Abstract
Radical writer Willard Motley’s (1909–1965) fourth and final novel, Let Noon Be Fair, was posthumously published by Putnam in 1966. Motley was, by that time, a bestselling and well-known writer, having published a number of popular novels in the naturalist literary vein that were also adapted into major Hollywood films. His radical ties, however, and his dislocation in American society as a gay black man had impelled him to seek exile in Mexico for over a decade, where he lived a destitute life while maintaining a career as a writer and enjoying the company of many men. Written during those years, Let Noon Be Fair depicts the fictional Mexican community of Las Casas, a rapidly developing tourist village modeled in equal parts on Puerta Vallarta, Acapulco, and Motley’s adopted home of Cuernavaca.1
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Notes
Willard Motley, Let Noon Be Fair (New York: Putnam, 1966), 286. All further references to Let Noon Be Fair in this chapter use parenthetical page citations and refer to this edition.
Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007 ), 1.
Rebecca M Schreiber, Cold War Exiles in Mexico: US Dissidents and the Culture of Critical Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). Alan M. Wald offers a slightly more nuanced assessment of Motley’s engagement with sexuality in American Night, but he ultimately concludes that Motley’s “view is mostly that sex of any kind only brutalizes people’s sensibilities” (213), further suggesting that “the ghosts of [Motley’s] early psychological damage revisit in customary as well as in new shapes to create a demoralizing finale to his literary career” (208). American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012 ).
Charles Poore, “Books of the Times: The Death and Life of a Tropic Town,” review of Let Noon Be Fair, by Willard Motley, New York Times, February 24, 1966.
Howard Cline, Mexico: Revolution to Evolution, 1940–1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963). For a useful survey of the historiographic consensus that emerged between 1940 and 1965 and constructed the narrative of Mexican progress against which Motley’s novel might be positioned, see Arthur Schmidt, “Making It Real Compared to What? Reconceptualizing Mexican History Since 1940,” in Fragments of a Golden Age: The Politics of Culture in Mexico Since 1940, ed. Gilbert Joseph, Anne Rubenstein, and Eric Zolov ( Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 2001 ), 25–27.
Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World ( Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995 ), 4.
Eric Zolov, “Discovering a Land ‘Mysterious and Obvious’: The Renarrativixing of Postrevolutionary Mexico,” in Fragments of a Golden Age: The Politics of Culture in Mexico Since 1940, ed. Gilbert Joseph, Anne Rubenstein, and Eric Zolov ( Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001 ), 235.
J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, Second Edition, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbis à (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962, 1975 ).
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© 2015 Ruth Barraclough, Heather Bowen-Struyk, and Paula Rabinowitz
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Lecklider, A.S. (2015). “Night Must Fall”: Desire and Development in Willard Motley’s Let Noon Be Fair. In: Barraclough, R., Bowen-Struyk, H., Rabinowitz, P. (eds) Red Love Across the Pacific. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137507037_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137507037_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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