New Yorker Fiction Review #253: "The Englishman" by Douglas Stuart
This is Douglas Stuart's second story in The New Yorker this year -- second of all time, I think -- following on his story called "Found Wanting" from the Jan. 13, 2020 issue. Since that story was published pre-COVID and before I went through my renewed New Yorker obsession and finally got caught up again on reviewing the stories as they come out each week, I did not read "Found Wanting."
However, based on some literary triangulation -- i.e. reading this current effort,"The Englishman,"and a quick reading of a couple of Douglas Stuart's interviews -- one can get a pretty decent idea what Douglas Stuart is all about and what material he's working with. Essentially, it seems he is exploring what it means (or what it meant) to grow up gay in rural Scotland in the 80s and 90s. Throw in some poverty, family dysfunction, and drug abuse, and you've got his 2020 novel Shuggie Bain (sorry to put such a revisionist summary on a book I've never read...but also not sorry).
As to the short story at hand, "The Englishman," we have a short story set in 1990 or so about a young Scottish man named David (19 or 20 years old) who answers a personal ad in a gay magazine and travels to London to be the "house boy" for a rich English banker. Except that when he gets there he either pretends he doesn't understand the arrangement, or actually doesn't understand it, and essentially he and the rich banker, William, never really get along and David takes the train home to Scotland after a week or so.
What's interesting about this story is the power differential between the rich banker and the young working class kid from Scotland. This is clearly a broader theme in Douglas Stuart's writing, but in the immediate term it gives the main character a sort of two-layered minority status: he is gay and he is Scottish. Being "Scottish" might not sound like it counts as minority status but in the U.K. at one time, especially among a certain class of people, it was. Maybe it still is.
Thus William, with more money (the true determiner of status, am I right?), more years, more sophistication, and being English, might have a lot of power over David. The younger man tries to adapt to this arrangement, but ultimately he exercises really the only power he has in the situation: the right to walk away.
William, the wealthy, (presumably closeted) gay bachelor skirts a bit too close to Hannibal Lechter territory, with his meticulous photo albums full of all the "houseboys" he has employed over the years, and certainly would not have survived very long in the #metoo era in which people are more empowered to call attention to sexual predators. Is William a sexual predator? The arrangements he gets into seem voluntary enough (if one can even use such a term) and in the end he never forces David to do anything or threatens him in any way.
This story should be considered, mainly, an episode from a much larger story arc about a young man in search for himself. The story by itself doesn't have enough consequence on its own, or even in the life of the main character, to be truly memorable for it's own sake, but more -- as a lot of novelists do when they write short stories -- acts as a microscopic examination of one period or episode in a character's life, which carries undercurrents or signs as to where the character may be headed in life.
The one key paragraph that I'll remember from this story:
"There are no trees on my island. There have not been any for hundreds of years, not since they were all chopped down for boats or fuel. The land offers no protection. Whatever soil has scabbed over the Lewisian gneiss is too intractable to grow anything other than the hardiest of vegetables, and even those have to be cultivated in raised beds.
Occasionally, holidaymakers who were romanced by the isolation of the isle would buy an old croft and set about planting an apple tree or a peony rose. The islanders would cover their smiles and wait. They knew that trees are like men. They need one another, and without the support of a cluster they will be ripped up, knocked over; they will wither."
You can sometimes notice writers handing you the keys to understanding a story or character. In my opinion, that is what Douglas Stuart is doing in the above paragraph. To me this pretty much encapsulates David's journey to London, whether or not he realizes it, which is an attempt to find and connect with others like himself after spending his life feeling like an outcast in Scotland. Furthermore, I think it hints to the larger journey David might be on in life.
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