfilment in the presence and attention of one who is the same sex, with a sense of exclusivity – so whether or not it’s an expression of some other deep desire – to compensate for a loss or fear in another part of life – there’s no telling. But yes, it’s an attraction and a need, and it’s between two young males.

(Maxwell was married for fifty-five years and had two daughters. Not that this means anything in particular, see Cheever, John and countless others, of course. But do know that most of Maxwell’s fiction is highly autobiographical, much of it turning on significant events from his youth, most notably the death of his mother in the Spanish Flu epidemic.)

So that was interesting to parse and figure out exactly how Maxwell is interpreting these characters’ desires and reactions to the desires.

As I said, Maxwell positions male initiation as a central theme in the book, beginning with the whole general concept of acceptance as a male in the male group, then moving specifically to a high school fraternity initiation, then onto a couple of different male groupings in college, where there’s no explicit initiation, but again, the tension of identity and acceptance.

  The boys called him “Maggie” behind his back, but they liked him. They liked anything that was odd or extreme. They thought it was fine that Colter knew how to call pigs; that Fred Howard was a Christer and spent all his spare time at the Wesley Foundation; that Amsler’s mother drove over from Evansville once a week just to see that he was getting enough to eat; and that Freeman every now and then at dinner took out six of his upper front teeth and tossed them into the water pitcher.

  Far from holding it against Lymie that he was so thin, they bragged about him to strangers. Geraghty, who was a premedic, used to come into Lymie’s room at night and make him take off his shirt. It was as good as having a skeleton, he said; he could find and name every bone in Lymie’s body.

The boys took a brief dislike for Spud until he persuaded Reinhart and Pownell to go to the gym with him one afternoon and box. They nicknamed him “The Killer” and from that time on, he had his place in the gallery of freaks; he belonged.

And in the end, it seems to me that Maxwell is describing what the relationship between these two boys/young men as a form of initiation. He takes some time early on to describe traditional male initiation rites and emerges with a major critique of what passes for it, both formally (fraternities) and informally (just life) in his day – the absence of grown men to shepherd the young men through the experience.

The boys, he says, are left on their own to figure out what manhood is, so of course they flounder.

The night that Lynch was born, his father, then a young man of twenty-four, stood and stared at his son through the window in the hospital corridor with the tears streaming down his cheeks. Where was he now? Catanzano’s father was dead, but why wasn’t Mr. Ford at the Hotel Balmoral that evening? He could have talked to his son quietly and perhaps coaxed him until Ford jumped from the stepladder of his own free will. Where was Carson’s father? And Frenchie deFresne’s? And what about Mr. Latham? That stupid pursuit of enemies that were sometimes imaginary and sometimes flesh and blood, to which Spud devoted so much of his time—Mr. Latham must have known, even though Spud didn’t, who Spud’s real enemy was, whose death he desired. The rites of puberty allow the father to punish the son, the son to murder his father, without actual harm to either. If Mr. Latham had been present and had taken part in the initiation, he might have been able to release Spud forever from the basis of all his hostilities. And Mr. Peters should have been there certainly. The call he made from the corner cigar store was not important even to him. It could have been made the next night, just as well. Now instead of being freed of his childhood, Lymie will have to go on smearing his face up with taffy-apples of one kind or another and being stopped by every plaster pig that he encounters, for years to come.

Maybe Maxwell’s interpretation of the relationship between Lymie and Spud is more obvious than I thought….

What I particularly enjoyed about The Folded Leaf was simply the close look at adolescent and college life (in the Midwest) in the 1920’s. It’s always so interesting to see how different things were – and how much people don’t change at all, despite radically different times.

So interesting, really, to read about a time in which two boys travel to their new college town, get off the train with their suitcases and then just wander around looking for “to let” signs in boarding house windows, make the arrangements with the landlord, and then move in. Freshman year: commence.

There would be a lot to quote here, because Maxwell really is a masterful, if quiet writer, and his descriptions are just on point. We’ll end with this one, of one of the young women in the college circle. It’s long, but I really appreciated it – and it fits in with my other persistent theme of our culture trying to constantly commodify and box up identity, as well as the theme of… not like other girls – how that is not a new thing, and to pathologize it is, simply, a crime:

There were several young girls, Sally among them, who came and went, bearing cups of tea and platters of sandwiches. Though Sally had known some of her mother’s guests since childhood and was privileged to call many full professors by their nicknames, today she looked on everybody with the eyes of a stranger. There was no place for her in this world. She liked dogs, horses, sailboats, airplanes, climbing apple trees, staying up late at night, walking in the rain, driving round and round in an open car on a summer afternoon, sitting by a beach fire at night, lying on the ground and looking up at the undersides of leaves and at lightning bugs and falling stars, dividing her attention between a book that she had read many times and an apple, watching the sun go down and the moon come up, wondering what the boy she was going to marry would look like and where he was at that moment, and how long it would take him to find her…. The list was endless and made up entirely of normal human pleasures. If it had only included an appreciation of respectability, she would have been happier. Or at least she would have been spared a great many bitter arguments with her mother.

The words “nice” and “proper” seemed to inflame Sally, and an attempt to consider her conduct in the light of conventional standards made her start talking furiously in a loud voice without much logic.

  She loved her mother and father but she didn’t love the things they lived by—professorial dignity, scholarship, old books, old furniture, old china, and brand new amusing gossip. She liked storms, lightning and thunder, excitement; and the climate of her home was unfortunately a temperate one.

  When there were too many arguments in too short a time, she took a few clothes and moved into the sorority house, where she ran into similar difficulties. She was expected to be careful of her appearance and of her friends, and to remember at all times that she belonged to the best sorority on the campus. She didn’t try to do any of these things and so there were more arguments, especially in chapter meetings. She moved around the house in a cloud of disapproval, which had the curious effect of making her clumsy. She tripped over rugs, her feet slid out from under her on the stairs. The girls that she wanted to have like her did, actually, but they also laughed at her, because she was so enthusiastic and so like an overgrown puppy; and this hurt her pride.

  The girls who were not amused by her behavior were appalled by it. No room that she walked into was ever quite large enough, nothing was safe in her apologetic hands. She didn’t mean to drop Emily Noyes’ bottle of Chanel No. 5 or split open the seams of Joyce Brenner’s white evening dress which she had asked to try on, but the result in each case was disastrous. The girls snatched fragile things from her if she showed any sign of picking them up, and the girl she bumped into hurrying around a corner of the upstairs hall took to her bed, with cold compresses on her head. It seemed to her that all girls were made of glass and she alone was of flesh and blood and constantly cutting herself on them. She gave up trying to please them.

  Though she was undeniably a tomboy, there was nothing masculine about her appearance. She was a recognizable feminine type which the Greeks represented as a huntress with a crescent moon in the center of her forehead, a silver bow in her left hand, a quiver of arrows slung over one shoulder, and her skirts caught up so that her long thighs would be free and unhampered. During the annual festival which the Romans held in her honor, hunting dogs were crowned with garlands and wild beasts were not molested. Wine was brought forth and there was a feast consisting of roasted kid, cakes served piping hot on plates of leaves, and apples still hanging in clusters on the bough. It was not a type generally admired or often found in the university in the year 1927