[Since I'm spending some time back in Natchez, MS this month, I thought I would repost this story about a much-overlooked Mississippi writer, Hubert Creekmore, that I wrote last year. Mississippi has produced so many marvelous authors, including William Faulkner, Eudora Welty and Natchez native Richard Wright. The mystery writer Greg Iles now lives in Natchez. But few people today remember Hubert Creekmore. Like so many of the figures I profile here, he and his work deserve a second look.]

I felt a twinge of trepidation when I picked up The Welcome, a completely forgotten novel written in 1948 by Hubert Creekmore (1907-1966).  It had been a book I’d been seeking for quite some time, and cost a pretty penny on the internet; but I had no idea what to expect. Its cover is as bland as can be, without any hints as to its contents. A writer, editor, agent, critic, translator and poet, Creekmore came from a small town in Mississippi called Water Valley in Yalobusha County. His father, Hiram Creekmore, was the town lawyer with roots that went way back into Southern history. (His house, below, from Mississippi Home-Places by Elmo Howell)

Tall, good-looking, with a taste for bourbon and boldface names, Creekmore felt claustrophobic in his hometown and ventured out into the world after graduating from the University of Mississippi in 1927. He studied drama at the University of Colorado and playwriting at Yale University with George Pierce Baker. He worked with the WPA during the Depression. Then, in 1940 (according to Wikipedia), “he was awarded a Masters in American literature from Columbia University. After finishing his education, he was sent to serve in the Navy during World War II.” He served three years in the Pacific.

Although his entire artistic persona was saturated with his upbringing in the Deep South, Creekmore felt that he would be stifled there –despite a close friendship with the author Eudora Welty. He was a founding member of her famous literary group, The Night-Blooming Cereus Club. Creekmore returned to New York, where he traveled in tony circles, worked for New Directions, and won acclaim for his powerful, touching novels. He also edited volumes of poetry, reviewed books for the Times, wrote libretti, and played the piano. He even, according to an article I found on the web, hosted drag parties with Clifford Wright in his room at Yaddo. He was in every way, shape and form, a man of letters.

Creekmore’s first novel appeared in 1940, Personal Sun, followed by The Stone Ants; The Long Reprieve; The Chain in the Heart; Daffodils Are Dangerous, The Fingers of the Night (later reissued as a pulp, Cotton Country, above), and of course, The Welcome, which is perhaps only known at all today because of its early homosexual theme. In 1966, Creekmore died in a car accident while on his way to the airport to fly to Spain. The freakish nature of his demise was immortalized in a famous poem by William Jay Smith in 1967.

The Welcome is subtitled “A Novel of Modern Marriage.” That’s certainly a wry way of putting it since the story quite obviously revolves around two men struggling to come to grips with a passionate affair they had as young friends. It just might be the first full-blown account of what is now referred to as “bromance”. One of the boys, Don, left to explore his “creative” side in New York; the other, Jim, married the local beauty who is a clothes horse and an airhead. Perhaps Creekmore was hinting that it was the boys’ relationship which was “modern” — a kind of male marriage. If so, he was 60 years ahead of his time!

What makes The Welcome such a curious novel, however, is the fact that Creekmore never utters the word “homosexual” or “queer” to describe the love that dare not speak its name percolating between the two protagonists. Wikipedia says Creekmore was a “closeted homosexual” and perhaps that is why the book is so drastically circumspect in discussing the topic. But there is no denying, reading it today, that homosexuality is the central theme. These two boys moon over each other, fight, take long walks in the woods, swim in the old swimming hole, coo in an abandoned chapel, and do everything that lovers do except touch each other. There’s even a deftly drawn sardonic old bachelor, the local newspaper editor, who takes Don under his wing and tries to mentor him with bitchy barbs and campy self-loathing. It is not until the penultimate page when Jim has become a nasty drunk and nearly abandons his wife out of a sense of lost opportunity and suicidal despair that he utters the unutterable, calling Don “a damned little fairy.”

Yet, despite its tone of caution, or because of it, The Welcome is a tightly written, painstakingly composed tale. Some of the language that Creekmore uncorks is haunting and sensuous, almost hypnotic. When Don, who is clearly based on Creekmore, comes home reluctantly to take care of his sick mother, he revisits his childhood bedroom. He crawls in the dark towards the window sill.

“…he sat down with the deliberation of a man drinking poison, and leaned his arms on it and looked out into the night. The treetops at each side of the roof furled up around his view like dark, restless lace framing the perspective of dim, unpeopled shapes opposite. The lawn stretched flat and unbroken to the black street where two round, clipped lygustrum bushes guarded the walk. On the pavement, at the left, a wriggling mottle of shadows fell through the branches of a tree crowding around a streetlight. Nothing had life but these shadows and the reminiscent wind that gave them life. The houses across the way were vacant shells, solidly impenetrable in their heavy obscurity, an occasional column, banister rail, iron fence or cornice touched pallidly by their distant light. This was the development of the childhood dream-vision he had stared into, waiting and wondering; and it had all darkened and deadened, and in its barrenness and hunger had dragged him back to stare in its scornful face the rest of his days.”

Luckily for Don, he finds new life, after Jim’s rejection, with Isabel, a less-adequately drawn character, perhaps based on someone Creekmore did know and love. She is the local artist, a bohemian ill-at-ease in the small town, and someone who understands, albeit painfully, Don’s secret life. She gives him permission to be who he really is yet strikes an accord that seems to point to a happy future for the two of them. Jim, by contrast, is left with his selfish and childish wife, nursing a newborn baby, and the prospect of unrequited love for the rest of his life. It’s a miracle that Creekmore resisted the temptation to have either Don or Jim commit suicide or be murdered. Gore Vidal’s classic gay novel, The City and The Pillar, also published in 1948, did end with a violent tragedy, although he revised it later out of shame for its cheap melodrama. Creekmore instead leaves us guessing.

The Welcome may not be a “gay novel” in the traditional sense. But it is far more truthful and real than many of the so-called liberated works that came after. And something, to my nostalgic mind at least, far more rewarding than the latest buzz in the bestseller bin.