The Great Mirror of Same-Sex Love - Prose - 77. Axel Nissen “Entirely credible and honestly touching”

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Axel Nissen “Entirely credible and honestly touching”

I am posting this story introduction alone because its shows what first-class research in Gay+ belle lettres should look like. The fact that the researcher provides documented proof that the real-life couple of the story actually lived is entirely due to his intrepid digging into the subject. By Nissen doing so, it stymies all the Gay-erasing, Gay-deniers a chance to say Harte “didn’t mean THAT!” Thanks to Nissen, we can rebuff any attacks on the integrity of the work’s same-sex love aspects with a spirited “Ha, Suck it, haters. Live with the truth for once.”

And, I will be posting the story next, so no need to search online and find a possibly corrupted (that is, straight-censored) version of Tennessee’s Partner. I will be reproducing it from the first book edition of 1871.

Till Death Us Do Part

Bret Harte,

“Tennessee’s Partner” (1869)

Bret Harte was born Francis Brett Harte on August 25th, 1836, in Albany, New York. He traveled to California at the age of seventeen and by the late 1860s had become the literary leader of the western United States. As founding editor of the Overland Monthly, he became mentor of writers such as Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Ina Donna Coolbrith, and Charles Warren Stoddard. Harte’s contemporary reputation rests on the handful of stories he wrote for the Overland in the two and a half year period prior to his triumphant return to the East in 1871, including “The Outcasts of Poker Flat,” “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” and “Tennessee’s Partner.”

“Tennessee’s Partner,” arguably Harte’s most enduring and finely crafted story, was first published in the Overland Monthly in October 1869 and later included in Harte’s landmark first short story collection, The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches (1870) [sic]. Reviewing the volume in the Atlantic Monthly, Harte’s soon-to-be friend, William Dean Howells, pointed out that the author was “quite a unique figure in American authorship, not only that he writes of unhackneyed things, but that he looks at the life he treats in uncommon lights.” What struck the reviewer was “the entirely masculine temper of his mind, or rather, a habit of concerning himself with the things that please only men.” [ii]

Despite Howells’ assurances, not all men were able to relish “the rude pathos” of Tennessee’s Partner. The story has been the source of continuous critical dissension. In his first edition of The Luck of Roaring Camp, Mark Twain wrote the following comment against the last paragraph of the story: “Does the artist show a clear knowledge of human nature when he makes his hero welcome back a man who has committed against him a sin which neither the great nor the little ever forgive?—& not only welcome him back but love him with the fondling love of a girl to the last, & then pine and die for the loss of him?”

Others have posed the same [hetero-biased] questions. In an attack on Harte’s “sentimentality,” that entirely misses the point of the story, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren made “Tennessee’s Partner” representative of the worst aspects of American fiction. Making the [tangential] wife-stealing episode central [as Twain had] to their analysis in their influential college textbook Understanding Fiction (1943), they concluded that “the author intends for the reader to experience an intense emotion which is actually not justified by the materials of the story” and that [Harte] never comes to terms with the ”real psychological issues [i.e. queerness as a “disease”] involved.”

What Brooks and Warren, and several other modern critics, seem unable or unwilling to come to terms with is that this is primarily a story about the love between two men, not about their relationship to a random, chronically unfaithful woman who briefly pops in and out of their life together. When we recognize that their partnership is of primary importance in their lives, the story’s intrigue becomes entirely credible and honestly touching.

In a male-dominated world – women were only one-twelfth the population of California in 1850 – the men in the mining camps turned to each other, forming partnerships that oftentimes lasted a lifetime. Anyone doubting the plausibility of Harte’s short story and the possibility of an intensity of emotion between men such as it depicts, need only turn to the lives of Harte’s purported models for corroboration. John A. Chaffee and his partner Chamberlain came to California in 1849 and spent more than fifty years together in a tiny cabin in Second Garrote. Though Harte never met them, he has given us an eerily prophetic portrayal of what would be described by one reader as “a love surpassing the love of woman, true unto death and beyond death.” Not long after John Chaffee died in late July 1903, Chamberlain chose to take his own life. [v]

“Tennessee’s Partner” is only the most famous of Harte’s many stories about love among the “Argonauts” [his term for the California gold-rush 49ers]. He would continue to write these stories throughout his life: “Captain Jim’s Friend” (1888) and “Uncle Jim and Uncle Billy” (1897) being most clearly in the mold of his classic story from 1869.

—Axel Nissen,

2003