March 17, 2024

And they were roommates!

Spring Fire by Vin Packer/Marijane Meaker (1952)

Two girls lock eyes on the dance floor: one a freshman looking to pledge a sorority at Cranston University, the other the reigning beauty queen of Tri Ep. The younger of the two is Susan Mitchell or "Mitch," an awkward, naive girl who's admitted to the sorority because of her nouveau riche father and flashy red convertible. The older is Leda, whose reputation as a "fast" rule-breaker hasn't stopped her from being crowned the campus Harvest Queen.¹ Because Mitch is considered a bit of a project, she's assigned to room with Leda. In the logic of romantic fiction, they end up falling into bed together. In the logic of lesbian pulp fiction, they will eventually be torn apart in dramatic fashion.

But before that happens, there's plenty of intrigue to recommend Spring Fire to someone browsing a midcentury spinner rack. Aside from the promise of forbidden love and necking coeds, there's also boozing, violence, and even a climactic car crash—no wonder it sold 1.5 million copies. That being said, all that immorality is pretty tame by modern standards. Perhaps that's why I was more interested in Meaker's take on midcentury attitudes about sexuality than I was in the plot.

Do they dare speak its name? 💬

On page 80, when Leda tells Mitch she couldn't love her if she were a lesbian, to which Mitch responds,

‘I'm not,’ Mitch said, wondering what the word meant, ‘I'm not. I—I just haven't met a man yet who makes me feel the way you do.’

In the pages that follow, we see Mitch try to figure out just what this mysterious word means. First she consults Leda's dictionary, which has the following definition:

1. Of or pertaining to Lesbos (now Mytilene), one of the Aegean Islands. 2. Erotic:—in allusion to the reputed sensuality of the people of Lesbos. (81)

Not particularly helpful. The next day Mitch goes to the science reading room, grabs a book from the psychology shelf, and comes to understand that,

a Lesbian was abnormal, a female who could not have satisfactory relations with a male, but only with another female ... Mitch thought back to the crushes she had had in boarding school, awful emotional orgies in which she had idolized certain teachers, and Miss English, the dietician, and there had never been any boys. Until Leda, there had been no one who had set her whole body pulsing with the sweet pain and the glory in the end. That was abnormal. (83)

Mitch returns to this book later on, when she's struggling with her decision to leave the Tri Ep sorority house and move into the dorms. She reads that,

‘The female homosexual, the Lesbian, often preys on girls who are not true homosexuals. Such girls may enjoy men, and be capable of normal heterosexual life if they do not become involved with a genuine Lesbian type, whose technique is often more skillful than that of many of her young men suitors ... under the proper circumstances, a female homosexual may learn to control, if not eliminate, her active homosexual tendencies once she is removed from an environment where the temptation is great ... But, on the other hand, a change in environment may only lead to new conquests, a fresh hunting ground.’ (103)

If you'll forgive me for putting my librarian hat on for a few minutes, I'm struck by a few things here. First, in a pre-digital library, the go-to method for finding introductory information on a topic would be to consult the card catalog entry for that topic, which would list out the call numbers for any relevant books and related terms. Unfortunately, Mitch wouldn't have been able to do this kind of search in 1952. The Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), which has formed the basis for most university libraries since the early 20th century, didn't have a subject heading for “Lesbianism” until 1954, which is probably why Meaker has her heroine look in a general psychology book. That being said, Mitch might have been able to find books listed under the “Homosexuality” subject heading, which had been in use since 1945, or under its cross-reference with “Sexual perversion”. ²

Second, the language Mitch finds in this unnamed psychology book comes across as remarkably stigmatizing, even cruel to a contemporary reader. This is, of course, the product of a homophobic society and an equally prejudiced medical establishment. In the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or DSM-I—coincidentally published in the same year as Spring Fire—homosexuality was classified as a “sociopathic personality disturbance.” Homosexuality remained classified as a disorder until the sixth printing of the DSM-II in 1973, which simply categorized internal conflict related to one's sexual orientation as a disorder, similar to how gender dysphoria is in the current DSM-V.

