Is "A Separate Peace" Gay?

Here's the high school essay I never knew to write.

Last weekend, I finished a book on the couch, closing it with a satisfied thump. (Book: Play it as it Lays. Author: Joan Didion. My review: Good; sad.) I reached behind me to the bookshelf in our living room – not even getting off of that couch – searching for something easy and breezy to read next. My fingers danced across the tops of the books and paused on John Knowles’ A Separate Peace.

I read A Separate Peace at least three times growing up. Once in junior high school, when a woman at the bookstore recommended it to me, and then again in ninth grade in Honors English with Mrs. Stevenson, before I got a C on my paper and dropped the class to go to non-Honors-English, where I read it again in the spring, smug that I knew what I could write my paper on.

I’ll save an examination of the regrets and trauma of believing you’re not good enough to be in a class for another decaf draft, because what I really want to concentrate on here is the book itself. If you have not read A Separate Peace (do they read it outside of New England? Serious question), here’s a quick synopsis WITH SPOILERS in case you too read some high school classics as an adult: It’s 1944 and Gene goes to a New England boarding school with his friend Phineas, known as Finny. As a game, they jump out of this tree into a river until one day, when the two are on the branch together, Gene jounces the limb and Finny falls and injures himself. Finny ruins his athletic talent, without knowing why he fell, and Gene spends the rest of the time wrestling with guilt (his own) and the horrors of humanity (in general). When Finny breaks his leg a second time, and dies during a surgery, it marks the loss of innocence in totality. The boys have become men, understanding the dark truth of humanhood; peace is broken, and it’s off to the War.

OK now that we’re all caught up: I loved A Separate Peace growing up, and I never really knew why. I loved the characters, barely older than I was at the time, and how they felt so many things I did: confusion, rage, joy. I love that Finny wore his tie as a belt. (I tried it once or twice. The literary reference was lost on my peers, and it was hard to go to the bathroom.) I loved how I recognized the New England outside my window in those pages, and especially loved the descriptions of the Devon campus. Sitting in my public school classrooms, I dreamed of going to that boarding school with the marble staircase and the gym across the field and the shared rooms and the smoking lounge in the basement. I wanted to go back to my own room after class, not home. It sounded amazing.

Another thing I loved: the friendship between Finny and Gene. Like, just dudes all living together and jumping out of trees holding hands. It’s not explicitly gay, especially knowing this was butch WWII era, but it feels a little, you know … [drops wrists]. 

So when I re-read it last week, I was kind of surprised to pick up on even more clues. Mrs. Stevenson nailed into our brains writing “Knowles suggests …” in our papers, to quote his writing and justify our own theses. In reading, and writing this, I kept thinking, Knowles suggests that he’s one of us.

Take, for example, Knowles’ description of Brinker Hadley, the upper-classman who is heavily involved in school politics, and, we later learn, kind of catty. In that first scene, our narrator, Gene, confesses that there isn’t much special about Brinker “unless you saw him from behind” (79) , which, I understand as there are plenty of people I know from the gym who I describe in this way. (Also, yes, I’m going to quote the page numbers because despite what Mrs. Stephenson said I’m not a C student.) Knowles continues that his “gabardine jacket parted slightly over his healthy rump, and it is that, without any sense of derision at all, that I recall as Brinker’s salient characteristic; those healthy, determined, not over-exaggerated but definite and substantial buttocks” (79).

That’s a full paragraph in first meeting a character dedicated to the beauty of his booty. His athletic buns look good in that gabardine suit and Knowles, via Gene, knows it. Knowles suggests the beauty of the male form through muscular, inviting buttocks, which, when I was a teenage boy I certainly did not think it was normal to admire dudes’ from behind and certainly not something I would write all over page 79 of my novel. Also, the next time I’m searching for online content, I want to write “healthy, determined, not over-exaggerated but definite and substantial buttocks” and see what I get.

It didn’t work.

By the way, when I was looking up more about John Knowles for this piece, apparently Brinker is based his Phillips Exeter buddy – and known homosexual – Gore Vidal. So, there’s that.

Take also Knowles’ description of the school locker room, one that stood out for its “pungent air” where “sweat predominated … richly mingled with smells of paraffin and singed rubber, of soaked wool and liniment, and for those who could interpret it, of exhaustion, lost hope and triumph and bodies battling against each other” (105). Those who could interpret it feels like a specific type of person if you know what I mean.

Knowles continues, as the narrator, Gene: “I thought it anything but a bad smell. It was preeminently the smell of the human body after it had been used to the limit, such a smell as has meaning and poignance for any athlete, just as it has for any lover” (105).

Now, sex is never explicitly mentioned in this (YA) novel, and practically every character is male. This is one of the only suggestions of sex. Here, Knowles suggests that athleticism and sex are mutual; they activate the senses in a primal and natural way, just as emotions for, say, your buddy whose athletic build “flowed from his legs to torso around shoulders to arms and full strong neck in an uninterrupted, unemphatic unity of strength” (8).

Inspired by that strength, the two friends wrestle; at one point Gene body-checks Finny, “catching him by surprise, and he was instantly down, definitely pleased. This was why he liked me so much. When I jumped on top of him, my knees on his chest, he couldn’t ask for anything better” (11). Again, just, so much in common with these characters.

When the athletic Finny breaks a school swimming record, casually, without any other witness than Gene, he asks our narrator to keep it a secret, causing his “head [to feel] dizzy and my stomach began to tingle …. It made Finny seem too unusual for – not friendship, but too unusual for rivalry. And there are few relationships among us at Devon not based on rivalry” (37). Indeed, their relationship is deeper and different than friendship.

After Finny’s (AGAIN SPOILER ALERT) death, Gene confides that he doesn’t cry because he “could not escape the feeling that this was my own funeral, and you do not cry in that case” (186). He loses, in a sense, his entire personhood and identity in when his best friend leaves this Earth. Loss of innocence, yes, but also, perhaps, a loss of love.

Early in the book, when the two sneak off campus for the night to sleep on the beach, Gene wakes up before Finny the next morning. The image of Finny “asleep on his dune, made me think of Lazarus, brought back to life by the touch of God” (41). What an incredibly romantic line to write.

That description of Phineas as Lazarus is marked with a pen in my book. It’s the only mark-up in there. Seeing it last weekend felt like peeking into a time capsule I forgot I buried. For whatever reason, as a teenager reading this book, waking up to the gray dawn on the beach next to your friend seemed worthy of marking.

Queer kids today may have the internet in their pockets, but I had my dog-eared copy of A Separate Peace. Rereading Knowles suggests that was enough.