The Airport Novel
Brigid Brophy, In Transit
Lurid Editions, 322pp, £12.99, ISBN 9781739744175
reviewed by Gabrielle Sicam
I first encountered Brigid Brophy through Aubrey Beardsley. Brophy had written a book, Black and White, about the artist; I was trawling through criticism of his work for an undergrad project. It’s difficult, sometimes, to dislodge one’s opinions of an artist from the associative conditions you have met them under. With Brophy and Beardsley, fortunately, this was something that worked, as placing them in conversation boded well: two queer, idiosyncratic aesthetes who placed eroticism at the forefront of their work. In one passage of Black and White, discussing the androgyny of Beardsley’s figures, Brophy writes: ‘Are they female fops, these personages of Beardsley’s, female dandies: female effeminates, even? Or are they male hoydens, male tomboys, boy butches?’
Beardsley is also referenced in In Transit, in its final section, or, as Brophy would better have it known, its final movement. Amid a quasi-revolution in the airport, a message is scratched onto the wall: ‘DON’T FORCIBLY SHAVE ME NURSE, I’M TRYING TO GROW A BEARDSLEY.’ A revolutionary named Baroco, running away from his own set-up explosion, momentarily stops to make ‘a moment’s salute to the draughtsman he considered one of the greatest of baroquists’.
It is no wonder why Brigid Brophy took to Beardsley. Brophy’s writing is perpetually working through a late Decadent hangover — sexual, subversive, satirical. In 1896, Beardsley made a series of illustrations to accompany a private edition of Lysistrata published by the equally controversial Leonard Smithers. It is a whirl of naked bodies and suggestive motifs, fitting for a narrative of desire and frustration, wherein the protagonist Lysistrata attempts to end the Peloponnesian War by convincing the women around her to withhold their husbands’ access to sex. In one of Beardsley’s illustrations, Lysistrata ‘shields her coynte’ with her left hand and carries an olive branch in the other, which is rested on an inexplicably disembodied and grandiose penis. Her attempt at concealment is inevitably fallible — purposefully — as the light fabrics of her dress, drawn with pointillist delicacy, tease out her curves besides.
Beardsley’s notions of androgyny and gender more broadly are of sexual and fleshly concern. Like Brophy — and in a very baroque manner, as she would’ve liked — Beardsley was less concerned with imagining sanitised futures than he was with manipulating the issues of his time and rendering the desires that belay it. His ‘female fops’ and ‘boy butches’ are gendered, and ambiguated, through playful dispersal of line and space. Thick blacks delineate the difference, and conflation, of woman, man, fop, butch — what Jongwoo Jeremy Kim called a configuration of the ‘synecdochal failure’ of desire.
In Transit is caught up in synecdochal enquiry, not quite convinced of the failure of desire, or any other broadly cohesive life-narrative, but certainly curious about probing its shape. Operating under a similar playful pretence, the novel broadly follows Pat O’Hara, and his/her inquiry into gender and other further adventures in an ultra-modern airport. Pat is also Patrick, and also Patricia, each as legitimised throughout as the other — Brophy often changes the character’s name and pronoun mid-paragraph. There are two definitive things about the novel, if that: its airport setting, and the character’s Irish heritage, mirroring that of the author’s. Otherwise, the text resists pinning down, traverses the styles of libretto, trivia quiz, dungeon erotica, espionage thriller; linguistic play extends past puns, dotted on every other page, into casual use of French, Latin, Greek.
Pat indulges in his/her unique autonomy, partaking in a singular engagement with his/her own fiction. Pat is an intelligent narrator, aware of the expectations of reciprocation; to be read is to be ‘taken over, possessed, by you’. Pat regularly wonders if we have wondered, if we enquire, what we have questioned. Have we thought, for example, about the reason In Transit is written in first-person? And if not, why not? In one of many addresses to the reader, he/she says: ‘please remember that, to me it is you who are the fictitious — the, indeed, entirely notional — character. To be engulfed by you into an identification must be like being nibbled at, ticklingly, by a void. I have to summon my weightiest resources of gravity to take you seriously. I don’t even know, for example, what sex you are.’
