Vin Packer (aka Marijane Meaker): Spring Fire: San Francisco: Cleis Press: 2003.

Originally published in 1952, Marijane Meaker’s Spring Fire was the first lesbian pulp novel with a contemporary setting. She had some reticence about republishing this work, and asks readers to bear its historical context in mind.

Hey, I enjoyed it, though- particularly the characterisation. Susan Mitchell (”Mitch”) is an upwardly mobile, robust and motherless young woman from Kansas, and the first person in her family to attend university. She becomes aware of her lesbian identity through the conflicted and complex Leda Taylor, her roommate. I found her experience of rape and its concealment horrifying, and it reminded me that the setting certainly was the historical past. By the end of the novel, we care deeply about what has happened to her, and despite her broken relationship with Leda, she has matured and grown as a person. What’s even better, she survives with her lesbian identity more or less intact.

Perhaps because I share some common characteristics with Mitch, I didn’t find it so easy to relate to Leda. However, from a contemporary perspective, and given mention of some of her mother’s shady relationships with men, I wondered if Meaker meant to depict Leda as a survivor of child sexual abuse? It wasn’t unknown in later lesbian pulps (witness Val Taylor’s excellent The Girls in 3-B), and it would certainly explain her latent alcoholism, dysfunctional social and sexual behaviour. I can imagine some contemporary femme lesbian or bisexual readers gritting their teeth at the depiction of this character, though, with the implication that Mitch is the ‘real’ (’butch’) lesbian in their relationship, and Leda is just a fickle, experimenting dilettante.

As for the setting, Meaker evidently found the fraternity and sorority culture class-ridden and hypocritical. As New Zealand universities lack such student institutions, I found myself nauseated at its pretentious class hierarchies, cloying immaturities and ridiculous degree of social control over the activities of the young spoilt brats of both genders that were enmeshed within this suffocating environment.  However, that sounds like an adequate summary of my own ghastly, repressive, hypocritical and conservative high school life in seventies New Zealand, with its alcohol bans, curfew time restrictions and ever-present elderly overseers. Perhaps there were generational differences, but the milieux seem to be virtually identical.

Might I also say that Meaker has produced a potentially great comic creation in the character of “Mother Nesselbush?” This elderly, conservative and plus-size woman is ‘house mother’ to the younger women, childless, widowed and seems deliberately intended to be a figure of grotesquerie and ignorance. For some reason, she reminds me of quite similar elderly conservative Christian women that I’ve encountered on the other sides of picket lines over various contentious social issues over the years.  She could have gone on to write a whole series about her further misadventures.