Better Angel

Better Angel is a novel by Forman Brown first published in 1933 under the pseudonym "Richard Meeker". It was republished as Torment in 1951. It is an early novel which describes a gay lifestyle without condemning it. Christopher Carey called it "the first homosexual novel with a truly happy ending".

The novel's title references Shakespeare's Sonnet 144: "the better angel is a man right fair", a poem which has itself been read as having a homosexual subtext.

Brown's novel was initially published pseudonymously in 1933 and attracted little critical attention. Universal paperbacks re-published it 1951 under the title Torment. The blurb on the cover read: "Is it evil for one man to lavish affection on another? Torn between the boy who cherished him and the girl who struggled for his love, Kurt Gray could not be sure." The Mattachine Review described Kurt as "perhaps the healthiest homosexual in print".Alyson Publications published the novel again in 1987 under its original title with an introduction by Hubert Kennedy. Brown was unaware of the 1987 edition, since his copyright had expired and the novel could be printed and sold without his permission. He learned of its appearance from a friend who reported seeing it in a bookstore. He provided an epilogue for the 1990 reprint of the 1987 edition in which he explained that he used a pseudonym decades earlier to protect his writing career at CBS and to shield his parents.

The novel is a Bildungsroman recounting the passage of Kurt Gray—his surname plays on the author's Brown—from his adolescent years in central Michigan to mature adult and his development as a musician and composer. Kurt's teenage years are marked by "solitude, bookish seriousness, gender dislocation, and religion", a dislike of sports, and an interest in amateur theatricals. He memorizes Bible stories and experiences a Christian awakening that transforms into a spiritual devotion to poetry and music. At the University of Michigan he has his first same-sex experiences and discovers the poetry of Swinburne, "a revelation". After graduating he explores the psychological literature of Jung, Freud, and Ellis, then Edward Carpenter, Plato's Phaedrus and Symposium (Plato), and Oscar Wilde. Kurt identifies a contrast between American religiosity and an alternative offered by the Europeans he reads, which he identifies as spiritual, even preferring the French spirituel: "The English never had created so exact a word for it."

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