Chocolates for Breakfast (24 page)

 

Edited or Censored Passages in the American Manuscript

But to return to the original manuscript, which Pamela had submitted to Rinehart in early 1956, the cutting of dozens of manuscript pages from the American published version may have been the decision of Moore herself; her agent, Monica McCall; or her editor at Rinehart, Sandy Richardson. Many of these passages underscore the sensual connection between Courtney and Miss Rosen. For example:

 

Miss Rosen flinched. She got up and put her hand on Courtney's shoulder. Courtney felt the touch through her whole body, and the sensation was an agreeable one. Often at night she thought about Miss Rosen touching her, and being with her all the time, not just for a few hours in the evening. She would like to have that warm feeling more of the time instead of the loneliness. (Original manuscript, p. 17)

 

Unlike the lofty, sometimes stilted language of the French
nouvelle édition
, the passages cut from the conversation between Janet and Courtney about Miss Rosen sound much like the conversation of two teenagers discussing a taboo subject:

 

“I don't dig this
thing
you two have,” [Janet] went on. “You know, I was up in Alberts and Clarke's room before lunch, and they were talking about you and Miss Rosen. I'd watch out if I were you.”

“What do you mean, ‘Watch out'?”

“What I mean is, she seems queer as hell to me. Now don't flip, I mean it. I know she's engaged and all that, but she's not sleeping with the guy or anything, and funny things happen to people in boarding school. She's got this fixation on you, and she wants to make you a little Miss Rosen, and she loves the fact that you worship her.”

“So what? You think of everything in terms of sex. I have a crush on her, everyone knows that, and like any teacher she loves to work with an intelligent student and feel that she's developing a person.” (p. 4)

 

And the deleted portion of the teachers' conversation on the same topic sounds plausibly the way teachers might talk about it:

 

The staff members began to get concerned about Courtney, and one afternoon in the staff parlor, where they could smoke, they talked about her . . .

Miss Rosen was not there . . .

. . . “Well, if we may speak frankly,” said Mrs. Reese, “the relationship that Farrell had with Miss Rosen was— well,
unnatural
. Not that Miss Rosen had anything to do with that,” she added hastily. (p. 34)

 

Here is Courtney watching Barry, her first lover, as he sleeps:

 

She constructed his body beneath the blanket, lean and pale with an almost girlish grace. Then she felt almost embarrassed, with the sensual self-consciousness that she had known at Scaisbrooke when Miss Rosen leaned over her. (p. 55)

 

From her death in 1964 until the late 1990s, Pamela Moore was mentioned only in passing—and often in lists of lesbian fiction. In a 1965 article entitled “Feminine Equivalents of Greek Love in Modern Fiction,” Marion Zimmer Bradley, who later wrote the bestselling
The Mists of Avalon
, compared
Chocolates for Breakfast
favorably with several novels about the obsessive love of a young girl for an older woman. Courtney, she wrote, “is taken up by a friendly, kindly teacher; but just as Courtney is coming out of her shell, the teacher realizes the nature of this attachment and rebuffs her . . . [T]his rejection of her overwhelming need for love touches off the sexual promiscuity and dissipation which characterize Courtney's later adolescent years.” In
Contingent Loves: Simone de Beauvoir and Sexuality
(2000), Melanie Hawthorne surveyed French novels that feature an erotic bond between schoolgirls and older female teachers, and she cited
Chocolates for Breakfast
among the English language counterparts to this genre.

It would seem that these and other characterizations of
Chocolates for Breakfast
as lesbian fiction were based on little more than the schoolgirl crush depicted in the book's first chapter. But the relationship becomes more complex in light of the passages deleted from the manuscript. One can view these cuts as censorship, or self-censorship, or perhaps the editing process of paring a book down to a more suggestive, essential form. If the work is done artfully, the missing material might be sensed though not seen. It's as if a face were cropped from a photograph in such a way that certain viewers still perceive it to be there—a ghost image of a desire deferred, of original love and loss.

K. K.