We continue our series on the reissue of John Mulgan's classic novel Man Alone. Today: Janet Charman examines the book's apparent homoerotic subtext
Johnson [the novel's main character] is presented to the reader as a penniless young Englishman who after coming of age in the World War One trenches is in need of a completely new life. On an assisted emigrant’s ticket he therefore travels halfway across the world to New Zealand in which he knows not a soul.
Across a series of male-focused settings Mulgan goes on to present his hero’s staunch resilience as he establishes himself in apparent conformity with the “hard man” stereotype prescribed for mature masculinity in patriarchal “God’s own” country. Yet it is also necessary to read Man Alone for its stealthy subversion of such conventional masculine norms. Mulgan’s subtext in fact constitutes a systematic interrogation of the code of exclusive heterosexuality that is the implied reader’s default expectation of (New Zealand) society.
Ostensibly Johnson’s bachelor independence is celebrated through the commonality of his single name with a handful of other single-name male characters he meets on his travels: Scott, Thompson, Petersen, Sayers, Roach. All are depicted as being free of family ties and obligations. In this he is both an enigmatic “everyman” and an intriguing repository of untold stories.
Yet a name shorn of kinship connections also suggests that significant parts of the protagonist’s identity are calculatedly hidden. And so it will prove. Similarly, the man who becomes Johnson’s best mate is also singled out as an emblematic character “type”. The name “Scott”, with its historic echoes of the polar explorer’s tragic fate, also allows Mulgan to ironically foreshadow just how ill-equipped the mates are to survive the hostile social and economic climate in which their bond will be tested.
When Johnson sets eyes on Scott, their meeting is subtextually suggested as an embodiment of love – and sexual attraction – at first sight.
“Scott was a small man and dark, with a moustache like a Mexican, and kind and tired looking eyes. He stood with hands in his belt below his hips, in the doorway, looking out at the night coming down over the pinetrees. 'I wasn’t in the war,' he told Johnson. 'No, boy, no war for me. M’chest’s bad so they said. It’s a good thing it’s over now.' And Johnson, sitting on the doorstep, was trying to roll a cigarette. 'You got to pack it fairly tight,' Scott said, 'and roll it round a bit. You want to roll the end off and shake it down. They’re better than anything you’ll buy.'"
“‘You got to pack it fairly tight and roll it round a bit. You want to roll the end off and shake it down”... is a homoerotic double entendre
Scott’s disclosure to Johnson of a physical vulnerability is made while the listening protagonist struggles with the assembly of a smoke, his difficulty seemingly explained by a lack of experience with roll-your-owns. The implied reader can therefore presume that in the filth and misery of Johnson’s immediate past years in the World War One trenches, he only had access to tailor-mades. However the grammatical conjunction ‘And’ makes it possible for the reader to infer an emotional conjunction between Johnson’s feelings on meeting Scott and his own clumsiness. His trembling ineptitude points to a sexual alertness in him that is fully reciprocated in Scott’s attentively detailed response.
The subtext of Scott’s suggestion ‘You want to roll the end off’ assumes that Johnson, like himself, is uncircumcised. This is a logical presumption since such surgical interventions became commonplace (in Aotearoa New Zealand) only after World War One, when a generation of men who suffered the agonising infections of trench warfare were fatalistically moved to preempt any such future suffering in their sons.
The homoerotic double entendre of Scott’s overall advice— “‘You got to pack it fairly tight,’ Scott said, ‘and roll it round a bit. You want to roll the end off and shake it down. They’re better than anything you’ll buy.’”—is a revelation of Scott’s own instant attraction to the man with whom he is going to live for around half of the next twelve years.
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Of course, to paraphrase Freud’s apocryphal remark about his own habitual pipe smoking: Sometimes a cigarette is just a cigarette. But it is precisely this scepticism of phallic symbolism that insulates the implied reader of Man Alone from the homoerotic import of Mulgan’s subtext—not only in this scene but across the whole course of the narrative.