In the afterword to this edition, Arwa F. Al-Mubaddel likens the novel to Tristram Shandy, with its tendency towards non-explanations. I think In Transit is also similar to The Faerie Queene for this reason: like Spenser, Brophy pulls ambiguity down to the line, her word-play reminiscent of his doubling. Pat, like the avatars of Elizabeth in The Faerie Queene, is a site of inquiry and identity-play — though, much more than Britomart or Belphoebe, Pat is active in his/her indulgence of ‘sitehood’, ever in negotiation with the author and reader. Pat kicks off the inquisitive tone of the novel by placing a hand into his/her corduroy trousers, ‘virtually erectile tissue in its own right’. Pat runs straightforwardly into the incumbent revolution, taking on the persona of ‘Barbara’ in a group of lesbian rebels as a man in disguise. Brophy allows Pat to be an agent of his/her own ambiguity, evocative of the winking Ganymede/Rosalind in As You Like It’s epilogue.
Pat’s dissatisfaction with being merely a character draws me back to that notion of ‘synecdochal failure’. In a 1970 interview for the New York Times, Brophy commented that In Transit ‘dispenses with a naturalistic texture and substitutes fire-works’. Like Beardsley, Brophy finds joy playing in a broken synecdoche. There are several instances in the text, especially in its final few pages, where Brophy scatters the narrative(s) throughout two columns. Sometimes this is used more conventionally; for about a page, she drops in fictional quotations, as though they were the columns of a broadsheet. But, more often, it is simply a method of ecstatic dispersal, neither column being more truthful, or more false, than the other. In Transit does away with coherent desires, and doubly with their demands. ‘I don’t even know what sex you are,’ Pat says to the reader — mustn’t this be read with excitement?
Today, in a period of regression regarding the subjects of gender and sexuality in the UK, where public authorities have truncated legal definitions of ‘sex’ and ‘woman’ solely to biological bases, In Transit’s mode of free enquiry has the danger of being understood as nostalgic, even utopian. Yet, published in 1969, constantly reissued — my previous copy was published in 1989 by the now defunct Gay Men’s Press — and resurfacing in 2025, In Transit is a book that has always stood at an alternate position to dominant ideas, that has always, miraculously, appeared at the right time. It’s not a utopian text, and certainly does not set out to be read as one – rather, it is a curio of lasting provocation. As long as there is a dominant knowledge to be interpreted, dictated rules to be bent, there will always be In Transit.
Beardsley is also referenced in In Transit, in its final section, or, as Brophy would better have it known, its final movement. Amid a quasi-revolution in the airport, a message is scratched onto the wall: ‘DON’T FORCIBLY SHAVE ME NURSE, I’M TRYING TO GROW A BEARDSLEY.’ A revolutionary named Baroco, running away from his own set-up explosion, momentarily stops to make ‘a moment’s salute to the draughtsman he considered one of the greatest of baroquists’.
It is no wonder why Brigid Brophy took to Beardsley. Brophy’s writing is perpetually working through a late Decadent hangover — sexual, subversive, satirical. In 1896, Beardsley made a series of illustrations to accompany a private edition of Lysistrata published by the equally controversial Leonard Smithers. It is a whirl of naked bodies and suggestive motifs, fitting for a narrative of desire and frustration, wherein the protagonist Lysistrata attempts to end the Peloponnesian War by convincing the women around her to withhold their husbands’ access to sex. In one of Beardsley’s illustrations, Lysistrata ‘shields her coynte’ with her left hand and carries an olive branch in the other, which is rested on an inexplicably disembodied and grandiose penis. Her attempt at concealment is inevitably fallible — purposefully — as the light fabrics of her dress, drawn with pointillist delicacy, tease out her curves besides.
Beardsley’s notions of androgyny and gender more broadly are of sexual and fleshly concern. Like Brophy — and in a very baroque manner, as she would’ve liked — Beardsley was less concerned with imagining sanitised futures than he was with manipulating the issues of his time and rendering the desires that belay it. His ‘female fops’ and ‘boy butches’ are gendered, and ambiguated, through playful dispersal of line and space. Thick blacks delineate the difference, and conflation, of woman, man, fop, butch — what Jongwoo Jeremy Kim called a configuration of the ‘synecdochal failure’ of desire.