Similarly, the current standards for the world's most used library classification system are much less stigmatizing than they were 70 years ago. The aforementioned cross-reference with “Sexual perversion” removed in 1972, and the first “people-first” headings to do with homosexuality–e.g. “Homosexuals, male,” “Gays, male,” and “Lesbians”—were introduced in 1976. That being said, there's still [room for improvement] (https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2022/the-old-and-the-prudish/), which makes sense given that these standards are designed to reflect the society in which they're used. ³

There's also some bisexuality discourse in Spring Fire that would put the TikTok queers to shame. Leda tells Mitch that for her, “men come first. Men, as distinguished from women! Sure I've got bisexual tendencies, but by God, I'm no damn Lesbian!” (80) Clear enough, but when Mitch asks her about this conversation later, Leda admits she may not have been telling the full truth.

I don't have to label my love, do I? Do I have to say that it's lesbian love? Ok, then that's what it is. It's Lesbian love, pure and simple. Ye gods, I've known about myself for years ... You've got to understand, Mitch, I don't like what I am. If Jan⁴ ever knew, I'd take a razor and slash my wrists. I couldn't live with people knowing, and pointing and saying, ‘Queer’ at me ... Bisexual—that's sort of like succotash, isn't it? Only this succotash hasn't got any corn in it. It's straight beans!” (112)

If that terrible food metaphor's not enough for you, here's a slightly better one: she compares sex with her boyfriend Jake to “dry bread” and admits that she only stays with him to prove something to herself.⁵ (113) Of course, this conversation comes just before Leda and Mitch are discovered in flagrante, Leda has a nervous breakdown, and Mitch decides she's straight after all, so that undercuts things a bit, but I'll get into why I think the ending can be more or less ignored in just a bit.

How sexy is it? 🔥

Per romance.io's steam rating system, Spring Fire is behind closed doors. Once clothes start coming off, things immediately fade to black or else get pretty vague. Even the book's heterosexual sex scenes—an assault at the beginning of the book and an aborted attempt towards the end—are very tame by today's standards.

Would I recommend it to a queer teen? 👍👎

I went into Spring Fire with some background knowledge about lesbian pulps, so I knew more or less how the story was going to end before I read the first page. Midcentury publishers didn't want to put out books that could be seen as condoning homosexuality, so they required some sort of narrative condemnation at the end of the text in the form of a death, a breakdown, or a rejection of lesbianism. What I didn't know is that the ending would feel quite so lazy or tacked on.

Leda crashing her car and having a nervous breakdown I can almost get on board with. She's portrayed as being high-strung, drinking too much, and being borderline unstable throughout the book. Maybe the guilt from lying to her sorority sisters and making Mitch out to be a predator could have pushed her over the edge. But I'm supposed to believe that after spending fifty pages feeling personally targeted by an abnormal psych book, Mitch decides she's straight after all? Not a chance.

Meaker, who wrote Spring Fire and a number of other mystery titles under the name Vin Packer, based this novel on an experience she had at boarding school and in the introduction to my edition, she alludes to the fact that the real life story did not have a happy ending. That being said, it clearly didn't end with the Mitch equivalent—Meaker herself—deciding she was straight after all. Stories, even romantic ones, needn't have happy endings to be satisfying, but they should have some sort of internal logic, plot points and character choices should make sense to the reader based on what has come before. I personally can't enjoy or recommend a book that doesn't meet that criteria. Put differently, what makes Spring Fire interesting from a historical perspective makes for a very unsatisfying reading experience.

Lesbian classic cliché bingo! 🏳️‍🌈

I'm being a real stickler here by not giving Spring Fire bingo. While Meaker based the book on her experience attending an all girls school, Cranston University is coed. Also, while the cover shows a brunette and a blonde, Mitch and Leda's hair colors are never mentioned in the book. What gives, Marijane?

How to read it 📚

When I first decided I wanted to read Spring Fire for this project, I had resigned myself to bidding for a battered copy on eBay. As it turns out, the book is very much in print—and available from my local library.

After not particularly enjoying this one, I'm going to take a bit of a break from pulps. Until next time!