The Other Sleep

Pascal contemplated that one's waking hours may be but "another sleep," and one's dreaming hours may indeed be another existence, of equal weight. Julian Green contemplated that as he "created" afresh the reality of the present book his imagination was amalgamating events from his past existence: he was not thinking, but dreaming. The book is little because it effortlessly, miraculously conveys the essence of the author's self: his isolation from people acquiescing to ordinariness and impurity, his yearning to speak "I love you" to a beautiful male face and to be answered in kind, the two bonding in a perfection beyond carnality. THE STORY Say around 1908, Denis is the only child of a middle-class family in Paris, but his hardened orphaned cousin Claude, several years older, has been taken in. A poor student, an immovable resister, Claude is like an older brother, an indifferent companion--yet he casts an inexplicable spell over Denis. Denis may gaze long at the sleeping Claude. Denis may gaze long at the naked Greek statues in the plaster-casting shop. Denis is lured by his lycee associate Remy to meet girlfriend Andree, deeply troubled because she has yielded to Remy. Denis loses his father, the First World War breaks out, Claude enlists, Denis loses his mother. Mustered out, Claude stolidly attends her funeral. A few days afterward, Denis seeks out Claude in his hotel room, to join him in the short journey to the site of their summer vacations, and there among the well-remembered trees, to say "I love you." Though the novelette is told in the first person, Julian Green denied that it was really autobiographical. For Denis's relation to father and mother is ultimately unfeeling, and Claude is a recasting of Mark, Julian's perfectly loved beautiful face at the University of Virginia in the early 1920s--a face whose eyes could never express to Julian, I love you.

Julian Green's 1931 novella about a young man who comes to awareness of same-sex desire is a landmark of Gay literature, long out of print. Still, readers who encounter _The Other Sleep_ may find that this voice from the past eerily resembles that of the contemporary Gay writer Edmund White. (I suspect that Green, not Proust, is White's true literary forebear.) Half a century before the classic coming-out novel _A Boy's Own Story_, Green explored very similar emotional territory, and did it at least as well as White.That said, Euan Cameron's translation is much too mannered and precious for my taste. Green has generally been ill served by his translators (which is why, outside of France, he has never been as widely read as he should be), and Cameron is no better or worse than the rest of the lot.