I first learned of Louise W. King’s queer comedies from Barbara Grier’s capsule book reviews (written as Gene Damon) in the 1960s lesbian magazine The Ladder. “If ever a novel could rightly be termed Gay, this is it,” she wrote of King’s first book, The Day We Were Mostly Butterflies (1964), describing the book as “High camp in full flight.”
I suspect that Grier was the only reviewer who “got” the book. The TLS missed the fact that it’s a work of comic fiction, noting instead that it admirably avoided “the twin temptations of revelatory pornography and sociological exposition.” Hear, hear! Punch’s reviewer, the young Malcolm Bradbury, on the other hand, bristled at the publisher’s description of the book as “camped up Jane Austenese,” writing that “my indignation still hasn’t cooled.” He found it more “camped-down Truman Capotese” and dismissed it as a complete failure as a work of fiction: “Nothing at all in the way of real relationships or convincing dialogue pulls them around in the direction of reality; so that the bright sparkle of the wit seems to have nothing to engage with, and Jane Austen wouldn’t like it at all.”
But then, even its publishers didn’t understand The Day We Were Mostly Butterflies. The U.K. publisher, Michael Joseph, was responsible for the completely off-target Jane Austen comparison. And the U.S. publisher, Doubleday, was even more obtuse. At the time, Doubleday ran a regular ad in The Saturday Review of Literature and similar journals in the form of a “Letter from the Editor” written by one L. L. Day. Their ad for the week of November 14, 1964 called the book “the best novel I ever read about an interior decorator living more or less happily in sin with the cast-off girlfried of a lady truck driver,” which suggests that the copywriter either didn’t read the book or was one of the dumbest straight men on Madison Avenue.
Both The Day We Were Mostly Butterflies and its sequel The Velocipede Handicap (1965) are about the misadventures of an queer threesome living in Greenwich Village. Miss Moppet is a beautiful blonde agent of chaos who carries on like an airhead while maintaining an impressive TBR stack in her bed (“In her bed? You mean by her bed?” “No, in her bed”) with everything from Naked Lunch to the complete works of Shakespeare. Everywhere she goes, she insists on bringing along her pet turtle Emma Hamlet Woodhouse, named for her three favorite works of literature [Woodhouse = Wodehouse. Ed.].
Miss Moppet is alternately loved and loathed by Lillian Richardson, a lady truck driver who hits the road whenever she finds her patience with Moppet’s antics running thin. Rounding out the trio, narrating their tales, and usually cleaning up afterwards, is Maurice Calhoun, an interior decorator and delicate Southern beau. Whenever Lillian heads out of New York City, she leaves Moppet in his charge. Maurice denies any such responsibility:
I might take this opportunity to explain about Miss Moppet and how she doesn’t belong to me at all. And just in case any damnyakee Federalist is making ready to pop up and give me that Union jazz about no one human being owning another since the days of the unspeakable treachery of General Butler and his ilk, I know it sufficiently good and well…. Miss Moppet is more than usually unrewarding as far as I am concerned because not only can you not hitch her to a little basket cart and drive to distant places … but she doesn’t care for men and won’t do the littlest morsel of housework.
In fact, the book opens with Maurice complaining that Moppet has just slipped into the bathroom with a copy of McTeague to avoid washing the dishes.
The Day We Were Mostly Butterflies is no novel, but rather a collection of four stories, and though The Velocipede Handicap is one coherent story, taken together the book more closely resemble The Pickwick Papers or Mr. Sponge’s Sporting Tour than anything we’d consider a novel today. One story is about a trip to Coney Island where Emma Hamlet Woodhouse (the turtle) gets lost (temporarily). In another, Maurice comes home to find that Miss Moppet has smuggled a racehorse into the laundry room. A racehouse features again in The Velocipede Handicap, but this time outside the apartment and in the clutches of a bunch of mafiosi.
But just as with P. G. Wodehouse, it’s a mistake to read the Moppet/Lillian/Maurice stories for plot. Good comedy is always about the journey, not the destination. And though King’s characters are gay, there’s nothing more titillating in her books than there is in Wodehouse’s. She does, however, slip in more than a few sly observations from the queer side of life.
On one of her road trips, Lillian sends Miss Moppet a postcard of a redhead stripper from Reno. “It’s true what they say about the West, love L.” reads the inscription. Moppet begs Maurice to explain: what did they say about the West? “They always do say the West is wide open.”
When, at Coney Island, Miss Moppet tells Maurice somewhat haughtily that she doesn’t swim, she wades, he informs her,
Moppet, honey, you can wade elegantly near the shore. It’s out deeper all the evil dykes swim, to show how terribly manly they are. You’d be fifty million times happier just messing around in the shallows with the queens…. You don’t want to go wading in deep water where some butch is likely to drown you without ever knowing it.
So much for the TLS reviewer’s claim that King avoids “sociological exposition.”
I have to admit that I found The Day We Were Mostly Butterflies and The Velocipede Handicap somewhat tedious when I first read them straight through (no pun intended) some months ago, and I kept putting off writing this post. But that tends to be true of a lot of comic writing. I thoroughly enjoy S. J. Perelman, for example, whenever I sit down and read one of his pieces. One — not two, and never three. And I’d put the same warning label on these two books: “To Be Consumed in Small Portions.”
Taken in small bites, there is something to enjoy on almost every page. Here, for example, is a moment in a diner, from “The Love Goddess of the Middle West,” about the attempt by Miss Moppet’s third cousin twice removed to make it in the Big Apple as “an editor, or an actress, or a poetress, or all three”:
The Love Goddess said loudly that she’d like a ham and cheese sandwich and a glass of sarsparilla to drink, without bothering to say please or thank you. The waitress mopped off the marble top of the table, and carefully wrote down what the Love Goddess wanted on a little pad of paper. No sooner had the waitress turned herself around and got halfway to the safety of the kitchen, than the Love Goddess changed her mind about the sarsparilla. By saying “hey” very insistently several times, the Love Goddess managed to call the girl back. After an unconscionable amount of erasing and a few false starts for the kitchen on the part of the waitress, the Love Goddess settled on a ham and cheese sandwich and a glass of sarsparilla.
One of the few critics to mention King’s work after its initial publication called her books “amusing but mindless and stereotyped trash.” While I think that’s quite unfair, I wouldn’t take the Wodehouse comparison too far. One of the reasons we can still read and enjoy Wodehouse is that there is always a certain deftness in his touch. Restraint is crucial for comic writing to survive, and strain is the disease that usually kills it off. King wrote these books in the space of just a couple of years (her first story appeared in The Transatlantic Review in 1962), and there are times when her effort to be funny shows.
Louise W. King only attempted one other work of adult fiction, an apparently un-ironic Gothic thriller titled The Rochemer Hag (1967). She moved to Connecticut, where she took up ceramics and was active in animal rights causes. She self-published a children’s book about two Pekingese puppies, Geronimo and Geranium, in 1979. She died in Washington, Connecticut in 2016.