The Heart in Exile: Detachment and Desire in 1950s London

Abstract

This essay explores the ‘underground’ queer culture of London, as mapped assiduously by the pseudonymous author, Rodney Garland, in his 1953 novel, The Heart in Exile. The novel charts the progress of its narrator, Dr Anthony Page, a psychiatrist, as he investigates a former lover's mysterious death. His investigation draws him into the ‘strange half-world of the homosexual’, as a 1961 paperback edition of the novel announces; it is a world which Page maps in detail. The novel was reissued in 1995 with a preface by novelist and playwright Neil Bartlett, who claimed that Garland offers contemporary readers ‘a perfect crash course in the prehistory of British gay culture’, a ‘systematic exploration of our twilight world’. This essay takes issue with that claim and suggests that we need to view Garland's London as radically unfamiliar territory – a queer world, but not a gay world as we now understand the term. It suggests that the task of recuperation – of finding ‘our’ hidden history – is an inadequate paradigm within which to read Garland's text. It defamiliarizes the London of 1953, mapping the ways in which the queer subject was then constituted, and demonstrates how The Heart in Exile is central to the project of destabilizing those categories of identity taken for granted today.

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