In Transit is caught up in synecdochal enquiry, not quite convinced of the failure of desire, or any other broadly cohesive life-narrative, but certainly curious about probing its shape. Operating under a similar playful pretence, the novel broadly follows Pat O’Hara, and his/her inquiry into gender and other further adventures in an ultra-modern airport. Pat is also Patrick, and also Patricia, each as legitimised throughout as the other — Brophy often changes the character’s name and pronoun mid-paragraph. There are two definitive things about the novel, if that: its airport setting, and the character’s Irish heritage, mirroring that of the author’s. Otherwise, the text resists pinning down, traverses the styles of libretto, trivia quiz, dungeon erotica, espionage thriller; linguistic play extends past puns, dotted on every other page, into casual use of French, Latin, Greek.
Pat indulges in his/her unique autonomy, partaking in a singular engagement with his/her own fiction. Pat is an intelligent narrator, aware of the expectations of reciprocation; to be read is to be ‘taken over, possessed, by you’. Pat regularly wonders if we have wondered, if we enquire, what we have questioned. Have we thought, for example, about the reason In Transit is written in first-person? And if not, why not? In one of many addresses to the reader, he/she says: ‘please remember that, to me it is you who are the fictitious — the, indeed, entirely notional — character. To be engulfed by you into an identification must be like being nibbled at, ticklingly, by a void. I have to summon my weightiest resources of gravity to take you seriously. I don’t even know, for example, what sex you are.’
In the afterword to this edition, Arwa F. Al-Mubaddel likens the novel to Tristram Shandy, with its tendency towards non-explanations. I think In Transit is also similar to The Faerie Queene for this reason: like Spenser, Brophy pulls ambiguity down to the line, her word-play reminiscent of his doubling. Pat, like the avatars of Elizabeth in The Faerie Queene, is a site of inquiry and identity-play — though, much more than Britomart or Belphoebe, Pat is active in his/her indulgence of ‘sitehood’, ever in negotiation with the author and reader. Pat kicks off the inquisitive tone of the novel by placing a hand into his/her corduroy trousers, ‘virtually erectile tissue in its own right’. Pat runs straightforwardly into the incumbent revolution, taking on the persona of ‘Barbara’ in a group of lesbian rebels as a man in disguise. Brophy allows Pat to be an agent of his/her own ambiguity, evocative of the winking Ganymede/Rosalind in As You Like It’s epilogue.
Pat’s dissatisfaction with being merely a character draws me back to that notion of ‘synecdochal failure’. In a 1970 interview for the New York Times, Brophy commented that In Transit ‘dispenses with a naturalistic texture and substitutes fire-works’. Like Beardsley, Brophy finds joy playing in a broken synecdoche. There are several instances in the text, especially in its final few pages, where Brophy scatters the narrative(s) throughout two columns. Sometimes this is used more conventionally; for about a page, she drops in fictional quotations, as though they were the columns of a broadsheet. But, more often, it is simply a method of ecstatic dispersal, neither column being more truthful, or more false, than the other. In Transit does away with coherent desires, and doubly with their demands. ‘I don’t even know what sex you are,’ Pat says to the reader — mustn’t this be read with excitement?
Today, in a period of regression regarding the subjects of gender and sexuality in the UK, where public authorities have truncated legal definitions of ‘sex’ and ‘woman’ solely to biological bases, In Transit’s mode of free enquiry has the danger of being understood as nostalgic, even utopian. Yet, published in 1969, constantly reissued — my previous copy was published in 1989 by the now defunct Gay Men’s Press — and resurfacing in 2025, In Transit is a book that has always stood at an alternate position to dominant ideas, that has always, miraculously, appeared at the right time. It’s not a utopian text, and certainly does not set out to be read as one – rather, it is a curio of lasting provocation. As long as there is a dominant knowledge to be interpreted, dictated rules to be bent, there will always be In Transit.