Book Review: Lord Dismiss Us
/Lord Dismiss Us
Lord Dismiss Us was published in 1967, the year English law was amended to decriminalize homosexuality between consenting adults. Change was in the air, and few previous novels had paid so much attention to schoolboy sex – a highly charged subject even today – without flinching in the end.
Campbell’s novel is set only a decade earlier than Holleran’s sex-and-drugs romp, and yet it feels as alien as Alpha Centauri. In these pages not the smallest particle of homoeroticism can be acknowledged openly, even though the Greek and Roman classics at the backbone of middling-rank Weatherhill public school, where our scene is laid, are suffused with it. Instead, a humid sub-climate of unspoken attentions and physical negotiations pervades every classroom and leafy cul-de-sac, and the students are entirely acclimated to an environment not of kaleidoscopic disco lights but of coded messages and secret nighttime assignations, as often as not between students and teachers:
He kind of half lies on [my bed], up on the pillow beside me, with his head against the wall … (there’s a hair oil mark above my bed only) … and his left hand comes in and works its way inside the back of my pyjamas, while he is talking – and none of them know – and he takes my bottom between finger and thumb and gives it a gentle pinch, which is comforting and flattering, and at the very same time somehow not entirely pleasant.
(In the subtle, telling note of pride at the sole possession of that head-stain on the wall lies a good index of Campbell’s thrilling skill at evoking pathos without demeaning it.)As the novel opens, the teeming, steady-state chaos of Weatherhill is radically destabilized by the arrival of the new headmaster Philip Crabtree, a middle-brow reforming martinet who immediately quarrels with Ashley and only reluctantly allows himself to see the ‘problem’ at the heart of his new school (“His lips were purple, with the lower one protruding, and his face rubicund,” Campbell writes, “His hair was sandy, turning grey, and it had been cut high above the ears, to show that there was going to be no malingering”). With Crabtree comes his imperious, troublemaking wife, who takes up an affair, as the novel progresses, more out of boredom than lust.At the heart of the novel is the burgeoning, impossible love between Ashley and a senior student, although Campbell here avoids most of the dated high camp that can at times deform his other (equally forgotten) novels. The sharpness of his observations has a decidedly post-Stonewall acidity that makes Lord Dismiss Us ripe for rediscovery. This is the wry and utterly unsentimental chronicle of a world steadily being legislated out of existence, but our author – no stranger himself to frustrations that run too deep for easy expression – wisely situates the main weight of his narrative’s power on the universality of young yearning. Which, alas, never goes out of date.