Pip Gordon calls The Welcome (UMiss Press 2023), Hubert Creekmore’s “most radically significant work,” and both terms seem important to understanding what makes this novel noteworthy. Gordon discovered that, perhaps because the novel went so completely out of print, there was surprisingly little academic work on it, despite its recognition as an important example of pre-1969 gay-themed literature. He and a few other scholars, moved by the value of Creekmore’s writing, began the work of bringing it back into the full gaze of scholars, historians, and documentary filmmakers, a process that, for the moment, has culminated in this 2023 volume of The Welcome returning to print.
Set in fictional Ashton, Mississippi, a small, somewhat claustrophobic town in which the old money families struggle to maintain social position, the same-sex desire around which the story centers itself is key, but Creekmore is clearly also interested in a lot of the same things—the rise of consumer culture and twentieth-century alienation stand out as examples—that interested contemporaries like Fitzgerald, Welty, and of course, Faulkner. At its heart The Welcome is about a romance plot mostly focused on the difficult-to-navigate relationship between Don Mason and Jim Furlow, but that trouble spins the story in interesting and not always expected directions. Outsiders whose interest in big ideas like the ones they found in The Dial or The New Republic mark them as products of the same North Mississippi that produced Faulkner’s Quinton Compson, Jim and Don had been inseparable until Jim, no longer able to stand being an outsider, plans to marry Doris and find a place in the community. Don, heartbroken, and unwilling to bear witness, leaves for New York.
Don’s return after three years in the city is the impulse that puts the plot into motion. The single women of Ashton, desperate for eligible men, excitedly talk about him coming back over Cokes at the drug store and Gus Traywick, a school friend of Jim and Don’s is recruited to meet Don at the train station. Almost the first third of the novel walks up the narrative tension leading up to Jim and Don’s first encounter, which, when it finally happens is an underwhelming exchange of small talk at a party hosted by Magde Dalton, one of the leading women of Ashton. Don is fixing a drink when this happens:
Turning, he came face to face with Jim, who stood before him almost in a challenge.
“How long you going to be here?” asked Jim casually, looking straight into his eyes.
“For good.”
“Oh! Not going back to New York?” There was a trace of sarcastic antagonism in the tone.
Jim’s story goes from bad to worse. Something about Don’s return awakens the deepest of his dissatisfactions with his life, especially his marriage to Doris, whose narcissism and class anxiety make her impossible to live with. She relentlessly complains to Jim, for instance, about wanting a Lincoln so she can show up Magde Dalton by having a nicer car. This conflict comes to a head not long after Don’s return when Jim drunkenly confronts Doris about her coldness and demands they start a family. After his ultimatum the narrator explains with a sort of grim optimism that Jim, “didn’t urge her any further. Perhaps the whole conflict could rest unresolved with the trivial impasse, and no change would come into their lives.” Doris, however, breaks the silence in the worst possible way. “Will you promise to give me the car,” she asked hesitantly, “if I…if…”
It’s a central point to the story that he isn’t married, but Don’s home life is similarly plagued. His ailing mother demands more and more of Don’s attention, petulantly angry first about his job at the newspaper and then at the attention he pays to Isabel Long, a woman whose self-possession marks her as an outsider much the way Don was. In fact, if there’s something to criticize in this novel it might be that it doesn’t exactly treat the female characters fairly, making Doris and Mrs. Mason into cartoonish villains rather than women caught up in the same sort of pressures and disappointments that make life so hard for Don and Jim.
Meanwhile Gus Traywick, called Tray by all his friends, and his wife Bea stand out as the only genuinely happy people in the story. Their marriage has the sort of boisterous love that makes them radiate goodwill. The narrator clearly sees Gus as a sort of perpetual sidekick to the more sophisticated (and miserable) Don and Jim, but the seemingly effortless affection we see between him and Bea and their relentless commitment to help their friends mark them as the model for this world. Although subject to the same superficial consumerism and sterile modernity—Bea can’t have children—their ability to connect with each other allows them to find the meaning and satisfaction that escapes Don and Jim.
After Doris delivers the baby, the story escalates. Jim’s anger and drinking are completely out of control. On a duck hunt organized by Tray, Jim asks Don to kill him. He doesn’t and shortly after, Jim confronts Don at his house with a half-cocked plan for the two of them to run away together. “You were a coward when you were young,” Don tells him, finally articulating the hurt that drove him away the first time “a coward when you married. And now, when you can’t face your marriage, you want me to rescue you.”
In the meantime, perhaps shaken by Jim’s downward spiral and driven by misguided self-recrimination over what he sees as by his inability to make her happy, Don has abandoned his relationship with Isabel. All seems lost, but Tray confronts Isabel about her plan to move to New Orleans. Revealing the truth about Don and Jim—something he discovered during the duck hunt—Tray tells her, “I’ve begun to see the two parts—the two double parts. I never thought about it till I realized Jim—But things hang on, they come back. Just understand Isabel; just try.”
Ultimately, Isabel convinces Don that they can be happy together and their wedding, a relatively simple ceremony at his mother’s house, closes the story with a mixed sense of possibility. “Jim,” Isabel tells him after the wedding, “Come see us when we get back…Will you? We want you to.” As the newlyweds leave, Tray confronts Jim, who is sulking in Don’s old room, telling him “You’ve never tried, deep down, to be happy.” Jim’s tears catch him off guard, and the novel closes with Tray awkwardly at first and then gently wrapping his arms around Jim, whispering “If only people could forgive each other for loving,” with a voice not entirely his own.
Returning to Philip Gordon’s introduction to the novel, a detail that seems worth noting is that his rediscovery of The Welcome, is rooted in graduate school work he did at the University of Mississippi, with Dr. Jamie Harker, whose Violet Valley Book Store is now a fixture in Creekmore’s native Water Valley, MS. That Gordon was moved to return to the novel and his work with other Mississippi LGBTQ scholars all these years later speaks to the power of community in preserving and recontextualizing this kind of important literary history and, I think, also offers a hopeful counterpoint to the isolation that Jim and Don suffered though in The Welcome.
Writer, critic, translator, librettist, and poet Hubert Creekmore was born in Water Valley, Mississippi. He earned a BA from the University of Mississippi. He then went on to study drama at the University of Colorado and play writing at Yale University before earning an MA in American literature from Columbia University. Creekmore served in Pacific in the U.S. Navy during World War II. After the war, he moved to New York City, where he worked as an editor and literary agent for New Directions publishing company, as well as a teacher, freelance writer, and translator. His collections of poetry include Personal Sun: the Early Poems of Hubert Creekmore (1940), The Stone Ants (1942), The Long Reprieve and Other Poems of New Caledonia (1946), and Formula (1947). His novels include The Fingers of the Night (1946), The Welcome (1948), Cotton Country (1950), and The Chain in the Heart (1953).
Phillip Gordon is associate professor of English and gay studies coordinator at University of Wisconsin–Platteville. He was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and grew up just north of Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County.
Leave a Reply