Gordon Merrick - Literary Success

Literary Success

Merrick's first novel, The Strumpet Wind (1947), was a huge success in the United States for a gay novel. The somewhat autobiographical novel is about a gay American spy in France during World War II. Homosexual themes are minimized in the novel, which explores concepts of individual liberty and freedom. The spy's director is a dazzlingly handsome but sadistic bisexual. It would be easy to dismiss the novel as homophobic, but Merrick does not let the reader off so easily. Nearly every character in the novel has major character faults, including the protagonist. Merrick neatly turns the "evil homosexual" character on his head by presenting every human being as flawed. The pressures of war only exacerbate these problems, bringing out each person's inability to handle his own problems.

With the money he earned, Merrick returned to France. Merrick continued to write in France, but success eluded him. He left France to avoid the unrest which accompanied the Algerian War of Independence. Merrick moved to Greece and took up residence on the island of Hydra.

During his Greek tenure, Merrick's best-known book, The Lord Won't Mind, became his second major American success. Charlie Mills and Peter Martin are both young, handsome and well-endowed. They meet and fall madly in love. The book has been criticized for its insistence on beauty in the gay male world. Although the novel and Merrick are often criticized for an insistent emphasis on handsome virile men, some critics defend Merrick:

Beauty is a part of gay life, an important part—those men aren't spending all those hours at the gym just for the cardiovascular benefits. This "obsession" has its roots in our core definition; we are gay because we find men beautiful. Beauty has its dangers, of course. That's part of our complex response to it, and it is in fact this complexity that makes beauty a valid and vital subject for our literature.

The book follows Charlie's path from a closeted gay man to a person who accepts himself. Charlie is terrified of rejection, especially that of his rigid, moralistic grandmother whom he loves but who expects him to marry and have children. Charlie at first attempts to live a double-life, expressing his homosexuality through acting and painting. But his life is incomplete without Peter.

It is through Charlie's anguish that the reader catches a glimpse of Merrick's interest in the problems the gay male experiences establishing an identity. Charlie's socially imposed resistance is in contrast to Peter's childlike innocence. When Charlie eventually throws Peter out and marries a woman to protect his reputation, every reader, straight or gay, can detest his duplicity and weakness, but must also empathize with the situation that Charlie has had forced upon him by an intolerant society.

Charlie's wife later suspects his homosexuality, and perpetrates an horrific act of violence on her husband. As Charlie works through the aftermath of the attack, he slowly comes to realize that honesty and self-acceptance are the only way out. Merrick presents this self-isolation as a necessary first step on the road to self-realization.' At book's end, Charlie finally confesses his love for Peter, and they move in together.

The book appeared on the New York Times Best Seller list for sixteen weeks in 1970. The first in a trilogy, Merrick followed it up with One for the Gods in 1971 and Forth into Light in 1974. In 2004, German screenwriter Renatus Töpke wrote several drafts of a screenplay. Currently, Munich production company and Paradigma Entertainment is attempting to raise money to finance a motion picture based on the books.

Merrick left Greece in 1980, when the local tourism industry made Hydra too crowded for his taste. In that year he moved to Ceylon (now known as Sri Lanka), having bought property there in 1974. But he returned to France occasionally, eventually purchasing a home in Tricqueville. For the rest of his life, he divided his time between the two countries.

Gordon Merrick died in Colombo, Sri Lanka, of lung cancer on March 27, 1988. He was survived by his companion, Charles Gerald Hulse (born 1929), a dancer turned actor turned novelist (In Tall Cotton, 1987).