Scott’s recognition of the physical and emotional effect he is having on the protagonist is further distanced from the implied reader by Johnson’s eventual characterisation of his mate as “stupid". Scott’s directions would indeed be fatuous if they were only a reference to the assemblage of a cigarette—especially when offered by one adult to another. It’s as if somebody only fractionally more experienced in a proscribed grown-up activity is sharing his “superior” expertise with a beginner.
However at the point of the mates’ first separation the protagonist cherishingly refers to these patently superfluous directions, thereby inviting a subtextual reading of this moment’s peculiar emotional resonance as being, for both men, sexually charged.
And although in the novel’s introduction Johnson is depicted as a mature, combat-hardened man of the world, his apparent shakiness at this, his first encounter with Scott, may be believably indexed to his sexual inexperience: “He was young then, not more than twenty-two."
Hidden here in plain view, the apparently casual making of a fag points to an audacious homoerotic subtext
Sexual innocence is entirely credible in somebody whose emergence from adolescence into adulthood has taken place during active army service. Hidden here in plain view, the apparently casual making of a fag points to an audacious homoerotic subtext. Scotty’s roll-your-own advice offers Johnson and the reader unequivocal reassurance that despite the inexpertness of the hero’s initiatory attempt to piece together what is an implicitly phallic symbol, the effort will be well-rewarded.
Scott’s final remark—“They’re better than anything you’ll buy”—while directing attention to the relative merits of roll-your-own versus tailor-made cigarettes, actually misleads in suggesting that Johnson would not also have to buy the makings of DIY smokes. Therefore the reader attuned otherwise may treat this remark as a metaphorical one. Scott’s cocksure implication is that an intimate relationship with him, freely entered into, will produce better sexual rewards than could ever result from Johnson’s purchase of “tailor-made” sexual services from women like the prostitute Rose.
In the previous chapter Johnson’s half-hearted attempt to buy sex from Rose is depicted as fizzling out. By contrast, after Scott’s assurance of the merits of rolling-your-own Mulgan subtextually implies in the phrase “a little later”, that post-coital bonhomie is what accounts for the geniality of Scott’s remark about their boss Blakeway: “‘He’s not a bad old sod,’ he said, a little later of Blakeway, ‘only it’s an easier life when he’s off the farm’.” The sexual-afterglow unreliability of Scott’s assessment is apparent in its direct contradiction of the chillingly impartial summation of the farm boss offered to Johnson but a page earlier by the hotel-keeper: “He’s got money alright, but he’s mean as death".
Mulgan’s carefully nuanced use of the roll-your-own as a sexual symbol is further apparent in the homosocial prospecting of Johnson’s offer to make a rollie for the trucker Sayers, whose lift assists him to escape the Auckland police.
Then in part two of the novel, when the protagonist offers a smoke to Jim, his brother, Mulgan recognises the incest taboo by restricting Johnson to the prefabricated courtesy of a tailormade: “He opened a packet of cigarettes, offered Jim one, and took one himself.”
The sexual symbolism of the roll-your-own, as referenced at the point of the protagonist’s first period of separation from Scott, also allows Johnson to recall the smoking details of his original encounter with his mate as being “the teachable moment” of their relationship. Here the elegiac tone of what is in fact only to be a temporary separation permits Mulgan to subtextually reaffirm the sexual symbolism of Scott’s lesson: “He was going, as far as Thompson and the farm were concerned, without sympathy or regret, but was sorry to leave Scotty, with the lank hair and the twisted drooping moustache, the man who had shown him how to roll his cigarettes.”
Apart from the single chapter describing Johnson’s sojourn in the north, the pair will not be parted again until their traumatic separation, years later, in the suggestively named Queen Street riot.
An abridged extract from Smoking: The homoerotic subtext of Man Alone by Janet Charman, to be published later this year by Steele Roberts. Man Alone by John Mulgan (Victoria University Press, $30) is available in bookstores nationwide.
