Mother and Son

New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. Very Good+ in Good dj. (c.1946). First Edition. Hardcover. [a good sound clean book, with light wear to the extremities; the jacket is edgeworn, particularly along the bottom edge, where there various small nicks and tears with associated creasing, and a little paper loss at the base of the spine]. Very scarce novel about a young widow (age 36) who holds an obsessive and neurotic love for her adolescent son, to the extent that she refuses to remarry (despite having three quite serious suitors) because she feels it would be a "betrayal" of the boy. The author (1894-1971) made something of a splash with his first novel, "The Western Shore" in 1925 -- still considered something of a classic of California fiction (and particularly of LGBTQ lit, cited in Young (842) and with an entry in Slide's "Lost Gay Novels") -- but then went novelistically dark for the next 20+ years before publishing back-to-back novels in 1946 and 1947 (the latter was "Naomi Martin"). Given the title and theme, one might expect this novel to be an exploration of an over-possessive mother's incestuous longing for her gay son, with the focus on how it warps the boy's growth to maturity -- but in fact this tale is practically all about the mom (there's a reason she's given top billing in the title) and how she negotiates and navigates her affairs with her various gentleman friends, all the while trying to reconcile her attraction to them with her strong feelings for her son. From a narrative perspective, the son is conveniently off at boarding school (in Ojai) for most of the book, which is set in and around San Francisco, and even when he's present in the story there's no indication that he's gay. (Mostly he seems to find his mother somewhat annoying.) Crane himself was known to be gay, and had a 47-year relationship with his partner, Clyde Evans; he also published a number of short stories, but primarily made his living as a lecturer in English Literature at the University of California Extension School. His papers (two small collections) are held by UC-Berkeley's Bancroft Library and the Library of Congress. (I think it's also worthy of note that the book's dedication is to historian and critic Van Wyck Brooks, described by Slide as Crane's "best friend," a relationship further evidenced by the presence of 28 letters from Crane in Brooks's papers at the University of Pennsylvania.) .