CORPUS OF JOE BAILEY

    Corpus of Joe Bailey is a peculiar novel in that it contains a nearly perfectly formed novella in the middle. Book Three, focusing on the protagonist's college days at Berkeley, is sufficiently different from the rest of the book to suggest that it was written separately. I wonder if  this section, which runs 135 pages, could be reprinted on its own. It would make a nice companion to two other UC undergraduate novels, The Western Shore and Senior Spring. In 2007 Oakley Hall (1920-2008) revisited prewar San Diego in another semi-autobiographical novel, Love and War in California.

    Corpus of Joe Bailey by Oakley Hall. Viking Press (1953), 479 pp.
    This story covers twenty years in the lives of Joe Bailey and his family and friends. It begins in 1928 in the Mission Hills neighborhood of San Diego, when Joe is eleven and learns of the death of his mother. It continues with teen-age experiences during the Depression, goes on to fraternity life at Berkeley, pretty much skips Joe's experiences in World War II, and ends with his efforts to settle in to postwar America. Many other characters enter into the story, particularly Con, a childhood friend who later becomes his lover. Through it all Joe copes with his  insecurities, which manifest themselves in different ways during different episodes and stifle his attempts to find direction to his life.
    This is a long, serious book filled with psychological insights and well-drawn characters. The author based the novel, in broad outlines at least, on his own life. Readers will hope that Hall’s real-life friends came out better than Joe’s friends in the book. Almost everyone has either a sexual problem (such as old friend Peter, who can’t accept his homosexual feelings) or a deeper psychological problem that reveals itself through ungratifying sexual behavior of one sort or another. The third-person narrator leaves Joe fairly often to enter the mind of Con, Peter, and lesser characters. This is especially true of the long segment set in Berkeley. Many figures show up there who are not directly related to the course of Joe’s life but serve instead to give a rounded look at fraternity values and interactions. All in all, Hall has succeeded in creating a novel that allows readers to understand its characters and the times in which they lived.

Comments

[mike varner]

I read this book many years ago why does it still affect me am i wrong in believing that it was relevant then as now? Was it just another story or was it more ?and why do i still think about it. It was both troubling and comforting Im i alone in this. Respond if you understand why it was memorable.

[mike varner]

It's been almost a year and
I guess there have been no
responses...I can't believe
I am the only one who read
this book and was not touched, It would make an
incredible screen play..Oh well if you read it too, I am still curios, or was it just me? Mike Varner one year later.

[Tony]

Mike,
You're not the only one who read this. I read this book in 1996 when I was working in the archives of the San Diego historical Society and it gave life to all the history that surrounded me and hit many personal issues at the same time. Great book. Made a great impression on me and inspired me to write a book at some point based in San Diego capturing a different era, the early 1990's.

I actually met Oakley Hall briefly at that time. Cool guy. He just died a few months ago.

The time in Berkeley is somewhat disjointed but still interesting. I need to reread the book but I don't think it is in print. Do you know where to find it?

[Ian]

Re: "Corpus of Joe Bailey" For years and years I've been trying to track this book down. I read it as a 22-year-old in the mid-late'50's, and it gave me the s---s, as it was the first novel I'd ever read that mentioned a man's sexual attraction to another man.
At the time I had been told by a friend that "You could be queer" (this was England) and I didn't want to know. I subsequently married and had a family until, inevitably, I began to follow my true sexual path.
My failure to trace this book was due to getting the title wrong. For some reason I thought it was "Corpus of Joe Christie." A friend currently visiting suggested searching "Corpus of Joe..." and hey presto, this site came up with quite a few others.
As the grandfather of seven (five boys). It will be with mixed emotions that I re-read this very significant book.
Ian Williams

[Stephen Joe Payne]

I read the book when I was 16, now some 51 years ago. I had searched for it and I finally found it on Amazon. I am surprised how vivid it was and how much I remembered. I lived in Pawhuska, Oklahoma and was a kid in high school so the names, streets, cities, and many events had no meaning to me then. Since, I have walked and driven the streets of San Diego, been to Berkley, Standford, San Francisco and so many other places Hall details. As I read, I continue to think how visual the story is and I wonder why it has never been a movie. I am fortunate in that I know an unusual director and I may be able to suggest it to him as a story. I'm so pleased I found the book again and that I understand it so much better today. Thank you Mister Hall.

Stephen

[Stephen Joe Payne]

Mike, it was memorable because it was so vivid, in part, but it was also a deep psychology that most of us American males share, certainly males of the time, before so much changed in the 1960's. The issues of having sex but wanting a virgin to marry, becoming men and not understanding women very well, nor ourselves, are threads woven again and again throughout the story. It is a shared experience and also greatly symbolic. Is Phil Gardener the Devil himself? Is he representative of the same evil character that Svidrigailov presents in "Crime and Punishment?" The book is universal and I'd love to see it reissued instead of all of us who want to share it having to chase down copies today. And Oakley Hall is such an underappreciated writer. The book is ultimately so memorable because it contains a piece of each of us.

Stephen Joe Payne